Where the Fires Burn
Photo: Karan Madhok
In her captivating debut novel A Burning (2020), Megha Majumdar reports on the searing flames that ignite the ambitions of aspiring Indians—or destroy them.
Facing the odds stacked against her, of the brute and unforgiving cruelty of our system, Jivan—one of the chief protagonists of Megha Majumdar’s debut novel A Burning—finds herself rambling to her lawyer behind bars, before she finds brief enlightenment in her plight. She gathers her thoughts. “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.’”
Jivan is a young woman from the slums in an unnamed West Bengal city (re: Kolkata), who is arrested for being embroiled in the perfect storm of misfortunes—external and self-afflicted—for writing the wrong thing after being the wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time. A terrorist attack (the ‘burning’ itself) kills almost a hundred people trapped on a train. Jivan is an innocent witness, but in a country looking for a scapegoat, for someone to punish, she becomes an easy target.
A Facebook update—one that would be decried by India’s chest-thumping nationalists as an ‘anti-national’ statement—lands her in the hands of the authorities. Her religion makes her an easy pawn in a larger political game, played to win over the hearts of India’s discontented majority. The poverty and hardships of her family make it near-impossible for her to fight back. The corruptions and complexities of the nation around her all but seal her doors out to justice.
But what springs A Burning to life, what truly fans the flames of this city-in-turmoil, is the introduction of two other central characters, both of whom are somewhat connected to Jivan. One is Lovely, a hijra, India’s recognised third-gender, who introduces herself as: “My chest is a man’s chest, and my breasts are made of rags. So what? Find me another woman in this whole city as truly woman as me.” Lovely has been taking English language classes from Jivan before the narrative of the novel, and has hopes of acting stardom, of making a leap into Bollywood.
And then there is PT Sir, a sports teacher in the school that Jivan used to attend, who saw potential in the young student before she mysteriously left the school, and who—through chance and through ambition—now stares ahead at a crucial role in the state’s right-wing political movement.
Rarely has a novel been able to capture so much of India’s vast complexity in such a concise narrative. Jivan’s life and freedom is at stake—and in the orbit of her story, we find the flotsam of countless perils that are rotting the lives of so many others.
The characters that share this city are varied, in the course of different life-journeys, facing different priorities. But there is a thread of aspiration that connects them all—and connects the larger populace of Indians around them.
Jivan, who has dropped out of school to work at a clothing store, aspires to move out of the slums where she lived, to provide a better life for her ailing parents, to earn and live like her ‘middle class’ classmates in school. Lovely aspires to become a film star, to be recognised for her talents, to be a complex leading lady and not just a caricature. PT Sir aspires for respect from his co-workers, from the average person on the local trains, from his wife; he aspires to be in the company of important people, to be inside the rooms where the big decisions are made. There are flickers of hope everywhere. Another actor attempts to enter an air-conditioned mall, a political fixer hopes to earn more with a side-hustle, a politician hopes to be the chief minister, a lawyer hopes for ‘positive energy’ from his Guru, and a gamut of more characters that dream to move up, to be something they’re not, to find a quick-fix for the unending daily struggles of life.
Jivan aspires for the freedom that is bestowed upon the rich or the upwardly mobile. Her ‘original sin’ in the novel—a Facebook update—is simply a casual proclamation of one’s opinion, a grasp for attention and individuality that should’ve caused little else than some raised eyebrows. She wrote after the terrorist attack: 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? Prior to this, Jivan dreams about a life where she wouldn’t have to think twice before speaking her mind.
I admired these strangers on Facebook who said anything they wanted to. They were not afraid of making jokes. Whether it was about the police or the ministers, they had their fun, and wasn’t that freedom? I hoped that after a few more salary slips, after I rose to be a senior sales clerk of Pantaloons, I would be free in that way too.
A lot of Indians may have had the privilege to make that Facebook post—and get away with it. But people like Jivan—poor, Muslim, female—paid the price for a brief declaration of freedom. When she is arrested, she notices a group of drunken rich kids drive above the speed-limit, in sight of the police. Their crime is obviously ignored.
A Burning is drenched with these themes, themes of the privileged versus the poor, of Hindus and Muslims, of the political class and of everyone else. And yet, the novel also manages to read like a thriller, an old-fashioned page-turner where the plot speeds along at breakneck pace, every action causing a decisive, direct reaction to the fate of the characters. Rarely has a novel been able to capture so much of India’s vast complexity in such a concise narrative. Jivan’s life and freedom is at stake—and in the orbit of her story, we find the flotsam of countless perils that are rotting the lives of so many others.
Majumdar’s prose is sharp, whether she is writing from the first-person perspective (Jivan, Lovely) or from a close distant third (PT Sir). There is a sense of unease in the simplicity of her sentences: there is very little room for abstractions or vague grappling in the dark. It makes A Burning an unfiltered, exacting novel, a glimpse of India without any flowery decoration. The prose makes piercing declarations of truth, with statements like, “Her husband threw acid on her, but somehow, she is the one in jail. These things happen when you are a woman,” or the even simpler, “Nothing good comes of contacting the police”.
In his review for Scroll, Devarsi Ghosh correctly noted the sense of constant activity in the novel. “Things are always happening,” Ghosh wrote, “and the protagonists are rarely still. Not much prose is spent on anyone sitting back and ruminating.” PT Sir finds himself in the throng of a political rally, setting into motion a set of tasks that take him from schools to homes to offices to meetings to courthouses and on to stages, always acting upon something, always making a difference. Jivan, even when under arrest, recollects the flurry of activity and tragedy of her past that resulted in her misfortune, jumping from place to place, incident to incident, igniting the flames that burn up to the present.
The liveliest of these characters is Lovely, who spends her days fully aware of how she is often perceived as a contradiction to society, someone revered, feared, mocked, and ostracised, oscillating between joy and anger and hope and despair, chasing every opportunity presented to her, finding a way out despite the obstacles that are presented to her because of the perceptions of her sexuality. In one scene, after she and her ‘sisters’ bless a newborn baby, Lovely observes the mother:
The mother is looking harassed, and taking the baby inside. We are waiting for the sound of a drawer opening, some cash being counted by mother and father. But what is this, she is going inside the room, where a tap is running and water is falling. From here, over all the sounds of the street, I am hearing one sound clearly: She is washing her hands. She is washing her hands of us.
From her acting class to the local trains, Lovely’s days are filled up with small moments of heart-breaking interactions such as this one; but they rarely slow her down. She washes herself away quickly from any sense of anger or remorse; there is hardly any time for her to sit back and wallow.
Despite the focus of Majumdar’s plot, A Burning is an ambitious novel, attempting to explain much of India’s intertwined social structure through the experiences of these three primary characters. It is an angsty country, where citizens deal with daily headaches of joblessness, income inequality, social hierarchies, flawed judiciary, and the occasional violent threat of terrorism. Characters in the novel are often frustrated. As Jivan states earlier, the country needs someone to punish, and she becomes the sacrificial lamb, set for slaughter to provide temporary respite for the nation’s frustrations.
There is very little room for abstractions or vague grappling in the dark. It makes A Burning an unfiltered, exacting novel, a glimpse of India without any flowery decoration. The prose makes piercing declarations of truth, with statements like, “Her husband threw acid on her, but somehow, she is the one in jail. These things happen when you are a woman,” or the even simpler, “Nothing good comes of contacting the police”.
India can be a complicated place to understand, and Majumdar—in brilliant fashion—ties together so many of India’s complexities in a single, taunt, unputdownable narrative. This is a major reason why A Burning has received near-unanimous positive reviews and been particularly adored abroad; the novel gives the Western audience a peek into the cobwebs of India, attempting to provide an answer to these complexities.
But this hunt for answer is also the reason why the novel often feels a little inauthentic, as if it’s attempting to fulfil a checklist of every Indian problem. Instead of following a natural progression of the story of its characters, A Burning attempts to cram together every contemporary Indian issue, to ensure that all of it is addressed through its plotline. There is the corruption of the rich and the politically-connected, there are comments on patriarchy and sexual violence, there is terrorism, there are gau-rakshaks obsessed with cows who target alleged beef-eating Muslims, there are shady film producers, smooth-talking politicians, police brutality, land-grabbing bureaucrats that target the poor, ‘godmen’ that promise prosperity for a fee, and more. At times, the puzzle of these themes come together in beautiful fashion. At other times, it seems cliched, as if stories from a half dozen other news headlines and narratives have been plucked out together to complete this one.
This intent to translate India—or Indians—for a foreign readership often also leads to characters almost spoon-feeding information through direct exposition, instead of allowing the readers to comprehend or absorb for themselves. An early example of this is of the night Jivan is picked up by the police, when she observes a car speed past her, filled with boys returning from a nightclub, unafraid of the police vehicle. They are from a richer class, unaffected by the ‘system’ that has trapped Jivan. Jivan goes an extra measure to explain the entire power-dynamic, “The doddering police meant nothing to these boys. They did not slow down. They were not afraid… And me, how could I get out of this? Whom did I know?” We see a similar over-explanation when Jivan recalls how she had ‘moved up’ in her social status when she began to learn and teach English, when she went from being an eater of cabbage to an eater of chicken. “But now I was connected to a world beyond this neighbourhood”, she says of herself.
Repeatedly, we are told directly how these characters see themselves in their place in society. But the exposition is often unnecessary. The characters of A Burning are unforgettable, the type that will likely haunt readers for years to come. The story, when allowed to proceed at its own pace, is breath-taking, tightly wound, with little space wasted, pacing towards rewarding climaxes for each of its protagonists. The novel lassoes in the reader and doesn’t let them go. For every action, there seems to be an equal reaction. For every rise, there is a fall. Every decision by Lovely and PT Sir impacts their fate—and the fate of Jivan, too.
There are very few ‘good’ people in Majumdar’s story; but there are rarely any ‘villains’, either. What we are presented with instead are characters with complex arcs, who often come from a place of desperation or frustration, who make incremental choices that piece together the larger jigsaw puzzle. They face the choice between their ascent and Jivan’s descent.
At the eve of her breakout moment, of her path out of her rut, Lovely sums up this zero-sum game: “In this world, only one of us can be truly free. Jivan, or me. Every day, I am making my choice, and I am making it today also.” The tragedy of the story is that there are no easy answers; that fame, money, and liberation always comes at the expense of another. In an unequal Indian society, every gain is a someone else’s loss.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose fiction, translation, and poetry have appeared in Gargoyle, The Literary Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, FirstPost, and more. Karan is currently working on his first novel. Twitter: @karanmadhok1
