A Burning(61)

But my palms make no sound. The wall, high above my head, is cold and feathery with algae. The scraping stops, eventually, and the repairmen go away, leaving me this present.

The light alerts me when morning comes. Now that I know it is morning, I practice the yoga I learned long ago, on rainy days in school. But my body is reluctant. It adheres, like a block of concrete, to the floor. There is nothing supple in my arms. They are twigs, waiting to snap. When I look down, my legs are dry and scaly, white with skin that is neither alive nor willing to shed.



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*

IT IS EARLY WHEN Uma madam comes for me. She tells me to bathe.

“Has my mother come?” I say.

When I rise slowly on knees which creak, I wait for her to snap at me, but she doesn’t. Softly she tells me to go to the bathroom, to use the toilet and take a bath.

Oh, a bath. I follow her to the bathroom, a spacious room whose walls and floor are brown with the filth of bodies, accumulated over the years. There stands a bucket of water, with a plastic mug floating in it.

    Now Uma madam stands in the doorway, waiting for me to undress. She will stand there the whole time, her back turned to me if she is feeling kind.

“Do you have,” I say, “any letters…?”

Before she has said, “No! No letter! How many times do I have to tell you?”

Today she silently shakes her head.

I drop my clothes on the floor just outside the doorway, so they will not get wet. Inside, I crouch on the floor by the bucket. I can smell myself. I lift a mug of water and tip it over my head, and it drips over my oily hair, barely wetting it. The water is cold. Goose bumps rise on my skin. I feel a breeze that I did not know was there.

Another mug of water, and another.

I remember bathing as a child in the village, in the pond ringed by tal trees. My mother would press my head so I dipped in the green water, soap frothing about me. The bar of soap we used then was thin from her body. This bar is too. It is a sliver which I hold tight, or else it will fall and spin across the floor.

After I am dry and clothed, Uma madam waits for me to come out of the room, on my own. Nobody grabs me. The door is open. I step out. Then she locks the door, and there we are, standing in the corridor.



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*

    I COULD HAVE BEEN an ordinary person in the world. Ma, I could have gone to college, the city college where girls my age sit under trees, studying from their books, arguing, joking with boys. This is what I have seen in the movies.

Then I too would have given scraps of my meal to the stray dogs. I too would have had nostalgic corners of campus, corridor romances. I might have studied literature, and I might have spoken English so well that if you had met me on the street, Ma, you would not have known me! Ma, you would have thought I was a rich girl.





THE PAST TENSE OF HANG IS HUNG


UNLESS WHAT IS BEING hung is a person, in which case the word is “hanged.” One morning, after the president of the country rejected her mercy petition, and before the journalists loitering outside the prison walls had a chance to crush their cigarettes underfoot and ask what was happening, Jivan was taken from her cell to the courtyard. As soon as she saw the platform, the length of rope thick enough to tether a boat to land, she fell. An attendant caught her. He was waiting for this purpose. In his arms, her body was a sack.

When she recovered, in the startling bright of the courtyard, she was given a minute to speak her last words. She licked her lips. Swallowed. Rubbed a cold palm on her kameez. “Where is my mother?” she asked. “Where is my father?”

She looked wildly about.

“You are making such a mistake,” she said, voice cracking. “Minister madam, Bimala madam, see my letter. Please, have you got my letter?”

    They were not there. Nobody was there, other than a few prison officials.

When Jivan was hanged, her neck snapped. The hair which had grown unruly during her time in prison fell over her face and drooped to her belly. The executioner, patches of sweat creeping up his armpits, shook his arms loose of the tension. A doctor, standing by with what looked like a receipt book, noted the time of death. Then a clerk went inside and dispatched a letter by speed post to inform Jivan’s next of kin—a mother, in the Kolabagan slum—that her daughter had been killed by the state.





JIVAN


MOTHER, DO YOU GRIEVE?

Know that I will return to you. I will be a flutter in the leaves above where you sit, cooking ruti on the stove. I will be the stray cloud which shields you from days of sun. I will be the thunder that wakes you before rain floods the room.

When you walk to market, I will return to you as footprint on the soil. At night, when you close your eyes, I will appear as impress on the bed.





PT SIR


THE NEW APARTMENT COMES with lights built into the ceilings. There is a balcony that an assistant has filled with potted plants. PT Sir accepts a window AC in the bedroom, though he declines ACs for the living room and the guest bedroom. He cannot hide the pleasure of no longer waking up sweating like a peasant.

He is now, he realizes, a cup of hot tea resting on the railing, a man who lives here, in a top-floor apartment in Ballygunge, a nice, upper-middle-class neighborhood of the city.

The party has seen fit to improve his salary. On top of that, it is true that very occasionally, educational institutions send him a little token in return for having their licenses and permits renewed in a timely manner.