A Burning(12)

The police, desperate for progress, have asked Jivan’s friends and associates to step forward. Nobody will be harassed, they have promised. They are only looking for insight into the character of the terrorist, some scrap of information that will crack the case open. The men involved in the case have long slipped across the border and fled. Jivan is the only hope.

So it is that one morning, encouraged by his wife, PT Sir, in fresh clothes, his sparse hair combed, his belly full of breakfast, picks up the phone and calls the local police station. When the superintendent on duty, a man who insists on speaking in English, urges him to come to the station right away, PT Sir does. So consumed is his mind that it is only halfway on his walk to the station that he realizes he is still wearing his house slippers.





JIVAN


WHEN MY MOTHER CAME to visit for the first time, she cried to hand over a tiffin carrier, full of home-cooked food, to the guards. She did it again, and again, hoping the meals would reach me. Then I told her, “Why are you cooking for the guards?”

I watched her cry then, my own eyes dry.

Today, upon my request, she hands me, not cooked food, but a small pouch, knotted shut, filled with golden oil. It is ghee.

“What will you do with this?” she asks.

I tell her.

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 KITCHEN, where my work is to make ruti, holds a large grill which allows me to make bread in batches of ten. One woman kneads the dough, one tears balls and flattens them into disks, several roll them flat and round, and I tend them as they’re tossed on the grill. When they’re done, I lift them with long tongs and flip them onto the stone surface next to the grill. There, a couple of women dust the flour off and stack them.

After making a hundred and twenty pieces of ruti, I pour the ghee on the grill. The scent is the luxury that I imagine sleeping on a bed of feathers must be, or bathing in a tub of milk like the old queens of our country. With my hand, I flip the dough in the pool of clarified butter, and the edges crisp. The bread rises, and its belly gains brown spots.

When I take a plate to Uma madam, she is sitting on a plastic chair in the courtyard, her arms draped on the sides, like the ruler of a meager kingdom. Surrounding her, in tidy rows, inmates eat. She accepts the plate, and looks at me with a sly smile.

    “Why this preparation?” she says. “What do you want now?”

She is not angry.

I step back and watch her eat the porota. I hear the shatter of the crisp dough, or maybe I imagine it. She folds the porota around a smear of dal and lifts it to her mouth. I watch like a jackal. My stomach growls.

In the row of seated inmates and their children, a little girl cries. A boy whines for food, though he has just eaten. 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?

Uma madam twists around in the chair, spots me, and gives me a thumbs-up. She lifts the plate to show me. She has eaten every bite.

Kneeling at Uma madam’s feet, I take the empty plate from her. I can feel the damp algae green my knees.

“So,” she says, digging in her teeth with her tongue, “what was this about?”

“I have a brother,” I say. “He wants to visit. Can you approve him for my visitors’ list? His name is Purnendu Sarkar.”

I try to smile. My lips manage it.

“Brother, hmm?” she says. “You never mentioned him. Was he living in a cave until today?”

“No, he was working outside the city—”

When Uma madam stands up, she puts her hands on her waist and arches her spine. She squints at the sky. With a look of great boredom, she turns to me. “The fewer lies you tell, the better for you. God knows how many lies you tell every day.”

    Then she is gone, and I am left holding the plate. There is a thin shard of porota sticking to the rim, an airy nothing made of flour. Not even a fly would be nourished by it. I pinch it with my fingers, and put it in my mouth.





LOVELY


EVEN A FUTURE MOVIE star is having to make money. One morning my sisters and I are spraying rose water in our armpits, braiding our hair, putting bangles on our arms, and together we are going to bless a newborn. The general public is believing that we hijras are having a special telephone line to god. So if we bless, it is like a blessing straight from god. At the door of the happy family, I am rattling the lock thuck thuck thuck.