The next Saturday, dawning. Shyamanand, Burfi and Jamun in their charpais on the roof, comatosely witnessing the sky slide through her tints. Jolted by the bellow of dogs from the Sikhs’ house, whose border wall (snips of glass sitting on its ridge like a crew cut) has elbowed forward to gulp the roadshoulder into the house lawn. In the spectral light of every daybreak and dusk, the dogs yawp evenpacedly. Shyamanand has distended and jolted the imaginations of his sons with, ‘It is possible, isn’t it, that those Sikhs have no hounds at all? For the dogs that can hustle them up the ladder would be too costly. Far cheaper to arrange for tape recordings of the baying of mongrels, some hellish streetfighters. Our Surds play back the tapes to deflect the unwanted – neighbours poorer than they, schoolchildren hawking lottery tickets. Plus, for ultra effect, they rerun the cassette at those moments of the day when the world seems at anchor. Now, shut your eyes and focus on that barking. Well? And none of us has ever spotted one of those Surds with a dog, have we? Yes?’
Thereafter, at a thousand and one unannounced moments in his life, the neck-and-neck baying of dogs dredges up for Burfi the halcyon-day-image of roguish male Sikhs, with hair stumbling loose like an avalanche to the shoulders – perhaps a crystal holiday morning, and the males have earlier fumigated their scalps abreast of blue buckets in the garden – now crouching over an upmarket stereo system (whose speakers skulk in the prodigal moneyplant that fawns on the wise pipal by the gate), index fingers taut above the buttons Rewind and Play, about to unmuzzle the whelp snarls at Burfi vacillating at the gate, wiggling in his hand the raffle tickets pressganged on him by the Jeremiah who bullied him four years before she baited Jamun.
‘Poor vision can be inherited, like diabetes and the assorted lunacies, from our parentage. The eyes of somebody or the other in your mother’s family or mine might have been sickly. This is not good. In manhood, some spheres will not be for you – Air Force, certain engineering careers. Let’s see how you handle today’s eye test. Yet I can’t think of a sole example of excessive myopia in either family.’
So the King George’s Hospital at eleven. A Raj structure; with time, the verandahs have been blinkered with humpbacked plywood for more space. Public Works has slapped on the exterior a rust-red that scuffs off on the domes and shoulderblades of the drones against the walls. Like the average mortal, Jamun resents hospitals – the squeeze, the infestation, the torpor on hardwood benches, the trepidation at the malodour of purulence.
They have determined to reach by nine. For both Urmila and Jamun, the greatly loathesome excursion is a little uplifted by the fellowship of the other. They cadge with and scramble into an auto-rickshaw because both quail at buses. Urmila is also somewhat uncertain about her adroitness to prance on to a bus. ‘The conductor waits till my one foot remains on the road, then the bus reels away: The steps are very skiddy and high. My legs are columns of mucus,’ she inventories proudly as she gathers her sari about her and shortsightedly examines the floor of the rickshaw for crud. Jamun corkscrews and, through the oval hole in the rexine behind his head, waves to his father. Time after time, Shyamanand scans from the verandah when one of the family sets out of the house.
At the hospital, Urmila trudges crabbedly, drearily, clutching tongslike Jamun’s wristbones for reinforcement. Underneath her sari, her legs will be wan and spongy, with veins varicose like a bluish subcutaneous skein. One foot forward; next, the rear foot inches abreast as though she is always fording chancy stepping-stones, and wishes not to wet her feet at all. When she walks, she scrutinizes the ground with the vigilance of a child sleuth with a magnifying glass dogging Professor Moriarty. ‘Corns and arthritis, but when I was a schoolgirl, I was the wind!’ After every few steps, she halts, reconnoitres her surroundings, wheezes and clacks, ‘Your father was surveying us, wasn’t he? To check that I don’t mess things up? That we cross the road safely, that I pick an honest auto wala? How shabby he is. Why doesn’t he escort you himself? When you grow up, you’ll realize – he’s unforgivably idle and self-absorbed. No, much cushier not to help in any way, instead to inconvenience and belittle till your wife wants to die, yet not permit her enough time to die.’
Urmila manifests not acrimony, but a kind of blithe untrammelling, a garrulous sunniness to an on-off listener. At the OPD, she unlatches her bag for her spectacles. Jamun gazes at small change, derelict oneand two-rupee notes, two or three rectangles of folded paper – recondite, with smudgy creases – the Lakme face powder compact with its fractured rose-plastic top on which Jamun has gummed a sticker of Batman, one flesh-pink, two-inch disc of the edible clay to which she is addicted (the sons have fitfully nibbled at some – paradisal!), two ponderous swarms of keys, the travel soap that couches in the lining solely to transude its balm, her scarlet Parker fountain pen with which Jamun secretly tests his calligraphies, a scalloped kerchief sulphur-yellow with desuetude, the carmine lipstick that like all other shades of red looms discrepantly against her etiolated skin (the same shade that Jamun, in his fantasies, tarts up on his bum-pulsing schoolmarms in their sunglasses and nylon stretchpants, sleeveless caftans, highnoon boobs, pruned armpits and hairdos the size of a bucket), (Urmila illumes with her lipstick only on signal events – when her kin overrides and tows her to the cinema for The Sound of Music, or on a Sunday afternoon with the grandsons on the beach – perhaps once every three years, maybe twice), a talisman of rudraksha beads, and The Good Earth by Pearl Buck – the job-lot of her portable world.
Eye tests at the KGH are scrupulous. They are also gratis if one vouches that one’s family earnings are preposterously humble. Everyone fibs with felicity on the blanched old-ivory forms. Timeless laps in convoluted queues – Jamun quails whenever Urmila diffidently tries to pioneer new Ladies Only queues – toadying to unshaven bespectacled clerks, exploring the hospital for a loo that will not enrich Urmila with some ghoulish chancroid fester. The woman ophthalmologist is laidback, rotund, with a bobbed beehive hairdo, bull lips that will not bestride her teeth, and a tumid face that for the burgeoning Jamun resembles the nob of a sprouted phallus. He can’t read the final three rows of the illuminated box chart. He sidles up to it while Urmila natters to the doctor and tries to mug up the lines. The penultimate line is peculiarly naughty – COQCGO. To his vision, the letters look like a file of minute black quoits.
The doctor dashes off a prescription. Urmila condoles with Jamun, and airs a brief mortification. ‘Spectacles don’t count. Brainy persons put on spectacles. Perhaps you read again and again in minimal light, and earned your poor vision. Henceforth you’ll always be propping up eyeglasses, deadweight on the bridge of your nose.’
The basement shop within the hospital compound offers spectacles at some concession, or so their billboard announces. Urmila and Jamun are jittery and morose, as seconds before one’s set piece at an elocution contest. He ventures on a gold frame and inspects the bespectacled twin unknowns in the open-book looking-glass. The gold frames are overly costly. ‘You look so elderly,’ grimaces Urmila dispiritedly, and commends without fervour a biscuity Clark Kent pair. Neither bestirs him/herself immoderately over the choosing, and Jamun in addition feels both abasement and an undefined complicity. He returns for his spectacles six days hence. They aren’t done. He, with deliverance vibrant on his skin, does not go back for the tryout until a fortnight after, when the assiduous Jeremiah hustles his recall with a rally of stunning haymakers.
Thus for Jamun, a miraculous virginal world careens into focus at three on one ordinary, false-monsoon afternoon. Each atom of the stuff of existence around him is transmuted, steeled and fissioned, is a deflector of a crystalline light. He feels wobbly, The ground appears to lunge towards him. Demeanours and vegetation, stray dogs and the waterfall-blotches of a million micturitions against compound walls, crows floating like black hang-gliders on a candyfloss sky – all contours have diamond lines, and the light is cusped like broken glass. Each leaf is an entity, and all creation looks scrubbed and lacquered with dew. Yet Jamun pluc
ks off his glasses. For he feels etched upon, spotlit, as acutely edged as what he beholds; he is marred for life, he thinks, and for a flicker mulls over which parent is to be arraigned.
In a few days, he starts slipping his spectacles off whenever he is distressed, glum or enervated, is with persons whom he thinks are goodlooking, or aspires to dazzle, or whose traits he wishes to commandeer. In such contexts, his bedimmed sight rallies after a fashion his spirit; with the years his vision slumps in leaps and bounds.
‘Going home?’ The woman, sixty-five-ish, on Jamun’s left in the plane, percolates through his pesky half-snooze. She has earlier softened him into ceding to her his window seat (‘I’ve a soft spot for the sunrise’) and has powdered her mug all through takeoff. ‘So drearily lower-middle-class, Ma, to powder your face – oof, makes me unwell,’ so Burfi has chorused for years on end, actuating his mother not a bit. For Jamun, powdering the face and neck is a deed not of womanhood, but of motherhood, executed (in the seconds pinched from the treadmill) to camouflage the chinks in a doleful housewife face. The ritzy perfumes from Dubai and Singapore that Joyce gifts Urmila in succeeding years are all pickled in her black trunk, and enjoyed on incomparably momentous jubilations – Burfi’s civil marriage, for example, for which Urmila swaddles herself in Benares silk and where she grieves only because she feels that she has to provide her spouse companionship.
Yet Kasturi powders her face too. ‘Much cheaper and much less hanguppy,’ she retorts to a sardonically diverted, knottedly concupiscent Jamun contemplating her floundering with a sari in the darkish light, some seven months ago. In the lookingglass, she dabs and smothers with the puff. In that second, that she is older than him cannons into his skull anew.
‘But I’ve all along bracketed it with mothers, Boss. When women who haven’t hatched use face powder, can’t one deduce that they tacitly yearn to bear kids?’
In response, Kasturi inexpertly lights a Wills and exhales a haze of smoke at him.
‘Yes, I’m on my way home.’ The window-seat-hijacker is grey and patrician. She is Mrs Shireen Raizada, she gabbles. She is petrified of aeroplanes, and to outpace her cold feet jabbers the hind leg off a donkey. ‘My youngest has flunked three times in the Ninth Standard and once again in the Tenth now. How much more will his father have to satisfy the school with to hold him in there? Truly, living is null – like mud – when one’s children are one’s misfortune. Everything feels ill-spent – dust. But one twitches on. Good blood is the real fortune. I don’t suppose he’s dense, but what tension in the house whenever the exams are louring! How I quail at his Progress Reports. And then I’ll cop it and some petticoat will roost on his head and milk out my sap. All he achieves day by day is exercise, three hours in the morning and two more hours by nightfall. He’s soured on those days when he can’t strain and gasp for that long. Nothing else upsets him.’
‘I’m positive that all children dismay their parents now and then,’ assuages Jamun vacantly, with a smart-ass smirk that connotes that he considers himself exempted. But for sure he isn’t, and his words are more accurate than his smirk. Because memory is a crank, he does not remember the cold sweat that he and his brother have touched off, a million times, on those who cling to them. They’ve never threshed about for their parents with any remotely comparable strain. Burfi has scarcely troubled his head about them, or so Jamun reckons, with the entangled malevolence of the younger sibling. Yet parents can lacerate with equal virulence, so Burfi avers. ‘You must recall – on the morning of my marriage, and Joyce within range, fixedly simpering and steaming in her Kanchipuram, weighted like bedding, Ma distrait and asking whether what I was about to sign held the provisos for divorce.’
Of course, Jamun too has triggered off enough disquietude in his parents. In his early pubescence, for instance, he has temporarily – but deeply – strained his mother with his clumsy itch for the grocer’s boy (a man, really – old, malodorous, balding, buxom). Subsequently, as a hugger-mugger bisexual adult, he now and then remembers, with a feeling of lost blessedness, his unpolluted and stark, axial rut of those weeks. While the house had dozed, in the inflamed afternoons, he had waited, aguish with lust, for the buffeting on the back door.
Towards which he scampers, from whichever part of the flat he is in, to simper a welcome at Garam Gandu – Kuki’s name for him (Hindi: meaning Hot Arselender, according to Jamun, and Hot-Arse Lender, according to Kuki). Jamun observes the plump frame of the shopkeeper’s assistant, and randomly touches his bicep, and adventitiously rubs against his thigh, and bulges rasher and rasher every afternoon, and is tantalized on the days of the man’s truancy; he is finally impeded, one day – ‘Shall I tell your father that you don’t know what to do with your hands?’ – at which, in bafflement and funk, Jamun strafes him with a squirt of the newly learnt bawdry that is a feature of growing up. Bewildered, distressed, that evening, he is revealed to his mother. ‘You’d better watch your second son.’ Urmila is too shut in and fatigued for the stricture actually to register before Jamun is quaveringly confuting it. ‘But, Ma, he broke two of our eggs, right before my eyes, and crammed them raw into his mouth – I only called him, bastard – his hands were all gooey with the yolk, and he wanted to fondle my face with that glueyness – so I called him sonofabitch. And he said, if you asked about the eggs, I should say I boiled and ate them.’
Urmila cautions neither; presumably, she just wishes the unpleasantness away. Jamun and Garam Gandu backslide into familiarity, into the itch, the irksome incontinence, the secondrate frottage, the limp menace of disclosure, till divergent yearnings tug the mellowing boy away.
Afterwards, Jamun, once in a way, broods on how much his mother had distressed herself over the affair of Garam Gandu, whether and how often she remembers the matter, and how marvellous she is to tend her son’s secrets, for certainly she couldn’t’ve divulged his proclivity to any soul. Or could she? At these moments, he vows to requite her caring, and for a time strives to be heedful of her numberless, paltry, annoying wants. Of course, he falters in honouring his vow; with him, as with many others, the allures and undertakings of the fleeting world bid fair to prevent duty (or contrition, if you prefer).
Mrs Raizada is still chinwagging when the plane begins its descent. Her eyes are glazed and infinite like the crushed dog’s on the day of the telegram. Those eyes had ricocheted on to the rich, almost chewable, pages of the Bodley Head Robert Payne, and beyond the book on to the gossamer hexagons of the mosquito net, and the albumen-white of the ceiling, unmarked yet by spider and lizard. Mucus eyes; they had far transcended this life. For a moment or two, Jamun had watched the dog’s head in the fading rain, slackly attached to some wads and dollops of flesh, and the blood slowly and without end poisoning the water.
Jamun considers (an idiosyncrasy of his, to sport with the features of his kin) whether he would’ve preferred his mother to look like Mrs Raizada. Like-his mother, she also appears equably vain about the inwrought comeliness, underneath the powder and crannies, of her face. Urmila is placidly certain that no matter what she wears, no one can doubt her ingrained gentility. Yet one afternoon, decades in the past, Kuki’s mother, out of the evanescent rancour that one neighbour feels for another, had flabbergasted her by mistaking her for their communal sweeperess.
The sweeperess has decamped the day before with one of Aya’s male friends, a scraggy, peevish wolf called Kishori. The fuss over their moonlight flit impedes Aya from even thinking of the stodginess of housework. She, on the rooftop with her remaining chums, is in a huddle over the misadventure. Urmila screeches and yelps for her for some time. She will never be forceful enough to compel a toughie like Aya. Then Shyamanand begins to carp about the racket. Temples turgid at their insouciance, Urmila totes the garbage bin out.
‘Oho, Laxmi,’ miaows Kuki’s mother to Urmila’s back, ‘the refuse of other houses is much more important than mine, is it – oh, it’s you, Mrs – from the back I thought – with the rubbish pail –’
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nbsp; From the verandah, Jamun spots in the ice-blue of the road tubelights his mother stumping arduously away. He glides out after her, past Burfi at this desk practically swooning over the newborn incubus of logarithms. Stalking Ma is initially more diverting than Hindi homework – easier too; only after a time does it drag. She wends at a foot’s pace, does not look up or about and, Jamun recognizes at once, is not going to any specific place. Feebly trying to give her existence the slip, at least for a time. Dinner will wind her in, or the responsibilities of feeding a family, so she befools herself. For when she doubles back, her husband, ramping against his stomach ulcer, will have sated his jaws with whatever his fingers fumble on in the fridge before reverting to his divan. Burfi, study and dinner mopped up helter-skelter, will be in Kuki’s house, clipped round-eyed to their TV. Jamun the gourmandizer will have guzzled once with his father and once alone, hating Burfi for having (while moseying past the table, aware that only Urmila and Jamun have yet to eat, and that his mother will never bleat over the dole of a leftover dinner) crammed down the best of the mutton. If there is mutton, when Urmila eats alone, wretchedly, she gets much gravy and many potatoes.
Her footfalls are uneven in the dispersed blue-ivory light that makes Jamun feel that he has slipped on sunglasses at nightfall – a tread more rickety than expected of her age, incarnating her infirmities and her cheerlessness. She does not trudge very far. She squats on the culvert by the lane, within earshot of the cigarette-wala from whom Burfi has lately, cloak-and-daggerly, started buying Gold Flake Filter Kings, parroting the adult world. She shows no wonder at seeing Jamun. Sluiced with sobbing, her face is voided and sacramental, as a landscape after a cloudburst.
The Last Burden Page 3