A Burning by Megha Majumdar

Author:Megha Majumdar [Majumdar, Megha]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

PT SIR

IN AUTUMN, DURING THE Durga Pujo festival, young lovers roam the streets, holding hands, till dawn. Ceremonial smoke wafts where priests worship, and drummers keep their beat going until the next day arrives. The streets, closed to cars, fill with vendors of fried snacks and cotton candy. Some neighborhoods install Ferris wheels and swinging pirate boats where traffic might have been.

On such a night, while the city celebrates, the Jana Kalyan Party leader, whom PT Sir has only briefly met, a man with three mobile phones in his palms at all times, dies. It is late, well after dinner, when PT Sir gets the phone call. His wife, woken by the ring of the phone, and worried by the tone of voice she hears, rises from bed and asks, “What happened?”

She tells him where he might be able to buy a grief wreath, of white evening flowers, at this hour.

PT Sir takes a rickshaw, then a taxi, then abandons the car and runs when the traffic stalls. Crowds stream past him in the opposite direction. Now and then a child, no taller than his hip, blows a pipe whose neck unfurls and reveals a feather.

The party leader’s house is in the old part of the city, where lanes accommodate one Ambassador car at a time. Two police jeeps try to regulate the crowd, a mass of men holding hot earthen cups of tea by the cool rim. On balconies along the lane, neighbors watch the gathering like it is a festival of its own.

“Have they brought the body from the hospital?” PT Sir asks a stranger beside him, a man carrying a cloth bag like a scholar.

“Few minutes ago,” he replies.

PT Sir sees no familiar faces, so he stands some distance from the house, holding a tall bunch of white flowers, the only flowers he could find at that hour. Murmurs spread that the chief minister is coming to pay his respects, and the railway minister too. A car is allowed through, bearing a famous actor, who steps out in sunglasses. To the crowd, he joins his hands and bows his head. Then he disappears inside the house. The crowd roars and moves as one, and for a moment PT Sir fears a stampede.

“Please keep order,” shouts a man from the front. “His wife is inside, his elderly mother is inside, have respect for them!”

PT Sir feels ashamed of himself, a participant in this strangely excited crowd of the supposedly grieving. He feels the way he did at the first Jana Kalyan Party rally he attended, when he was a diffident man.

Should he go home? Should he, at a calmer moment, phone the bereaved? But he has brought these flowers. Wouldn’t he like to show Bimala Pal that he has come? There, inside the house, all the senior ministers are gathered. Wouldn’t it be good to be acquainted with one or two of them?

At that moment he hears a voice.

“You have come,” says the assistant, the same one who delivers PT Sir’s courthouse bonuses by motorcycle.

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