A Burning(40)

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THE NIGHT THE TRAIN would burn, I walked to a place where my mother would not come upon me. The Kolabagan train station. There was a cigarette shop open there until late hours. I bought a single. I lit it. On the platform I stood like an independent woman, flicking ash. Next to me, I rested a package of my textbooks which I was long past needing. I would give them to Lovely.

A few of the passengers inside the halted train looked at me, all alone at night, smoking a cigarette. They were thinking, I thought, that I was a risky girl.

This is what city girls do, I thought. I enjoyed troubling them.

Then I heard two slaps of thunder. Quick as lightning, a crackle of fire spread through the train. I saw two shapes slipping away into the overgrown public garden next to the railway lines, the slum’s toilet. One minute two coaches were smoking, a trembling fire within them, and the next the fire was roaring out of the windows, jumping from coach to coach. Other than the fire, I heard nothing, though I could see faces trapped and screaming. I stood, frozen, a tiny fire glowing in my hand. The air began to smell like burning hair.

    Directly in front of me, locked in the train, a man was beating his wrist against the iron bars of a window. The man was looking at me. A grown man, he was looking at me and crying. He was speaking to me. Between his lips stretched saliva. I could not hear his words, but I could guess them. He was begging for help. He was holding up a little girl. She was struggling, squirming, crying.

He was pleading with me to come up and, somehow, grab his little girl, pull her through the window bars if I could.

I turned and ran. In a gutter somewhere, I dropped my cigarette. Then I ran and ran, and did not stop until I arrived home.



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ALL I AM GUILTY OF, Purnendu, listen—all I am guilty of is being a coward.





PT SIR


ONE MORNING, AT THE school assembly, while the principal speaks, the microphone shrieks.

Students cover their ears. Teachers keep sober faces.

Instead of hurrying forward to fix the problem, PT Sir stands with the other teachers, calmly sipping a cup of tea.

The principal calls, “Where is Suresh?”

Suresh is a peon in the administrative office. When he is fetched, he goes up to the microphone and jiggles the cables. He unplugs it and plugs it in once more. He taps the head of the microphone.

PT Sir looks on, not moving a finger.





JIVAN


THEN PURNENDU IS GONE. I wake with my heart clamoring in its cage. I force stale bread and dry potatoes down my throat—no tea today. The sun, unseen, makes itself felt in clothes sticking to our bellies and salt water dripping down our necks. Kneeling, I perform today’s beautification task, which is to clean a bathroom. I scrub the toilet, and pour boric acid down a pipe. The acid, diluted in water, stings where my hand holds old cuts. But it will kill the moving, pulsing soil smeared in the sewage lines—dozens of cockroaches.

All the while, in a clean office far from here, Purnendu writes my story, and his editor makes it better.

“Your editor made the story better?” I laughed when Purnendu told me. “My story would be better if…”

I count on my hands. “If we had not been evicted, do you see? If my father had not broken his back, if my mother had not been attacked for trying to run a small business. If I could have afforded to finish school.”

    “Not better like that,” said Purnendu.

“Then like what?”

He had no answer.



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TWO DAYS LATER, I am standing in line for my morning meal, when Uma madam arrives in the courtyard, waving a newspaper in the air.

“You,” she says, looking at me. Her mouth twists, hiding a smile. Then she hands me the newspaper. “Nice job.”

The headline, in large text, reads, “I THREW BOMBS AT THE POLICE”: A TERRORIST TELLS HER LIFE STORY.

The story begins: Over several interviews conducted at the women’s prison, this reporter heard a story of poverty and misfortune, as well as a lifelong anger at the government. It began when Jivan was a child, and was, along with her family, evicted from their settlement near Kurla mines. At that time, she freely confessed to this reporter, she and her family prepared homemade bombs with which they attacked the police.

I move out of the line, and sit on the ground. I read the lines again. Did I forget to clarify to him that those bombs, as we called them, were nothing more than urine and shit? They were the pathetic defense of an insect.

I check the byline. Purnendu Sarkar, it reads. That was his name, wasn’t it?

I read some more. Her anger at the government is not recent, and has roots in a lifetime of neglect. From mistreatment of her father at a government hospital, leaving him with chronic debilitating pain as the result of a back injury, to her time living in government housing where an unreliable water supply made daily life difficult, close analysis of her story reveals animosity toward the government—

    I finish reading the article, and begin again. I finish it once more, and return to the top of the column, over and over until the words become no more than balls of earth rolled by termites. I close my eyes, and the ground tilts, taking me with it.

Uma madam takes the newspaper from me. I let her take it. From where I sit, I see only her feet, wrinkled skin in Bata slippers, and a sari reduced to rag in the humid air. “Feels good?” she taunts above my head. “This is what happens when you do secret interviews without permission! Do another! Do ten more! See how much they help!”