A Burning(20)

Any cell phone or camera will be confiscated

“Have you printed the first part of my story?” I demand.

Once more he has placed that useless pen on the bench between us. The guard has seen it, but whatever it is, she does not want to deal with it.

Purnendu smiles. “We have hardly begun! Once we have the full story, my editor will help me—”

“Why do you need some editor?” I charge. Then I try to be polite. “I need this story printed. I am telling it to you in order, arranged nicely, exactly how things happened. Just print it. You have to do it quickly, don’t you understand?”

    Purnendu looks at me and pats my hand, on the bench. How soft his fingertips. I wish he would keep them there, on the bony back of my hand, where my knuckles sprout hairs.

“It doesn’t work like that. We want the public to see the full story, beginning to end, rather than leaking a piece here, a piece there. Do you trust me?”



* * *



*

THE MORNING AFTER THE EVICTION, when we woke up in a displeased aunt’s house in the neighboring village, my father complained of “a little pain.” His neck was held stiff, his whole body turning when he looked this way and that. This new village bordered a site at which garbage was burned. The rot and smoke made us all feel sick. But my father, I could see, was injured, perhaps from a policeman’s blow.

My mother, her own bones sore, lay quietly in bed, saying nothing. I took charge, suddenly my parents’ parent, and took my father to a doctor who, the aunt told us, was part of a clinic at a district government hospital. There the doctor saw the poor and the illiterate for no more than a flat fee of twenty rupees.

The hospital compound looked like a village in itself. Under the trees, on the porch, every spot of shade was taken by a family. Each family surrounded a patient who lay, moaning or blank-faced, on unfolded leaves of newspaper. My father walked straight past them, looking ahead and nowhere else. Into the hospital building we went, and I filled out a form and paid twenty rupees. Then we sat in a room, under a ceiling fan whose blades were so weighted with cottony dust that they barely moved. My father held a gentle hand to his shoulder, not rubbing it, but seeking to soothe it in some way that was beyond him. Finally, the doctor called us, “Patient party? Where is the patient?”

    “He,” I began, calling my father by the respectful pronoun, “he has a lot of pain in his shoulder.” We scrambled into the tiny chamber, and sat in two chairs, both with woven seats on the verge of tearing from the weight of hundreds of patients over the years. On the wall fluttered a calendar with pictures of pink-cheeked babies. “Please see what happened to his shoulder,” I said.

My father looked at the doctor, his eyes glistening with tears he would not release.

“Fell, or what?” said the doctor, looking at us over his spectacles.

“No, they hit him,” I said.

Immediately, as the doctor asked, “Who hit him?” my father spoke up.

“Somebody on the road,” my father said, with a small smile. “Who knows? It doesn’t matter. I am only here for some medicine. I couldn’t sleep last night because of the—”

My father cried in pain. The doctor had reached over and was laying cold fingertips on my father’s upper back, pressing at various points. My father, whose calves had carried three people at once up slopes in his rickshaw. My father, whose back leaned forward in strength as he pedaled, up and down, up and down, for twenty-five rupees per ride. A tense silence descended on the room.

    I grew angry—why wasn’t my father telling the doctor the police did it? Catch the police! Put them in jail for hurting him like that! How would he drive the rickshaw again with such pain?

Now I understand his silence. Now I know his reluctance.

The doctor stopped his examination and spoke in an irritated tone. “You could have gone to a general physician and had an X-ray first, why didn’t you do that? I can’t give you anything except this painkiller when you have come like this, with no test. Maybe the bone here is broken, but maybe not. How can I tell? You are not letting me touch the place, saying, ‘Oo aa, I am in pain.’ Go get the X-ray first—”

“Yes, yes, sir,” my father said, timid. “Can you write it down, please, the X-ray place where I should go—”

“Do you know how to read?” the doctor demanded.

“My daughter knows,” said my father. Even in his pain, he looked at me and smiled with pride.



* * *



*

WHEN I RETURN TO my cell, it smells like flowers. Americandi is surrounded by five or six others, including Yashwi, who is spraying something from a bottle.

    I sneeze.

“Not in your armpit!” Americandi scolds her. “You don’t even know how to put perfume. Like this,” she says, “watch me.”

Americandi turns her chin up and tilts the bottle at her neck. Striated with lines, a column wobbly with fat, her neck newly glistens with a patch of scent.

“Like this,” she says once more, now holding a delicate wrist upturned. “You have to put it on the places where your blood is beating.”

“Then why aren’t you putting it on your chest?” someone challenges her.