A Burning(55)

PT Sir feels that he is vibrating with energy. Let the old-timers try to challenge him. Just let them. Hasn’t he been a teacher? Doesn’t he know what life in the school is really like? He knows, more than these career bureaucrats who have not seen the inside of a school since 1962!

He continues, “With all respect, we have to take care of the people before taking care of the ideology. Through people is how we will spread ideology, not by neglecting them.”

Some raise their eyebrows in appreciation. Bimala Pal looks at PT Sir with a hint of a smile.

“You turned out,” she says, “to be quite a persuasive orator!”

“He’s a teacher after all,” says someone else. “How can he not have a commanding side?”

On the train, PT Sir holds his head high. Near his house, he gives a five-rupee coin to a beggar child who sits on the pavement, looking up with blank eyes.

How did it happen? His colleagues at the school, those teachers, those ladies, with their cinema gossip and recipe trades, their husbands and children to return to—their lives continue as they always have, above the watermark of political tides. But in the villages, those other teachers look at him with hope and desperation. They look at him as somebody who can do something. So, he thinks, perhaps he can.



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IT IS SUMMER, ROADSIDE trees dry and dusty, when PT Sir hands his resignation letter to the principal. She tears it open, glances at it, and jokes, “Now you are a powerful man, what use do you have for our humble school?”

PT Sir presses his teeth on his tongue in a show of humility.

Then, his three-week notice dismissed by the principal, having declined the offers of a farewell party, pleading to be excused for the busy electoral campaign, PT Sir is free. PT Sir is no longer a PT Sir. At this thought he feels mournful. The defiant and silly girls were children, after all. Walking down the lane, he looks back at the building one more time. In the barred windows, ponytailed heads appear. He feels a tug of nostalgia for his old life, and then, in a moment, it is gone.



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THE FOLLOWING DAY, WHEN PT Sir visits Bimala Pal’s house, the living room is a tangle of cables and chargers, young men and women on every available seat, their faces lit in the blue glow of screens. PT Sir notes, impressed, that this is the campaign’s social media team.

    At an office elsewhere in the city, a video production company releases short films on YouTube every week, highlighting the lives of ordinary people positively affected by the initiatives of the party. These films are played on LED billboards at intersections, and on mobile screens carried by small trucks through villages. On Facebook, the films gather tens of thousands of views.

PT Sir’s work is on the ground. Every day, he is driven in a party Sumo car to towns and villages across the state. When he covers all of the nineteen districts, he starts over again. His car speeds past vegetable markets under tarp, past green hills and rocky outcrops, past streams which run dry, their sandy bottoms exposed. He smiles at curious men who tap on the car’s tinted windows, and steps out and greets village elders who sit on porches, their faces wrinkled from decades in the sun. He wags his finger and delivers speeches under welcome banners strung between the limbs of trees.

He meets with teachers and teachers’ unions. He drinks endless cups of tea. He smiles until his cheeks ache.

“Until I gave up my job to represent you all,” he begins every speech, “I was a teacher, like you!”

Now and then PT Sir looks, from the stage, for a glint of a knife, or a weapon held high in the air.



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FROM THE YOUNG MEN and women working on social media, phones attached to their palms at all times, Bimala Pal learns about the angry Twitter and Facebook messages. They arrive, blips and bloops on laptops and phones, bubbles and boxes of typo-riddled, emoji-filled complaint.

    Y is Jivan getting a shot at a mercy petition? Mercy 4 wut??

Justice now!!! Dont forget the 100+ innocents who died!!!

This case will drag on for a decade and use up our tax money, nothing else will happen.

Why r we payin 4 that terrorist 2 sleep and eat and relax in prison while some mercy petition goes thru the system? If u become the govt how will u handle?

It doesn’t end.



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ON ELECTION DAY, a statewide holiday, PT Sir wakes up at four in the morning. A peculiar exhaustion slows his body, the exhaustion of getting up in darkness, and turning artificial lights on. His limbs are slow. While the sky lightens, he bathes, a stream of cold water falling down his back to the bathroom floor.

Soon, a car arrives to take PT Sir to cast his vote. His polling station, which is Bimala Pal’s too, is a local school, closed for the day. Where on other days children fill water from coolers, where they linger and play and drop crumbs of lunch, there are now a dozen TV cameras and trucks carrying generators. Reporters drink paper cups of Nescafé purchased from a vendor who makes rounds with a kettle. Above them, barred windows conceal silent classrooms, their desks scratched in teenage love and impatience.

    Already there is a long line of voters. A housewife with sequined slippers, a maid with a thin shawl thrown over her sari, a man with alcohol-red eyes. A woman feeds a stray dog a biscuit, and the people behind her idly watch.