Adding fuel to burning fire
A Burning
Megha Majumdar
Knopf
Megha Majumdar’s debut novel, A Burning, is aptly named. This story rages along, bright and scalding, illuminating three intertwined lives in contemporary India. Majumdar, who was raised in West Bengal before attending Harvard University and moving to New York, captures the scope of a tumultuous society by attending to the hopes and fears of people living on the margins. The effect is transporting, often thrilling, finally harrowing. It’s no wonder this novel was chosen for the Today show’s book club and leaped immediately onto the bestseller list.
The story opens with horrific news: Terrorists have firebombed a train, trapping more than 100 people inside the cars as they burned. Facebook lights up with calls for justice, requests for donations and complaints about the ineffective police. Scrolling through these posts, a young sales clerk named Jivan jumps in with her own casual outrage. But when her message earns no “likes,” she comes up with something more provocative: “If the police watched them die, doesn’t that mean,” she writes, “that the government is also a terrorist?”
With that one impulsive moment, Majumdar conveys the perils of social media. Jivan has fallen for the illusion of freedom that Facebook creates. Only later does Jivan realize, “I wrote a dangerous thing, a thing nobody like me should ever think, let alone write.”
Sure enough, a few nights later, police pound on her door and throw her into the back of a van. With a narrative style that feels like a cascade, Majumdar reveals that Jivan has been beaten into signing a confession and then arraigned for firebombing the train. Even as she professes her innocence, journalists begin spinning the pedestrian details of her life into a narrative of plotting against the state.
Interspersed between scenes of that nightmare are the stories of two other tangentially related characters, equally well drawn and compelling. Lovely is a hijra — part of an intersex community in South Asia that is both revered and reviled. As it happens, Lovely’s English tutor is Jivan. But Lovely knows Jivan didn’t bomb the train: Those weren’t explosives she was carrying; they were books for her. Although she’s eager to testify in her tutor’s defence, circumstances will challenge Lovely’s virtue.
The fragility of moral courage is central to the third story of this novel. A man known as PT Sir is a teacher at Jivan’s old school. He’s not inherently evil, just desperate for the trappings of prestige. That hunger makes him a handy tool for a local politician who needs a servant willing to lie when necessary. And so, PT Sir slides into a morass of political corruption — all for the greater good, of course.
Majumdar’s outrage is matched only by her sympathy for ordinary people so deft in the practice of self-justification. The short, intense chapters of A Burning present a society riven with abuses of power but still devoted to the appearance of propriety. It’s a damning critique of a culture that generates constant upheaval but no systemic change.