The mother is looking harassed, and taking the baby inside. We are waiting for the sound of a drawer opening, some cash being counted by mother and father. But what is this, she is going inside a room, where a tap is running and water is falling. From here, over all the sounds of the street, I am hearing one sound clearly: She is washing her hands. She is washing her hands of us.
Meanwhile, the father is coming out in shorts and giving Arjuni Ma, our hijra house’s guru, three thousand whole rupees. He is sliding his glasses down his nose and looking at us from the top. One of my sisters is flirting with him for an old microwave or old TV. He is looking unhappy and pleading, “Where am I having so much, sister? Look at me. New baby and all.”
Me, I am only trying to see what the mother is doing behind him, in the dark corridor, her hands so, so clean.
* * *
*
IT IS NOT NEW, this insult. But it is not old. I am leaving the group and hurrying to the sweet shop down the street. Inside there is running a long glass case holding trays full of sweets. The pyramids of sweets, some dry, some soaking in syrup, are tempting me. There is brown pantua, fried and syrupy; there is white chomchom, so sweet your tongue will be begging for salt; there are milky and dry kalakand; and there is my favorite, kheer kodom. I am smelling the whole case from where I am standing, believe me. I am feeling the flavor of the flies buzzing over the sweets, and how some of the old sweets are beginning to sour in the hot day.
“How much is this?” I am saying. “And how much this one?”
The man behind the counter is grumbling. He is unhappy that he is having to serve me, I know. Finally I am getting one small roshogolla, ten rupees. The man is giving it to me in a small bowl woven with dried leaves. I am lifting the bowl to my forehead. I am giving thanks. It is no small thing to buy a sweet, and that is enough today. That is how my life is going forward—some insult in my face, some sweet in my mouth.
Someday, when I am a movie star, that mother will be regretting that she washed me off her hands.
* * *
*
IN THE EVENING, when my sisters are coming to my house, wearing nice saris for their outing, mosquitoes the size of birds are flying in happily also. One of my sisters is saying, “Did the police ask you anything?”
It is true that Jivan was teaching me English, so for sure the police will be coming to interrogate me. How come they are not coming yet?
In the corner of the room, hanging from a nail, is a coil of cables. One of my sisters is pulling a line and plugging it into the boxy TV on the floor. After she is slapping the top of the TV, it is waking up. That classic movie A Match Made by God is starting.
While the songs are playing, Arjuni Ma is raising her notebook close to her old eyes and reading what we have earned this week. Five thousand for a marriage, three thousand for a baby blessing. A few hundred rupees from the train.
My mind is somewhere else. Who is liking the police? Nobody. But I am also hoping that they are coming and I am getting a chance to tell them that Jivan was teaching me English. Impossible that Jivan is a criminal. Cannot be. I am wanting to tell the police this.
“When they come,” Arjuni Ma is telling me later, “be careful when you talk to them. Maybe it is better that you try to avoid them.”
We are all knowing what is happening to hijras who are displeasing police, like Laddoo, our young hijra sister who was going to the police to report harassment from a constable, and was herself put in the lockup. There she is staying for days and days. Many years ago I would have been asking why is this happening? But now I am knowing that there is no use asking these questions. In life, many things are happening for no reason at all. You might be begging on the train and getting acid thrown on your face. You might be hiding in the women’s compartment for safety and getting kicked by the ladies.
I was almost being arrested one time also. A constable named Chatterjee was catching me when I was begging near the traffic light. He was saying to me, “Now you are trying to do this nonsense in my area?”
“What?” I was challenging him. “I can’t stand on the road?” I was speaking like a heroine. I was new. I was not knowing.
Anything could have happened. But he was a reasonable man. He was letting me go after I was buying him a single cigarette and lighting it for him.
JIVAN
IN PRISON, OUR MAIN activity is waiting. I wait for Americandi to get confirmation from the journalist that he will come, and to see if Uma madam will look the other way. In the complete black of night, I wonder if there are other ways. If my hands were spades, they would burrow from my cell to beyond the garden wall, where buses race, where beggars loiter, where women wearing sunglasses buy chop-cutlet for evening tea.
In the morning, I stand in line for breakfast. A rumor goes around: Sonali Khan, the famous film producer whose name every household is knowing, was spotted in the booking room. Everybody cheers. What did she do? we wonder. Did she hit somebody with her car? Did she hide some money in Switzerland?
“You all,” says Americandi, ahead of me in line, “don’t know anything. It’s that rhino.”
The film producer once shot, from the safety of a jeep, an endangered rhino. The ghost of this rhino has caught up with her. She is finally being punished for it. Now she will live with us, and tell us all about the cinema.
Yashwi says, “Definitely we will get a new TV, then!”
“What’s wrong with this TV?” snaps Americandi. “If you don’t like it, see if you can arrange for a new TV for yourself.”
“No, I mean…” Yashwi looks at her feet. I know she dreams of a TV whose pictures will not jump, whose remote control will work.
Komla, who once robbed a family, striking with an iron rod a mother who was left paralyzed, begins to salivate thinking of the meals in store.
“Chicken curry,” she calls, turning her head up and down the line for the benefit of all, “for sure we will get chicken curry. Regularly!”
She sticks a finger in her ear and shakes it vigorously to scratch an unreachable itch. “Maybe mutton also, who knows?”
I listen, believing myself far away.
When we have returned to our cells, and Uma madam comes on her round, I catch her eye.
“Have you put my brother on the list?” I ask her.
She looks at me blankly and continues on her path, the ring of keys singing at her hips. But Americandi, greedy for the two hundred thousand rupees the Daily Beacon has promised for an interview with me, leaps up and stands at the gate.
“Uma,” she calls. “Come here.”
Down the corridor, the constant chatter and clang of our prison pauses.
There is a long silence while Uma madam saunters back. “What did you say?” she says softly. “Am I your best friend? Talk to me with respect.”
Somebody in a neighboring cell whistles.
“What is this, TV hour!” somebody else comments.
“Okay, Uma madam,” my cellmate says. “This poor girl,” she continues, pouting, in a voice loud enough to carry down the corridor, “got ghee from her mother to cook for you. And you won’t let her see her own brother? Shame! How must her mother be feeling?”
“Let her see her boyfriend, for god’s sake!” somebody says, laughing.
Uma madam stands still. I watch from behind Americandi.
“Don’t interrupt my round again,” Uma madam says quietly. Then she is gone.
* * *
*
THE WEEKS PASS and nothing changes. In the courtyard? No Sonali Khan. In the TV room? The same old TV. Every week the women pin their hopes on a different day—surely she will be transferred here this Sunday, or next Thursday. Then we hear that Sonali Khan is being kept under house arrest, which means that she lives, as before, in her own house. Even the meaning of “prison” is different for rich people. Can
you blame me for wanting, so much, to be—not even rich, just middle class?
PT SIR
THE SECOND TIME PT Sir goes to a Jana Kalyan Party rally, he stands close to the stage.
“You can see with your own eyes,” Bimala Pal continues, “what this party—”
The microphone screeches. Bimala Pal takes a step back. The crowd roars and waves tiny flags. PT Sir waves his flag, saved from the previous rally.
“What this party brings to districts across the state,” Bimala Pal says. “The auto parts factory—”
The microphone screeches again, and the crowd murmurs. Some cover their ears with their palms.
“The factory employing three! thousand!—”
Screech. This time, Bimala madam looks about with a stern face for a technician. Behind her a number of assistants dash about, looking for the sound guy, who has probably wandered off to smoke a cigarette. The crowd stirs in boredom.
In a mad and decisive moment, PT Sir marches forward, angling his body sideways and holding an arm out in front of him.
“Side,” he calls, “side!” He climbs the steps to the stage two at a time, assuring Bimala Pal’s bodyguards that he intends only to fix the microphone. He wiggles the cord and tests the jack, then moves the microphone farther away from the speaker. He steps up and says, “Testing, testing.”
His voice rings out clean and sharp over the crowd.
PT Sir’s drumming heart calms.
Bimala Pal resumes her speech, and from a plastic chair somebody offers him at the back of the stage, PT Sir looks out over the vast number of men who have gathered. It is many stadiums’ worth of men, their heads like the bulbs of ants. These are not the spoiled and lazy students who occupy his days, nor the teacher aunties who proceed as a horde after school to watch Bengali detective films and eat Chinese noodles. When has he ever been among so many patriots, men who are invested in the development of the nation, who are here in a field listening to an intellectual lecture rather than at home, under a sheet, taking a nap?
After Bimala Pal closes her speech, she comes around to the back of the stage, and thanks him. PT Sir jumps up and folds his hands in greeting.
“I am just a schoolteacher.” PT Sir gestures down the road. “At the S. D. Ghosh Girls’ School.”
Bimala Pal leans in.
“That school?”
“Yes, that one,” PT Sir says. The terrorist’s school. “In my school functions I set up the microphone, so…”
Both turn to look at the microphone. It is turned off and silent on its stand. Somebody has garlanded it.
“Well, teacher sir,” says Bimala Pal, “it is our good fortune that you came.”
Later PT Sir’s wife will say, “That was a scolding for coming to the stage! Don’t you know that politicians always say the opposite of what they mean? It is called diplomacy.”
But PT Sir is glad. An esteemed public figure, taking note of him! A gathering of assistants behind Bimala Pal nods and voices its agreement.
Bimala Pal draws the anchal of her sari around her shoulders, and continues, “We need educated people like you to support our party. More educated people must care about what is happening in our state, in our country. So to see a teacher like you at our rally makes me glad.”
PT Sir opens his mouth to say something. He must clarify that he teaches physical education. He is not the kind of teacher she imagines, he is only—
A boy appears with dishes of samosas, and after that there is chicken biryani for all. The men in the fields have received, away from the glare of a TV camera, and distributed from the rear of a discreet van, their dinner boxes of biryani too. They take their boxes quietly and disperse.
But there is a problem. There are more men in the field than boxes of biryani. A scuffle breaks out. The man handing out boxes of biryani immediately closes the back doors of the van. Bimala Pal and her lackeys turn to look, and PT Sir looks too.
A man, not too far from the stage, points his finger at another. “This one is taking three boxes! He is hiding them in his bag!”
That man demands, “Who are you calling a thief?”
An open palm slaps a face, a leg kicks a leg.
Bimala Pal has slipped away, cupping a hand around her mouth on her phone, occupied by a more pressing matter. One of her assistants turns to PT Sir and jokes, “Well, sir, look at these rowdy children.”
The other assistants, young men holding two mobile phones each, wait with hidden smiles to see what the teacher will do.
PT Sir feels the eyes on him. The pressure is subtle but great. He steps up to the edge of the stage, sits on the pads of his feet, and calls, “Brothers, brothers! There is food for all! Why are you fighting like children?”
The men in the crowd look up at him.
“Are you children,” PT Sir continues, “that you are spoiling the gathering here with your fight? Do you want to disgrace the party, and our elders who have gathered here, in front of those reporters over there?”
“Who are you?” a man shouts at PT Sir. “Who are you, mister, to tell me what to do?”
But the fight has lost its air. The men separate with some curses. When PT Sir returns to his seat and picks up his box of biryani, one of the assistants stops him.
“Wait, please,” he says, “the rice has grown cold by now, wait one minute.”
He calls the tea boy—“Uttam!”—and asks him to bring a “VIP box” right away. A fresh, hot box of biryani, with two pieces of mutton, arrives for PT Sir.
* * *
*
“TODAY I AM NOT HUNGRY,” PT Sir announces at home. “Today I had biryani with, guess who? Bimala Pal!”
His wife looks up from her phone. In the background, softly, the news plays. PT Sir settles heavily on the sofa, and picks up the remote. He turns up the volume. A reporter shouts: “This alleged terrorist used a very modern way of spreading her anti-national views, find out how she used Facebook—”
On another channel, a soft-spoken news host says: “On top of throwing torches at the train, dear viewers, let me tell you all, she was also sharing anti-government views on Facebook, and who knows where else, for years—”
“Beware,” PT Sir tells his wife. “What all you do on Facebook. It’s full of criminals.”
“Your head,” she says, “is filled with all this. I only look at cooking videos. It’s a totally different part of Facebook. People abroad make such nice things, you don’t know—like apple pie with ready-made whipped cream! I have never seen such things. The cream comes out of a can.”
At bedtime, when they climb under the mosquito net, his wife marvels at the story he has told her. “Imagine that!” she says. “You saving the day at a JKP rally!”
A mosquito has followed them inside the net. It buzzes near their ears until she locates the mosquito resting on the sheet and smacks her hand down on it. A blot of blood appears, and she carries the corpse of the mosquito off the bed and flings it out of the window.
Then she stands by the window, and pulls the glass closed. She draws the curtain. Only then does she say, “Can I tell you something?”
He waits.
“I don’t know about these politicians,” she says. “In our country politics is for goons and robbers, you know that.”
PT Sir sighs.
His wife continues, “When you do something for them, like you helped them when their technician was not there, they make you feel nice. On a stage, in front of so many people—who wouldn’t feel like a VIP? But associating with such people—”
This irritates PT Sir. He lies with his head on his thin pillow and wonders why his wife cannot tolerate something exciting that is happening in his life. She is annoyed, he feels, because he didn’t have much of an appetite for the yogurt fish she cooked. She is annoyed because he filled his belly with store-bought bir
yani. But he is a man! He is a man with bigger capacities than eating the dinner she cooks.
“Well,” he says in as calm a voice as he can manage. It is easier in the dark. “Why are you getting worried? I just went to one rally.”
She slides back into bed, her silence thick. “You went to two,” she says finally. After a pause, she speaks again. “Please, I ask you,” she says, “don’t go to more rally shally.”
PT Sir thinks about this for hours, until deep night has settled into the home, turning their furniture unfamiliar, amplifying a squeak here, a knock there. Somewhere a clock ticks. Far away, an ambulance siren sounds.
JIVAN
THIS VISITING DAY, SEATED on a bench waiting for me, is not my mother but a man. He has a beard, and a cloth bag in his lap. At his feet, a plastic sack which he lifts and hands to me. His soft fingers against mine are a shock.
The bag is heavy. Inside, I see a bunch of bananas, and a packet of cookies.
“You are…” I say.
“Purnendu,” he says, with no hi or hello. He is gentle, gentler than any reporter I have encountered. “How is your health?” he asks me.
“Fine,” I tell him. I look again inside the bag, at the perfectly yellow bananas, no bruises on them that I can see. I want to eat them all, right now.
“Sit,” he suggests when I remain standing.
“You are not allowed to take notes,” I say, pointing at the pen in his fingers. “Didn’t they tell you that?”
“Oh,” he says, looking down at the pen in his hand, as if he has just noticed it. He puts it on the bench between us. “Then this is useless,” he says, smiling. There is a joke in his words that I don’t catch. Is it a pen, or…?
A Burning Page 5