A BURNING
By Megha Majumdar

In the opening paragraphs of “A Burning,” Megha Majumdar’s fierce and assured debut novel, a train briefly halts in a station, and flaming torches are thrown in through the windows — which are large enough to admit the torches but too small to allow the passengers to escape. Scores burn to death. Who committed this horrific mass murder? Our almost-witness, Jivan, doesn’t know. Though she lives in the slum that borders the station, and happened to be in the station that night, “all I saw,” she narrates, “were carriages, burning, their doors locked from the outside and dangerously hot.”

The next day, scrolling through Facebook, Jivan finds a video of a grief-maddened woman whose husband and daughter have perished, and shares it, adding an admonitory caption: Policemen paid by the government watched and did nothing while this innocent woman lost everything. But the caption gets only two likes. Disappointed, Jivan tries again: 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? This time, she gets some attention: The same police she accused of inaction drag her out of her bed in her nightgown and throw her in jail, now the sole suspect in the terror attack on the train.

Though the city’s name never appears in the novel, “A Burning” is set in present-day Kolkata; the reader inclined to sleuth can deduce location from the presence of the Victoria Memorial, built of white marble, as well as an upscale neighborhood called Ballygunge, and time period not merely from the prominent role played by Facebook, but equally from the presence of the up-and-coming “Jana Kalyan” political party, a clear allusion to the Indian actor-politician Pawan Kalyan’s Jana Sena Party, founded in 2014. Backgrounding these particular time-space coordinates is all the tinderbox complexity of contemporary Indian life, from anti-Muslim violence to staggering income inequality, from the outsize power exercised by celebrities to the outsize tolls exacted on women simply on the grounds of their not being men.

[ “A Burning” was one of our most anticipated titles of June. See the full list. ]

But Majumdar is so far from exoticizing her setting as to be almost too economical, leaving the reader to snatch at clues where she can as to political, social and cultural context. From the moment of Jivan’s arrest, “A Burning” hurtles along like the unfortunate train finally freed from the station, smoke and flame still pouring from its windows, but its final destination, the terminus of inflexible steel tracks, feeling somewhat ordained.

Jivan, luckless victim of circumstance and gimlet-eyed observer of police and government corruption, never quite comes into focus as a character in her own right, separate from the story’s requirement that she fulfill her dismal prophecies. But happily for the reader, Jivan shares the novel with two other central characters whose stories electrify with their unpredictable turns: Lovely, a hijra, or trans woman, dedicated to making it as an actor; and PT Sir, a man whose title at the girls’ school where he teaches physical education has so completely subsumed his identity that even after his humdrum existence is starkly transformed by a chance encounter with a ruthless politician, we never know him by another name.

Lovely and PT Sir both have glancing ties to Jivan: PT Sir was formerly Jivan’s gym teacher, and in turn Jivan was formerly Lovely’s English teacher. But rather than increasingly entangle, these slight ties among the three loosen and dissolve as the story proceeds; their fates are not convincingly entwined. What the characters do share, not only with one another but with the novel as a whole, is a quality of embodied and astonishing momentum, of exponential change triggered mostly by chance. It’s a sensation particularly apt to our present global moment, when we’ve already run out of ways to articulate a worldwide convulsion still in progress. Though pandemic is not one of the many contemporary horrors Majumdar unsparingly weaves into the tapestry of everyday life in “A Burning,” this is a novel of our pandemic times, an exploration of precarity in all its forms. For Jivan, all momentum is downward; her ill-considered Facebook post undoes at a stroke years spent clawing her way out of poverty. As if to demonstrate the limits of such clawing, the state throws Jivan first into prison and then, that apparently not being enough, into solitary confinement in a dungeon beneath the prison floor.

For Lovely and PT Sir, by dizzying contrast, momentum is upward: An impulse to post videos of herself to WhatsApp — no more considered than Jivan’s post to Facebook — brings Lovely not doom but fame, while PT Sir’s moth-to-flame infatuation with the politician reaps him unexpected rewards. Necessary to the accomplishment of all three breakneck transformations is the total absence of justice, and the equally towering presence of insecurity of every kind: physical, material, spiritual. Such insecurity, while the ruination of those like Jivan, is the dubious salvation of those like PT Sir and Lovely, for it allows them to shuck off their morals and their scruples with minimal regret. How else will they survive?

Majumdar excels at depicting the workings of power on the powerless; for her characters, power is no abstract concept but a visceral assault on the body and its senses. For Jivan, power is the eviction by the police of her entire village to make way for a coal-mining interest: First crushed is Jivan’s father’s rickshaw, by which he supports the family; then the meager home, ripped wall from wall from roof; and finally Jivan’s father himself, as his back is broken but his life is not extinguished, fating him to an existence of unendurable pain.

For Lovely, power is the back-alley dentist who “operates” on Lovely’s hijra sister Ragini without qualification, a modicum of hygiene or any anesthetic: “I was asking the doctor, ‘Why don’t you give her a little bit of anesthetic, sir, or some numbing medicine?’ At that he was getting irritated. ‘You are doing the operation, or me?’” Ragini interrupts to beg Lovely not to antagonize the doctor; soon, Ragini is dead.

For PT Sir, power is the seduction to which he succumbs the first time he stumbles into a political rally held by his future employer, Bimala Pal. His idle curiosity, at hearing that a movie star is speaking onstage, is almost immediately alchemized: “On all the men’s foreheads, even the phuchka walla’s, PT Sir sees a smear of red paste, an index of worship — of god, of country. The men, marked by the divine, wear pants whose bottoms roll under their feet, and hop up now and then to see what is happening. The stage is far away. ‘Brother,’ he says to a young man. He surprises himself with his friendly tone. ‘Brother, is it really Katie Banerjee up there?’ The young man looks at him, hands PT Sir a small party flag from a grocery store bag full of them and calls a third man. ‘Over here, come here!’ he yells. Soon that man rushes over, holding a dish of red paste. He dips his thumb in the paste and marks PT Sir’s forehead, drawing a red smear from brow to hairline. All PT Sir can do is accept, a child being blessed by an elder.”

While the bondage of the subject to power is meticulously portrayed, the bonds between individual characters can feel less developed; for a story so packed with cause and effect, there is little of the emotional variety. Jivan stakes her hopes on a brotherly journalist who elicits her life story from her; when he thoroughly sells her out, packaging her story as a terrorist’s confession and effectively sealing her destiny, her response is muted, and the journalist disappears from the story. Bimala Pal elicits bald criminality from PT Sir; Lovely’s venerated acting teacher jerks her around. Yet moments of reckoning, of the exacting of emotional tolls, don’t come. The primary relationship, for each character, is with fate — but fate has rarely been so many-faced, so muscular, so mercurial, or so mesmerizing as it is in “A Burning.”