A Burning(32)

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THAT DOES NOT MEAN school was easy. I kept my distance, or others kept their distance from me, and from their faces I knew they found something physically unappealing about me: my hair, often knotted and chalky with dust, or my smell, like metal. But it did not keep me from laughing at what they said, accepting a glance thrown my way as a kind of friendship.

    I learned English, the language of progress. I couldn’t get anywhere if I didn’t speak English, even I knew that. But I dreaded being asked to stand up and read from the textbook.

I read like this: “Gopal li-li-livaid—lived on a mou-mou-moonten, and he—”

The other girls, from middle-class homes where they read English newspapers and watched Hollywood films, disdained me. But in the slum, I was the only one with an English textbook, and who cared whether I was good or not? It was a place where most could not read a word—Bengali or English—and what I had was a great skill.





PT SIR


IN AUTUMN, DURING THE Durga Pujo festival, young lovers roam the streets, holding hands, till dawn. Ceremonial smoke wafts where priests worship, and drummers keep their beat going until the next day arrives. The streets, closed to cars, fill with vendors of fried snacks and cotton candy. Some neighborhoods install Ferris wheels and swinging pirate boats where traffic might have been.

On such a night, while the city celebrates, the Jana Kalyan Party leader, whom PT Sir has only briefly met, a man with three mobile phones in his palms at all times, dies. It is late, well after dinner, when PT Sir gets the phone call. His wife, woken by the ring of the phone, and worried by the tone of voice she hears, rises from bed and asks, “What happened?”

She tells him where he might be able to buy a grief wreath, of white evening flowers, at this hour.

PT Sir takes a rickshaw, then a taxi, then abandons the car and runs when the traffic stalls. Crowds stream past him in the opposite direction. Now and then a child, no taller than his hip, blows a pipe whose neck unfurls and reveals a feather.

    The party leader’s house is in the old part of the city, where lanes accommodate one Ambassador car at a time. Two police jeeps try to regulate the crowd, a mass of men holding hot earthen cups of tea by the cool rim. On balconies along the lane, neighbors watch the gathering like it is a festival of its own.

“Have they brought the body from the hospital?” PT Sir asks a stranger beside him, a man carrying a cloth bag like a scholar.

“Few minutes ago,” he replies.

PT Sir sees no familiar faces, so he stands some distance from the house, holding a tall bunch of white flowers, the only flowers he could find at that hour. Murmurs spread that the chief minister is coming to pay his respects, and the railway minister too. A car is allowed through, bearing a famous actor, who steps out in sunglasses. To the crowd, he joins his hands and bows his head. Then he disappears inside the house. The crowd roars and moves as one, and for a moment PT Sir fears a stampede.

“Please keep order,” shouts a man from the front. “His wife is inside, his elderly mother is inside, have respect for them!”

PT Sir feels ashamed of himself, a participant in this strangely excited crowd of the supposedly grieving. He feels the way he did at the first Jana Kalyan Party rally he attended, when he was a diffident man.

Should he go home? Should he, at a calmer moment, phone the bereaved? But he has brought these flowers. Wouldn’t he like to show Bimala Pal that he has come? There, inside the house, all the senior ministers are gathered. Wouldn’t it be good to be acquainted with one or two of them?

    At that moment he hears a voice.

“You have come,” says the assistant, the same one who delivers PT Sir’s courthouse bonuses by motorcycle. PT Sir follows him gratefully. The man leads him through the crowd—“Side, side,” he commands—and PT Sir feels eyes on him. He can feel the crowd thinking, reminding him of that long ago moment on the train when he received free muri, who is this VIP?





LOVELY


WHEN THERE ARE NO babies or newlyweds to bless, the sisters of my hijra house are giving blessings for money on the local trains. It is our tradition, and we are doing it more during Durga Pujo days, when the goddess is not in the sky but here in our city.

“Come now, sisters,” Arjuni Ma is saying to everyone in the compartment, clapping her palms together, “don’t you want your day to be blessed?”

The passengers hiding by the windows are trying to look outside and ignore, but they cannot. Arjuni Ma is specifically calling to them. “Listen, mother, give us a few rupees from the goodness of your heart.”

Every face that is turning to me, I am hoping it is not somebody from Mr. Debnath’s acting class. Please god, I am thinking. Now I am on my way to being a star, why to ruin that reputation? Those classmates are maybe the only people in my life who have not seen me in this trade. They have not seen how this trade is making me a little disgusting in the eyes of others. But if I am not having this trade, how am I saving money for acting classes?

    I am always learning from the train. Here is a mother sitting cross-legged with her baby sleeping in her lap. Her head is tilting on her shoulder and she is sleeping also, dead to the world. She is not hearing any of our words. Next time when I am having a role as a tired mother, I will be thinking about her.