A Burning

by Megha Majumdar

I admired these strangers on Facebook who said anything they wanted to. They were not afraid of making jokes. Whether it was about the police or the ministers, they had their fun, and wasn’t that freedom? I hoped that after a few more salary slips, after I rose to be a senior sales clerk of Pantaloons, I would be free in that way too.

in the small, glowing screen, I wrote a foolish thing. I wrote a dangerous thing, a thing nobody like me should ever think, let alone write. Forgive me, Ma.

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?

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.

A hand reached out of the dark and dragged me up in my nightie. I screamed and fought, believing it was a man come to do what men do. But it was a policewoman.

At some point, a car filled with boys sped by, and I heard whooping and cheering. They were coming from a nightclub. The doddering police van meant nothing to those boys. They did not slow down. They were not afraid. Their fathers knew police commissioners and members of the legislature, figures who were capable of making all problems disappear. And me, how would I get out of this? Whom did I know?

A woman like me is never believed.

It is as peaceful as it gets in a cage.

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

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.

some evenings I taught her English. It began as a compulsory school program where each student had to teach the alphabet to an illiterate person. But we continued long after the school graded me on it. Lovely believed she would have a better life someday, and so did I. The path began with a b c d. Cat, bat, rat. English is the language of the modern world. Can you move up in life without it? We kept going.

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.

If she had received a chance to tell her story, how might her life have been?

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.”

The children are each given a boiled egg and milk every other day. Other than that, there is no concession made to their growing bodies, their muscles stretching overnight. They eat the same stale curry as the rest of us. The mothers have agitated over this, but who will listen to them?

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?

“TELL ME,” I SAY. “How does this sound to you? What kind of start did I get in life?” Purnendu looks at me and smiles sadly. “Such is our country,” he says.

THEN THE POLICEMEN CAME to evict us. The company wanted to mine the land on which we lived, rich with coal. Why should the company let some poor people sit and bathe and sleep on top of vast sums of money?

“Leave our houses alone,” she screamed. “Where will we live?” Until then I had naively believed another home would materialize, but in my mother’s transformation I saw the truth: We had nowhere to go.

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.

We are moral men. We are principled men. But let me tell you, there are persons who don’t have any respect for our nation. They don’t have any respect for mother cow, and they attack her for beef, for leather, all sorts of disgusting things. There is really no place for such persons in our society, don’t you think so?

I think, what are they teaching him at school? If they are not teaching him the subjects, are they teaching him manners, loyalty to the country, et cetera, et cetera? No!” The two men pause when a box of sweets comes around. “Take my students,” says PT Sir. “Will they ever sweep the school grounds? Will they ever paint a beautiful mural like this? Never! Because they”—and here he pauses to chew his sweet—“are trying their level best to flee the country. They work so hard on applications to American universities that they ignore the school exams, failing and crying and pleading—they had SAT I! They had SAT II! What are these nonsense exams? Why will the school allow such brain drain?” The party man listens intently. When he is done with his sweet, he claps crumbs off his hands, then clasps his hands behind his back like a diligent schoolboy. “The problem, you see,” he joins in, “is we teach our children many things, but not national feeling! There is a scarcity of patriotic feeling, don’t you think so? In our generation, we knew our schooling was to…was to…” “Serve others,” offers PT Sir. “Improve the nation.”

I grew angry—why wasn’t my father telling the doctor the police did it? Catch the police! Put them in jail for hurting him like that! How would he drive the rickshaw again with such pain? Now I understand his silence. Now I know his reluctance.

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

PURNENDU HAS BROUGHT ME a string of shampoo sachets, clothesline clips, and elastic hair bands. I hold the gifts in my lap. They are currency. “Thanks,” I say to him in English, so that he knows, even while he gives me products with which I will clean myself and groom myself, that I can be his equal.

“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.

PT Sir has never seen this man before, of course, but he knows—he has been told—that this is a man who has robbed and stolen for a living, but never been caught. There has never been evidence, though his neighbors and friends all know the truth. It is true that he also belongs to the wrong religion, the minority religion that encourages the eating of beef, but that is a peripheral matter, according to Bimala Pal’s assistant. The main issue is, a robber has to be stopped. What decent man would object to participating in the execution of justice?

For the first time, as he wanders down the familiar corridor, past the law library and to the canteen, PT Sir wonders if the guard is paid by the party too. For that matter, how about the courtroom clerks, and the judges, and the lawyers? Not one of them has ever said: “This man is really something! Everywhere there is a robbery, a domestic problem, a fight between neighbors, this man happens to be walking by! Is he Batman or what?”

THIS IS HOW BIMALA PAL explained it to him, and this is how he explains it to his wife. All these cases are instances in which the police are one hundred and ten percent sure that the accused is guilty. They don’t have that much evidence, is all. But the accused are known in their neighborhoods. They have reputations. Should these dangerous men return to the streets on a technicality? Much better to fill the gap with a witness and make sure the guilty party lands in jail. PT Sir cannot disagree. It is true that there is a lot about life that the law misses. And it doesn’t hurt that each assignment comes with a “gift,” delivered to him every month by an assistant, perhaps the assistant’s assistant, who drives to the house on a noisy motorcycle and offers a pristine white envelope.

In the outside world, I was wearing boy’s shorts and a boy’s haircut, and playing cricket. But secretly, at home, I was trying lipstick. I was wearing my mother’s saris once, twice, thrice. The fourth time my uncles were persuading my father to kick me out of the house. “What dignity will we have with this unnatural boy in the household?” they were shouting. “Our children are normal, think about them!” My cousins were hiding in a bedroom, peeping out at me with big eyes. My mother was fighting to keep me at home. She was saying I could be going to a special school! I could be seeing a doctor! But how long can a mother be fighting against the laws of society? So I was leaving. In my heart I am knowing that my grieving mother must have been looking for me for years. Maybe she is still searching for me. I am not thinking about her anymore.

When I was a child, I was being taught that school was the most important thing in the world—my exams and my marks would make me successful! These days, I am seeing that’s not true.

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.

I learned English, the language of progress. I couldn’t get anywhere if I didn’t speak English, even I knew that.

The other girls, from middle-class homes where they read English newspapers and watched Hollywood films, disdained me. But in the slum, I was the only one with an English textbook, and who cared whether I was good or not? It was a place where most could not read a word—Bengali or English—and what I had was a great skill.

Every face that is turning to me, I am hoping it is not somebody from Mr. Debnath’s acting class. Please god, I am thinking. Now I am on my way to being a star, why to ruin that reputation? Those classmates are maybe the only people in my life who have not seen me in this trade. They have not seen how this trade is making me a little disgusting in the eyes of others. But if I am not having this trade, how am I saving money for acting classes?

All this I am seeing through the windows of the train, like they are a kind of television. * THE INVITATION CARD IS arriving one morning, passed from hand to hand because there is no address on it except Lovely Hijra, near Kolabagan Railway Station. I am opening the card as if it is a flap of my heart. I am reading the words so many times I am knowing them like a song. Opening and closing the card, opening and closing the card—I am ready for my heart to be tearing at the fold.

“Lovely is here,” he says, standing up when he sees me, “you are right. The message has been delivered.” “I know,” I tell him. “My mother found her, when you couldn’t!” “She has promised she will testify,” he says, as if he can’t hear me. “A win for us!” A few days later, in the papers, I see stories which claim Gobind did extensive on-the-ground investigation, endless nights of detective work, to track down the elusive hijra, Lovely.

Later, when the audience had dispersed, Ma sat in the house with her head in her hands. When she looked up, after long minutes, she said, “They were touching me here, touching me here. Oh my girl, my gold, don’t make me tell you.” I saw my mother then as a woman. I felt her humiliation. And where I had always felt shame, I now felt white-hot anger. Anger crept into my jaws and I had to gnash my teeth to be calm. Why was this our life? What kind of life was it, where my mother was forced to buy cheap vegetables in the middle of the night, and got robbed and attacked for it? What kind of life did we have, where my father’s pain was not taken seriously by a doctor until it was too late? So I made a decision. Whether it was a good decision or a bad decision, I no longer know.

ALL I AM GUILTY OF, Purnendu, listen—all I am guilty of is being a coward.

All the while, 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.

I don’t know what this means, this matter of hope. Moment by moment, it is difficult to know whether I have it, or not, or how I might tell.

From my mother’s immense strength, I have borrowed a little.

IN THE DARKNESS OF the house, Jivan’s mother and father sit before meals of rice and yogurt, tears falling on their plates. “It took everything I have,” says Jivan’s mother, “to smile before her.” “I know,” says Jivan’s father, a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “I know. Eat.”

I am glad for this small triumph. I have done nothing, I have done nothing, but nobody in this courtroom believes that. Only my mother. My mother is sitting somewhere behind me, but I have no courage to turn around and face all the other eyes.

Imagine you are a Muslim. One day what happens? Your neighbors, good people, suddenly form a mob over some rumor and break your door, threaten your wife, frighten your crippled mother. They set fire to your house. Thankfully, they do it while you are all out. That is their kindness. You run. You leave your damaged house, your property, and you run. Life becomes so precious, so precious! For a few months, okay, there is refugee camp, some donated rice, some tin house. But one day the government announces, no more this ugly refugee camp! You all get five lakh rupees, now go somewhere else and live. Shoo. Immediately, who comes? Vultures. You have your broker, your landlord, your town council, your water man, your electricity man, even your school man—what will your small children do, sit at home and grow up illiterate like you? So they all come and say, sir, there is a good plot here, you buy and build your own home. Most important you have your own piece of land in your name. There will be a water connection, and electricity cables are already laid, you come and see just. So you look at the plot. The land looks fine. You give most of your compensation money to buy this plot. Then one day everyone disappears—your broker who called you five times a day? Vanished. The electricity man, the water supply man? Vanished.

Then you go to the address given on your deed and feel confused when you arrive somewhere different from where you went the first time. You have never seen this plot! All the neighborhood boys nod and chew their twigs and nod and then they laugh. When they laugh, you realize—you have bought a patch of this swamp. So this is the riot economy. In this economy, I am a broker, nothing more.

am always thinking that Mr. Debnath is believing in me, but this time, with my eyes on his hairy toes, I am feeling that he is a man I am not truly knowing, and I am a person he is not truly knowing.

it. I am feeling that the world is so big, so full of our dreams and our love stories, and our grief too.

Azad has not come to see me even once. I am wiping my tears on my dupatta. I was forced to, my heart, is he not knowing that? It was not me who was throwing him out. It was this society. This same society which is now screaming for the blood of innocent Jivan, only because she is a poor Muslim woman.