About a third of the way through Megha Majumdar's lean, propulsive novel A Burning, published in early 2020, the protagonist tells a reporter who has come to visit her in jail: "You must understand my childhood to know who I am, and why this is happening to me." A young woman living in a Kolkata slum, Jivan is awaiting trial after being arrested on charges of "crimes against the nation" for an attack on a train that killed 112 people. She is, however, innocent. A risky post on Facebook, along with an unfortunate set of coincidences, has allowed the state to link her to the attack as an accomplice of shadowy terrorists who have already fled "across the border".
Over the course of several interviews with the reporter, Jivan recounts a life defined by poverty and helplessness. The story begins with her childhood in a mining town, from which her family is unceremoniously evicted to allow for new mines. During the demolition of their home, her father is assaulted by the police and seriously injured. The family's move to the city is accompanied by further misfortunes until Jivan is compelled to drop out of school and take up a job to support her family; as a sales clerk at a retail store, she is finally able to imagine a path out of destitution. But the charges that have been brought against her, Jivan seems to be implying, are in keeping with her past misery.
Jivan is perceived very differently by the world outside, where a political party flying "the saffron flags of ardent nationalism", the Jana Kalyan Party, is gaining ascendance. We soon discover that Jivan is Muslim, and from the outset is labelled a terrorist, her guilt in the attack taken for granted. One TV news programme asks why she bears "so much hatred in her heart for her own country". Jivan's hopes of communicating her innocence to the public vanish when the reporter's article is finally published under the words "A terrorist tells her life story". In it, an anecdote about lobbing "bombs" of shit and urine at her evictors is transmuted into a story about actual bombs and woven into a narrative of her apparent disloyalty to the state.
Jivan's fate, however, will ultimately rest on the testimony of a limited cast of characters. One is PT Sir, Jivan's former teacher who held a soft spot for her as an athletically gifted "charity student" at an elite girls' school. Another is Lovely, a hijra to whom she used to teach English and who aspires to make it as an actress. But as Jivan's case amasses notoriety, their lives are transformed. Soon after learning about Jivan's apparent treachery, PT Sir becomes entangled with the Jana Kalyan Party and rises through party ranks, aided by his connection to "the terrorist". Lovely, searching in vain for a break into the film industry, is suddenly catapulted into the public eye. Much of the novel's drama turns on whether these characters, in the changing circumstances of their lives and their country, will testify to Jivan's innocence.