A Burning(60)

    “Okay, sir,” Gobind agrees. He is unsure if he chooses this.





JIVAN


UMA MADAM SAYS, “LOOK who has come.”

Who? I wipe sleep from my eyes and smooth the tangles of hair at the back of my head. A smell of cigarettes enters the room. The flash of gemstones up and down fingers. I stand. My skull, lifted so far from the ground, feels uncertain of itself.

My lawyer, Gobind, looks at me sorrowfully. Then he takes a deep breath which I can hear.

“What can I say? This case has become politicized. It is not even about you. I am sorry about the mercy petition. I truly did not think they would reject it.”

“You told me they would let me go,” I say. “Remember? You told me I am young, and I promised in my letter to be a teacher, serve anywhere in the country, dedicate myself to the country. I wrote all that in my letter. Then what happened?”

“Tell me,” he says, after a pause, “are you getting enough to eat here? Do you want phone calls every day? I can try to bring you some magazines, something to read. What about a blanket? Is it cold here at night?”

    “I…” I say after a while, my voice a croak. I have not had a drink of water all night, if this is morning. All day, if this is evening.

Then I find my voice.

“Am I cold?” I say.

“Enough food?” I spit.

“A magazine?” I scream.

“Stop it!” shouts Uma madam.

Gobind looks at my face, my bony body in the yellow salwar kameez, a reminder of sun. Soon the color will fade.

The lawyer looks at Uma madam, who is standing just outside the door, fiddling with the lock and key in her hand. She frowns at me.

“There is really nothing to do after the mercy petition is rejected,” he says.

“Don’t treat me like I am stupid,” I shout. I don’t know why I am shouting. I have a voice, I remind myself. This is my voice. It booms. It startles. “The country needs someone to punish,” I tell him. “And I am that person.”

“That blanket looks thin,” Gobind says, his voice withdrawn. “What do you need to be comfortable? Better blanket, maybe.”

“Blanket?” I say. “Blanket?”

I want to take off my slipper and whack him over the head with it. He is no better than a toilet cockroach.

“If you are not going to help me, then fine. I will write a hundred letters. I have time,” I am shouting again. “I have time.”



* * *



*

A COTERIE OF FLIES rises from a heap of—is that my shit? The sewage lines are blocked again. This late at night, someone walks up, sending the soft sound of bare feet on floor to my alert ears. “Uma madam!” I say. I am happy she has come. “It is you!”

But she does not respond.

Maybe it is only a rat.

Twice a day, a guard, a different guard, opens the gate and shoves in a plate of ruti and lentils, a watery soup specked with cumin or dirt, impossible to tell.

“Who is making ruti now?” I ask, but she doesn’t answer. “It was my job. I was the one making ruti.”

Roars of disgust rise from someone—me?—but in the end I eat, my back and my elbows working.



* * *



*

IT TAKES LONG FOR ME to get a notepad and a pen. The ink in the pen has dried, so I lick the nib to get the blue flowing.

In school, I learned how to write letters. I put the notepad on the ground, kneel before it in a posture of praying, and begin.

    Dear Hon’ble Chief Minister Madam Bimala Pal,

This is in regards to my curative petition (BL9083-A). Respectfully I am writing to see if your office may please forward my petition one more time to the Council of Ministers in Delhi. As you know the evidence against me is circumstance-based. I am innocent. I lived in the Kolabagan slum, but I did not have anything to do with the train. If I am pardoned, I am willing to serve the nation for the rest of my life. My goal is to be a teacher, and teach English to the children living in poverty. Without me, my poor mother and father will have nothing left in their life. I am their only child.

     Respectfully yours, your loyal citizen.





* * *



*

WAITING FOR SOME REPLY in the mail, I travel along with the letter in its hopeful van.

I travel along with the letter on a train, paddy fields outside.

I travel along with the letter in the air, on a plane where rich men eat chocolates.

But the letter lands on an indifferent desk.

Days pass. Weeks too. Maybe the minister’s assistant glances at it, no more. Maybe they are overwhelmed by letters from prison.

Who am I except one of many?

My pen grows feeble.

What can words do? Not very much.



* * *



*

MY MOTHER DOESN’T COME this week. I wait alone, licking puffed rice from my palm, waiting for Uma madam to fetch me. I listen to the roar from the building above me grow and subside—a hundred conversations in one hour.

    After the roar of the visitors is gone, I hear some repair work outside. It seems to me that a shovel scrapes on the other side of a wall. And then, a glorious thing. A hole, the size of a cigarette, opens up on a high wall. I see sun. In delight, I slam my palms on the wall.