A Burning(42)

The judge frowns. He calls both lawyers to his seat, grand like a throne. In my chair, I wait, my limbs growing cold. What is the judge discussing in secret? I feel like a straw doll, dressed up for play, at the mercy of callous children who decide my fate.

Then, mercy. The judge throws out my “confession.” He pronounces it inadmissible, as I was forced to sign it—this, he believes.

Gobind gives me an encouraging smile.

I am glad for this small triumph. I have done nothing, I have done nothing, but nobody in this courtroom believes that. Only my mother. My mother is sitting somewhere behind me, but I have no courage to turn around and face all the other eyes.



* * *



*

FOR FOUR DAYS, I go through the routine of coming to court. On the fourth day, a reporter, or maybe just a passerby, spits on my face outside the courthouse. My lawyer finds a canteen napkin with which I wipe my face, but there is no time to find a bathroom and wash. I sit with that stranger’s hatred on my face all day.

    By this time, the prosecution has called forty witnesses, including old neighbors from the slum eviction, the doctor who treated my father, the NGO lady who sponsored my education. They testify behind the white curtain, for fear that I—I—may intimidate them by making eye contact. I listen to their ghost voices. Some saw me smoking—several people mention this, as if lighting a cigarette is the same as lighting the tip of a torch.

Is smoking a cigarette as a young woman a crime?

Then, on the fifth day, a man arrives in the witness box. He speaks, and his voice revives me. I know this voice.

I am back in the school courtyard, playing basketball. It is my old PT teacher. I wait for him to tell everyone that I was an ordinary student, that I used to love to play.

He says, “She was poor, always separate from the other girls. But she didn’t behave badly in my class. She played very well, in fact. I had high hopes that she would be an athlete.”

Listen to my teacher, I think. Listen to him. He knows. I want to catch his eyes to thank him, but it is not possible.

“Yes, my understanding was that she had a difficult life,” he says. “Sometimes I gave her food for lunch. I never knew if she had enough to eat. She seemed grateful for the food.”

    I was, I remember. I was grateful. Perhaps in my child’s arrogance I failed to thank him adequately. I will do it as soon as they let me speak to him. I will thank him for speaking up on my behalf. Nobody else has been willing to do it. Not a person from the NGO, not a person from my school, nobody yet from my locality.

Then he says, “But she disappeared. I tried to help her, by being encouraging, by giving her food, but one day she stopped coming to school. This was after the class ten exams. She didn’t do so well, if I remember. But so what? You can make up with better marks in class twelve. But no. She just left. Vanished. Never saw her again, until I saw her on TV. Maybe she got involved with criminal elements after leaving school. It happens.”

I feel a weight in my chest, the earth’s pull within my ribs. I try to hear further, but there are wasps in my ears.



* * *



*

FOR THE SIXTH, SEVENTH, and eighth days, my lawyer presents our defense. When I try to persuade him to let me speak, he lifts a finger to his lips.

“Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time,” he tells me during a break in the proceedings, “it does not help to have the defendant speak. It is a proven fact.”

Is it? There is nothing I can do but trust him.

Though I have been in touch with a terrorist recruiter over Facebook, he concedes, all we spoke about was my job, my coworkers, my feelings. Not a word about an attack. I, Jivan, thought he was a friendly boy in a foreign country—what girl wouldn’t chat with such a boy?

    Gobind points out all the errors in Purnendu Sarkar’s article. He corrects the notion that I threw real bombs at the police before. He asserts that my writings on Facebook were nothing more than a young girl expressing her feelings. He paints me as stupid and gullible. And how glad I am for it.

Then he says: “That package that you keep hearing about? That package? Was not an explosive of any kind. It was a package of books! She was going to deliver books to a hijra in the slum! That’s right, my client was doing public service, she was teaching English to a hijra in her locality. We can hear about it from the hijra herself.”

I hear Lovely called to the witness box. My heart lifts, the thread of a kite unspooled, fed into the sky by the hands of a hopeful child.

Lovely has come. The microphone catches her settling into the witness box, and I hear her say, “You are only making these boxes for thin people or what?”

For the first time during the trial, a smile springs to my mouth. Lovely has come, with her voice, her unafraid manner, and the truth of my story.

“What is shocking me,” she says in Bengali, “is how you all are making up such lies.”

“Please,” Gobind tells her, “stick to the facts.”

“Fine!” she says. “Jivan was teaching me English. I was not knowing English and in fact I am still not knowing English.”

    The courtroom laughs.

The judge asks for order.

Lovely continues. “But it’s not Jivan’s fault. Every two–three days, she was coming to my house with some old textbooks. I was learning a b c d, then simple words like ‘cat.’ Like that. I was learning it all so that I was being able to audition better. I am”—she coughs bashfully—“an actress.”