A Burning(23)

I have sixty to eighty cases at any time. A big case like Jivan’s means nothing but more misery—a dozen press people hounding me at all hours, pressure from all political parties, daily communication with police chiefs trying to hide their inept investigations. No matter the result, there will be plenty of people upset with me. It is trouble. The sooner it ends, the better for me.

“Will it end soon?” I ask. “It’s too much.”

    My guru tells me yes, it will, but—she pauses.

“Your role,” she says with a gentle smile, “will be bigger than you can see at the moment.”

“In a good way?” I ask.

“In a good way,” she says. “When paths show themselves, don’t be afraid to follow them.”

And I feel lifted on a wave and placed on a shore. I get up. I should call my wife, I think. Check how my daughter is handling her suspension. I need to get back to my office before the assistant turns it into an ashtray. On the road I will eat an egg roll.

“Your wife may not support my suggestion,” my guru says, “but I am getting a strong feeling that one thing will be especially valuable for you during this time. For your right index finger”—and here she holds up the finger she means—“an amethyst.”





JIVAN


PURNENDU HAS BROUGHT ME a string of shampoo sachets, clothesline clips, and elastic hair bands. I hold the gifts in my lap. They are currency.

“Thanks,” I say to him in English, so that he knows, even while he gives me products with which I will clean myself and groom myself, that I can be his equal.



* * *



*

WE RESETTLED IN GOVERNMENT housing in a town, fifty kilometers away from our village, with nothing in it but buildings whose walls were plump with damp, whose sewage flowed in open gutters, whose taps coughed rusty water. But it was my first and only time living in an apartment building, and I was proud of my residence.

I heard the neighbor boy, fellow evicted, stomp down the stairs every evening. I watched, from the window, as he emerged into the lane, where a cohort gathered to play cricket. A plank of plywood served as a bat, and the fielders chased a hollow plastic ball. They were my age. My limbs itched to play with them, to scream and run and skid on the small pebbles of the street, now that my known fields were gone. My mother said no.

    I was a girl. I stayed home to watch my father, while my mother left at dawn and returned in the evening, seeking daily labor. A few days she was employed on construction projects, but after that, the jobs ran out.

Then my mother cooked, hidden in the kitchen. An atmosphere of smoke and chili about her deterred conversation.

One night, I heard her and my father.

“Where is the work?” my mother said. “Everybody here is resettled like us. Who will hire me?”

“Wait a few days,” said my father. “I will take a loan to buy a new rickshaw.”

“Another rickshaw,” my mother mocked. “Who will ride your rickshaw in this cursed town?”

I was ashamed to hear everything. I was ashamed to see my mother sinking into this gray mood.

I crept up on her one day as she was cooking.

“Bhow!” I said behind her. She jumped and smacked at my legs, but I escaped. From the doorway I said, in a monster’s deep voice, “Ow mow khow! I smell some human chow!”

I crept closer, allowing my mother to take another swipe at my legs, to trap me this time, but she did not try.



* * *



*

    SO THAT IS HOW I grew up, you see, Purnendu. When Ba’s turn in the X-ray came, I took him. We took a bus which sped down the highway, horn blasting, and brought us to an air-conditioned clinic. I gave a look to a woman until she moved her bag, so that Ba could take the chair. The woman’s arms were white and plump. Diamonds sparkled on her fingers. Her feet were wrapped in the crisscrossing strings of a leather sandal, and her toenails were painted pink. They looked like lozenges. She looked at us. I slid one cracked and soiled foot behind the other.

In a dark room, a technician positioned Ba against a cold glass plate, then disappeared. Ba flinched.

“Stand still!” scolded the technician, from a chamber we could not see. “Stand straight!”

But the X-ray man could not make the picture. He came out, irritated.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

Ba rubbed his bare skin, chilled. Still he smiled as a way of asking forgiveness. “It’s cold—”

“The plate is supposed to be cold!” said the X-ray man. “You have to stand firm, touching it, that’s what I told you. I can’t do my work with these unschooled people—”

Afterward I held the large envelope in my hand, within it a ghostly image of Ba’s back and shoulders. I carried it home, like a parent carrying their child’s schoolbag, the weight too heavy for the young one to bear.

At home, I began to show Ma the scan, but she shouted, “Put it back, put it back! You can’t look at these things without a special light, or it will be ruined. Fool child.”

    Was that right? I did what she said.

“X-ray today, then something else tomorrow,” said my mother. “Wait and see, that doctor will keep you running around. That’s what doctors do. They get paid to make you do tests and buy medicines, don’t you know that? Where will we get the money?”