A Burning(14)

“What?” I was challenging him. “I can’t stand on the road?” I was speaking like a heroine. I was new. I was not knowing.

Anything could have happened. But he was a reasonable man. He was letting me go after I was buying him a single cigarette and lighting it for him.





JIVAN


IN PRISON, OUR MAIN activity is waiting. I wait for Americandi to get confirmation from the journalist that he will come, and to see if Uma madam will look the other way. In the complete black of night, I wonder if there are other ways. If my hands were spades, they would burrow from my cell to beyond the garden wall, where buses race, where beggars loiter, where women wearing sunglasses buy chop-cutlet for evening tea.

In the morning, I stand in line for breakfast. A rumor goes around: Sonali Khan, the famous film producer whose name every household is knowing, was spotted in the booking room. Everybody cheers. What did she do? we wonder. Did she hit somebody with her car? Did she hide some money in Switzerland?

“You all,” says Americandi, ahead of me in line, “don’t know anything. It’s that rhino.”

The film producer once shot, from the safety of a jeep, an endangered rhino. The ghost of this rhino has caught up with her. She is finally being punished for it. Now she will live with us, and tell us all about the cinema.

    Yashwi says, “Definitely we will get a new TV, then!”

“What’s wrong with this TV?” snaps Americandi. “If you don’t like it, see if you can arrange for a new TV for yourself.”

“No, I mean…” Yashwi looks at her feet. I know she dreams of a TV whose pictures will not jump, whose remote control will work.

Komla, who once robbed a family, striking with an iron rod a mother who was left paralyzed, begins to salivate thinking of the meals in store.

“Chicken curry,” she calls, turning her head up and down the line for the benefit of all, “for sure we will get chicken curry. Regularly!”

She sticks a finger in her ear and shakes it vigorously to scratch an unreachable itch. “Maybe mutton also, who knows?”

I listen, believing myself far away.

When we have returned to our cells, and Uma madam comes on her round, I catch her eye.

“Have you put my brother on the list?” I ask her.

She looks at me blankly and continues on her path, the ring of keys singing at her hips. But Americandi, greedy for the two hundred thousand rupees the Daily Beacon has promised for an interview with me, leaps up and stands at the gate.

“Uma,” she calls. “Come here.”

Down the corridor, the constant chatter and clang of our prison pauses.

    There is a long silence while Uma madam saunters back. “What did you say?” she says softly. “Am I your best friend? Talk to me with respect.”

Somebody in a neighboring cell whistles.

“What is this, TV hour!” somebody else comments.

“Okay, Uma madam,” my cellmate says. “This poor girl,” she continues, pouting, in a voice loud enough to carry down the corridor, “got ghee from her mother to cook for you. And you won’t let her see her own brother? Shame! How must her mother be feeling?”

“Let her see her boyfriend, for god’s sake!” somebody says, laughing.

Uma madam stands still. I watch from behind Americandi.

“Don’t interrupt my round again,” Uma madam says quietly. Then she is gone.



* * *



*

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?





PT SIR


THE SECOND TIME PT Sir goes to a Jana Kalyan Party rally, he stands close to the stage.

“You can see with your own eyes,” Bimala Pal continues, “what this party—”

The microphone screeches. Bimala Pal takes a step back. The crowd roars and waves tiny flags. PT Sir waves his flag, saved from the previous rally.

“What this party brings to districts across the state,” Bimala Pal says. “The auto parts factory—”

The microphone screeches again, and the crowd murmurs. Some cover their ears with their palms.

“The factory employing three! thousand!—”

Screech. This time, Bimala madam looks about with a stern face for a technician. Behind her a number of assistants dash about, looking for the sound guy, who has probably wandered off to smoke a cigarette. The crowd stirs in boredom.

In a mad and decisive moment, PT Sir marches forward, angling his body sideways and holding an arm out in front of him.

“Side,” he calls, “side!” He climbs the steps to the stage two at a time, assuring Bimala Pal’s bodyguards that he intends only to fix the microphone. He wiggles the cord and tests the jack, then moves the microphone farther away from the speaker. He steps up and says, “Testing, testing.”

    His voice rings out clean and sharp over the crowd.