The job of fiction should be twofold: first, it should entertain and secondly, it should allow readers a glimpse into another’s life—to perchance walk the hallways of another’s mind. A great piece of fiction always accomplishes these and leaves you with a reading experience that stays with you long after the last page has turned. That is precisely what Megha Majumdar has done in her debut novel, A Burning.
Set in modern times, in a globalised age when smartphones are the order of the day, A Burning tells the story of three characters as their lives unravel after a train is set afire in the slums of Kolkata in the dead of night. Hundreds die and our main character Jivan who has witnessed this, writes a post the next day criticising the government on Facebook. She is detained, her past pored over, and she is sent to jail. The rest of the novel traces what happens after Jivan’s imprisonment, how the people around her rally behind her cause.
The book moves breathlessly, each chapter weaving in and out of the minds of each of its characters, who are well sketched and nuanced. Jivan is a young woman who comes of a poor family; with her father disabled, she works at a departmental store to support her family. The other two characters are Lovely and PT Sir.
Lovely is a transgender woman who dreams of one day being a famous actress and who Jivan tutored in English in the slum where they both once lived. PT Sir is Jivan’s former athletics teacher. The story follows these three characters as their lives change after the incident of the fire takes place. Majumdar does a wonderful job of breathing life into these characters, each having hopes and dreams, fears and disappointments that are not only incredibly relatable but also offer fresh new perspectives into the lives of people far removed from the privileged classes. Consider, for example, the struggles of Lovely as a member of the transgender minority in India. Generally speaking, in South Asia transgender people are rarely acknowledged in any form of media and even in the course of daily life are typically shunned and ridiculed.
The book sets itself apart with its tone and atypical storytelling. This is not a fantasy to transport you to another world, or a feel-good book to make you happy. It is a grim look into modern life in India, into the lives of the have-nots and how the lack of power can change lives in an instant. It is a micro examination of the worrying trends in our own world—rise of the extreme right, particularly in India and generally in South Asia, how draconian cyber security laws can be used to put the innocent in jail, how a crisis is manipulated by opportunists to seize power, and also, how ordinary people can get caught up in the swell of the hive-mind.
What will remain with me for the longest time is the tone of the book—starkly final, impassive and without any fluff. There are times when it reads almost like fact instead of fiction. There is one particular scene in which a Muslim man, along with his family, is murdered in a frenzy—it reads almost as though it were lifted out of a newspaper.
In the end, A Burning lifts a mirror to the warped visage of society and shows us our dark, smouldering reflection.
Zubier Abdullah is a fiction writer and software developer. He is currently working on his first book.
Title: A Burning
Author : Megha Majumdar
Publisher : Knopf
Price: $25.95
ISBN : 978-0-525-65869-6
