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Summary
Summary
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK! * A "gripping thriller with compassionate social commentary" ( USA Today ) about three unforgettable characters who seek to rise -- to the middle class, to political power, to fame in the movies -- and find their lives entangled in the wake of a catastrophe in contemporary India.
Jivan is a Muslim girl from the slums, determined to move up in life, who is accused of executing a terrorist attack on a train because of a careless comment on Facebook. PT Sir is an opportunistic gym teacher who hitches his aspirations to a right-wing political party and finds that his own ascent becomes linked to Jivan's fall. Lovely -- an irresistible outcast whose exuberant voice and dreams of glory fill the novel with warmth and hope and humor -- has the alibi that can set Jivan free, but it will cost her everything she holds dear.
Taut, symphonic, propulsive, and riveting from its opening lines, A Burning is an electrifying debut.
Author Notes
Megha Majumdar was born and raised in Kolkata, India. She moved to the United States to attend college at Harvard University, followed by graduate school in social anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She works as an editor at Catapult and lives in New York City. A Burning is her first book.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Majumdar's audacious debut, a politically conscious English tutor who works with an aspiring film actor is wrongfully accused of terrorism. After an ill-advised Facebook post criticizing the police's response to a train bombing in Bengal, Jivan, a Muslim, is charged with the attack. Jivan has an alibi; she was on her way to tutor Lovely, whose testimony might be able to save Jivan from execution. A right-wing party luminary, hoping to gain political mileage from the case, bribes one of Jivan's former teachers from grammar school in exchange for his false testimony about Jivan, and his lies in court lead to Jivan being jailed. A large portion of the chapters devoted to Jivan, told in the first person, come in the form of expository monologues to Purnendu, a reporter. Lovely's dialect-heavy passages speak to her difficult life as a hijra (a third gender in India), and her desire to become a star despite being marginalized. Majumdar expertly weaves the book's various points of view and plotlines in ways that are both unexpected and inevitable. This is a memorable, impactful work. (June)
Booklist Review
For the first time in her young life, Jivan has her own cellphone, which she bought with money earned by working as a shopgirl, having left high school after barely passing her tenth-form exams. After witnessing a gruesome train-station attack during her 15-minute walk home to the slums, she continues to follow events on Facebook. And then Jivan does "a foolish thing . . . a dangerous thing, immaturely hoping to multiply her 'likes' by responding to a post: if the police watched them die, . . . doesn't that mean that the government is also a terrorist?" Days later, Jivan has been beaten and jailed, accused of terrorism, effectively condemned without a trial. The two people who could possibly save her--a trans woman to whom Jivan was attempting to teach English, and her former PE teacher, who recognized her athletic prowess--have other priorities: dreams of film stardom for Lovely, a political future for PT Sir. Still holding on to her innocence, Jivan entrusts her story to a hungry journalist. Salvation seems possible, even narrowly so, over and over again, until it's not. Kolkata-born and Harvard- and Johns Hopkins--educated book editor Majumdar presents an electrifying debut that serves as a barometer measuring the seeming triviality of human life and the fragility of human connections.
Guardian Review
Megha Majumdar's excellent debut novel begins with a pile-on, the kind of digital public shaming Jon Ronson has written about. A young Muslim woman named Jivan reads on her phone about a terrorist attack at a railway station near the slum in Kolkata where she lives. More than a hundred people were killed in the blaze. She posts a question - simple, pointed, instinctive: "If the police didn't help ordinary people like you and me, if the police watched them die, doesn't that mean the government is also a terrorist?" Her question spreads across social media like forest fire. Monstrous accusations are hurled at her. She is alleged to have been spotted at the station carrying a bulky package and, worse, chatting online with someone the local police declare is a known terrorist recruiter. Charged with the heinous crime, she's sent to jail to await trial. A Burning isn't just about Jivan. Her fate lies in the hands of two people who might be able to vouch for her character. One of them is Lovely, a young hijra (a long-established class of intersex and transgender people in India) to whom she has been giving English lessons. The other is a PE teacher, known as PT Sir, who sometimes fed her when she was one of his pupils. Both are set on changing their lives - Lovely is taking acting lessons to become a movie star; PT Sir, earnest and efficient, is courted by a political party that wants to be known for its law and order credentials. The novel is both a crime thriller in which Jivan battles to avoid execution, and a moral drama: will her old acquaintances risk their burgeoning careers to speak up for a vilified Muslim woman? The world all three of them want to leave behind is corrupt and choking. In the good old days, which were slightly less rotten than the present, Jivan's mother eked out a living by shovelling lumps of coal from a pit. Then a company bought the land and bulldozed the homes of protesting residents. They were resettled in government housing that had damp walls and open gutters. PT Sir knows that bribes and backhanders are the order of the day at many schools, where teachers complete their students' exams for a few rupees and administrators pocket funds assigned for pupils' meals. Lovely saw one of her friends die after undergoing gender reassignment surgery without anaesthetic at a dodgy dental clinic. Lovely, a self-declared "half-half" who narrates her adventures in the first person, lives up to her name. She has never recovered from her lover, a businessman who sells "Tony Hilfiger" wristwatches, rejecting her in favour of a family-pleasing marriage. Slum dwellers laugh at her; but she exudes sass and social defiance. As for PT Sir, he could be a VS Naipaul invention - the middling apparatchik who is given one opportunity after another to climb the political ladder and sell his soul. He is at once strong and weak, self-knowing and blinkered. Little escapes Majumdar's roving eye for detail. Jivan takes her sick father to see a doctor who treats the pair of them with condescension; in his penholder, "a pen printed with the name of a pharmaceutical company shined". The holy water into which Lovely dips flowers before blessing babies comes straight from a municipal pump. Every monsoon season, local schools get flooded, the rainwater drives cockroaches to the surface, and alarmed girls in "uniform and Hawaii slippers" stomp them dead. These small, apparently trivial details are noted with anthropological dispassion. In their different ways, all Majumdar's characters are drawn to gadgets and appliances that can help them transcend their surroundings. Their shiny phones offer textures of another life, one that's modern and urban, at once connected and individualistic, zingy and fast paced rather than traditional. Is this other realm just a fantasy? When Lovely visits a new mall on the site of a former sewing machine factory, she's aroused by the air conditioning and the smell of leather bags. Before she can enter, a security guard blocks the path and demands an entrance fee he doesn't solicit from affluent women shoppers. "Do I make the rules?" he protests when challenged. The more Kolkata changes, the more it stays the same. Rumours spread like viruses. Anti-Muslim hatred can be whipped up from nowhere. Villagers are tantalised by - and weaponised with - chimeric promises of reform. Caught in the middle is a young woman who dreams of being "not even rich, just middle class". As a schoolgirl, Jivan once walked by a butcher and saw herself amid the skinned goats hanging from hooks - a vision, fleeting but potent, of existence stripped bare, and of how near to violence she and hundreds of millions of other Indians are forced to live their lives. Immaculately constructed, acidly observed and gripping from start to finish, A Burning is a brilliant debut.
Kirkus Review
A polyphonic novel that sharply observes class and religious divisions in India. Shaken by a terrorist attack that sets train cars ablaze and kills more than a hundred people, Jivan, a young Muslim woman living in the nearby Kolabagan slum, posts a careless comment lambasting the government on Facebook and is thrown in jail as a suspect for the attack. As her case becomes national news and the public is increasingly convinced of her guilt, Jivan works to prove her innocence by arranging clandestine conversations with a reporter. "Believe me when I say you must understand my childhood to know who I am, and why this is happening to me," she tells him. It was a youth marked by poverty, humiliation, and violence, often at the hands of local officials: Policemen wielding bamboo rods demolished her family's hut in a rural village, leaving her father with a debilitating injury, and the family was tricked into purchasing a plot in a dangerous slum. Meanwhile, as Jivan's trial nears, two of her acquaintances become witnesses: Lovely, a neighbor who learned English from Jivan, takes acting classes and dreams of becoming a film star while PT Sir, the physical training teacher at Jivan's old school, gets involved with the populist Jana Kalyan Party and performs a series of increasingly morally questionable acts to curry favor with its leader. Debut author Majumdar has a gift for capturing the frustrating arbitrariness of local government and conjures up scenes in just a few well-chosen images, like this lunch: "PT Sir looks at her, and her plate, where she has made a pile of fish bones, curved like miniature swords." Lovely, a hijra--a trans woman who lives in a religious community with others like her--is, voicewise, a particular gem. "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." But Jivan's storyline feels a bit thin, seemingly purpose-built to make a point about the very real injustices of being poor and a member of a hated religious minority. The novel's brilliant individual vignettes far outshine a rather flimsy overarching plot. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
DEBUT And what has burned? A train, torched in the Kolabagan railway station with more than 100 left dead. Jivan, a determined young Muslim woman from the slums, witnessed the attack and has taken righteously to social media, even posting a video clip she's found insinuating that the police did nothing. When she gets pushback, she says, "I wrote a foolish thing. I wrote a dangerous thing, a thing nobody like me should ever think, let alone write," suggesting that perhaps the government is also a terrorist. Soon she is hauled off to jail, accused of consorting with the terrorists and of committing crimes against the nation, her remarks exploited by a nationalist gym teacher who once had her as a student. Even neighbor Lovely, to whom she was teaching English and who as a hijra might understand unwarranted attacks, pulls back from supporting Jivan owing to her big movie-star ambitions. Weaving together these story lines, the author offers fresh, brisk, striking language while remaining relentless in her depiction of Jivan's fate and of the kind of rampant suspicion and finally hatred that burns us all. [See Prepub Alert, 12/9/19.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
Excerpts
Excerpts
JIVAN "You smell like smoke," my mother said to me. So I rubbed an oval of soap in my hair and poured a whole bucket of water on myself before a neighbor complained that I was wasting the morning supply. There was a curfew that day. On the main street, a police jeep would creep by every half hour. Daily-wage laborers, compelled to work, would come home with arms raised to show they had no weapons. In bed, my wet hair spread on the pillow, I picked up my new phone--purchased with my own salary, screen guard still attached. On Facebook, there was only one conversation. These terrorists attacked the wrong neighborhood #KolabaganTrainAttack #Undefeated Friends, if you have fifty rupees, skip your samosas today and donate to-- The more I scrolled, the more Facebook unrolled. This news clip exclusively from 24 Hours shows how-- Candlelight vigil at-- The night before, I had been at the railway station, no more than a fifteen-minute walk from my house. I ought to have seen the men who stole up to the open windows and threw flaming torches into the halted train. But all I saw were carriages, burning, their doors locked from the outside and dangerously hot. The fire spread to huts bordering the station, smoke filling the chests of those who lived there. More than a hundred people died. The government promised compensation to the families of the dead--eighty thousand rupees!--which, well, the government promises many things. In a video, to the dozen microphones thrust at his chin, the chief minister was saying, "Let the authorities investigate." Somebody had spliced this comment with a video of policemen scratching their heads. It made me laugh. 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. Then, in a video clip further down the page, a woman came forward, her hair flying, her nose running a wet trail down to her lips, her eyes red. She was standing on the sloping platform of our small railway station. Into the microphone she screamed: "There was a jeep full of policemen right there. Ask them why they stood around and watched while my husband burned. He tried to open the door and save my daughter. He tried and tried." I shared that video. I added a caption. Policemen paid by the government watched and did nothing while this innocent woman lost everything, I wrote. I laid the phone next to my head, and dozed. The heat brought sleep to my eyes. When I checked my phone next, there were only two likes. A half hour later, still two likes. Then a woman, I don't know who, commented on my post, How do you know this person is not faking it? Maybe she wants attention! I sat up. Was I friends with this person? In her profile picture she was posing in a bathroom. Did you even watch the video? I replied. The words of the heartless woman drifted in my mind. I was irritated by her, but there was excitement too. This was not the frustration of no water in the municipal pump or power cut on the hottest night. Wasn't this a kind of leisure dressed up as agitation? For me, the day was a holiday, after all. My mother was cooking fish so small we would eat them bones and tail. My father was taking in the sun, his back pain eased. Under my thumb, I watched post after post about the train attack earn fifty likes, a hundred likes, three hundred likes. Nobody liked my reply. And then, in the small, glowing screen, I wrote a foolish thing. I wrote a dangerous thing, a thing nobody like me should ever think, let alone write. Forgive me, Ma. If the police didn't help ordinary people like you and me, if the police watched them die, doesn't that mean, I wrote on Facebook, that the government is also a terrorist? Outside the door, a man slowly pedaled his rickshaw, the only passenger his child, the horn going paw paw for her glee. Excerpted from A Burning: A Novel by Megha Majumdar All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
