A Burning

by Megha Majumdar

“YOU SMELL LIKE SMOKE,” my mother said to me.

It’s the opening line now, and it’s all thanks to my brilliant editor. For a long time, the opening of the book was a standalone section describing the burning of the train and imagining the thoughts and acts of the passengers inside. But my editor asked what would happen if we moved away from that opening—false in some way because it wasn’t introducing us to the main character—and to this simple line which introduces both the central character and her mother? I loved her suggestion. Funny how my way of opening the book for years got scrapped so late in the process for a different doorway into the story!

This was not the frustration of no water in the municipal pump or power cut on the hottest night. Wasn’t this a kind of leisure dressed up as agitation?

I grew up middle class in India, and we often had power cuts in the middle of summer. Maybe you’re familiar with the experience? Really hot, mosquitoes biting you, and suddenly the TV blinks off and the fan stops turning. On those nights my mom would call the electricity supply company and they’d say something and she’d call back after an hour and they’d either not pick up or say something else and meanwhile us kids grew miserable with our half sleep in the heat… you can imagine! That kind of private frustration that you experience isn’t really performed for anyone. And it still holds so much privilege—we had electricity, we had beds, it was a minor annoyance in the scheme of things. I was wondering about how there are some things we bear in silence—and things much worse than the power cut I mentioned—and some experiences that we perform. Is there something performative about complaint on social media? In order to do that, doesn’t one need a level of comfort and privilege? Is outrage on Facebook or Twitter mixed with a kind of pleasure? I may be completely wrong, but these were the questions I was thinking through.

If the police didn’t help ordinary people like you and me, if the police watched them die, doesn’t that mean, I wrote on Facebook, that the government is also a terrorist?

Sometimes we might imagine that anyone can joke on social media, anyone can criticize people in power. But what happens if you’re vulnerable in real life, and that vulnerability carries over into the internet? Can anybody post a criticism of the government on Twitter with no consequences? Do we have to think about our class status, our immigration status, our place of privilege or lack of privilege in order to speak up online?

My chest is a man’s chest, and my breasts are made of rags. So what? Find me another woman in this whole city as truly woman as me.

Lovely is such a defiant and spirited character, I loved writing her. I wanted a bold declaration from her of who she is as she steps onto the train to go to an acting class.

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

To the women reading this—you know the feeling of bewildering injustice, the feeling of living in an upside down world? The kind of feeling I have when I read about assault victims blamed for wearing the wrong (?!) clothes, the feeling I got reading about the recent law in Texas effectively banning abortion. All of us have stories about the injustice we’ve faced simply for being women, and I wanted to acknowledge that topsy turvy, everything-is-wrong feeling in these lines.

Now I watch TV, openmouthed like the others. More than the show, it is the world I watch. A traffic light, an umbrella, rain on a windowsill. The simple freedom of crossing a street.

I am often amazed by simple freedoms, because when you think about them, they’re not very simple. I feel grateful for them. I’m amazed that I can take a walk on a sunny day. I’m amazed when there’s a cool breeze before it starts to rain and it takes the stress out of a busy workday. I’m amazed that umbrellas exist, these cups to keep us dry from the rain. Do you know what I mean?

That is how my life is going forward—some insult in my face, some sweet in my mouth.

I am a Bengali person from Kolkata, and Bengali people love sweets. Our sweets, which are often made from milk, sometimes dipped in syrup, are such a treat, and that’s what I was thinking about here—the joy of eating a sweet can restore order in a day which is marred by something bad. And deriving a kind of philosophy of living from the act of eating a sweet—that connection of banal to profound was interesting to me.

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?

Isn’t house arrest a strange concept? One of those concepts I learned when I was young, probably watching the news on TV, and the idea that staying at home is the same as being confined in a prison—whew. I probably saw news stories about celebrities getting such special treatment. I think a lot about the divides between rich and poor, that we live in societies where some people own yachts and multiple houses and some people don’t have enough to eat.

In this life, everybody is knowing how to give me shame. So I am learning how to reflect shame back on them also.

When I was twelve or thirteen, I’d get touched and groped on public buses. It happened to my friends too. First we spoke about it with shame and confusion, and then we started sharing advice on how to react when it happened. I learned to shout, in the middle of crowded buses, “Keep your hands to yourself!” I had friends who were bolder and said things like, “Don’t you have any shame?” So that experience of first internalizing shame (why did we feel ashamed when it was the men who groped us?) and then learning to call out the men who did it was a really powerful switch for me.

“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.

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. One thing I have seen is how ambition presents itself differently across generations. Our mothers may have aspired to certain things, and we might find that because of their sacrifices and hard work, we are able to aspire to bigger things. There’s something a little sad and a little joyful there.

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?

The despair of knowing something is true—your innocence, your talent, your ambition—but everybody around you failing to recognize it… the powerlessness of that situation made me think of insects and lizards.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you for reading these annotations. The paperback edition of A BURNING will be out on 6/29: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57001533-a-burning