A Burning

by Megha Majumdar

  But my mother had to stop when the rains came, beating on roofs, muddy water rising from the wheels of passing rickshaws churning waves that soaked the stove and licked at our high mattress. I took a bucket, its handle cracked so that I had to hold it by the bottom, and tipped the water out on the street, where it joined a stream in which seedpods and the brown shells of cockroaches floated.

  By then, Ba’s condition was worse. He lay in bed, his shape barely human. There, the head. A foot slipped outside the sheet. An arm raised to show his pleasure at seeing me. While he slept, Ma cooked and cleaned, refusing to speak her worry. But I knew what it was. His medicines cost money, and the monsoon wouldn’t let her run her breakfast business. What would we do?

  PT SIR

  ON THE LAST MORNING of the summer holiday, PT Sir feels the mattress shift under him as his wife wakes. Up she sits, swinging her legs to the ground, yawning noisily, a whiff of her morning breath reaching him. He does not mind. He does not even think about it. He falls back into the delicious sleep of ten more minutes. Dozing, he hears her slippers on the tile floor, the clink of her bangles rolling to her wrist, the tumble of pots and pans as she pulls one from the drying stack. She is going to boil water for oats.

  At this thought, he gets up. The sun shines directly in his eyes. Many times he has told her he wants a double-egg omelet and butter-cooked potatoes for breakfast, but she continues to make oats, like she did every morning for her elderly father. But that man is old. What is he, PT Sir? A young man. A man of vigor and power.

  Well, today, he is going to buy himself the breakfast he deserves. It will be even better than omelet-potatoes. Off he goes to the marketplace, where a sweet shop makes kochuri with chholar dal for breakfast. Fried dough, stuffed with green peas, and a lentil curry. A breakfast of decadence. Let his wife eat her oats!

  On the street, a stray dog ambles after him, and he shoos it away.

  “Go, hut!”

  But the dog follows him, its ribs outlined in its skin, a patch of fur missing, its tongue hanging out of its pink mouth.

  PT Sir dares to pick up a stick from the road and swat it at that dog. Only when he throws the stick does the dog retreat, trotting away in the other direction.

  PT Sir has sent a dozen men to jail, does anybody know that? So this street dog better beware of him, or he can have it locked up in a snap of his fingers, ha-ha!

  * * *

  *

  ONE MORNING, DAYLIGHT FAILS. The sky turns so dark that lights are flipped on throughout the neighborhood, lending the dawning of day a mood of dusk. With a storm that thunders and blazes, and whose rain strikes rooftops across the city, the monsoon arrives. PT Sir’s wife draws the windows closed before the slanting rain, and PT Sir emerges from the house with his trousers folded up to his calves, his feet in rubber slippers. His work shoes he carries in a plastic bag.

  From his doorstep, PT Sir surveys the terrain. Brown water sloshes this way and that, the street turned into a stream, as office-goers wade. PT Sir spots a rickshaw churning water as it makes its way slowly down the lane. It has high wheels, and a high blue seat sheltered under an accordion roof. When he raises an arm and calls, “Rickshaw!” the driver pedals toward him and comes to a lazy stop. With his shirt unbuttoned and calves muscled, his head dry under an umbrella held upright by the handlebars, the man looks blankly ahead and quotes a fare that is triple what it should be. PT Sir, with some pride, casually agrees to it.

  “Fine,” he says, “fine, let’s go.”

  * * *

  *

  FOR YEARS, THE SCHOOL has tried to get the drainage in the access lane fixed so that it doesn’t flood. Every monsoon, it floods. So it has today too. Students, in school uniform and Hawaii slippers, hover by the dry mouth of the lane, on high ground. Rainwater has flooded the underground dens of cockroaches, and now the insects emerge from cracks in the pavement. On land they dash, alarming girls who yell and stomp them dead. When a school bus arrives, or a classmate’s car pauses, girls pile into the vehicle to be carried to the gate of the school.

  Classes proceed as usual, but whose mind can be on Mongol invasions and trigonometry when the city is flooded? All day rain drips and drops, and when it pauses for a breath, it is replaced by the false rain of fat water from ledges and leaves.

  In his class, PT Sir has them do yoga indoors, four students at a time, because it turns out that’s how many yoga mats there are. The others “meditate”—eyes half-open, a giggle spreading now and then. PT Sir says, “Quiet!” but he knows this too: The rules are different on a rainy day.

  * * *

  *

  AT LUNCHTIME THE PRINCIPAL, in a show of solidarity, leaves her air-conditioned office and sits with the teachers. She too has arrived with feet soaked, the bottom of her sari darkened by water.

  “Undignified,” comments an English teacher. “All of us teachers lifting up our saris like that to walk to school. Imagine how it looks to the students!”

  “It gives a poor impression to the parents,” agrees the maths teacher.

  The principal, before a tiffin box of sandwiches, teases, “PT Sir, we have all seen that you know powerful people.”

  PT Sir looks up from his lunch of noodles. He smiles, and makes no protest.

  “Any chance,” the principal says, “something can be done for our lane?”

  * * *

  *

  SO IT IS THAT the following Monday, two laborers appear, wearing city corporation badges, and present themselves to the principal. “Your work order,” they say, offering her a sheet of much-folded paper. “Work has been done. Sign and give back, please.”

  The principal cannot believe her eyes. “I noticed,” she says, “that the lane looked dug up.”

  And here it is, indeed, a document detailing what has been done. Over the weekend, men dispatched by the municipal corporation ripped up the asphalt, pumped the old drainage pipes clean of muck and plastic, then sealed the road above.

  The next time it rains, students and teachers walk down the school lane, clean and dry, while districts of the city drown.

  LOVELY

  AT THE END OF a class, Mr. Debnath is sitting in his chair with a puddle of tea on a saucer, and he is blowing phoo phoo. I am analyzing my performance that I was recording on my phone. On the wall, some brown flowers are hanging around the faces of his late parents. High time for Mr. Debnath to buy fresh flowers.

  “Lovely, today I am realizing,” he is saying, after the others have left, “that you are growing far beyond this class.”

  “Don’t say such things, please,” I am protesting, even though I am secretly thinking that maybe he is right. My performances are always outshining. In fact, I am having the same thought myself. But I am always being humble. “I have to learn a lot more from you,” I am saying to him.

  “I have been writing a script, Lovely,” he is saying. “Remember how I was getting a chance to go to Bombay, twenty years back? From that time till now, I have been writing this script. And it is getting to the point where I am thinking about casting and so on and so forth.”

  “Wow!” I am saying with my neck coming out like a goose. “You are directing a film?”

  “Writing,” he is saying, “and directing, naturally. Now, I have one question for you.”

  And just like that, with his tea breath on my face, he is asking me to be the heroine. The question is coming as such a shock I am taking one minute to understand fully what he is asking.

  “Do you accept?” he is saying.

  I am just looking at him like a fool. I am meaning Yes! Yes! Yes!

  Mr. Debnath is telling me, “You must be wondering who is playing the lead opposite you? The hero, well, I am really writing that role for someone like Shah Rukh Khan.”

  “Shah Rukh Khan!” I am finally saying. My voice is catching in my throat. “Was I ever tell
ing you that I am sleeping every night under a poster of Shah Rukh Khan?”

  It is really too much emotion. I am feeling like I am on top of a high Himalayan peak of happiness. If I am having to be putting words to this feeling, that is truly how I am feeling.

  “Someone like Shah Rukh Khan,” Mr. Debnath is saying, “more or less.”

  But I am not even hearing.

  “Accept?” I am saying. “Mr. Debnath, this is the greatest day of my life!”

  JIVAN

  IN THE BEGINNING, THE hot air of the kitchen made my head swoon. Once I paused my work of flipping ruti and, recalling what I learned in PT class, lowered my head between my knees. Soon after, a guard, a man, noticed the slowed production line and said, in my ear, “Want to rest? I can take you to the clinic if you want.”

  Everybody knew what happened in the on-site clinic to women who were sedated and weak, unable to do more than lift a hand or briefly open their eyes.

  No longer am I that light-headed woman. Every morning and every evening, I make more than a hundred pieces of ruti. My movements have become economical—slap and turn, pinch and lift. My head is down, my bony fingers swift. Looking at me, you might think I have become a servant, but that is true only of my hands. In my mind, I have resisted being imprisoned. In my mind, every morning I dress smartly, clip on my badge, and take the bus to my job at Pantaloons. That morning will come again. The clock, though reluctant, moves forward.

  * * *

  *

  I HAVE ALWAYS BELIEVED in work. Only once, I promise Purnendu, only once did I think about committing a crime.

  In the big city, one of the first things I noticed was how everybody had big cell phones like handheld televisions. One of those cell phones could pay for a few months of my father’s medicines.

  “So you stole a phone?” Purnendu says. He sits cross-legged on top of the bench, wearing office pants which smell like ironing. “From who?”

  “No, wait,” I say. “Listen first.”

  One day, on the main street, I saw a woman whose purse was unzipped. A wallet peeked out. The woman was holding a receipt and looking hopefully at the roll shop. My heart pounded in my ears as I reached forward and touched that wallet. I touched it gently at first, then nearly lifted it from the purse. Even while I was holding the wallet, indecision screamed at me: Should I really do this? Was I a thief? In any case, the wallet had caught on something deep in the purse. I tugged once, then let it go.

  No, I wasn’t a thief.

  No, I was never a thief, but the woman turned around, surprised, and gripped my wrist. With my bony wrist in her strong hand, she shouted, “What are you doing?”

  Everybody at the roll shop looked at me. The man who was cracking eggs on the black pan paused. The boy who was chopping onions held his rag-wrapped knife still in the air.

  I looked at the ground, my wrist still in the hand of the woman. How soft her hand was. I readied for a beating.

  But the woman with the soft hands bent toward me and asked me a question, her voice suddenly different.

  “How old are you, child?” she said. “Are you hungry?”

  The kindness of her voice made me harden with suspicion. Why was she being nice? I refused to speak, turning my eyes to the road, where yellow Ambassador taxis rumbled along, honking their horns.

  “Why didn’t you ask me for something to eat?” she said.

  She took her roll from the shop, bought me one, and took me back to her office, me agreeing to her soft hand on my back, her warm fingers touching my skin through the zipper fallen open, in my mouth delicious chicken, nothing more. Her office was up an elevator. The box moved, and I kept a hand on the wall.

  “Never been in a lift?” said the lady. She smiled. “Don’t be afraid.”

  In the office, other ladies came forward and asked me many questions. After I devoured the chicken roll, one gave me two biscuits which I crammed in my mouth, buttery crumbs sticking to my chin.

  They were an education NGO, and they provided scholarships for underprivileged children to attend one of the best schools in the area, S. D. Ghosh Girls’ School.

  * * *

  *

  ON THE PATH FROM our slum to my new school, there was a butcher shop. Every day I walked past skinned goats hanging from hooks, their bodies all muscle and fat except for the tails, which twitched. The goat must have had a life, much like me. At the end of its life, maybe it had been led by a rope to the slaughterhouse, and maybe, from the smell of blood which emerged from that room, the goat knew where it was being taken.

  Before I began going to the good school, I used to feel that way. In this prison, sometimes, I feel it again.

  But at that time, with my clean school uniform, a bag full of photocopied books strapped to my shoulders, even a new pencil in my pocket, I did not feel like that goat anymore.

  * * *

  *

  THAT DOES NOT MEAN school was easy. I kept my distance, or others kept their distance from me, and from their faces I knew they found something physically unappealing about me: my hair, often knotted and chalky with dust, or my smell, like metal. But it did not keep me from laughing at what they said, accepting a glance thrown my way as a kind of friendship.

  I learned English, the language of progress. I couldn’t get anywhere if I didn’t speak English, even I knew that. But I dreaded being asked to stand up and read from the textbook.

  I read like this: “Gopal li-li-livaid—lived on a mou-mou-moonten, and he—”

  The other girls, from middle-class homes where they read English newspapers and watched Hollywood films, disdained me. But in the slum, I was the only one with an English textbook, and who cared whether I was good or not? It was a place where most could not read a word—Bengali or English—and what I had was a great skill.

  PT SIR

  IN AUTUMN, DURING THE Durga Pujo festival, young lovers roam the streets, holding hands, till dawn. Ceremonial smoke wafts where priests worship, and drummers keep their beat going until the next day arrives. The streets, closed to cars, fill with vendors of fried snacks and cotton candy. Some neighborhoods install Ferris wheels and swinging pirate boats where traffic might have been.

  On such a night, while the city celebrates, the Jana Kalyan Party leader, whom PT Sir has only briefly met, a man with three mobile phones in his palms at all times, dies. It is late, well after dinner, when PT Sir gets the phone call. His wife, woken by the ring of the phone, and worried by the tone of voice she hears, rises from bed and asks, “What happened?”

  She tells him where he might be able to buy a grief wreath, of white evening flowers, at this hour.

  PT Sir takes a rickshaw, then a taxi, then abandons the car and runs when the traffic stalls. Crowds stream past him in the opposite direction. Now and then a child, no taller than his hip, blows a pipe whose neck unfurls and reveals a feather.

  The party leader’s house is in the old part of the city, where lanes accommodate one Ambassador car at a time. Two police jeeps try to regulate the crowd, a mass of men holding hot earthen cups of tea by the cool rim. On balconies along the lane, neighbors watch the gathering like it is a festival of its own.

  “Have they brought the body from the hospital?” PT Sir asks a stranger beside him, a man carrying a cloth bag like a scholar.

  “Few minutes ago,” he replies.

  PT Sir sees no familiar faces, so he stands some distance from the house, holding a tall bunch of white flowers, the only flowers he could find at that hour. Murmurs spread that the chief minister is coming to pay his respects, and the railway minister too. A car is allowed through, bearing a famous actor, who steps out in sunglasses. To the crowd, he joins his hands and bows his head. Then he disappears inside the house. The crowd roars and moves as one, and for a moment PT Sir fears a stampede.

  “Please keep order,” shouts a man fro
m the front. “His wife is inside, his elderly mother is inside, have respect for them!”

  PT Sir feels ashamed of himself, a participant in this strangely excited crowd of the supposedly grieving. He feels the way he did at the first Jana Kalyan Party rally he attended, when he was a diffident man.

  Should he go home? Should he, at a calmer moment, phone the bereaved? But he has brought these flowers. Wouldn’t he like to show Bimala Pal that he has come? There, inside the house, all the senior ministers are gathered. Wouldn’t it be good to be acquainted with one or two of them?

  At that moment he hears a voice.

  “You have come,” says the assistant, the same one who delivers PT Sir’s courthouse bonuses by motorcycle. PT Sir follows him gratefully. The man leads him through the crowd—“Side, side,” he commands—and PT Sir feels eyes on him. He can feel the crowd thinking, reminding him of that long ago moment on the train when he received free muri, who is this VIP?

  LOVELY

  WHEN THERE ARE NO babies or newlyweds to bless, the sisters of my hijra house are giving blessings for money on the local trains. It is our tradition, and we are doing it more during Durga Pujo days, when the goddess is not in the sky but here in our city.

  “Come now, sisters,” Arjuni Ma is saying to everyone in the compartment, clapping her palms together, “don’t you want your day to be blessed?”