Praise to the motherland!
The man at the top of the car repeats, screaming, “Vande Mataram!”
PT Sir might have thought that this man, along with hundreds of others, had been trucked here from a village, his empty belly lured by a free box of rice and chicken, his fervor purchased for one afternoon. He might have thought that, for these unemployed men, this rally is more or less a day’s job. The party is feeding them when the market is not.
But the man’s cries make the hairs on PT Sir’s arm stand up, and what is false about that?
The man on the car lifts his shirt and reveals, tucked in the waistband of his trousers, wrapped in a length of cloth, a dagger. He holds the handle and lifts it high in the air, where the blade catches the sun. Below him, surrounding the car, a man dances, then another, and another, a graceless dance of feeling.
The dagger stays up in the air, itself a sun above the field, and PT Sir looks at it, frozen in alarm and excitement. How spirited this man is, with his climb atop a jeep like a movie hero, with his dagger and his dancing. How different from all the schoolteachers PT Sir knows. How free.
* * *
*
WHEN THE MEN BEGIN to tire, a coordinator announces, “Brothers and sisters! There are buses! To take you home! Please do not rush! Do not stampede! Everyone will be taken home free of charge!”
PT Sir returns to the train station. He has missed the delayed train, and when the next one comes, he finds an aisle seat, tucking his behind, the fifth, into a seat meant for three. The soles of his feet itch, reminding him they have been bearing his weight for much of the day. Somebody shoves past, dragging a sack over his toes. The person is gone before PT Sir can say anything. A woman then stands beside him, her belly protruding at his ear, and her purse threatening to strike him in the face at any moment. In this crowd, a muri walla, a puffed rice seller, makes his way. “Muri, muri!” he calls. The coach groans.
“Today out of all days!” comes the woman’s loud voice above his head. “First the delay, now there is no place to stand, and you have to sell muri here?”
“Harassment, that’s what this is,” says a voice from somewhere behind PT Sir. “This commute is nothing less than daily harassment!”
“Here, here, muri walla,” somebody objects. “Give me two.”
“And one here!” someone else calls.
The muri walla mixes mustard oil, chopped tomato and cucumber, spiced lentil sticks, and puffed rice in a tin. He shakes a jar of spices upside down. Then he pours the muri into a bowl made of newsprint.
PT Sir’s stomach growls. He lifts his buttocks to try to reach his wallet.
“And one muri this way!” he says. “How much?”
The muri walla makes him a big bowl, heaping at the top.
“Don’t worry,” he says, handing the bowl to PT Sir. “For you, no charge.”
“No charge?” says PT Sir. He laughs, holding the bowl, unsure whether it is truly his to eat. Then he remembers: the red mark on his forehead, the party flag in his lap. PT Sir feels the other passengers staring at him. They must be thinking, who is this VIP?
* * *
*
AT HOME, AFTER DINNER, PT Sir sits back in his chair, gravy-wet fingers resting atop his plate, and tells his wife, “Strange thing happened today. Are you listening?”
His wife is thin and short, her hair plaited such that it needs no rubber band at its taper. When she looks at him from her chair, it appears she has forgiven him for the forgotten tomatoes.
Something has happened at the school, she thinks. A man teaching physical training to a group of girls, all of whom are growing breasts, their bellies cramping during menstruation, their skirts stained now and then. A bad situation is bound to arise.
“What happened?” she says fearfully.
“There was a Jana Kalyan rally in the field behind the station,” he begins, “then one man climbed on a car—understand? Climbed on top of a car—and took out….Tell me what he took out!”
“How will I know?” she says. When she bites into a milk sweet, white crumbs fall on her plate. “Gun, or what?”
“Dagger!” he says, disappointed. The truth is always modest. He goes on, “But Katie Banerjee was there—”
“Katie Banerjee!”
“Then Bimala Pal also was there. Say what you like about her, she is a good orator. And she was saying some correct things, you know. Her speech was good.”
His wife’s face sours. She pushes back her chair and its legs scrape the floor. “Speech sheech,” she says. “She is pandering to all these unemployed men. This is why our country is not going anywhere.”
“They are feeding a lot of people with discounted rice,” he says. “And they are going to connect two hundred villages, two hundred, to the electricity grid in two years—”
“You,” says his wife, “believe everything.”
PT Sir smiles at her. When she disappears into the kitchen, he gets up and washes his hands clean of turmeric sauce, then wipes them on a towel that was once white.
He understands how his wife feels. If you only watch the news on TV, it is easy to be skeptical. But what is so wrong about the common people caring about their jobs, their wages, their land? And what, after all, is so wrong about him doing something different from his schoolteacher’s job? Today he did something patriotic, meaningful, bigger than the disciplining of cavalier schoolgirls—and it was, he knows as he lies in bed, no sleep in his humming mind, exciting.
JIVAN
IN THE DAYS-OLD PAPERS that make it to the prison, they write versions of my life. They report that I grew up in Sealdah, Salpur, Chhobigram. My father, they share, has polio, cancer, an amputated limb. He used to cook food in a hotel; no, he used to be a municipal clerk; no, in truth he used to be a meter reader for the electricity supply company. They have not found out about my mother’s breakfast business, because they write that she is a housewife, when they mention her at all.
“Look,” I say to Americandi, who is my cellmate because, I learned, she demanded to be housed with the famous terrorist. “Desher Potrika says I used to work at a call center, and they have pictures of somebody! Somebody else on the back of a motorcycle with a man. I have never even been on a motorcycle.”
It is midday, after bath time, and my cellmate has hiked up her sari to her thighs and is giving herself a massage, running her fingers up and down calves. Her veins are crooked, like flooding rivers.
“Reporters write anything,” she says. “Take my case, where I said—”
But I don’t want to hear about her.
“They hear something in the street,” I say. “Then they write it down.”
“They work on deadlines,” she says. “If they miss their deadlines, they are fired. Who has time to ask questions?”
“And it says here, listen,” I continue, “ ‘An Internet cafe operator in the neighborhood said Jivan would often make calls to Pakistan numbers.’ Why are they lying about me?”
Americandi looks at me. “You know, many people don’t believe you. Myself, I heard everything. There was kerosene in your home. You were at the train station. You were friends with the recruiter. Did you do it?” She sighs. “But somehow, I don’t see you as a bad person.”
A sob rises thick in my throat.
“Listen,” she says. “I am not supposed to tell you, but you know reporters are beating down the gates trying to get an interview with you?”
I wipe my eyes and blow my nose. “Which paper?” I say.
“The Times of India! Hindustan Times! The Statesman!” she says. “Name any paper. All are offering money, so much money, just for one interview with you. That’s what I heard. But Uma madam is forced to say no to all of them. There is pressure from above.”
“It is my right to talk to them!” I shout.
Amer
icandi makes as if to slap me. “Keep your voice down!” she hisses. “This is why I shouldn’t be nice to anyone in this rotten place.”
She picks a sari from the stack of four that I have washed and folded for her. She winds the sari about herself. She tucks in the top of the pleats. “You have the right?” she says, kicking a leg under the fabric to order the pleats. Under a smile, she buries all else she meant to say.
“I want to talk to them,” I say softly. “What is Gobind doing for me anyway? I have not seen him in days. Not once has he called me.”
If only I could speak to a newspaper reporter, a TV camera, wouldn’t they understand? Every day I bear this dark corridor with its rustle of insects’ wings, the drip of a leak which conveys news of the rains, the plaster on the ceiling swelling like a cloud. Days have turned into weeks, and still I kneel by the gutter in the back, washing Americandi’s nighties by hand, the smell of iron rising where we all wash our monthly cloths. I have been a fool to wait for Gobind’s plan, I see. He may be my court-appointed lawyer, but he is no advocate of mine.
This is why, I think, we are all here. Take Americandi. She pushed a man who was trying to snatch her necklace on the street. The man fell, and struck his head on the pavement. He went into a coma. The court charged Americandi, and here she is, a decade or more into confinement that never ends. If she had received a chance to tell her story, how might her life have been?
* * *
*
THE NEXT MORNING, Americandi gathers her thin towel, rough as a pumice stone, and a bottle of perfumed liquid soap she guards with her life. She is off to take a bath.
“Listen,” I say, while the day is new and Americandi’s mood unspoiled, “will you do one thing for me?”
I hold up the newspaper I have been looking at.
“Will you send word to this reporter?” I unfold the newspaper, Daily Beacon, and look at the name Purnendu Sarkar. “Ask this Purnendu Sarkar to come? My mother said he visited her. He was helpful.”
Americandi looks about for her shower slippers.
“Good plan!” she says, mocking. “Why should I be bothered?”
She waits, and turns to me. I have one moment of her attention, no more.
“The money,” I tell her. “What they offer for an interview. You just said, they are offering a lot? You can take it all. What can the courts do if the media does not—”
“You really love lecturing,” says Americandi. “Did you say all the money?”
“Every rupee.”
“When did you become such a rich person?” she says.
PT SIR
NOTHING GOOD COMES OF contacting the police. Everybody knows that. If you catch a thief, you are better off beating the man and, having struck fear in his heart, letting him go.
But this is no ordinary thief. This is a woman who attacked a train full of people. She killed, directly or indirectly, more than a hundred people. Now, the TV channels are reporting, she is silent in prison. She has granted no interviews. She has offered no details, and other than a confession, which she insists she was forced to sign, she has shared no information. She is protesting that she is innocent.
The police, desperate for progress, have asked Jivan’s friends and associates to step forward. Nobody will be harassed, they have promised. They are only looking for insight into the character of the terrorist, some scrap of information that will crack the case open. The men involved in the case have long slipped across the border and fled. Jivan is the only hope.
So it is that one morning, encouraged by his wife, PT Sir, in fresh clothes, his sparse hair combed, his belly full of breakfast, picks up the phone and calls the local police station. When the superintendent on duty, a man who insists on speaking in English, urges him to come to the station right away, PT Sir does. So consumed is his mind that it is only halfway on his walk to the station that he realizes he is still wearing his house slippers.
JIVAN
WHEN MY MOTHER CAME to visit for the first time, she cried to hand over a tiffin carrier, full of home-cooked food, to the guards. She did it again, and again, hoping the meals would reach me. Then I told her, “Why are you cooking for the guards?”
I watched her cry then, my own eyes dry.
Today, upon my request, she hands me, not cooked food, but a small pouch, knotted shut, filled with golden oil. It is ghee.
“What will you do with this?” she asks.
I tell her.
Then she is gone, all the mothers are gone, and the rest of the day stretches before us. In the courtyard, I see a fight among three women—teeth bared, hair coming unclipped. They scream about a missing milk sweet.
For the rest of the day, we fall and die from knowing, but never being able to say, especially to our mothers, that the inside of the prison is an unreachable place. So what if there is a courtyard, and a garden, and a TV room? The guards tell us over and over that we live well, we live better than the trapped souls in the men’s prison. Still we feel we are living at the bottom of a well. We are frogs. All we can bear to tell our mothers is “I am fine, I am fine.”
We tell them, “I walk in the garden.”
“I watch TV.”
“Don’t worry about me, I am fine.”
* * *
*
THE KITCHEN, where my work is to make ruti, holds a large grill which allows me to make bread in batches of ten. One woman kneads the dough, one tears balls and flattens them into disks, several roll them flat and round, and I tend them as they’re tossed on the grill. When they’re done, I lift them with long tongs and flip them onto the stone surface next to the grill. There, a couple of women dust the flour off and stack them.
After making a hundred and twenty pieces of ruti, I pour the ghee on the grill. The scent is the luxury that I imagine sleeping on a bed of feathers must be, or bathing in a tub of milk like the old queens of our country. With my hand, I flip the dough in the pool of clarified butter, and the edges crisp. The bread rises, and its belly gains brown spots.
When I take a plate to Uma madam, she is sitting on a plastic chair in the courtyard, her arms draped on the sides, like the ruler of a meager kingdom. Surrounding her, in tidy rows, inmates eat. She accepts the plate, and looks at me with a sly smile.
“Why this preparation?” she says. “What do you want now?”
She is not angry.
I step back and watch her eat the porota. I hear the shatter of the crisp dough, or maybe I imagine it. She folds the porota around a smear of dal and lifts it to her mouth. I watch like a jackal. My stomach growls.
In the row of seated inmates and their children, a little girl cries. A boy whines for food, though he has just eaten. The children are each given a boiled egg and milk every other day. Other than that, there is no concession made to their growing bodies, their muscles stretching overnight. They eat the same stale curry as the rest of us. The mothers have agitated over this, but who will listen to them?
Uma madam twists around in the chair, spots me, and gives me a thumbs-up. She lifts the plate to show me. She has eaten every bite.
Kneeling at Uma madam’s feet, I take the empty plate from her. I can feel the damp algae green my knees.
“So,” she says, digging in her teeth with her tongue, “what was this about?”
“I have a brother,” I say. “He wants to visit. Can you approve him for my visitors’ list? His name is Purnendu Sarkar.”
I try to smile. My lips manage it.
“Brother, hmm?” she says. “You never mentioned him. Was he living in a cave until today?”
“No, he was working outside the city—”
When Uma madam stands up, she puts her hands on her waist and arches her spine. She squints at the sky. With a look of great boredom, she turns to me. “The fewer lies you tell, the better for you. God knows how many lies you tell every day.�
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Then she is gone, and I am left holding the plate. There is a thin shard of porota sticking to the rim, an airy nothing made of flour. Not even a fly would be nourished by it. I pinch it with my fingers, and put it in my mouth.
LOVELY
EVEN A FUTURE MOVIE star is having to make money. One morning my sisters and I are spraying rose water in our armpits, braiding our hair, putting bangles on our arms, and together we are going to bless a newborn. The general public is believing that we hijras are having a special telephone line to god. So if we bless, it is like a blessing straight from god. At the door of the happy family, I am rattling the lock thuck thuck thuck.
“Give, mother,” we are calling so that our voices can be heard deep within the big house. When nobody is coming, I am stepping back and looking up at a window. It is a big house, and the window is covered by a lace curtain.
“Mother!” I am calling. “Let us see the baby, come.”
Finally the door in front of us is opening, and the mother, wearing a nightie that goes only to her calves, her oily hair sticking to her scalp, her eyes looking like she has seen battle, is holding the baby and coming out. Poor woman is yawning like a hippopotamus. I am feeling that maybe I can make the mother cheer up, along with the baby.
So I am taking the baby in my arms, inhaling the milk scent of his skin. My eyes are falling in love with those soft folds in his wrists, the plump inside of his elbows. The others are clapping above the baby, singing, “God give this child a long life, may he never suffer the bite of an ant! God give this child a happy life, may he never suffer a lack of grains!”
The baby is looking surprised, with those big eyes. Maybe he is never coming out on the street before, never feeling the smoke and dust. For sure he is never seeing a group of hijras in our best clothes! He is screaming. His little mouth is opening to show pink gums and pink tongue, and he is screaming in my arms. He is a little animal. We are laughing. He is going to be fine, I am thinking, because he is having no defects, unlike myself.
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