“Serve others,” offers PT Sir. “Improve the nation.”
“Exactly!”
The thought stays with him when he returns to his school. The girls run a simple relay race. They huff and puff, carrying a stick in their hands, and afterward lean on their knees to catch their breath. They high-five and laugh so loud a teacher from the third floor emerges to give them a stern look.
What is the meaning of such an education? PT Sir thinks as he walks down the lane at the end of the day. Around him, girls suck ice candies and call with orange mouths, “Good afternoon, sir!”
JIVAN
THE NEXT TIME PURNENDU comes, I try to see everything the way he must see it. The guard’s pacing, and the stench of sweat which rises off her. The benches around us where visitors and inmates sit, a third person’s worth of space between them. The instructions painted on the wall:
Please hand all home-cooked food to prison personnel
Please no body contact
Be respectful and talk at low volume
Any cell phone or camera will be confiscated
“Have you printed the first part of my story?” I demand.
Once more he has placed that useless pen on the bench between us. The guard has seen it, but whatever it is, she does not want to deal with it.
Purnendu smiles. “We have hardly begun! Once we have the full story, my editor will help me—”
“Why do you need some editor?” I charge. Then I try to be polite. “I need this story printed. I am telling it to you in order, arranged nicely, exactly how things happened. Just print it. You have to do it quickly, don’t you understand?”
Purnendu looks at me and pats my hand, on the bench. How soft his fingertips. I wish he would keep them there, on the bony back of my hand, where my knuckles sprout hairs.
“It doesn’t work like that. We want the public to see the full story, beginning to end, rather than leaking a piece here, a piece there. Do you trust me?”
* * *
*
THE MORNING AFTER THE EVICTION, when we woke up in a displeased aunt’s house in the neighboring village, my father complained of “a little pain.” His neck was held stiff, his whole body turning when he looked this way and that. This new village bordered a site at which garbage was burned. The rot and smoke made us all feel sick. But my father, I could see, was injured, perhaps from a policeman’s blow.
My mother, her own bones sore, lay quietly in bed, saying nothing. I took charge, suddenly my parents’ parent, and took my father to a doctor who, the aunt told us, was part of a clinic at a district government hospital. There the doctor saw the poor and the illiterate for no more than a flat fee of twenty rupees.
The hospital compound looked like a village in itself. Under the trees, on the porch, every spot of shade was taken by a family. Each family surrounded a patient who lay, moaning or blank-faced, on unfolded leaves of newspaper. My father walked straight past them, looking ahead and nowhere else. Into the hospital building we went, and I filled out a form and paid twenty rupees. Then we sat in a room, under a ceiling fan whose blades were so weighted with cottony dust that they barely moved. My father held a gentle hand to his shoulder, not rubbing it, but seeking to soothe it in some way that was beyond him. Finally, the doctor called us, “Patient party? Where is the patient?”
“He,” I began, calling my father by the respectful pronoun, “he has a lot of pain in his shoulder.” We scrambled into the tiny chamber, and sat in two chairs, both with woven seats on the verge of tearing from the weight of hundreds of patients over the years. On the wall fluttered a calendar with pictures of pink-cheeked babies. “Please see what happened to his shoulder,” I said.
My father looked at the doctor, his eyes glistening with tears he would not release.
“Fell, or what?” said the doctor, looking at us over his spectacles.
“No, they hit him,” I said.
Immediately, as the doctor asked, “Who hit him?” my father spoke up.
“Somebody on the road,” my father said, with a small smile. “Who knows? It doesn’t matter. I am only here for some medicine. I couldn’t sleep last night because of the—”
My father cried in pain. The doctor had reached over and was laying cold fingertips on my father’s upper back, pressing at various points. My father, whose calves had carried three people at once up slopes in his rickshaw. My father, whose back leaned forward in strength as he pedaled, up and down, up and down, for twenty-five rupees per ride. A tense silence descended on the room.
I grew angry—why wasn’t my father telling the doctor the police did it? Catch the police! Put them in jail for hurting him like that! How would he drive the rickshaw again with such pain?
Now I understand his silence. Now I know his reluctance.
The doctor stopped his examination and spoke in an irritated tone. “You could have gone to a general physician and had an X-ray first, why didn’t you do that? I can’t give you anything except this painkiller when you have come like this, with no test. Maybe the bone here is broken, but maybe not. How can I tell? You are not letting me touch the place, saying, ‘Oo aa, I am in pain.’ Go get the X-ray first—”
“Yes, yes, sir,” my father said, timid. “Can you write it down, please, the X-ray place where I should go—”
“Do you know how to read?” the doctor demanded.
“My daughter knows,” said my father. Even in his pain, he looked at me and smiled with pride.
* * *
*
WHEN I RETURN TO my cell, it smells like flowers. Americandi is surrounded by five or six others, including Yashwi, who is spraying something from a bottle.
I sneeze.
“Not in your armpit!” Americandi scolds her. “You don’t even know how to put perfume. Like this,” she says, “watch me.”
Americandi turns her chin up and tilts the bottle at her neck. Striated with lines, a column wobbly with fat, her neck newly glistens with a patch of scent.
“Like this,” she says once more, now holding a delicate wrist upturned. “You have to put it on the places where your blood is beating.”
“Then why aren’t you putting it on your chest?” someone challenges her.
“I wish we had a party!” Kalkidi moans. “Don’t we smell so nice?”
“Smell it,” Americandi demands when she sees me. She hands me the bottle. “Pure rose and…and…!” She thinks for a moment. “Some other things. Doesn’t it smell costly? Even Twinkle Khanna wears this perfume.”
I wipe my nose with the back of my hand, and sniff the air around me. It smells like roses and chemicals. It smells like a disguise. Beneath it, there is sewage and damp and washed clothes hung to dry. There is indigestion and belching and the odor of feet.
For a moment, I wonder how Americandi has the means to buy expensive perfume. Then, of course, I know.
On the floor, I see a thick new mattress. On top, folded, are a soft blanket and clean sheets. Now I hear the crinkle of paper behind me, and turn to see Kalkidi holding a bar of Cadbury chocolate. Americandi holds up a dozen more bars.
“For the children!” she says, and a mother looks like she will cry.
Her purchases agitate me. I could have bought a few things for myself. Oils and soaps, some cream biscuits to eat. A better mattress, a sheet with polka dots. I could have given most of it to Ma and Ba. Ba’s medicines are not cheap. What have I done?
Late into the night I think about this, regret raising its head like a snake in the bushes. Is one story in a newspaper going to persuade anyone?
LOVELY
ONE MORNING, ON THE way to a blessing ceremony in a nearby village, the boys in front of the tailor’s shop are staring, so I am teasing: “You want to visit my bed, just tell me!”
They are ashamed and giggling at the floor, holding scissors i
n their hands.
In this life, everybody is knowing how to give me shame. So I am learning how to reflect shame back on them also.
At this pre-marriage party, where we are coming to bless and earn money that way, we are climbing up to a roof where, under one old towel drying on a string, there is an old woman, the bride’s grandma. With her knees folded on the ground, she is pumping air into an old harmonium and playing the keys, which are the color of elephant tusks. The thin gold bangles on her arms are clinking softly as she is pumping and playing, pumping and playing. In the gentle winter sun, in the breeze, I am seeing her as a young woman, learning to play harmonium. The morning is softening for me.
Then Arjuni Ma is singing, and I am stepping in the center and loosening my shoulders, pinching a bit of sari in my left hand to lift the hem away from the ground, and with my right hand making stars and suns in the air. Arjuni Ma is singing an old romantic classic. I am turning this way and that way, and with my turns my sari is flowing like a stream, catching the light. I am using my eyes to match the expressions in the song, I am really “emoting,” as Mr. Debnath would say. Now my eyes are loving, now they are seducing, now they are looking shyly at the ground, as if Azad is sitting right here too among the women. Since I was telling him to marry a woman, he is not coming to see me even one time. What a mistake! I was thinking I would be feeling noble, but no, I am only feeling sad.
Though this is a private ceremony, some donkey villagers are standing in the doorway, spilling down the stairs, laughing and pointing, taking pictures of me with their mobile phones. What can I be doing? This is my job, to perform.
The bride-to-be is shyly sitting on the ground, looking at the dancing. She is wrapped in a starched yellow sari, and eating peeled cucumber dipped in pink salt.
When I am getting tired of dancing, and sweat is starting to pour down my back, I am bending and taking the bride’s chin in my hands, saying, “God keep this beautiful girl in rice and gold.”
Finally the mother of the bride, who is standing in the doorway, is seeing me admiring the girl’s looks, and she is complaining, “This girl is getting so dark! You tell her, please. She is always riding her bicycle in the hot sun, no umbrella, no nothing.”
So I am giving the bride a sideways look and saying, “Why, child? Now you put some yogurt and lemon on that face! Look at me, dark and ugly, do you think anybody wants to marry me?”
“Yes!” the girl’s mother is saying. “Are you listening? Listen to her. She is telling you these things from experience. It is for your own good.”
So this is how my job is. You can be making fun of me, but tell me, can you be doing this job?
PT SIR
“MORE ANTI-NATIONAL STATEMENTS HAVE been uncovered,” shouts a reporter standing at the Kolabagan railway station, “after the Your News, Your Views team studied Jivan’s Facebook page. She posted seditious statements, no doubt testing whether—”
PT Sir’s wife picks up the remote and lowers the volume.
“This student of yours!” she complains. “This case will go on forever. You went to the police, you did your part. When did we last do something fun?”
So, after dinner, PT Sir and his wife leave the house and walk to the local video rental shop, a one-room operation called Dinesh Electronics. Inside, before shelves of lightbulbs and wires, the owner sits viewing his own stock, surreptitiously stored on tiny USB sticks, no bigger than half a thumb. These recordings of the newest movies he rents out.
“Try this one, sister,” he suggests to PT Sir’s wife. “Something Happens in My Heart When I See Her! In demand this week, I just got it back from a customer. New actress in it, Rani Sarawagi. And filmed fully in Switzerland!”
PT Sir’s wife accepts the USB stick and tucks it in her purse. Outside, the air smells of fried food. A vendor dips lentil balls in a dark wok filled with oil, and sells paper bowls full, alongside a cilantro and green chili chutney. Next to him, a shoe repairman works under the thin light of a bulb, gluing a separated sole.
The sidewalk is cracked and uneven, so PT Sir and his wife keep to the edge of the road, near the dry gutter, as they walk. Headlights of cars approach and swerve by. Often, there is no space to walk side by side.
* * *
*
WHEN THE END CREDITS roll across the TV screen, PT Sir shares his big news of the day.
“Oh, I almost forgot!” he feigns.
His wife looks at him, smiling from the romantic closing of the film, where the hero and the heroine found their way to each other and embraced on an Alpine meadow.
“I got a lunch invitation,” PT Sir says. “Bimala Pal invited me to her house.”
He speaks calmly. But he is aware that his heart is beating a little fast. The sleep has fled his eyes.
“Bimala Pal?” says his wife, surprised. “Lunch at her house? Why, what does she want?”
PT Sir braces himself. His wife will, no doubt, caution him against going. So far, she has said nothing about the school inauguration, for which he took a half day off work, but—
She laughs. “Look at you,” she says. “First she comes to your school, now this. Maybe she really likes you!”
PT Sir smiles, relieved.
“Remember to take a box of nice sweets,” she tells him, “not those cheap sweets you eat.”
JIVAN
IN THE MIDDLE OF TV hour, when the room is louder with our commentary than television, Uma madam appears, showily eating a pear.
“You.” She points at me with the bitten pear. “Somebody to see you.”
I jump up. My back seizes, a shock traveling up and down my spine. Clutching a hand to it, I make my way to the visiting room, where the lawyer Gobind waits.
“Where did you go?” I demand. “Every time I try to call you, I stand in line for half an hour, pay so much money to call, and then your assistant picks up—”
He holds both hands up. “I have seventy-four cases on my desk,” he says. “I can’t sit around waiting for your call. Anyway, I am doing the work, aren’t I? I contacted the leader of your Lovely’s hijra group. Her name is Arjuni. Do you know her?”
I shake my head.
“She told me that Lovely left,” he says.
“What?”
“She said that Lovely went to her native village—”
“Where is that?”
“In the north. She doesn’t know exactly.”
I look at him for a long while. He coughs into a fist, and says, “Want to tell me anything?”
“You think I’m lying?” I say. “That leader is lying. You are lying, for all I know! Did you even look for Lovely, or do you think she is an imaginary character I have made up?”
I lower my voice. “I will tell my mother to go find Lovely. I am sure she is here. She never mentioned any village to me. She will come testify if I ask her. She will tell them that I was teaching her, that the parcel I was carrying was books for her.”
“Try,” sighs Gobind.
INTERLUDE
GOBIND VISITS A SPIRITUAL GURU
BY FRIDAY AT LUNCHTIME, my office irritates me. There is no painless way to arrange my belly before my desk. The termite tracks on the wall seem to grow every time I look away. My assistant treats his hoarse cough by smoking cigarettes with greater devotion. When the phone rings, it is my daughter’s school saying my daughter has been suspended for breaking a fellow student’s spectacles. I call her mother. Her mother will pick her up. I have too much work.
Days like this, only one thing helps. I visit my guru. My guru, my spiritual leader, is in her seventies, and lives on the ground floor of a house where the door is always open. Her living room has idols of gods on all surfaces. It smells of morning flowers. She does not eat meat, does not leave her house, does not watch TV. Once, I saw an iPad on her lap, but she put it away. She meditates. Her only ba
d habit is, she feeds stray dogs.
“I thought you would come today, child,” she says, looking up from petting a tan stray. The dog barks. I hold my arms up as the dog jumps on my knees. I don’t like dogs. My guru calls the dog away, and instantly it settles at her feet and looks at me.
“I saw some clouds in your life,” my guru says. “But clouds pass.”
A glass of water appears in front of me, and I tell her everything. I even tell her what I was not planning to reveal. My wife is upset with me. She thinks I spend too much money on my guru’s recommendations—an onyx ring one day, a smoky quartz another day. But a garnet worn on the left pinky helped me win my first case. I am sure of it. A white coral, which is in fact red, helped me avoid a deadly accident on my regular route home, when a tree fell on top of a taxi in front of me. I have worn a green tourmaline close to my chest, I have worn a moonstone. The day I began wearing a golden citrine, a frightening medical test came back benign. Don’t tell me there’s nothing here. The world is made up of negativity, problems, hassles—trust me, a lawyer knows—and gemstones bring good energy.
I have sixty to eighty cases at any time. A big case like Jivan’s means nothing but more misery—a dozen press people hounding me at all hours, pressure from all political parties, daily communication with police chiefs trying to hide their inept investigations. No matter the result, there will be plenty of people upset with me. It is trouble. The sooner it ends, the better for me.
“Will it end soon?” I ask. “It’s too much.”
My guru tells me yes, it will, but—she pauses.
“Your role,” she says with a gentle smile, “will be bigger than you can see at the moment.”
“In a good way?” I ask.
A Burning Page 7