A Burning(16)

A mosquito has followed them inside the net. It buzzes near their ears until she locates the mosquito resting on the sheet and smacks her hand down on it. A blot of blood appears, and she carries the corpse of the mosquito off the bed and flings it out of the window.

    Then she stands by the window, and pulls the glass closed. She draws the curtain. Only then does she say, “Can I tell you something?”

He waits.

“I don’t know about these politicians,” she says. “In our country politics is for goons and robbers, you know that.”

PT Sir sighs.

His wife continues, “When you do something for them, like you helped them when their technician was not there, they make you feel nice. On a stage, in front of so many people—who wouldn’t feel like a VIP? But associating with such people—”

This irritates PT Sir. He lies with his head on his thin pillow and wonders why his wife cannot tolerate something exciting that is happening in his life. She is annoyed, he feels, because he didn’t have much of an appetite for the yogurt fish she cooked. She is annoyed because he filled his belly with store-bought biryani. But he is a man! He is a man with bigger capacities than eating the dinner she cooks.

“Well,” he says in as calm a voice as he can manage. It is easier in the dark. “Why are you getting worried? I just went to one rally.”

She slides back into bed, her silence thick. “You went to two,” she says finally. After a pause, she speaks again. “Please, I ask you,” she says, “don’t go to more rally shally.”

    PT Sir thinks about this for hours, until deep night has settled into the home, turning their furniture unfamiliar, amplifying a squeak here, a knock there. Somewhere a clock ticks. Far away, an ambulance siren sounds.





JIVAN


THIS VISITING DAY, SEATED on a bench waiting for me, is not my mother but a man. He has a beard, and a cloth bag in his lap. At his feet, a plastic sack which he lifts and hands to me. His soft fingers against mine are a shock.

The bag is heavy. Inside, I see a bunch of bananas, and a packet of cookies.

“You are…” I say.

“Purnendu,” he says, with no hi or hello. He is gentle, gentler than any reporter I have encountered. “How is your health?” he asks me.

“Fine,” I tell him. I look again inside the bag, at the perfectly yellow bananas, no bruises on them that I can see. I want to eat them all, right now.

“Sit,” he suggests when I remain standing.

“You are not allowed to take notes,” I say, pointing at the pen in his fingers. “Didn’t they tell you that?”

“Oh,” he says, looking down at the pen in his hand, as if he has just noticed it. He puts it on the bench between us. “Then this is useless,” he says, smiling. There is a joke in his words that I don’t catch. Is it a pen, or…?

    “Please don’t do anything so that they will kick you out,” I say. “I want to tell you everything, if you promise to print the truth. The other newspapers are printing rubbish, lies, they know nothing about my story—”

“That’s what I do,” he says. “Report the truth. That’s why I’m here.”

He glances at the clock on the wall. The guard on duty stands in a far corner and looks at us.

“Tell me your story,” says Purnendu.



* * *



*

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I lived—

Believe me when I say you must understand my childhood to know who I am, and why this is happening to me.

“Tell me one thing first,” says Purnendu. “Did you do it?”

I lick my lips. I try to look him in the eye. I shake my head.



* * *



*

IN MY VILLAGE, the dust of coal settled in the nooks of our ears, and when we blew our noses it came out black. There were no cows, or crops. There were only blasted pits into which my mother descended with a shovel, rising with a basket of black rock on her head.

“Did you see her working?” Purnendu asks.

“I watched her once,” I tell him. “Never again.”

    It frightened me to see her as a worker. At night I held her palm in my palm. The lines in her hands—lifelines, they call them—were the only skin not blackened.



* * *



*

MANY DAYS I WENT to school for the free midday meal of lentils and rice. There were rumors that we would get chicken in the festival season. Somebody said they saw a man ride in the direction of our school on a bicycle weighted with chickens, their legs bound, hanging upside down from the handlebars, all those white hens silent and blinking at the receding path. But that hoped-for bicycle never arrived.

I sat in this class or that class. It did not matter. When the language teacher reappeared after a long absence for her wedding, she chewed a paan stuffed with lime and betel nut, and told us to write our names on the tests. One day, she reminded us, “Stick five rupees to the page if you can.”

She would fill in the rest of the test if we did.

Soon, only goats were going to school, leaving pellets on the porch.



* * *



*

“TELL ME,” I SAY. “How does this sound to you? What kind of start did I get in life?”