* * *
*
A FEW NIGHTS LATER, on TV, a banner flashes Breaking news! Breaking news!
The host of the show walks down the corridors of a newsroom and, pen in hand, announces that a young woman has been arrested in connection with the train bombing. Her name is Jivan. Last name currently unknown.
PT Sir slams his after-dinner dish of sweets on the table and lunges for the remote. At the sound, his wife emerges from the kitchen, asking, “What happened?”
He raises a finger to his lips, and presses his thumb down on the volume button until sound fills the room. He leans so far forward his face is no more than a few inches from the screen. There, in a video clip being played and replayed, among the jostle of policemen and reporters, is that face, that poorly made plait, that scar on the chin, elements of a person he knows, or knew. Now the girl keeps a hand on her back, like an elderly lady who aches. PT Sir’s mustache nearly falls off his face. “Look at this,” he whispers to his wife. “Just look.”
“Do you know her?” says his wife. “How do you know her?”
“This young woman, all of twenty-two years old,” yells a reporter standing in the middle of a lane, curious onlookers crowding into the frame, “was arrested from the slum where I am standing right now. It’s the Kolabagan slum, that’s right, the Kolabagan slum next to the Kolabagan railway station, where the train was brutally attacked six days ago, killing one hundred and twelve people. In that attack, as we know—”
PT Sir presses a button and the channel changes. Jivan appears once more, a camera zooming in on her face.
“This Muslim woman is charged with assisting terrorists who plotted this heinous attack—”
“She has been booked under a very serious crimes against the nation charge and a sedition charge, which is highly unusual—”
“She allegedly made contact with a known recruiter for a terrorist cell on Facebook—”
PT Sir presses a button and the channel flips again.
“Why did she bear so much hatred in her heart for her own country? Sociology professor Prakash Mehra is joining us to talk about the alienated youth, and how the Internet—”
PT Sir watches until his eyes smart. He watches until he has seen every bit of footage and analysis available. Outside, the din of car horns.
* * *
*
IT WAS NOT SO long ago that Jivan was his student. When she started, one of the school’s charity students, as they were bluntly called, she had never seen a basketball in her life. But the rules were intuitive, and she played with energy, her legs uninhibited, her arms flung, her mouth open in laughter. Jivan scared the others. The aggressive game of kabaddi came to her naturally, and she was perhaps his only student who was disappointed when he asked them to play mild dodgeball.
PT Sir understood, from the fervor with which she played, and how she responded to compliments with a close-mouthed smile, that she needed this class in a way the other girls did not. So he pardoned her soiled skirt. He forgave her old shoes.
Once, when she fainted in the heat of the playground, he took it as his opening to offer her a banana. After that, every now and then, he gave her a sandwich from his own tiffin box, or an apple. Once, a bag of chips. She didn’t get enough to eat, he worried. He couldn’t have his prize student falling sick. He already had her in mind for march-past at school functions, for training so she could play basketball, or even football, at the city level. She could grow up to be an athlete, like him. Not once had he come across a student of his who showed real promise in his field, until Jivan.
Then, after the class ten board exams, she left school. He never knew why. He understood it to be a matter of school fees. But she offered him no explanation, never acknowledged how he had gone out of his way to support her. A small thing, but he found it rude.
Well, was it a small thing?
When he thinks about it, an old anger flickers to life. He had begun to dream of her as a mentee, but she had not considered him a mentor. She had considered him perhaps no more than a source of occasional free food. She had fooled him.
The TV plays, indifferent to its tired viewer.
“What happened to make this ordinary young woman, Jivan is her name, a terrorist? What led her down the path of anti-national activity, bringing her into alliance with a terrorist group and conspiring to bring down the government? After the break—”
He cannot believe what she has gone on to do.
His nerves thrum. His life is just the same, and yet this proximity to disaster electrifies PT Sir.
Now he knows, there was something wrong with Jivan the whole time. There was something wrong in her thinking. Or else she would never have left without telling him, a teacher who cared for her, farewell, and thank you.
JIVAN
THIS MORNING, AFTER UMA madam, the chief guard of the women’s prison, wakes us up, I find Yashwi in the courtyard. Yashwi, in clean yellow salwar kameez, who has robbed ten or twelve houses. In one of them she left a grandfather tied up so tight he suffocated. But she is a nice girl, always smiling.
She pumps the tube well for me, hopping up, then crouching down with her weight on the lever as water falls like stones into my cupped hands. With the cold water, pulled from reserves deep underground, a taste of minerals on my lips, I wash my face.
When my eyes feel fresh and new, we join the crowd on the other side of the courtyard for our hunks of bread. There is a fist’s scoop of potato on top, and a glass of tea ladled from a bucket. I eat, standing on the side, looking to see if anybody is getting more than me. It has happened. I am ready to fight if it happens again.
But the women are in the haze of sleep, the sky is just turning to morning, and the green algae on the ground are damp under my feet. It is as peaceful as it gets in a cage.
After breakfast, we gather in the TV room. Beside me sits Nirmaladi, dupatta drawn over her head, a corner of cloth clenched in her teeth. She sucks the cloth like a baby at a nipple. She used to work as a cook in the outside world, until she accepted twenty thousand rupees for putting rat poison in a family’s lunch. Behind me is one-eyed Kalkidi, half of her face burned, laughing hard when I turn to look, the gaps in her teeth showing. Her husband threw acid on her but, somehow, she is the one in jail. These things happen when you are a woman.
Rumors drift. Among us some have killed a child in bed, or slit the throat of an abusive husband. A few things I know, a few things I don’t want to know.
On TV, our favorite drama plays: Why Won’t Mother-in-Law Love Me?
My first day inside, there was an episode of this endless show playing. Here in this TV room, I asked questions: “Listen, sister, did you keep the court-appointed lawyer? Or did you find a better one? How did you pay for your own lawyer?”
I spoke, but it was as if I had said nothing.
All faces were turned to the TV.
What was this place? Before I knew it, I was saying, “I am innocent, I swear I didn’t—”
Some women turned. Their faces, with jutting teeth, earlobes slit from years of wearing hoops—so human, yet each one a stranger to me—made me feel that I knew nobody in the world.
I cried. I was a child.
Everyone stopped watching TV then, and turned to watch me. The woman with patches of light and dark skin, a kind of leader in the prison, I knew even then, got up from her position on the floor within licking distance of the TV, and came waddling to me. I had heard she was the one who arranged an upgrade from a black-and-white to a color TV. Americandi, American sister, as she was called for her pink skin, took my chin in her hands. She was gentle as a mother. I felt a moment of relief, assurance that made me wipe my tears. Then she slapped me. Her hand, tough as hide, struck my ear and left it whining.
“Blind or what?” she said. “Can’t you see we’re watching TV?”
&nbs
p; Now I watch TV, openmouthed like the others. More than the show, it is the world I watch. A traffic light, an umbrella, rain on a windowsill. The simple freedom of crossing a street.
* * *
*
BEFORE I LIVED HERE, I was a working woman. I had a job at a big shop, where we sold clothes—Indian, Western—suitcases, perfumes, wristwatches, even a few books that customers flipped through and put back on the shelves. Day after day I worked my long shifts, keeping stacks of clothes folded and tidy, bringing different sizes to ladies who yelled from the fitting room. I looked at them when they weren’t looking at me—their shiny hair, pedicured feet. Their purses with little plastic cards, sources of endless money. I wanted all that too.
They say the recruiter offered me money, plenty of money, to help them navigate the unmarked lanes of the slum, to bring supplies of kerosene to the train.
I live—I lived—in the Kolabagan slum, near the Kolabagan railway station, with my mother and father. Our house, one room with two brick walls and two walls of tin and tarp, was behind a garbage dump, a dump that was so big and occupied by so many crows screaming kaw kaw from dawn to night, it was famous. I would say, “I live in the house behind the dump,” and everybody would know where I meant. You could say I lived in a landmark building.
A hijra called Lovely, who went around blessing children and newlyweds, lived in the Kolabagan slum too, and some evenings I taught her English. It began as a compulsory school program where each student had to teach the alphabet to an illiterate person. But we continued long after the school graded me on it. Lovely believed she would have a better life someday, and so did I. The path began with a b c d. Cat, bat, rat. English is the language of the modern world. Can you move up in life without it? We kept going.
And I was moving up. So what if I lived in only a half-brick house? From an eater of cabbage, I was becoming an eater of chicken. I had a smartphone with a big screen, bought with my own salary. It was a basic smartphone, bought on an installment plan, with a screen which jumped and credit which I filled when I could. But now I was connected to a world bigger than this neighborhood.
* * *
*
ON MY WAY TO my job in the kitchen, I peep in the door of the pickle-making room, where six women prepare lime and onion pickles to sell outside. For years, the space was no more than an accidental warehouse of broken goods, until Americandi, our local entrepreneur, set up this operation from which the prison makes petty cash. Now the room is painted and lit, tables covered with jars, the air smelling of mustard. When she sees me, Monalisa takes off her glove to hand me a triangle of lime peel, dark and sour. A few days ago I helped her daughter learn the Bengali alphabet: paw phaw baw bhaw maw. The fragrance of the pickled lime makes my tongue water. The salt and acid play on my tongue, and I chew the sourness down.
PT SIR
AT THE END OF a school day, when the bottoms of his trousers are soiled, PT Sir holds his bag in his armpit and exits the building. Outside, the narrow lane is crowded with schoolgirls who part for him. Now and then a student calls, “Good afternoon, sir!”
PT Sir nods. But these girls, to whom he taught physical training just hours before, have hiked up their skirts and coiled their hair into topknots. Their fingers are sticky with pickled fruit. They are talking about boys. He can no longer know them, if he ever did.
When the lane opens up onto the main road, PT Sir is startled by a caravan of trucks roaring past. Three and four and five rush by in a scream of wind. Young men sit in the open truck beds, their faces skinny and mustached, their hands waving the saffron flags of ardent nationalism. One young man tucks his fingers in his mouth and whistles.
* * *
*
AT THE TRAIN STATION, PT Sir stands at his everyday spot, anticipating roughly where a general compartment door will arrive. He is leaning to look down the tracks when an announcement comes over the speakers. The train will be thirty minutes late.
“Thirty minutes meaning one hour minimum!” complains a fellow passenger. This man sighs, turns around, and walks away. PT Sir takes out his cell phone, a large rectangle manufactured by a Chinese company, and calls his wife.
“Listen,” he says, “the train is going to be late.”
“What?” she shouts.
“Late!” he shouts back. “Train is late! Can you hear?”
After the terrorist attack on the train, just a few weeks ago, the word “train” frightens her. “What happened now?” she says. “Are things fine?”
“Yes, yes! All fine. They are saying ‘technical difficulty.’ ”
PT Sir holds the phone at his ear and surveys the scene in front. Passengers arrive, running, then learn about the delay and filter away. To those who spread out the day’s newspaper on the floor and relax on it, a girl sells salted and sliced cucumber. In his ear, PT Sir’s wife says, “Fine, then. Can you bring a half kilo of tomatoes? There is that market just outside your station.”
A spouse always has ideas about how you should spend your time. Couldn’t he have enjoyed thirty minutes to himself, to drink a cup of tea and sit on the platform?
PT Sir goes to look for tomatoes. Outside the station, on the road where taxis and buses usually honk and curse, nearly scraping one another’s side mirrors, all traffic has halted. Motorcyclists use their feet to push forward. PT Sir learns, from a man who grinds tobacco in his palm, that there is a Jana Kalyan (Well-being for All) Party rally, in the field nearby. It is the biggest opposition party in the state. Film star Katie Banerjee is speaking at the rally.
Katie Banerjee! Now, PT Sir thinks, is it better to spend twenty minutes looking for tomatoes, or catching a glimpse of the famous Katie? Tomatoes can be found anywhere. In fact, tomatoes can be bought ten minutes from his house at the local market—why doesn’t his wife go there?
So he follows the street, which opens up onto a field trampled free of grass. The crowd, a thousand men or more, waves the familiar saffron flags. They whistle and clap. Some men cluster around an enterprising phuchka walla, a seller of spiced potato stuffed in crisp shells, who has set up his trade. The scent of cilantro and onion carries. On all the men’s foreheads, even the phuchka walla’s, PT Sir sees a smear of red paste, an index of worship—of god, of country. The men, marked by the divine, wear pants whose bottoms roll under their feet, and hop up now and then to see what is happening. The stage is far away.
“Brother,” he says to a young man. He surprises himself with his friendly tone. “Brother, is it really Katie Banerjee up there?”
The young man looks at him, hands PT Sir a small party flag from a grocery store bag full of them, and calls a third man. “Over here, come here!” he yells. Soon that man rushes over, holding a dish of red paste. He dips his thumb in the paste and marks PT Sir’s forehead, drawing a red smear from brow to hairline. All PT Sir can do is accept, a child being blessed by an elder.
Thus marked, party flag in his hand, PT Sir steps forward to hear better. Onstage, it is indeed movie star Katie Banerjee, dressed in a starched cotton sari. She too is marked by holy red paste on her forehead, PT Sir sees. Her speech drawing to a close, she raises both hands in a namaste. “You all have come from far districts of the state,” she says. “For that you have my thanks. Go home safely, carefully.”
The microphone crackles. The crowd roars.
When the star leaves the stage, her place at the microphone is occupied by the second-in-command of the party. Bimala Pal, no more than five feet two, arrives in a plain white sari, her steel wristwatch flashing in the sun. The crowd quiets for her. PT Sir holds the flag above his head for shade, then tries his small leather bag, which works better.
In the microphone, Bimala Pal cries, her words echoing over the speakers: “We will seek justice…ice! For the lives lost in this cowardly…ardly attack…tack on the train…train! I promise you…you!”
Aft
er a minute of silence for the lost souls, she continues, pausing for the echoes to fade, “Where the current government is not able to feed our people! Jana Kalyan Party—your idle government’s hardworking opposition!—has provided rice to fourteen districts for three rupees per kilo! We are inviting plastics and cars, factories which will bring at least fifteen thousand jobs—”
While PT Sir watches, a man wearing a white undershirt pulls himself up, or is pushed up by the crowd, onto the hood of a jeep far ahead. PT Sir had not noticed the jeep until now, but there it is, a vehicle in the middle of the field, still a distance from the stage. The man stands on the hood of the car, surveying the raised arms, the open mouths and stained teeth. Then he climbs onto the roof of the car, the car now rocking from the crowd shoving and slamming, their fury and laughter landing on the polished body of the vehicle.
“Fifteen thousand jobs!” they chant. “Fifteen thousand jobs!”
Whether they are excited or merely following instructions from party coordinators is hard to tell. A few TV cameras will pick this up, no doubt.
“We know that you are sacrificing every day!” Bimala Pal calls, shouting into the microphone. “And for what? Don’t you deserve more opportunities? This party is standing with you to gain those jobs, every rupee of profit that you are owed, every day of school for your children!” Bimala Pal pumps a fist in the air.
PT Sir watches, electricity coursing through him despite himself. Here, in the flesh, are the people of the hinterland about whom he has only seen features on TV. He knows a few things about them: Not only is there no work in their village, there is not even a paved road! Not only is the factory shut down, but the company guard is keeping them from selling the scrap metal!
“Remember that this nation belongs to you, not to the rich few in their high-rises or the company bosses in their big cars, but you!” Bimala Pal wraps up. “Vande Mataram!”
A Burning Page 3