A Burning(36)

At the nighttime market, two or three men had shoved my mother, grabbed her grocery-shopping money from her fist, and shouted at her to “go back to Bangladesh.”

Later, when the audience had dispersed, Ma sat in the house with her head in her hands. When she looked up, after long minutes, she said, “They were touching me here, touching me here. Oh my girl, my gold, don’t make me tell you.”

I saw my mother then as a woman. I felt her humiliation. And where I had always felt shame, I now felt white-hot anger. Anger crept into my jaws and I had to gnash my teeth to be calm.

Why was this our life? What kind of life was it, where my mother was forced to buy cheap vegetables in the middle of the night, and got robbed and attacked for it? What kind of life did we have, where my father’s pain was not taken seriously by a doctor until it was too late?

    So I made a decision. Whether it was a good decision or a bad decision, I no longer know.





INTERLUDE


BRIJESH, ASPIRING ACTOR, VISITS A NEW MALL


A NEW MALL OPENED where the sewing machine factory used to be. My jaw dropped when I saw it. It looked like an airport. Sharp and spiky. Glass here, glass there. Lights everywhere, like it was festival time.

On Sunday, after the acting class, I put on my new jeans and buttoned up my shirt with a horseman stitched on the chest pocket—Playboy shop in Allen Lane, go there sometime—then took out my phone and called my friend Raju, who does house-painting work. Together we went. Outside the mall, there were the snack boys and syrup-ice boys, and a few of them I knew so I nodded to them and they said, “Go inside, go inside, see how it is!”

So Raju and I went. Raju had some paint on his arms. My hair was washed and combed. My shoes were a bit dirty, but I had put polish on top of the dirt and covered it up, almost. Then we stood in the line for the metal detector, and I looked up at the big posters of ladies wearing golden watches. Then we walked through the metal detector, and at this point I could smell the AC air coming from inside, with a smell of perfumes and leather bags also. Oh that cool air on my face. I felt good. I felt excited. The cool, cool breeze coming, when suddenly the guard caught my arm.

    “Fifty rupees,” the guard said.

“What?” I said. “Go away, old man.” Can’t believe how anybody just asks for money, no excuse needed! I should also stand outside a mall and shout out amounts of money. See what I can get.

“Fifty rupees admission,” said the guard, neither annoyed nor interested, his eyes looking somewhere else.

“Admission to go to where? We’re just going to the shops,” said Raju, taking out his big new smartphone and holding it casually, just to show that he is a moneyed man.

But the old guard was not fooled. “See, brother,” he began, “fifty rupees and you can go in. Otherwise, you enjoy the air outside.

“Like me,” he added, but I did not have a mood to feel friendship with him.

“But you didn’t take admission from that aunty!” argued Raju. The woman ahead of us, her soft white belly spilling over the waist of her pink sari, her elbows disappearing in folds of fat, a woman who surely eats mutton every day, she had already disappeared in the mall.

“Do I make the rules, brother?” said the guard. “I am just telling you what is what. Now you want to quarrel with me and say, this person, that person! So what will I do? I am just telling you what is the rule. Now you decide—”

    So Raju and I stepped away from the entrance. We looked at each other. Neither of us wanted to say it. So Raju clapped my back and I smacked his shoulder, and we went to the syrup-ice stall and had some orange syrup-ice. Then we went back to work. Him to his house painting, that paint-smelling turban on his head again. Me to my electrician’s shop. It was giving me pain in my wrist, pain in my thumb. At least the syrup-ice was delicious.





PT SIR


IN COURT FOR WHAT will be his last case, PT Sir faces a counterfeiter, a man who sells fake Nikees and Adidavs to the local malls. His name, PT Sir reminds himself from a chit of paper before taking the stand, is Azad.

The man looks suspect, that’s what PT Sir thinks. There is something too new about his clothes. His hair is smoothed back with gel. Is he wearing eyeliner? Could be. PT Sir has been told he is a counterfeit goods trader, an immoral man who is harming the national economy and deserves to be jailed. That is the charge with which they have brought him to court today.

“Where do you get your supply?” says the judge.

“Judge sir,” says Azad. “Believe me, this is all made up. I can’t even—”

“Where?” repeats the judge. “You want to go to jail for this?”

“I don’t know what you are saying, judge sir,” protests Azad. “I am only transporting what the boss man tells me, I don’t know real weal, fake shake—”

    “Who has brought the charge?” says the judge, exasperated. The lawyer points out PT Sir. He takes the stand. He tells his story: He bought shoes for eight hundred rupees, then after one walk found that the sole was ungluing from the shoe.

“Who are you, mister?” interrupts Azad. He is listening, wide-eyed. “Who is this man? I have never seen him in my life. What is your issue with me?”

The judge warns Azad to be quiet. In the end, the judge orders Azad to pay a fine of five thousand rupees.