A Burning

by Megha Majumdar

I ought to have seen the men who stole up to the open windows and threw flaming torches into the halted train. But all I saw were carriages, burning, their doors locked from the outside and dangerously hot.

Policemen paid by the government watched and did nothing while this innocent woman lost everything, I wrote.

“Are you telling the truth?” he says. “They found your chat records talking to the terrorist recruiter on Facebook.” “Everybody keeps saying this to me, but this boy was just someone I chatted with online. We were online friends,” I plead. “I didn’t know who he was.”

“What about these cloths soaked in kerosene found at your house?” says Gobind after a while. “Very much like the kerosene-soaked torches that were tossed into the train. What about that?”

Her husband threw acid on her but, somehow, she is the one in jail. These things happen when you are a woman.

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.”

“This alleged terrorist used a very modern way of spreading her anti-national views, find out how she used Facebook—”