A Burning(17)

Purnendu looks at me and smiles sadly. “Such is our country,” he says.



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*

    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?

For a week we had saved our shits in plastic bags which we twirled closed, and our urine in soda bottles we capped tight, to make what my mother and father called bombs. The rickshaw Ba occasionally drove, ferrying mine workers, stood outside, its accordion roof folded, blue seat gleaming, and I prayed for mercy—where could he hide a rickshaw?

We waited in our huts, tarp snapping in the wind, our throats parched but nobody willing to leave their house to go to the municipal tap.

The policemen were late.

When they came, they came holding bamboo sticks, followed by the rumble of bulldozers, whose treads I watched, frightened. Mother slapped my head and said, “What are you looking at with your mouth open? Can’t you hear I’m calling?”

Hit me again, Mother, I think now. I will bear it like a blessing.

I rubbed my head, and unscrewed my soda bottle a little, so that the cap would fly off midair and spatter the policemen. I threw my urine bombs at them, traces of liquid on my fingers. I untwisted the plastic bags and threw the hard and dry cakes of shit, the dust of our own waste making us sneeze.

The policemen laughed at our poor weaponry. Their bellies, hanging over their belts, quivered. They swung methodically with their bamboo rods, bringing down our asbestos and tarp roofs. They grunted and yelled with the exertion. One gentle policeman lined up the glinting sheets of asbestos against a naked wall, as if somebody would come to collect them.

    Soon our houses were exposed to the sun, all lime walls and cracked corners. They looked like we had never lived in them at all.

The sight of our houses, so easily broken, startled me. I knew it would happen, but like this? Kitchens in which we had eaten before a flickering kerosene lamp, rooms in which we had combed each other’s hair, all roofless, soon to be crushed into a heap of brick.

News of our bombs had reached the police station, and new policemen arrived, this time wearing helmets and carrying shields of cane which looked like the backs of chairs, meant to deflect knives and stones. They had heard “bombs,” they were expecting bombs, and they were angry. But we had no real weapons. We had our bodies and our voices, our saved waste long gone.

When a policeman raised his bamboo stick to strike my mother, she screamed and threw herself at him, her voice strangled and soaring at once, her sari unfurling into the mud and shit at our feet, loose blouse slipping off her shoulders, her face black with rage.

“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.

Another policeman held her legs and began dragging her, and I watched in horror until I felt my arms rise and push him away, striking his face so that his spectacles fell and were trampled. My mother scrambled up and retreated, screaming curses until her voice snapped, the thread of it drifting down. In the meantime, somebody had smashed my father’s rickshaw. I looked, uncomprehending, at the bent wheels and slashed seat, my father kneeling to reattach, futilely, the cycle chain to the ruined vehicle.

The houses fell. Walls and roofs of our shelter turned enemy, wreckage coming down on our heads, the rising dust making us cough, paint and brick in heaps on the ground. The policemen, finally calm, bamboo limp by their sides, looked frightened. Maybe the houses looked too much like their own. In the end, one policeman pleaded with us, “Orders came from above, sister, what will I do?”



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*

“TIME, TIME,” CALLS A GUARD. She strides about the room, striking each bench with a stick. Our hour is over.

My brother, Purnendu, stands up and lifts the cloth bag on his shoulder.

“Next week,” he says, “and the week after that, and the week after that, for as long as it takes.”

His words play in my ears with the sweetness of a flute. I watch him go, past a door which magically opens for him, and I turn back. Inside, a woman beats her head on the wall. Once, I might have felt that way too, but now I don’t. Now I float beside her, her scrape only hers, not mine. I am on my way out. 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.

    I walk past the woman striking her head. A guard appears, and tells the woman, in a tone of boredom, to stop striking her head.

“What are you doing,” the guard drones. “Stop it right now.”

The woman pauses, turns, and strikes the guard with her head.

“Ooh!” gasps the corridor.

The woman is taken away, screaming, for something they will call treatment.





INTERLUDE


A POLICEMAN FIRED FOR EXCESSIVE VIOLENCE DURING SLUM DEMOLITION HAS A NEW GIG


“HIGHWAY.” YOU SEE, THIS is a fancy word. This road is just a road. It runs straight through the forest. It is paved, and in the rains it is potholed. You see the mounds of red soil? Termite hills. There used to be deer, but we haven’t seen any all year. So my friends and I, we come usually at night, yes, regularly at night. Ten o’clock, eleven o’clock. After our women and children have gone to sleep.