A Burning(41)

My head feels drawn to the earth, incapable of raising itself. So that is who he was, Purnendu. I listen to Uma madam’s scolding in this posture of shame, until the posture is all I am.



* * *



*

MA COMES, holding a newspaper in her hand.

“Don’t show that to me,” I say, anger flaring at her.

She opens the leaves, turning the cottony pages one by one.

“Wait, wait,” she says. “Kalu read this to me. He said it is good.” She shows me a column inside, marked by pencil.

    Beware of trial by media, says the article. This is a different paper. Where is concrete proof that this young woman had involvement in the attack? Everything the police tells us is circumstantial evidence. The woman is being sacrificed because of her Muslim identity.

“See?” says my mother. “Kalu told me this newspaper is speaking up in your defense. People are listening. Nothing is decided yet. Don’t give up hope.”

I don’t know what this means, this matter of hope. Moment by moment, it is difficult to know whether I have it, or not, or how I might tell.

“This just means you are being hopeless,” my mother teases. Then she smiles, and touches my cheek while the guard has her back turned to us.

There is nothing funny, but my mother’s smile, those familiar folds of her mouth, that crooked tooth, the wisps of hair at her temples, soothes me.

At the end of the hour, when she gets up to leave, she reminds me, “Many people from Kolabagan are going to come speak about you in the court, you’ll see. What a good girl you are, a good student, the only girl in our locality who speaks English. They will learn that you are nothing like what this one newspaper is saying.”

I nod, willing no tears to spill from my eyes.

Then the guard calls, “Time, time!” and, after her hand rests for a gentle moment on my head, my mother is gone. I turn back inside. I brace for a collapse, a removal of light during which I will lie, my bones against the floor.

But I am surprised to find that it is bearable. I cook ruti, I clean the new exhaust pipes which malfunction. Americandi’s eyes follow me from task to task, waiting for my breakdown. But it doesn’t come. From my mother’s immense strength, I have borrowed a little.





JIVAN’S MOTHER AND FATHER


IN THE DARKNESS OF the house, Jivan’s mother and father sit before meals of rice and yogurt, tears falling on their plates.

“It took everything I have,” says Jivan’s mother, “to smile before her.”

“I know,” says Jivan’s father, a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “I know. Eat.”





JIVAN


ON THE FIRST DAY of the trial, Uma madam brings me a sari to wear. I recognize it. It is the sari I purchased for my mother from Pantaloons, with my employee discount. It is light blue, the color of a winter day, with simple threadwork along the border. I wear it, and feel my mother close by.

At the courthouse, there is a garden. There is new soil under my feet, the bigness of trees in the yard, light so bright it hits my eyes like broken glass, a stampede of reporters who scream questions and fight to take a picture of my face. Policemen surround me as soon as I exit the van, and I walk as if inside a shell.

Still the reporters shout, “Here! Look here!”

They shout, “What will you say to the families of the dead?”

“What are you eating in the prison?”

“Are they beating you?”

“Has anyone from the terrorist group contacted you?”

“Have they coached you on what to say?”

    Inside the courtroom, I sit in relief. The room is large, with ceilings so high they could have fit another floor inside. Long rods drop from the ceiling, holding ceiling fans which turn. Before me, a witness box covered by a white curtain, so that I cannot influence the witnesses.

My lawyer, Gobind, asks me again and again whether I want to eat.

“Want a banana?” he says. “You should eat before it starts.”

I have no appetite.

The lawyer for the government begins. He spins a story in which I, unruly local youth, school dropout, angry at the government, cultivate a relationship with a known terrorist recruiter over Facebook. As proof, the lawyer points to the Facebook conversations I have had with my friend, my foreign friend. In this story, when the recruiter asks for my help, either through coded text messages or by calling me on the phone, I agree. The terrorists need a local contact, the lawyer insists, a helper who can guide them down the unnumbered, crooked lanes of the slum, all the way to the station, and all the way out. In his story, not only do I lead them to the station, I also hurl a torch of my own at the train. I have, he reminds the gathered, hurled bombs at authorities before—

I cannot bear it. I stand up and say, “Those weren’t bombs, my god, they were just our—”

Gobind hisses at me to sit. The judge, calmly, tells me to sit. Silence thunders in my ears. I lower myself into the wooden chair.

    “And,” the lawyer concludes, “let me remind the court that all of this is not some, what shall I say, theory I have made up. This is all in the confession that the accused signed.”

He points at me dramatically.

“Everything I have said,” he continues, “is in the confession, and what’s more, all of it is corroborated, like I have shown you. The accused herself has repeated many of these statements, as you all saw in her interview in the Daily Beacon done by esteemed journalist Purnendu Sarkar.”