A Burning(4)

Immediately, I am regretting. This is a great big mistake. I am wishing to be with Azad always, so why I am pushing him away?



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ACTUALLY, AZAD IS RIGHT. His brother was coming one night. He was coming before dawn, ringing the bell, banging his fist on the door. He was making such a racket the street dogs were barking gheu gheu.

    When I was finally leaping out of bed and unlatching the door, Azad’s brother was immediately shouting at my face, “Whatever curse you have given him, let him go, witch!”

“Shhh!” I was saying. “Be quiet, it’s the middle of the night!”

“Don’t you tell me what to do, witch!” he was screaming, wagging a finger in the air. One man pissing in the gutter was looking at him, then at me, then at him, then at me. Otherwise, all was quiet and dark, but surely everybody was hearing everything.

“You have trapped him!” this brother was screaming. “Now you have to free him! Let him get married like a normal person!”

I was only standing, holding the open door. “Calm yourself,” I was saying quietly. “You will make yourself sick.”

I was wearing my nightie. My ears were burning. The whole neighborhood was learning my business. Now this was making me angry. Who was giving this good-for-nothing brother the right to shout at me in front of the whole locality? All these people were hardworking rickshaw pullers, fruit sellers, cotton fillers, maidservants, guards in the malls. They were needing sleep. Now what respect was I having left in their eyes?

So finally I was shouting back some rude things. I don’t like remembering them.



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“OKAY,” I AM ADMITTING to Azad now. “Fine, your brother came. He was saying to me, ‘Lovely, I know your love is true. My brother refuses to even eat if you are not there. But please, I am begging, talk to him about marriage and children, for our old parents’ sake.’?”

Azad is looking at me. “My brother? Said that?”

He is not believing his ears.

“Yes, your own brother,” I am saying. “So I am thinking about it.”

A spider with thin brown legs is crawling through the window. With all eight legs it is exploring the wall. Both of us are watching it. When Azad is getting up and about to slap the spider with his shoe, I am saying, “Leave it.”

Why to always ruin other creatures’ lives?

“No!” Azad is saying. “I am not going to follow such stupid rules! I will marry you!”





JIVAN


THE NEXT MORNING, AT the courthouse, a policewoman opens for me a path through a crowd moving like they are joyous, like they are celebrating at a cricket stadium. The sun blazes in my eyes. I look at the ground.

“Jivan! Jivan! Look here,” shout reporters with cameras mounted on their shoulders or raised high above their heads. Some reporters reach forward to push recorders toward my mouth, though policemen beat them back. I am jostled and shoved, my feet stepped on, my elbows knocked into my ribs. These men shout questions.

“How did the terrorists make contact with you?”

“When did you start planning the attack?”

I find my voice and shout, a brief cry which dies down like a rooster’s: “I am innocent! I don’t know anything about—”

I stand tall, though colors appear bright in my eyes, the greens of trees luminous as a mineral seam, the ground beneath my feet composed of distinct particles. My legs buckle, and the policewoman catches me. A shout goes up among the crowd. The policewoman’s grip on my arm is the kindest thing. Then indoors, where the noise recedes and I am allowed to slump in a chair.

    A lawyer appointed to me appears. He is young, only a little older than me, though he has the potbelly of a wealthy man.

“Did you get food this morning?” is the first thing he says.

I look at my policewomen handlers and cannot remember. I nod.

“I am Gobind,” he says. “Your court-appointed lawyer. Do you understand what ‘lawyer’ means? It means that—”

“Sir,” I begin. “I understand what it means. I went to school. I am a sales clerk at Pantaloons, you know that shop? You tell me this, why am I arrested? Fine, I posted one stupid thing on Facebook, but I don’t know anything about the train.”

The lawyer looks not at me but at a folder in his hands. He licks a finger and turns the pages.

“Are you telling the truth?” he says. “They found your chat records talking to the terrorist recruiter on Facebook.”

“Everybody keeps saying this to me, but this boy was just someone I chatted with online. We were online friends,” I plead. “I didn’t know who he was.”

From my chair, I hear the wheeze of a ceiling fan above me, and the chatter of visitors entering the courtroom behind. In front, all I see is an aunty sitting at a typewriter. Tendrils of hair slip loose from the coil at the base of her neck.

    “On Facebook I made many friends, including this friend in a foreign country. At least, that is what he told me,” I explain to Gobind. “This friend asked me about my life, and my feelings. I sent him emojis sometimes, to say hello. Now they tell me he was a known terrorist recruiter. Known to whom? I didn’t know any of this.”