A Burning

by Megha Majumdar

Almost one year ago I was coming to Mr. Debnath’s house for the first time. He was asking to take my interview in the street. Because—he was saying, this was his explanation—the house was being painted, so there was nowhere to sit. Rubbish. Where were the painters, the rags, the buckets, the ladders? I was knowing the truth. The truth was that Mrs. Debnath was not wanting a hijra in the house. So I was standing in the street, making sure a passing rickshaw was not hitting my behind. Mr. Debnath was saying, “Why you are so bent on acting? It’s too hard!” My kohl was smearing and my lipstick was gone on some cup of tea. My armpits were stinking, my black hair was absorbing all the heat of the day and giving me a headache. But this was the one question I was always able to answer. “I have been performing all my life,” I was saying to him. I was performing on trains, on roads. I was performing happiness and cheer. I was performing divine connection. “Now,” I was telling him, “just let me practice for the camera.”

“They are feeding a lot of people with discounted rice,” he says. “And they are going to connect two hundred villages, two hundred, to the electricity grid in two years—” “You,” says his wife, “believe everything.” PT Sir smiles at her. When she disappears into the kitchen, he gets up and washes his hands clean of turmeric sauce, then wipes them on a towel that was once white. He understands how his wife feels. If you only watch the news on TV, it is easy to be skeptical. But what is so wrong about the common people caring about their jobs, their wages, their land? And what, after all, is so wrong about him doing something different from his schoolteacher’s job? Today he did something patriotic, meaningful, bigger than the disciplining of cavalier schoolgirls—and it was, he knows as he lies in bed, no sleep in his humming mind, exciting.

Then she is gone, all the mothers are gone, and the rest of the day stretches before us. In the courtyard, I see a fight among three women—teeth bared, hair coming unclipped. They scream about a missing milk sweet. For the rest of the day, we fall and die from knowing, but never being able to say, especially to our mothers, that the inside of the prison is an unreachable place. So what if there is a courtyard, and a garden, and a TV room? The guards tell us over and over that we live well, we live better than the trapped souls in the men’s prison. Still we feel we are living at the bottom of a well. We are frogs. All we can bear to tell our mothers is “I am fine, I am fine.” We tell them, “I walk in the garden.” “I watch TV.” “Don’t worry about me, I am fine.”

The man behind the counter is grumbling. He is unhappy that he is having to serve me, I know. Finally I am getting one small roshogolla, ten rupees. The man is giving it to me in a small bowl woven with dried leaves. I am lifting the bowl to my forehead. I am giving thanks. It is no small thing to buy a sweet, and that is enough today. That is how my life is going forward—some insult in my face, some sweet in my mouth.

Many years ago I would have been asking why is this happening? But now I am knowing that there is no use asking these questions. In life, many things are happening for no reason at all. You might be begging on the train and getting acid thrown on your face. You might be hiding in the women’s compartment for safety and getting kicked by the ladies.

THE WEEKS PASS and nothing changes. In the courtyard? No Sonali Khan. In the TV room? The same old TV. Every week the women pin their hopes on a different day—surely she will be transferred here this Sunday, or next Thursday. Then we hear that Sonali Khan is being kept under house arrest, which means that she lives, as before, in her own house. Even the meaning of “prison” is different for rich people. Can you blame me for wanting, so much, to be—not even rich, just middle class?

“TIME, TIME,” CALLS A GUARD. She strides about the room, striking each bench with a stick. Our hour is over. My brother, Purnendu, stands up and lifts the cloth bag on his shoulder. “Next week,” he says, “and the week after that, and the week after that, for as long as it takes.” His words play in my ears with the sweetness of a flute. I watch him go, past a door which magically opens for him, and I turn back. Inside, a woman beats her head on the wall. Once, I might have felt that way too, but now I don’t. Now I float beside her, her scrape only hers, not mine. I am on my way out. As soon as the newspaper publishes my story, the door will begin to open for me. Where public feeling goes, the court follows. Freedom will result not from boxes of papers and fights over legality but from a national outcry. I walk past the woman striking her head. A guard appears, and tells the woman, in a tone of boredom, to stop striking her head. “What are you doing,” the guard drones. “Stop it right now.” The woman pauses, turns, and strikes the guard with her head. “Ooh!” gasps the corridor. The woman is taken away, screaming, for something they will call treatment.

Damaged in the attack at the railway station nearby, the school building has been renovated over the past months, and is being reopened with great ceremony by the Jana Kalyan Party. The school is no more than a five-room shed. Murals on the exterior walls show a lion, a zebra, and a giraffe strolling alongside a herd of rabbits. A sun with a mane like a lion’s smiles at them all. A civic-minded artist has included, low to the ground, an instruction to passersby: Do not urinate.

“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.

“The system doesn’t always work for us. But you see that, now and then, you can make good things happen for yourself.” And I thought, only now and then? I thought I would have a better life than that.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I am thinking about it, I am truly feeling that Jivan and I are both no more than insects. We are no more than grasshoppers whose wings are being plucked. We are no more than lizards whose tails are being pulled. Is anybody believing that she was innocent? Is anybody believing that I can be having some talent? If I am wanting to be a film star, no casting man or acting coach will be making it happen for me. So I, myself, Lovely with my belly and no-English and dramatic success only in Mr. Debnath’s living room—I am having to do it myself. Even if I am only a smashed insect under your shoes, I am struggling to live. I am still living.

you’re a true party man now. Isn’t this what you wanted? Aren’t you proud?” He notes in her words both reward and punishment. But she touches his arm gently, and her presence soothes him. They buy the tandoor. Paying for the tandoor in a sheaf of cash, he feels rich. He feels powerful in how casually he decides that he will buy it, that he will pay the full amount right away. Monthly installments are for the common man. He? He has ascended.

As PT Sir sets off, his wife admires his traditional clothing, his shined shoes. “You are starting to look like a politician!” she says. “Is that so?” he says. This pleases PT Sir, though it is a meager reward. For what has he spent his days falsifying the truth in court? For what has he taken on the ghost of the beef-eater, that man who begs for mercy in the moments before sleep? That ghost who weeps in his mind when he is alone, who pleads with him when he waits for the schoolgirls to come to the field?

“One thing,” she says. “Jivan, that terrorist. She has been polling high on voters’ priorities.” “Oh,” says PT Sir, taken aback by the turn in the conversation. He should have known. “This issue is not going away.” Bimala Pal touches her forehead in a gesture of worry. “Something will have to be done. The public is unhappy that she is appealing for mercy and whatnot.” “I testified—” “That is why I am telling you,” Bimala Pal interrupts. “And the mercy petition is her legal right, so I don’t know—” “Legal right? You have much to learn about politics,” says Bimala Pal, smiling. Then her smile fades, and she looks at him, unblinking, until PT Sir feels his relief vanish.

Outside the gate, sitting on a plastic chair, there is a man. He is thin like a grasshopper, and his freshly cut hair is standing straight up on his head. He is looking at me coming closer and closer, and he is saying, “Please, ma, not today, there is an audition going on—” “Very strange you are!” I am telling him right away. “I am coming for the audition only!” To this the man is not knowing what to say. He is looking like his boss is going to fire him, but he is not knowing how to stop me. I am looking that good. I am feeling that confident. So what if some man is trying to put a barrier in front of me?

“Action!” someone else is calling. And me, from the depth of my heart, I am becoming the mother I am needing to be, even though the child actor will be coming tomorrow, and I am only imagining her today. Every wish of motherhood that I am having, for all my life, I am pouring into the lines they are giving me. I am dreaming this child into being before my eyes, and I am holding this beloved little person. How real is she, my child. This child is having the face of Jivan, daughter of those poor parents, donor of pencils and textbooks. How is she living, alone in some dark cell? Even if she is not feeling the knife at her neck, I am feeling myself holding it. Now, my face thick with makeup, my hair stiff with gels, I am knowing what Arjuni Ma was truly telling me: 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.

“What I am saying is, it would be a shame if, after all this, the mercy petition hangs, going nowhere, for months and months. Don’t you think so?” PT Sir leans back in his chair. The chair, subservient, tilts. From Bimala Pal he has learned to withhold words in favor of long seconds of silence. They tick. He feels the man on the other end evaluating his words. Cautiously, Gobind says, “It’s true, these petitions can take time.” “So,” PT Sir declares, “why don’t you hand the mercy petition to me. I will try to expedite it. Now I am in a position where I can expedite it, add my voice to it. We want swift justice, that is all I’m saying. Whatever outcome will be is not in my hands, but it is not good to keep the public waiting. It makes our new government look—” He throws up a hand, a gesture of not knowing, though Gobind cannot see him. “Let me send a messenger for it,” PT Sir continues. “He will pick up the papers from you. And for your trouble, we will of course send you a small gift, just a token of thanks for your hard work on this case. You don’t have to tell me, but I know how this work becomes a sacrifice—of family time, of time with children. Don’t you have a daughter, Gobind? Doesn’t she want more time with her papa, maybe a holiday next year?” “Okay, sir,” Gobind agrees. He is unsure if he chooses this.

WAITING FOR SOME REPLY in the mail, I travel along with the letter in its hopeful van. I travel along with the letter on a train, paddy fields outside. I travel along with the letter in the air, on a plane where rich men eat chocolates. But the letter lands on an indifferent desk. Days pass. Weeks too. Maybe the minister’s assistant glances at it, no more. Maybe they are overwhelmed by letters from prison. Who am I except one of many? My pen grows feeble. What can words do? Not very much.

There is nothing supple in my arms. They are twigs, waiting to snap. When I look down, my legs are dry and scaly, white with skin that is neither alive nor willing to shed.

When he speaks once more, his voice finds courage, and he finds courage too. Look at the rapt crowd. Look at the public, gathered before him, drinking in his words while he stands where Bimala Pal stood not so long ago. By the end of the speech, he feels barely anchored to the stage by his hands on the microphone, his whole self charged as if by the wind in the field and the electricity in the wires. When the crowd disperses, they fill buses where they hang from open doorways, and return to homes where the pride of the year is a new refrigerator. They will bend in fields, earning two rupees for crops that will sell in the city for forty, and stand by roadsides hawking stacks of dinnerware which will chip at first wash. They will watch, wide-eyed, the one movie that plays in the theater on their half day off from carpentry or construction or cleaning bathrooms, while PT Sir, in the government office’s special elevator, moves upward.