A Burning(29)

I followed my mother and father closely, and eventually the noise of the station opened up onto the impossible scene of a paved road, wide as a river, on which crawled cars of all colors. They beeped and honked. Their drivers leaned out of windows and shouted.

We climbed into a bus that was starting its route, a minibus painted maroon and yellow, with Howrah to Jadavpur written in beautiful letters on the side. I read it slowly. When Ba pulled himself up the high steps, straining with his arms, the conductor shouted, “What is this, why have you brought a patient on my bus? If he falls, then who will take the responsibility?”

Ba seated himself in silence, his back stiff, his neck turned to the window.

The conductor thumped the side of the bus, and off it flew, lurching and jolting. Ba refused to make a sound, though I knew he was in pain. The conductor, braced in the doorway, cast a suspicious eye on me.

But I was excited. I was thrilled. I walked down the aisle, uneven planks of wood under my bare feet, and watched the men seated by the window, breeze cooling their bald heads, tubes of newspaper rolled up in their laps. Their shirts were clean and pressed, as if they had never been worn before. I didn’t know I was staring until one man said, “What is your name?”

    He thought I was a child.

“First time in the city?” he said.

My mother, turning around to look at who he was, said yes, and I said nothing. His city accent intimidated me. In the time that it took me to comprehend his words, he said something new.

“I came here from Bolpur,” he continued—a town two hundred kilometers away—“three–four years ago. You’re coming from somewhere like that, aren’t you? I can’t imagine going back to a small place. You will like it here.”

I couldn’t stop thinking that I wanted to be like him. Clean shirt, shined shoes, a smart way of speaking. I hoped the city would make me rich, like him. He wasn’t rich, of course. Later I learned that what he was, was called middle class.



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*

I REALIZED HOW FAR we were from being middle class when I saw our house. It was deep in the Kolabagan slum, and though Ma had heard through her networks that it was a house made of brick, that turned out to be half-true.

Ma shouted, “This is the house? This house?” as we stood in front of its tarp and tin. “Let me call that fool broker right away,” she fumed.

    Ba smiled helplessly at the neighbors who were peeping, or else boldly standing in doorways with hands on their hips.

“I’m going to lie down,” he said in the end, when he couldn’t bear something—the shouting, his broken back—anymore.



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*

OVER THE MONTHS, it became Ma’s practice to go to the cheap, and illegal, market which sprang up by the railway lines in the middle of the night. There she bought loaves of bread, beets, potatoes, and tiny fish, with which she cooked breakfast. These meals she sold in front of our house at dawn. Through heavy sleep, I heard the swish of her sandals and the clink of ladle against pot. If I opened my eyes, I saw customers standing illuminated in the battery-powered flashlight which stood upright on the ground. The customers, our new neighbors, paid ten rupees for some bread and curry with which they could fill their bellies and begin their day’s work.

But my mother had to stop when the rains came, beating on roofs, muddy water rising from the wheels of passing rickshaws churning waves that soaked the stove and licked at our high mattress. I took a bucket, its handle cracked so that I had to hold it by the bottom, and tipped the water out on the street, where it joined a stream in which seedpods and the brown shells of cockroaches floated.

By then, Ba’s condition was worse. He lay in bed, his shape barely human. There, the head. A foot slipped outside the sheet. An arm raised to show his pleasure at seeing me. While he slept, Ma cooked and cleaned, refusing to speak her worry. But I knew what it was. His medicines cost money, and the monsoon wouldn’t let her run her breakfast business. What would we do?





PT SIR


ON THE LAST MORNING of the summer holiday, PT Sir feels the mattress shift under him as his wife wakes. Up she sits, swinging her legs to the ground, yawning noisily, a whiff of her morning breath reaching him. He does not mind. He does not even think about it. He falls back into the delicious sleep of ten more minutes. Dozing, he hears her slippers on the tile floor, the clink of her bangles rolling to her wrist, the tumble of pots and pans as she pulls one from the drying stack. She is going to boil water for oats.

At this thought, he gets up. The sun shines directly in his eyes. Many times he has told her he wants a double-egg omelet and butter-cooked potatoes for breakfast, but she continues to make oats, like she did every morning for her elderly father. But that man is old. What is he, PT Sir? A young man. A man of vigor and power.

Well, today, he is going to buy himself the breakfast he deserves. It will be even better than omelet-potatoes. Off he goes to the marketplace, where a sweet shop makes kochuri with chholar dal for breakfast. Fried dough, stuffed with green peas, and a lentil curry. A breakfast of decadence. Let his wife eat her oats!

    On the street, a stray dog ambles after him, and he shoos it away.

“Go, hut!”

But the dog follows him, its ribs outlined in its skin, a patch of fur missing, its tongue hanging out of its pink mouth.