A Burning

by Megha Majumdar

  “That’s nothing for you to worry about,” she snapped. “When did you become such a grandma? Just go to school, study hard, that is your job.”

  But I could not give up. If I let her talk me out of it, I would never attempt it again.

  “Class ten graduates,” I said, “can get well-paying jobs. I can finish class ten, sit for the board exams, then look for a job.”

  After days of back and forth, Ma gave up. One night, as we were finishing our meal, she threw up her hands.

  “Now this job ghost is sitting on your shoulder, what can I do?” she said. “So fine! Ruin your life, what do I care? Grow up and live in a slum, that will be good!”

  Maybe that was a poor decision. But whom did I have to teach me how to build a better life?

  * * *

  *

  IN THE MONTH LEADING up to the board exams, I studied hard. Late nights I sat on top of the high bed, a flashlight in one hand aimed at the page, my body swaying back and forth as I murmured paragraphs. As night grew deeper, in the silence around me, sometimes I heard a man pissing in the gutter right outside the house. Sometimes I heard footsteps, soft like a ghost’s. I don’t know how much I learned, but I did memorize whole textbooks by heart.

  In March, the board exams began. I went to my assigned school building—we were given seats in different schools, away from our own, so that we could not scratch answers into our desks beforehand. A few girls were pacing in the lane, textbooks open in their arms, their lips moving. Some distance away, a girl was bent over and vomiting while her mother patted her back.

  Inside, in a classroom, it was strange to take my chair, a sloping desk before it that belonged to somebody else. The desk was scratched with hearts which said S+K. Sheets of answer paper were passed out by a teacher, and I waited with my sheets, gripping my new ball pen, until the question paper was distributed. Outside the window a tree held still.

  Three hours later, when the bell rang, I handed over my sheets, bound with an elastic string, to the invigilator. My middle finger was swollen with the pressure of the pen.

  In the corridor, girls stood in clusters, hands smudged with ink, some rubbing their aching hands. I left, overhearing pieces of conversations.

  “What did you write for the summer crops question?”

  “Sorghum!”

  “I knew this diagram would come.”

  * * *

  *

  ON THE DAY OF RESULTS, my heart leaped to see I had passed, with fifty-two percent. It was the poorest score in my class, and my classmates looked at me with concern. They expected me to cry, or collapse in despair. A few girls were standing in the corner, sniffling into handkerchiefs because they had received seventy percent. But unlike them, I was not planning to go to college. All I needed was to pass, and I had.

  At home, I was feted as a graduate. How proud were my mother and father. In celebration, my mother pressed a milk sweet in my mouth, and distributed a packet of sweets to the neighbors.

  “My daughter,” she announced proudly, “is now class ten pass!”

  It was as if she had forgotten my plan. I had not.

  The week after, with a copy of my exam certificate in hand, I walked into the New World Mall and got a job, in the jeans section of Pantaloons.

  * * *

  *

  AND THERE, AT PANTALOONS, I picked up a bad habit. Everyone around me had bad habits. We were earning our own money, why should we not indulge? I started smoking cigarettes. Costly cigarettes, branded singles which I bought with pride and lit from a slow-burning rope dangling from a corner of the shop. I held each cigarette between my fingers like a film star.

  * * *

  *

  THE NIGHT THE TRAIN would burn, I walked to a place where my mother would not come upon me. The Kolabagan train station. There was a cigarette shop open there until late hours. I bought a single. I lit it. On the platform I stood like an independent woman, flicking ash. Next to me, I rested a package of my textbooks which I was long past needing. I would give them to Lovely.

  A few of the passengers inside the halted train looked at me, all alone at night, smoking a cigarette. They were thinking, I thought, that I was a risky girl.

  This is what city girls do, I thought. I enjoyed troubling them.

  Then I heard two slaps of thunder. Quick as lightning, a crackle of fire spread through the train. I saw two shapes slipping away into the overgrown public garden next to the railway lines, the slum’s toilet. One minute two coaches were smoking, a trembling fire within them, and the next the fire was roaring out of the windows, jumping from coach to coach. Other than the fire, I heard nothing, though I could see faces trapped and screaming. I stood, frozen, a tiny fire glowing in my hand. The air began to smell like burning hair.

  Directly in front of me, locked in the train, a man was beating his wrist against the iron bars of a window. The man was looking at me. A grown man, he was looking at me and crying. He was speaking to me. Between his lips stretched saliva. I could not hear his words, but I could guess them. He was begging for help. He was holding up a little girl. She was struggling, squirming, crying.

  He was pleading with me to come up and, somehow, grab his little girl, pull her through the window bars if I could.

  I turned and ran. In a gutter somewhere, I dropped my cigarette. Then I ran and ran, and did not stop until I arrived home.

  * * *

  *

  ALL I AM GUILTY OF, Purnendu, listen—all I am guilty of is being a coward.

  PT SIR

  ONE MORNING, AT THE school assembly, while the principal speaks, the microphone shrieks.

  Students cover their ears. Teachers keep sober faces.

  Instead of hurrying forward to fix the problem, PT Sir stands with the other teachers, calmly sipping a cup of tea.

  The principal calls, “Where is Suresh?”

  Suresh is a peon in the administrative office. When he is fetched, he goes up to the microphone and jiggles the cables. He unplugs it and plugs it in once more. He taps the head of the microphone.

  PT Sir looks on, not moving a finger.

  JIVAN

  THEN PURNENDU IS GONE. I wake with my heart clamoring in its cage. I force stale bread and dry potatoes down my throat—no tea today. The sun, unseen, makes itself felt in clothes sticking to our bellies and salt water dripping down our necks. Kneeling, I perform today’s beautification task, which is to clean a bathroom. I scrub the toilet, and pour boric acid down a pipe. The acid, diluted in water, stings where my hand holds old cuts. But it will kill the moving, pulsing soil smeared in the sewage lines—dozens of cockroaches.

  All the while, in a clean office far from here, Purnendu writes my story, and his editor makes it better.

  “Your editor made the story better?” I laughed when Purnendu told me. “My story would be better if…”

  I count on my hands. “If we had not been evicted, do you see? If my father had not broken his back, if my mother had not been attacked for trying to run a small business. If I could have afforded to finish school.”

  “Not better like that,” said Purnendu.

  “Then like what?”

  He had no answer.

  * * *

  *

  TWO DAYS LATER, I am standing in line for my morning meal, when Uma madam arrives in the courtyard, waving a newspaper in the air.

  “You,” she says, looking at me. Her mouth twists, hiding a smile. Then she hands me the newspaper. “Nice job.”

  The headline, in large text, reads, “I THREW BOMBS AT THE POLICE”: A TERRORIST TELLS HER LIFE STORY.

  The story begins: Over several interviews conducted at the women’s prison, this reporter heard a story of poverty and misfortune, as well as a lifelong anger at the government. It began when Jivan was a child, and was, along with her family, evicted from
their settlement near Kurla mines. At that time, she freely confessed to this reporter, she and her family prepared homemade bombs with which they attacked the police.

  I move out of the line, and sit on the ground. I read the lines again. Did I forget to clarify to him that those bombs, as we called them, were nothing more than urine and shit? They were the pathetic defense of an insect.

  I check the byline. Purnendu Sarkar, it reads. That was his name, wasn’t it?

  I read some more. Her anger at the government is not recent, and has roots in a lifetime of neglect. From mistreatment of her father at a government hospital, leaving him with chronic debilitating pain as the result of a back injury, to her time living in government housing where an unreliable water supply made daily life difficult, close analysis of her story reveals animosity toward the government—

  I finish reading the article, and begin again. I finish it once more, and return to the top of the column, over and over until the words become no more than balls of earth rolled by termites. I close my eyes, and the ground tilts, taking me with it.

  Uma madam takes the newspaper from me. I let her take it. From where I sit, I see only her feet, wrinkled skin in Bata slippers, and a sari reduced to rag in the humid air. “Feels good?” she taunts above my head. “This is what happens when you do secret interviews without permission! Do another! Do ten more! See how much they help!”

  My head feels drawn to the earth, incapable of raising itself. So that is who he was, Purnendu. I listen to Uma madam’s scolding in this posture of shame, until the posture is all I am.

  * * *

  *

  MA COMES, holding a newspaper in her hand.

  “Don’t show that to me,” I say, anger flaring at her.

  She opens the leaves, turning the cottony pages one by one.

  “Wait, wait,” she says. “Kalu read this to me. He said it is good.” She shows me a column inside, marked by pencil.

  Beware of trial by media, says the article. This is a different paper. Where is concrete proof that this young woman had involvement in the attack? Everything the police tells us is circumstantial evidence. The woman is being sacrificed because of her Muslim identity.

  “See?” says my mother. “Kalu told me this newspaper is speaking up in your defense. People are listening. Nothing is decided yet. Don’t give up hope.”

  I don’t know what this means, this matter of hope. Moment by moment, it is difficult to know whether I have it, or not, or how I might tell.

  “This just means you are being hopeless,” my mother teases. Then she smiles, and touches my cheek while the guard has her back turned to us.

  There is nothing funny, but my mother’s smile, those familiar folds of her mouth, that crooked tooth, the wisps of hair at her temples, soothes me.

  At the end of the hour, when she gets up to leave, she reminds me, “Many people from Kolabagan are going to come speak about you in the court, you’ll see. What a good girl you are, a good student, the only girl in our locality who speaks English. They will learn that you are nothing like what this one newspaper is saying.”

  I nod, willing no tears to spill from my eyes.

  Then the guard calls, “Time, time!” and, after her hand rests for a gentle moment on my head, my mother is gone. I turn back inside. I brace for a collapse, a removal of light during which I will lie, my bones against the floor.

  But I am surprised to find that it is bearable. I cook ruti, I clean the new exhaust pipes which malfunction. Americandi’s eyes follow me from task to task, waiting for my breakdown. But it doesn’t come. From my mother’s immense strength, I have borrowed a little.

  JIVAN’S MOTHER AND FATHER

  IN THE DARKNESS OF the house, Jivan’s mother and father sit before meals of rice and yogurt, tears falling on their plates.

  “It took everything I have,” says Jivan’s mother, “to smile before her.”

  “I know,” says Jivan’s father, a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “I know. Eat.”

  JIVAN

  ON THE FIRST DAY of the trial, Uma madam brings me a sari to wear. I recognize it. It is the sari I purchased for my mother from Pantaloons, with my employee discount. It is light blue, the color of a winter day, with simple threadwork along the border. I wear it, and feel my mother close by.

  At the courthouse, there is a garden. There is new soil under my feet, the bigness of trees in the yard, light so bright it hits my eyes like broken glass, a stampede of reporters who scream questions and fight to take a picture of my face. Policemen surround me as soon as I exit the van, and I walk as if inside a shell.

  Still the reporters shout, “Here! Look here!”

  They shout, “What will you say to the families of the dead?”

  “What are you eating in the prison?”

  “Are they beating you?”

  “Has anyone from the terrorist group contacted you?”

  “Have they coached you on what to say?”

  Inside the courtroom, I sit in relief. The room is large, with ceilings so high they could have fit another floor inside. Long rods drop from the ceiling, holding ceiling fans which turn. Before me, a witness box covered by a white curtain, so that I cannot influence the witnesses.

  My lawyer, Gobind, asks me again and again whether I want to eat.

  “Want a banana?” he says. “You should eat before it starts.”

  I have no appetite.

  The lawyer for the government begins. He spins a story in which I, unruly local youth, school dropout, angry at the government, cultivate a relationship with a known terrorist recruiter over Facebook. As proof, the lawyer points to the Facebook conversations I have had with my friend, my foreign friend. In this story, when the recruiter asks for my help, either through coded text messages or by calling me on the phone, I agree. The terrorists need a local contact, the lawyer insists, a helper who can guide them down the unnumbered, crooked lanes of the slum, all the way to the station, and all the way out. In his story, not only do I lead them to the station, I also hurl a torch of my own at the train. I have, he reminds the gathered, hurled bombs at authorities before—

  I cannot bear it. I stand up and say, “Those weren’t bombs, my god, they were just our—”

  Gobind hisses at me to sit. The judge, calmly, tells me to sit. Silence thunders in my ears. I lower myself into the wooden chair.

  “And,” the lawyer concludes, “let me remind the court that all of this is not some, what shall I say, theory I have made up. This is all in the confession that the accused signed.”

  He points at me dramatically.

  “Everything I have said,” he continues, “is in the confession, and what’s more, all of it is corroborated, like I have shown you. The accused herself has repeated many of these statements, as you all saw in her interview in the Daily Beacon done by esteemed journalist Purnendu Sarkar.”

  The judge frowns. He calls both lawyers to his seat, grand like a throne. In my chair, I wait, my limbs growing cold. What is the judge discussing in secret? I feel like a straw doll, dressed up for play, at the mercy of callous children who decide my fate.

  Then, mercy. The judge throws out my “confession.” He pronounces it inadmissible, as I was forced to sign it—this, he believes.

  Gobind gives me an encouraging smile.

  I am glad for this small triumph. I have done nothing, I have done nothing, but nobody in this courtroom believes that. Only my mother. My mother is sitting somewhere behind me, but I have no courage to turn around and face all the other eyes.

  * * *

  *

  FOR FOUR DAYS, I go through the routine of coming to court. On the fourth day, a reporter, or maybe just a passerby, spits on my face outside the courthouse. My lawyer finds a canteen napkin with which I wipe my face, but there is no time to find a bathroom and wash. I sit with that strange
r’s hatred on my face all day.

  By this time, the prosecution has called forty witnesses, including old neighbors from the slum eviction, the doctor who treated my father, the NGO lady who sponsored my education. They testify behind the white curtain, for fear that I—I—may intimidate them by making eye contact. I listen to their ghost voices. Some saw me smoking—several people mention this, as if lighting a cigarette is the same as lighting the tip of a torch.

  Is smoking a cigarette as a young woman a crime?

  Then, on the fifth day, a man arrives in the witness box. He speaks, and his voice revives me. I know this voice.

  I am back in the school courtyard, playing basketball. It is my old PT teacher. I wait for him to tell everyone that I was an ordinary student, that I used to love to play.

  He says, “She was poor, always separate from the other girls. But she didn’t behave badly in my class. She played very well, in fact. I had high hopes that she would be an athlete.”

  Listen to my teacher, I think. Listen to him. He knows. I want to catch his eyes to thank him, but it is not possible.

  “Yes, my understanding was that she had a difficult life,” he says. “Sometimes I gave her food for lunch. I never knew if she had enough to eat. She seemed grateful for the food.”

  I was, I remember. I was grateful. Perhaps in my child’s arrogance I failed to thank him adequately. I will do it as soon as they let me speak to him. I will thank him for speaking up on my behalf. Nobody else has been willing to do it. Not a person from the NGO, not a person from my school, nobody yet from my locality.

  Then he says, “But she disappeared. I tried to help her, by being encouraging, by giving her food, but one day she stopped coming to school. This was after the class ten exams. She didn’t do so well, if I remember. But so what? You can make up with better marks in class twelve. But no. She just left. Vanished. Never saw her again, until I saw her on TV. Maybe she got involved with criminal elements after leaving school. It happens.”