A Burning

March 15, 2020
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.

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April 6, 2020
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.

Starred review from May 1, 2020

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

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 15, 2020
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)