A Burning(6)

    They turned to look at the stooped woman who came right up to them, her feet in bathroom slippers.

“Stop, stop,” one said. “Where are you going? Can’t you see this is a police station?”

Jivan’s mother told them she was there to see her child.

“Who is your son?” said the guard, irritated, while his friend wandered away.

“My daughter. Jivan, she is called.”

The guard’s mouth fell open. Here she was, the mother of the terrorist.

“Not now,” he said finally. “No visiting in the lockup.”

The guard, on order to let nobody meet with the terrorist, refused to let her mother in.





JIVAN


EARLY ONE MORNING, A man appears outside my cell, holding in his hands a foolscap sheet of paper. “Undertrials!” he barks.

A line of filthy men forms. The men wear slippers rubbed thin at the heels, and vests pasted to their sweating chests. One shouts, “Is this the line for omelets?”

A few of the men laugh, no mirth in their voices.

Some say nothing, watching the specimen of me in my cell. I am to stay in prison until my trial a year later.

The man in charge unlocks the gate and pokes his head in.

“You, madam! You need a special invitation?”

So I scramble up from the floor. With a dozen others, I climb into a police van. When a man raises his handcuffed hands to touch my breasts, I slap them away.

“Keep your hands to yourself!” I shout.

The driver shouts at me to be quiet.

That is how I am transported from temporary lockup to this prison, where I now live.





PT SIR


THE PLAYGROUND IS A rectangle of concrete, surrounded first by a slim row of trees wilting in the sun, then by the five-story building of the school. The physical-training teacher, in collared shirt and ironed pants, his mustache thick as a shoe-brush and his bald pate shiny, stands in the sun and shouts commands for the students to march in rhythm, arms raised in salute, feet landing sharply on the ground.

The girls, his students, are thirteen years old, their skirts down to their knees, bra straps falling off their shoulders, tired socks curling off their shins. Many have cleaned their white sports shoes with a rub of blackboard chalk. Now their backs slouch, and their arms flop when they should be rigid as blades.

“Haven’t you seen,” PT Sir scolds as he walks down their rows, “the soldiers’ procession on TV? You should look exactly like that!”

Republic Day, the national holiday celebrating the country’s constitution, is coming up, and this will not do. The students’ parade, the most patriotic performance on this patriotic occasion, is PT Sir’s responsibility. It is the one time in all the school year when he, this odd teacher who teaches not geography or mathematics or chemistry, not even home science, showcases his work. Well, he thinks meanly about himself, that is other than all the times he steps up during assembly to fix a malfunctioning microphone, the only man at this girls’ school called on for handiwork.

    “Quiet!” he scolds when murmurs arise from the girls. “Be serious!”

The class falls silent. Girls look at the ground, laughter suppressed in their mouths.

Off to the side, two girls sit in the shade of a tree and giggle. At the beginning of class, they had come up to him and each whispered in his ear, “Sir, I have got my period. Can I please be excused?”

PT Sir thinks, but is not sure, that they perhaps had their periods last week also. Frowning, he removes a handkerchief from his breast pocket and wipes the sweat off his head, his forehead, his nose. What else can he do?



* * *



*

A FEW NIGHTS LATER, on TV, a banner flashes Breaking news! Breaking news!

The host of the show walks down the corridors of a newsroom and, pen in hand, announces that a young woman has been arrested in connection with the train bombing. Her name is Jivan. Last name currently unknown.

PT Sir slams his after-dinner dish of sweets on the table and lunges for the remote. At the sound, his wife emerges from the kitchen, asking, “What happened?”

    He raises a finger to his lips, and presses his thumb down on the volume button until sound fills the room. He leans so far forward his face is no more than a few inches from the screen. There, in a video clip being played and replayed, among the jostle of policemen and reporters, is that face, that poorly made plait, that scar on the chin, elements of a person he knows, or knew. Now the girl keeps a hand on her back, like an elderly lady who aches. PT Sir’s mustache nearly falls off his face. “Look at this,” he whispers to his wife. “Just look.”

“Do you know her?” says his wife. “How do you know her?”

“This young woman, all of twenty-two years old,” yells a reporter standing in the middle of a lane, curious onlookers crowding into the frame, “was arrested from the slum where I am standing right now. It’s the Kolabagan slum, that’s right, the Kolabagan slum next to the Kolabagan railway station, where the train was brutally attacked six days ago, killing one hundred and twelve people. In that attack, as we know—”

PT Sir presses a button and the channel changes. Jivan appears once more, a camera zooming in on her face.

“This Muslim woman is charged with assisting terrorists who plotted this heinous attack—”