![]() But he is a man! He is a man with bigger capacities than eating the dinner she cooks. She is annoyed because he filled his belly with store-bought biryani. She is annoyed, he feels, because he didn’t have much of an appetite for the yogurt fish she cooked. He lies with his head on his thin pillow and wonders why his wife cannot tolerate something exciting that is happening in his life. But soon PT Sir-his sobriquet comes from his job teaching physical training-begins to muster some character and starts climbing the ranks of a regional right-wing political party. The daily grind of school life, and the taunts and giggles of schoolgirls who are clearly richer than he is, wears him down. PT Sir, Jivan’s onetime gym teacher, completes a triptych of primary characters. I am looking at the lens and knowing-through this lens, someday I am reaching a thousand people, a million people. The man with sleepy eyes is standing behind it, and even though I am not liking him and he is not liking me, I am feeling like a real actress. It is balanced on top of a tripod, and there is a blinking red light on it. I am going to a room and standing nervously in front of not a theoretical camera but a real camera. Majumdar masterfully translates Lovely’s voice-and her Bollywood dreams-by writing her dialogue in the present continuous tense and maintaining the singsong rhythms of Bengali: ![]() Hijras dress in colorful saris and are known to belt out bawdy songs. They are often paid for their services, but it is common to see them begging at markets and on the streets. Lovely is a hijra-part of a community of mostly eunuchs but also intersex and transgender people who are both revered and reviled in Indian society for their supposed ability to bless or curse babies and newlyweds. Before being jailed, she spent her spare time giving free English lessons to an aspiring actress named Lovely. Majumdar’s novel takes us inside the mind of a woman who thinks she has agency but whose life was doomed from the start.įor someone with so little, Jivan has much to give. Her father, suffering permanent injuries from an act of police brutality, mostly lies supine at home. ![]() Jivan’s mother forages for fish and vegetables at an illegal night market and runs a tenuous business selling bread and curries outside the family shack. But life intervened: After passing her 10th grade examinations, Jivan dropped out to support her parents. Education was supposed to grant her a passport to a better life-the ability to speak English. The only good thing that has ever happened to Jivan is that an NGO sponsored her education at an all-girls private school. ![]() Jivan naively details her innocence to the press in the hope that she will get a fair hearing.įat chance. Every aspect of the Indian system betrays her: the police, social services, real estate agents, doctors, and more. Later I learned that what he was, was called middle class.”) As Jivan recounts her life story to a corrupt reporter while sitting in jail, Majumdar’s prose comes alive, taking us inside the mind of a woman who thinks she has agency but whose life was doomed from the start. But she realizes: “He wasn’t rich, of course. (She once sees a man in a clean shirt and shined shoes and wishes she could be rich like him. Even before she was locked up, she had little chance of rising. Take Jivan, an impoverished Muslim slum-dweller. (It’s surely no accident that Majumdar, who grew up in Kolkata, gave her character a name that means “life” in Bengali.)Īnd so begins Majumdar’s takedown of the notion of the Indian Dream-the promise of social mobility, if not riches, in one of the world’s most class- and caste-bound societies-peddled by the current government under Narendra Modi and parroted by most Indian TV news channels. They arrest Jivan, charge her with sedition, and lock her up as the Indian public and a jingoistic media bay for the death penalty. Whatever the police and the government actually are, they know a good scapegoat when they see one. “If the police didn’t help ordinary people like you and me, if the police watched them die, doesn’t that mean that the government is also a terrorist?” she writes. Of course, Jivan’s Facebook post, which starts the novel, was ill-advised-especially given the realities of today’s India, with its surge of nationalism and growing suppression of free speech. A Burning, Megha Majumdar, Knopf, 304 pp.
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