PT Sir understood, from the fervor with which she played, and how she responded to compliments with a close-mouthed smile, that she needed this class in a way the other girls did not. So he pardoned her soiled skirt. He forgave her old shoes.
Once, when she fainted in the heat of the playground, he took it as his opening to offer her a banana. After that, every now and then, he gave her a sandwich from his own tiffin box, or an apple. Once, a bag of chips. She didn’t get enough to eat, he worried. He couldn’t have his prize student falling sick. He already had her in mind for march-past at school functions, for training so she could play basketball, or even football, at the city level. She could grow up to be an athlete, like him. Not once had he come across a student of his who showed real promise in his field, until Jivan.
Then, after the class ten board exams, she left school. He never knew why. He understood it to be a matter of school fees. But she offered him no explanation, never acknowledged how he had gone out of his way to support her. A small thing, but he found it rude.
Well, was it a small thing?
When he thinks about it, an old anger flickers to life. He had begun to dream of her as a mentee, but she had not considered him a mentor. She had considered him perhaps no more than a source of occasional free food. She had fooled him.
The TV plays, indifferent to its tired viewer.
“What happened to make this ordinary young woman, Jivan is her name, a terrorist? What led her down the path of anti-national activity, bringing her into alliance with a terrorist group and conspiring to bring down the government? After the break—”
He cannot believe what she has gone on to do.
His nerves thrum. His life is just the same, and yet this proximity to disaster electrifies PT Sir.
Now he knows, there was something wrong with Jivan the whole time. There was something wrong in her thinking. Or else she would never have left without telling him, a teacher who cared for her, farewell, and thank you.
JIVAN
THIS MORNING, AFTER UMA madam, the chief guard of the women’s prison, wakes us up, I find Yashwi in the courtyard. Yashwi, in clean yellow salwar kameez, who has robbed ten or twelve houses. In one of them she left a grandfather tied up so tight he suffocated. But she is a nice girl, always smiling.
She pumps the tube well for me, hopping up, then crouching down with her weight on the lever as water falls like stones into my cupped hands. With the cold water, pulled from reserves deep underground, a taste of minerals on my lips, I wash my face.
When my eyes feel fresh and new, we join the crowd on the other side of the courtyard for our hunks of bread. There is a fist’s scoop of potato on top, and a glass of tea ladled from a bucket. I eat, standing on the side, looking to see if anybody is getting more than me. It has happened. I am ready to fight if it happens again.
But the women are in the haze of sleep, the sky is just turning to morning, and the green algae on the ground are damp under my feet. It is as peaceful as it gets in a cage.
After breakfast, we gather in the TV room. Beside me sits Nirmaladi, dupatta drawn over her head, a corner of cloth clenched in her teeth. She sucks the cloth like a baby at a nipple. She used to work as a cook in the outside world, until she accepted twenty thousand rupees for putting rat poison in a family’s lunch. Behind me is one-eyed Kalkidi, half of her face burned, laughing hard when I turn to look, the gaps in her teeth showing. Her husband threw acid on her but, somehow, she is the one in jail. These things happen when you are a woman.
Rumors drift. Among us some have killed a child in bed, or slit the throat of an abusive husband. A few things I know, a few things I don’t want to know.
On TV, our favorite drama plays: Why Won’t Mother-in-Law Love Me?
My first day inside, there was an episode of this endless show playing. Here in this TV room, I asked questions: “Listen, sister, did you keep the court-appointed lawyer? Or did you find a better one? How did you pay for your own lawyer?”
I spoke, but it was as if I had said nothing.
All faces were turned to the TV.
What was this place? Before I knew it, I was saying, “I am innocent, I swear I didn’t—”
Some women turned. Their faces, with jutting teeth, earlobes slit from years of wearing hoops—so human, yet each one a stranger to me—made me feel that I knew nobody in the world.
I cried. I was a child.
Everyone stopped watching TV then, and turned to watch me. The woman with patches of light and dark skin, a kind of leader in the prison, I knew even then, got up from her position on the floor within licking distance of the TV, and came waddling to me. I had heard she was the one who arranged an upgrade from a black-and-white to a color TV. Americandi, American sister, as she was called for her pink skin, took my chin in her hands. She was gentle as a mother. I felt a moment of relief, assurance that made me wipe my tears. Then she slapped me. Her hand, tough as hide, struck my ear and left it whining.
“Blind or what?” she said. “Can’t you see we’re watching TV?”
Now I watch TV, openmouthed like the others. More than the show, it is the world I watch. A traffic light, an umbrella, rain on a windowsill. The simple freedom of crossing a street.
* * *
*
BEFORE I LIVED HERE, I was a working woman. I had a job at a big shop, where we sold clothes—Indian, Western—suitcases, perfumes, wristwatches, even a few books that customers flipped through and put back on the shelves. Day after day I worked my long shifts, keeping stacks of clothes folded and tidy, bringing different sizes to ladies who yelled from the fitting room. I looked at them when they weren’t looking at me—their shiny hair, pedicured feet. Their purses with little plastic cards, sources of endless money. I wanted all that too.
They say the recruiter offered me money, plenty of money, to help them navigate the unmarked lanes of the slum, to bring supplies of kerosene to the train.
I live—I lived—in the Kolabagan slum, near the Kolabagan railway station, with my mother and father. Our house, one room with two brick walls and two walls of tin and tarp, was behind a garbage dump, a dump that was so big and occupied by so many crows screaming kaw kaw from dawn to night, it was famous. I would say, “I live in the house behind the dump,” and everybody would know where I meant. You could say I lived in a landmark building.
A hijra called Lovely, who went around blessing children and newlyweds, lived in the Kolabagan slum too, and some evenings I taught her English. It began as a compulsory school program where each student had to teach the alphabet to an illiterate person. But we continued long after the school graded me on it. Lovely believed she would have a better life someday, and so did I. The path began with a b c d. Cat, bat, rat. English is the language of the modern world. Can you move up in life without it? We kept going.