A Burning(15)

PT Sir’s drumming heart calms.

Bimala Pal resumes her speech, and from a plastic chair somebody offers him at the back of the stage, PT Sir looks out over the vast number of men who have gathered. It is many stadiums’ worth of men, their heads like the bulbs of ants. These are not the spoiled and lazy students who occupy his days, nor the teacher aunties who proceed as a horde after school to watch Bengali detective films and eat Chinese noodles. When has he ever been among so many patriots, men who are invested in the development of the nation, who are here in a field listening to an intellectual lecture rather than at home, under a sheet, taking a nap?

After Bimala Pal closes her speech, she comes around to the back of the stage, and thanks him. PT Sir jumps up and folds his hands in greeting.

“I am just a schoolteacher.” PT Sir gestures down the road. “At the S. D. Ghosh Girls’ School.”

Bimala Pal leans in.

“That school?”

“Yes, that one,” PT Sir says. The terrorist’s school. “In my school functions I set up the microphone, so…”

    Both turn to look at the microphone. It is turned off and silent on its stand. Somebody has garlanded it.

“Well, teacher sir,” says Bimala Pal, “it is our good fortune that you came.”

Later PT Sir’s wife will say, “That was a scolding for coming to the stage! Don’t you know that politicians always say the opposite of what they mean? It is called diplomacy.”

But PT Sir is glad. An esteemed public figure, taking note of him! A gathering of assistants behind Bimala Pal nods and voices its agreement.

Bimala Pal draws the anchal of her sari around her shoulders, and continues, “We need educated people like you to support our party. More educated people must care about what is happening in our state, in our country. So to see a teacher like you at our rally makes me glad.”

PT Sir opens his mouth to say something. He must clarify that he teaches physical education. He is not the kind of teacher she imagines, he is only—

A boy appears with dishes of samosas, and after that there is chicken biryani for all. The men in the fields have received, away from the glare of a TV camera, and distributed from the rear of a discreet van, their dinner boxes of biryani too. They take their boxes quietly and disperse.

But there is a problem. There are more men in the field than boxes of biryani. A scuffle breaks out. The man handing out boxes of biryani immediately closes the back doors of the van. Bimala Pal and her lackeys turn to look, and PT Sir looks too.

    A man, not too far from the stage, points his finger at another. “This one is taking three boxes! He is hiding them in his bag!”

That man demands, “Who are you calling a thief?”

An open palm slaps a face, a leg kicks a leg.

Bimala Pal has slipped away, cupping a hand around her mouth on her phone, occupied by a more pressing matter. One of her assistants turns to PT Sir and jokes, “Well, sir, look at these rowdy children.”

The other assistants, young men holding two mobile phones each, wait with hidden smiles to see what the teacher will do.

PT Sir feels the eyes on him. The pressure is subtle but great. He steps up to the edge of the stage, sits on the pads of his feet, and calls, “Brothers, brothers! There is food for all! Why are you fighting like children?”

The men in the crowd look up at him.

“Are you children,” PT Sir continues, “that you are spoiling the gathering here with your fight? Do you want to disgrace the party, and our elders who have gathered here, in front of those reporters over there?”

“Who are you?” a man shouts at PT Sir. “Who are you, mister, to tell me what to do?”

But the fight has lost its air. The men separate with some curses. When PT Sir returns to his seat and picks up his box of biryani, one of the assistants stops him.

“Wait, please,” he says, “the rice has grown cold by now, wait one minute.”

He calls the tea boy—“Uttam!”—and asks him to bring a “VIP box” right away. A fresh, hot box of biryani, with two pieces of mutton, arrives for PT Sir.



* * *



*

“TODAY I AM NOT HUNGRY,” PT Sir announces at home. “Today I had biryani with, guess who? Bimala Pal!”

His wife looks up from her phone. In the background, softly, the news plays. PT Sir settles heavily on the sofa, and picks up the remote. He turns up the volume. A reporter shouts: “This alleged terrorist used a very modern way of spreading her anti-national views, find out how she used Facebook—”

On another channel, a soft-spoken news host says: “On top of throwing torches at the train, dear viewers, let me tell you all, she was also sharing anti-government views on Facebook, and who knows where else, for years—”

“Beware,” PT Sir tells his wife. “What all you do on Facebook. It’s full of criminals.”

“Your head,” she says, “is filled with all this. I only look at cooking videos. It’s a totally different part of Facebook. People abroad make such nice things, you don’t know—like apple pie with ready-made whipped cream! I have never seen such things. The cream comes out of a can.”

At bedtime, when they climb under the mosquito net, his wife marvels at the story he has told her. “Imagine that!” she says. “You saving the day at a JKP rally!”