The monk who threw a bomb

Jiabi wrapped an old newspaper on her hand, tied it with a rope and was picking the broken pieces of shattered glasses lying all over the tiny Chinese restaurant floor, her grandmother owned. While her other hand stretched and adjusted her skirt to its full length. She had grown too much over the last few years to fit in that old and pale dress. This restaurant being one among the few serving ‘ethnic’ Chinese food to Kolkatans  was always chock a block with customers at this morning hour. But today it remained empty.

Jiabi’s grandmother, without putting on the silken red dress, which Jiabi hoped to inherit when she would be a big girl, the only sign of prosperity that they could hold on after migrating here and which covered her crumbled skin and portrayed her ‘ethnic’ Chinese origins when she sat on the cash counter on usual business days, was weeping intermittently and between her sobbing and the gush of despair that she exhaled she kept on saying “how strange is human nature! How can both good and evil reside in the same body”? She had seen with her own eyes a Buddhist Monk throw a burning bottle of inflammable petrol at her restaurant at the break of dawn.

Though Jiabi lived in such a populous city, the ebb and flow of Kolkata life could not penetrate the loneliness of this 13 year old girl caused by the murder of her parents by the Communist Revolution of the Red Army when she was 6 years old. While her cousins fled to Hong Kong, her Grandmother and another family member managed to come to Kolkata.

Hamado’s mind raced back to the events of his burning down a Chinese restaurant, while lying on the train sleeper on his way back to Dharmasala. Although hatred for other human being is a grave sin for a Buddhist monk, he could never completely give up on it, ever since his mother thousand other Tibetan was killed in the violence of the red Army under Mao Zeadong.