A Burning

by Megha Majumdar

A spouse always has ideas about how you should spend your time. Couldn’t he have enjoyed thirty minutes to himself, to drink a cup of tea and sit on the platform?

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.

NOTHING GOOD COMES OF contacting the police. Everybody knows that. If you catch a thief, you are better off beating the man and, having struck fear in his heart, letting him go.

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.”

mosquitoes the size of birds

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.

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.