“I am the only boy in a world full of women with extremely serious burns. Gas cylinder burns, dowry burns, love failure burns, jilted-lover-pours-kerosene burns. The stuff you read about in the news.” Krupa Ge does not make the oddness of finding a fifteen-year-old boy in the burns ward in the ‘off-season’ (since it is not around Diwali) very explicit. But it indeed appears to be the anomaly it truly is. Such ‘accidents’ are rare, but deliberate violence is not. Burns are indeed gendered. The author’s genius lies in the fact that, despite the title, the book does not revolve around a central character, but an incident. Or rather, the change in the ontology of those who come to experience it in many ways. The centrality of the episode allows Ge to make her multifaceted investigation of this rather atypical occurrence. There is no unfortunate series of events, but just one standalone day in a lifetime. Even when the caregivers, who are the doctors and the nurses, assure the child that he will be able to continue with his life as is, only with a few scars as reminders, and for his lovers an opportunity for metaphors, the reality seems to shift a certain way. The four chapters of the book provide different perspectives on what transpired on the day that Guru, the ‘Burns Boy’, became who he did. This Rashomon of a tale that Krupa Ge weaves, while shedding light on each family member’s memory, seems also to be tied together by a ‘gender’ thread: The boy, destined to be the saviour of the family’s women, as trained by his grandmother, ends up needing to be saved himself. Something moves inside him, and breaks. We do not know if it was self-doubt creeping in, a parent’s harshness, or simply the mask of masculinity making its exit. A life of solitude ensues anyway. The mother, once a government servant, then a cheat, then a mother of two, and then a writer. She is subjected to the male gaze, then to some liberty, then to postpartum depression, and then to whatever life is left in her. She is always struggling to belong and, in that desperation, pushing others away. Solitude follows. The daughter, a former mischievous brat. She tries, too, to find acceptance in her body, in her family, in her mind. She silently takes all the blame for the events that transpired for the rest of her life. Solitude remains despite the solace of finally belonging. The father, an entrepreneur in Iraq, is absent in the narrative as in the lives of his wives and children. Who remembers what happened? No one. But what happened to them, they all do, as if the societal norms burned into their skins. They are branded for life. Burns Boy By Krupa Ge Westland Context pp.130; Rs 499
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