A Burning(19)

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ONLY A FEW WEEKS after PT Sir’s ego is thus punctured, he comes home from school to find a letter in the mailbox. Inside, on the sofa, when he tears the edge open, he sees an invitation on Jana Kalyan Party letterhead. He jumps up and waves it before his wife, who is seated at the dining table, tucking cheese inside slit chicken breasts.

“Look what has come!” he says. “How did they find my address?”

    His wife wipes her hand on her kameez and takes the letter in hand.

“They have their ways,” she says with a smile.

To go to this special event, which will be held on a Monday, PT Sir requests a half day off from school.

On the given date, PT Sir rides a train, then a rickshaw, to the Kolabagan slum. He holds his small leather bag on his lap as the rickshaw descends from the main road into the lanes of the slum, jerking and bouncing over potholes, crossing buildings of brick, then half-brick, then tin and tarp. Jivan lived nearby, he knows, so he observes the surroundings all the more keenly. At a corner, before a municipal pump where water spills, men with checkered cloths wrapped around their waists rub their torsos with soap, their heads white with froth and their eyes closed to the street. The rickshaw moves on, the driver’s legs pumping. On a rickety bench before a tea shop, customers sitting with ankle resting on knee and drinking from small glasses in their hands look at PT Sir as he passes by.

When the rickshaw deposits PT Sir at his destination, he finds a crowd gathered in front of a primary school. Damaged in the attack at the railway station nearby, the school building has been renovated over the past months, and is being reopened with great ceremony by the Jana Kalyan Party. The school is no more than a five-room shed. Murals on the exterior walls show a lion, a zebra, and a giraffe strolling alongside a herd of rabbits. A sun with a mane like a lion’s smiles at them all. A civic-minded artist has included, low to the ground, an instruction to passersby: Do not urinate.

    There are children here. The students, presumably. They hold stick brooms and sweep the grounds around the school building. Bent over like that, one hand on knee, the other on the handle of a broom, sweeping dust from dust—the children’s posture is that of service. It moves PT Sir. This is what a school ought to teach, he thinks. How come his school doesn’t instill such feeling in the students?

When a party assistant arrives, he recognizes PT Sir, thumping him on the back and asking how the school building looks. PT Sir says, “First class!”

“Have you seen inside?” the assistant asks. The two of them walk up to the door and peep in.

There is a vacant room. It looks incomplete, until PT Sir realizes there will be no benches here, no chairs. The children are used to sitting on the ground. Probably they will share one textbook, photocopied to death. After the first wave of donated supplies runs out, the children will write with pencil nubs chewed and sucked.

Still they will come to school.

“And look at my own students,” PT Sir shares. “They are fed and clothed and schooled, given every convenience and comfort.”

“My son,” agrees the assistant, “goes to extra coaching for every subject. English, maths, chemistry, everything. I think, what are they teaching him at school? If they are not teaching him the subjects, are they teaching him manners, loyalty to the country, et cetera, et cetera? No!”

    The two men pause when a box of sweets comes around.

“Take my students,” says PT Sir. “Will they ever sweep the school grounds? Will they ever paint a beautiful mural like this? Never! Because they”—and here he pauses to chew his sweet—“are trying their level best to flee the country. They work so hard on applications to American universities that they ignore the school exams, failing and crying and pleading—they had SAT I! They had SAT II! What are these nonsense exams? Why will the school allow such brain drain?”

The party man listens intently. When he is done with his sweet, he claps crumbs off his hands, then clasps his hands behind his back like a diligent schoolboy. “The problem, you see,” he joins in, “is we teach our children many things, but not national feeling! There is a scarcity of patriotic feeling, don’t you think so? In our generation, we knew our schooling was to…was to…”

“Serve others,” offers PT Sir. “Improve the nation.”

“Exactly!”

The thought stays with him when he returns to his school. The girls run a simple relay race. They huff and puff, carrying a stick in their hands, and afterward lean on their knees to catch their breath. They high-five and laugh so loud a teacher from the third floor emerges to give them a stern look.

    What is the meaning of such an education? PT Sir thinks as he walks down the lane at the end of the day. Around him, girls suck ice candies and call with orange mouths, “Good afternoon, sir!”





JIVAN


THE NEXT TIME PURNENDU comes, I try to see everything the way he must see it. The guard’s pacing, and the stench of sweat which rises off her. The benches around us where visitors and inmates sit, a third person’s worth of space between them. The instructions painted on the wall:

Please hand all home-cooked food to prison personnel

Please no body contact

Be respectful and talk at low volume