A Burning

by Megha Majumdar

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.

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.

At the end of the night, when I am walking down the lane, all the shops are shuttered other than a welder’s shop where a masked man is working. From the machine, bright sparks are falling on the road. In the hands of this tired man, it is like Diwali.

So I made a decision. Whether it was a good decision or a bad decision, I no longer know.

I listen to Uma madam’s scolding in this posture of shame, until the posture is all I am.

In this world, only one of us can be truly free. Jivan, or me. Every day, I am making my choice, and I am making it today also.

He is unsure if he chooses this.

Nobody can say that PT Sir is not an ethical man.