A Burning(34)

I am going to a room and standing nervously in front of not a theoretical camera but a real camera. It is balanced on top of a tripod, and there is a blinking red light on it. The man with sleepy eyes is standing behind it, and even though I am not liking him and he is not liking me, I am feeling like a real actress. I am looking at the lens and knowing—through this lens, someday I am reaching a thousand people, a million people. So what if there is only one grumpy man here, and he is receptionist and clerk and cameraperson also? It may be a boutique company, as they say.

The man is telling me that he will give me a fifteen-minute reel with different characters and looks. That is what I am getting for six hundred, he is reminding me.

“Now, if you are taking the deluxe package—”

“No need!” I am saying. “Basic package is okay for me.”

I am tying up my hair and doing some voice exercises. In this empty room, my voice is sounding hollow.

Now he is saying, “Can you do an angry housewife?”

    Then: “Now you try a person waiting for the bus and it is just not coming. Subtle expressions, see?”

Then: “You are a baby throwing a tantrum,” to which I am saying, “A baby?”

But maybe these are tests for being an actress. You have to slide into the character, no hesitation.

I am lying down on a dirty mattress laid on the floor anyhow. A small worm is running along the edge of the mattress, trying to find an opening where it can be hiding. I am lying on my back with my hands and feet up, more like a dying cockroach than a baby. I am wailing waan waan.

The whole time, I am feeling like the man is secretly filming me for a bad website. How is it that this cashier is having full control of the camera? It is giving me an uneasy feeling in my chest.

When the man is taking six hundred and forty rupees from me—“tax,” he is explaining—and giving me the CD, I am feeling somehow cheated.



* * *



*

WHEN I AM COMING back home, there is one man waiting in front of my door. He is suited-booted, and everybody is looking at him because his clothes are looking too clean. On his fingers he is wearing one green stone, one red stone, one blue stone, some copper rings.

“Is your name Lovely?” he is saying, as I am taking my key out of my purse.

“What is it to you?” I am saying. Men are always wanting things.

    “Jivan said,” he is gulping, like a nervous fish, “Jivan said you are willing to come to the court, her mother came and saw you—”

“Who are you, mister?” I am asking him.

Then he is saying, “I am Jivan’s lawyer. I just need to confirm that you will come to the court.”

He is giving me a form.

“I am not knowing how to read English,” I am telling him.

“But she was teaching you?” he is asking.

“She was teaching me,” I am sighing. “How is Jivan? Is she getting proper food?”

Instead of answering my question, this man is liking to ask more questions. Now he is saying, “Can I sit and talk with you? I can help you fill this out. Maybe at the tea shop over there?”





PT SIR


TWO MONTHS AFTER BIMALA Pal becomes, quietly and without ceremony, Jana Kalyan Party’s new leader, she sends PT Sir on a mission that, if PT Sir is being honest, he finds a little bewildering.

A winter chill is in the air when a party jeep takes PT Sir to a village called Chalnai, eighty kilometers away. On the highway, large trucks transporting the season’s vegetables—cauliflower, potatoes—blow musical horns. Pedestrians, visible as triangles of wool shawls on two legs, run across the highway now and then, fearing nothing.

Nearing the village, the jeep slows as its wheels crush grain placed on the road by villagers. A girl sits on the pads of her feet, supervising the use of passing cars as millstones. Behind her, fields of stubble roll from the edge of the paved road to a horizon where woods blur.

In Chalnai, the government school is a doorless structure next to a dust field. Inside, a dozen men and women—teachers, PT Sir understands—sit cross-legged on the floor. When PT Sir enters, the teachers say nothing. They have about them an air of waiting to be instructed what to do, how to behave, whether to speak or smile. PT Sir joins his hands in greeting.

    PT Sir’s task is to impress upon the teachers that students must have a half hour of physical activity every day. They must be let loose from their books to eat the air, play a sport, or run races. If the school lacks large grounds, the students must be allowed to jump rope. After twenty minutes of lecturing, during which PT Sir feels slightly absurd, he distributes among the teachers pamphlets from the party, with illustrations showing overworked students choosing to hang themselves or jump from the roof. It has happened. It is a serious problem. But here, with the blank-faced teachers nodding at everything he says, PT Sir feels himself sent on a silly mission. This, after all, is a village, with abundant fields and woods where children run wild.

At night, at home with his wife, he takes off a shirt and undershirt going red from the soil of the region. When he washes his face, the red dust is in the crooks of his ears.

“So why did they really send you to this place?” demands his wife.

PT Sir thinks about this. He feels that this field trip was some kind of test, but whether he has passed or not, he does not yet know.