AFAReads discussion

Dear reader,

This month’s AFAReads book club selection may be titled A Burning (Knopf, 2020), but it’s also a novel about dreams, and what we’re willing to sacrifice—to burn—in order to reach them.

Through alternating chapters, author Megha Majumdar introduces us to three Kolkata, India–based characters whose lives are loosely intertwined—and become even more bound after a terrorist attack on a train leaves more than a hundred people dead. Jivan, a young Muslim woman who lives in the Kolabagan slum with her ailing father and frail mother, is arrested for the bombing, forced to sign a confession, and jailed. As the novel progresses, we meet Lovely, a hijra (a term for India’s third gender), who studied English with Jivan, as well as PT Sir, Jivan’s former P.E. teacher.

Each of the three characters makes a choice, the effects of which ripple through the novel. Jivan falls prey to the false anonymity of social media (“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.”) Lovely, an aspiring actress, pays for a dubious demo video (“I am looking at the lens and knowing . . . someday I am reaching a thousand people, a million people. So what if there is only one grumpy man here.”) The status-hungry PT Sir attends a rally for the growing Jana Kalyan political party (“PT Sir watches them, those common people who will always be on the outside.”)

These choices lead either to their downfall or the guilt they must carry going forward. (Jivan, of course, suffers the worst.) There’s an urgency to A Burning that makes it a quick read—it’s hard to step away from the drama of Jivan’s plight, the precariousness of Lovely’s dream, the dubious honor of PT’s quick rise within the Jana Kalyan party.

Looking beyond the narrative, A Burning puts a human face (or faces) on India’s hierarchical caste system, the poverty many endure, and issues of gender inequality and religious persecution. In Majumdar’s hands, Jivan’s Muslim identity is one of the main reasons she’s blamed for the terrorist attack, reflecting the reality that Indian Muslims have grown increasingly marginalized in recent years. Lovely’s life is rife with hardship (she frequently begs for money to get by) and danger—and according to the Civilian Welfare Association, many hijra and transgender people in India face intense discrimination and economic uncertainty. (They’re also are among those who have suffered the most during the pandemic, reports the Telegraph.)

Author Majumdar, who was born and raised in Kolkata and moved to the United States at 19 to attend Harvard, wanted to explore the way in which “the state’s systems of oppression bear down upon marginalized groups,” she said in an interview with NPR. But she also wanted to craft characters who “dream and make jokes and strive even in conditions of great oppression.”

We’ll talk about both—using fiction to critique systems of oppression as well as humanize the people who endure them—during our informal discussion of the novel on February 4, from 4 p.m. PST/7 p.m. ET to 5 p.m. PST/8 p.m. ET. Interested in joining? Register via Zoom—and until then, happy reading.

Aislyn Greene
Senior editor