The Last Burden

by Chatterjee, Upamanyu

  Shifting the tub, however, proves to be a killer. The coolies, for starters, decline to touch it, contending that it is not furniture. Then everyone starts to dispute with everyone else, glad to escape the decisions of cramming in and putting away. ‘These slobs need to be informed,’ squawks Jamun’s aya at Urmila, ‘that they are here to fetch and carry, and not to argue. And that of course the cactus is furniture, since it has as much sparrow shit on it as our dinner table and the chest of drawers.’

  Two removal men finally begin to shove and tug at the iron tub. A third is hindered from a handhold by the thorns of the plant. He disappears to smoke and cough. Progress is fraught. With every gasp and snort, the cactus teeters like a child learning to rollerskate. At the doorway, they discover that its arms and some two feet from the head will have to be sliced off. One coolie saunters away to forage for a weapon. The second tries to light his bidi, but is instantly prohibited by Shyamanand’s baying that he can’t puff under the noses of his superiors.

  ‘Look, Baba, can we call this off? I didn’t realize that this damned thing was so bloody heavy, unwieldy . . . However will these buggers cart it down the stairs? Especially those bends? . . . And now he’s going to hack away at it, and lop off large chunks – what’s the point? And after these guys’ve chopped it up, whatever remains will be further thwacked about while they’re staggering down the stairs with it . . .’

  Shyamanand’s face pronounces that he takes a dim view indeed of Jamun’s backing down after suggesting what might very likely turn out to be an A1 domestic adventure, and particularly one which is beginning to give him a chance to bully some lumpen. The first coolie returns with a rusty toy saw and, while Shyamanand yawps his astonished delight (‘But that saw! My god, it’s from the carpentry set that I presented Burfi on his tenth birthday! Amazing how one unearths the oddest things while moving house. Oye you! Wherever did you get hold of that saw?’), starts on an arm of the cactus. Jamun gazes at the milk, dribbling like blood from the wound of the plant, and plods on, ‘We could live without this giant in our new house, you know, and could plant something else instead, a palm or bougainvillaea or . . .’ His knowledge of flora is at this point exhausted.

  He recalls that he had, well, sort of chickened out just then, and had shambled off to pester his mother to make some tea. He had felt that standing about to witness the amputation of the cactus would be intolerable; so would the passage of the tub down the stairs. When it jammed at one of those bends, and when one of the plant’s vestigial arms grazed its spikes against someone’s skin, Shyamanand’s bile would spurt forth, and Jamun wished to be absent when the coolies reciprocated his father’s churlishness. Perhaps, most oppressive of all, their resolution and endurance would crock up midway, and his whimsical, sentimental suggestion would be abandoned.

  Cup in hand, but unmindful of the tea, he has ears only for the hoarseness, the turmoil, on the stairs. Shyamanand squawks at his wife, ‘But where is Jamun? Ask him to show himself at once! He should be wrangling with and overseeing these numbskulls, not me. After all, this demented proposal is his, isn’t it, to ferry a plant the size of a bloody tree . . .‘ Then an abrupt screech of panic: ‘– Mind that corner – on your left, you donkey, your left . . .’ From the stairwell, a deep, heavy thump, and some noteworthy Bihari vituperation. ‘. . . God, can’t you tell your left from your right?’

  When he is certain that he won’t be spotted, not even, somehow, by the mutilated cactus, Jamun sidles over to the head of the stairs to register better the sounds of the descent; he is nervy and half-believes that the enterprise can still stall. From the balcony, he observes them sweat blood to heave up the cactus into the truck. The plant looks woebegone. Shyamanand takes time off from his disparaging superintendence of the coolies to squint up at his son and scoff, ‘So we’ve won, but no thanks to you. Try and not cavort through life with the fickleness that you’ve shown today, Jamun. You wanted an outcome, but you couldn’t even witness the donkeywork for it, like craving victory without wishing to watch the savagery of battle.’

  They had not expected that the cactus would thrive in the new house. ‘It’s too old to be transplanted,’ Shyamanand pronounces, ‘and the hole that Jamun’s dug just isn’t deep enough. Homo sapiens is much more resilient than plants, you know, and can outlive all sorts of changes.’

  But the robust cactus belies his conclusion and, over the years, grows, thrusting out new arms to compensate, and scabbing over the scars of the old with a marred, charcoal-grey skin.

  ‘For how many days will you be with us? Chhana could only collect ten days. But a week should serve, to settle your mother’s case.’

  Doom is rebuffing Chhana’s jabs to seize the ball from him. ‘No no you came just now! You can’t bowl just when you come! You have to field! It’s the rule!’ With both hands he rams the ball tight into his pot belly, and jams against the wall his forehead, nose, chubby beetroot lips, tummy and smutty knees.

  ‘But I know one way, Auntie, to prod him to let go the ball,’ snickers Pista affably. ‘You should bully with, if you don’t drop the ball, then you’ll be turned into what Thakuma became the day we shoved her into hospital.’

  A routine lunch, gelid, all anyhow, eaten in slovenly ones and twos, off a marigold decolam surface, on which the X-ray of the two o’clock light from the windows betrays, like the splotches of a lively contagion, the crud of numberless comparable meals. ‘At the nursing home,’ launches Jamun, ‘we’ve to pay some four thousand rupees more.’

  ‘Oh, much more. When the bills show up,’ jeers Burfi – but his derision is beamed not so much at Jamun as at a dispensation; he is fuzzily discerning that the money that plunges pellmell into the pockets of doctors’ safari suits, plausibly to cure one’s kin and certainly to heal one’s own contingent distress, complicity and fatigue, is so thoroughly ineffectual; that the affliction of a relative, its spinoff on one, and the damned costs of alleviation – all mingle into some Deceiver’s extravagant, contumelious performance – and that money yet allures and abides, useless but magnetic – for the cabin, the Intensive Care, quacks’ fees, medicines, the solicitude of those pig nurses, the foolery of betterment, then you’ll understand. Thousands and thousands more.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ reacts Jamun, restrainedly, shrouding his choler. Like others, he dislikes being addressed as though he is slow-witted. ‘Meantime, this four thousand should be settled. In one letter you let out that we were bickering over who ought to share how much, should we split the costs by five, why should Joyce contribute. One of us can clear accounts now, afterwards we can square up.’

  ‘How could you write that?’ demands Shyamanand of Burfi, glancing up from the stupendous mass of rice on his plate, brow incised in ire. ‘Yet only you could have.’

  Burfi’s face dulls with umbrage. ‘Don’t talk shit. I wrote no such thing.’ He whams a tablespoon down on the table, at which Chhana hollers, ‘What happened!’ from a peripheral room.

  ‘My mistake,’ owns Jamun, detesting himself for relishing their friction. ‘I confused matters. You’d written that Baba’d proposed that we should divide the piles surgery costs, not this stroke.’

  ‘And that we haven’t!’ snaps Shyamanand spleenfully. ‘I forked out the full amount, only to watch her cave in three days after to this frozenness.’

  ‘But who bears the expenses of Ma’s medical care is definitely not the issue,’ remonstrates Jamun, peeved, endeavouring to sound measured.

  ‘Well – did I trigger it off?’ Shyamanand surveys his plate and again ponders why he has lumped food on it so edaciously.

  ‘It shouldn’t be an issue at all! She’s your wife. You hatched her maladies. You should pay for them.’ Burfi nettles and bridles like clockwork. He almost roots about for pretexts to explode, for he half-divines that in his other tempers he commands no attention.

  ‘But you’re her sons! Are you not her sons?’

  ‘That’s not the point, either! Thirty years hence, if Joy
ce is dying, will I angle for money from Pista or Doom for her pulling through? You’re gibbering.’

  ‘And you? Thirty years after, Pista should jump to contribute for his mother’s healing. Otherwise, you’ll provide further proof for what is already conspicuous – that your and your wife’s style of moulding children is disgraceful.’

  ‘Meanwhile,’ Chhana speaks in a designedly audible aside to Jamun, ‘I’m buying all the medicines. Somehow medicines are never urgent when anyone else is visiting.’ She snickers brashly at Burfi. She is forty-fiveish and speaks pantingly, as though she has never mastered the coordination of utterance and respiration.

  Four o’clock tea before the next circuit of the nursing home. Joyce returns early from office, for the reason that her mother-in-law could be dying, and debouches from a bathroom after epochs, etiolated, blinking as though her eyelashes are immutably weighted with waterdrops; she is older than Burfi by three years, so Burfi time after time, but cunningly, underlines.

  Boisterous family prattle over the marigold decolam after months, blithe emissions of homecoming, reunion and amity, while Shyamanand sips his tea, alone, in the soft-focus light of the drawing room. When Jamun steps in to check whether he needs a second cup, he is sitting in Urmila’s chair, gazing at the TV’s cataract face, twiddling Urmila’s bell, bemusedly raking his fingers through his beard. In that indistinct light, in his presence, the jollity from the proximal room is the peal of vileness. Jamun twitches with guilt. ‘We’re leaving now. Would you like some more tea?’

  ‘Your gaiety will fade when your mother and I are dead. This roof itself will moulder. Strangers to one another, with nothing in common, congregating once a decade, then how will you giggle?’

  Jamun is hotly stung. He strives to clarify. ‘We were chuckling about other matters to divert our minds from Ma – ’ He stalls at the falsehood. For those trivial minutes, they had all outright blotted out Urmila. ‘We were joyful – we were just glad to be together.’

  ‘Doubtless, the company of your dazzling sister-in-law is altogether preferable to that of your half-dead mother.’ At that, their eyes sheer off each other and their faces mantle with a shared remembrance.

  Of the foregoing year, early autumn. Burfi has just returned from his maiden tour of New York, bewitched, and with baubles for all. A Friday. An after-dinner champagne bout to jubilate his homecoming. ‘Ma? Champagne! Baba?’ proffers Jamun. ‘Won’t you? Champagne?’

  No, too late. Their disinclination dispirits the junket a bit. Possibly, all would’ve been pleased to rejoice together, without abrasion and discord. But a swarm of explanations behind their abstention, about which the sons introspect a while, waveringly, with abating impetus, investing the reluctance of their parents with less and less priority. Perhaps the parents intuit that the daughter-in-law will not welcome them and therefore neither will the two sons. Or maybe they, with the grumpiness that is the sensitivity that age doesn’t smother, wish to be the hub of the joviality and are huffed at being solicited as an afterthought Perhaps they wish to be wooed, for which the sons have no time. Possibly, they might’ve been pleased had Burfi rather than Jamun coaxed them to sip and are miffed that he has not budged. Maybe they imagine that he considers that champagne bought in New York will be squandered on them, who’ve never been overseas. Perhaps they truly are convinced that the time is too late and they too wrinkled to revel into the dead of night. Too late. Jamun attempts once more, flaccidly, from the dining room doorway to his, father’s sluggishly receding back, ‘Positive? Not even one?’

  ‘They won’t, Jamun, all right,’ trills Burfi from behind, half-waspishly; to Jamun, his inflexion seems to utter, why’re you wasting time, rush and join us, and listen to my yarns of 52nd Street and Park Avenue. Jamun intuits that his father hears the same meaning in Burfi’s voice.

  Through the exhilaration, the dry wine, the vignettes and the Marlboro smoke, Jamun fancies that he hears his mother call, a removed but indomitable bawling. He shuffles to her room, traversing his father’s. From his bed, Shyamanand pronounces, ‘She’s been bellowing for you for the last ten minutes. We could turn to dust here and you in the same house’d never be aware till disturbed from your carousal by the stink.’

  ‘I’ve been hollering and hollering for you for the past twenty minutes, and from his bed your father’s been hooting at me not to bawl and swamp his reading. Will you please lessen the speed of the fan? I guess the night’ll get chilly afterwards. I’ve just been floundering here like a fish, waiting for some soul to scale down the fan for me. You know that if I reduce it, the fan’s so prankish that it’ll promptly stop dead. I only need it a bit less.’

  Jamun twiddles the speed regulator of the fan a few times. He is feeling a little sinful at not responding sooner to his mother and a little piqued with himself for feeling sinful. ‘If you twirl the knob only clockwise, the speeds usually don’t go haywire.’ They both contemplate the ceiling for a time, like believers waiting for some portent from a doom merchant.

  ‘Isn’t that now too slow? If the room gets too stuffy, then I’ll perspire, won’t sleep, I’ll catch a chill from the cold sweat. Of course, I can’t open even one window because of that maddening black cat – it’ll saunter in, fishing about for a nook to doze in – you all are greatly entertained – but you should instead find beastly – the thought that more than once I’ve been hauled out of a rare sleep by a stinking, footloose cat trying to wrap itself around my face. Yes, my face! At least the cat finds my face appealing, unlike your father.’

  Jamun spins the knob once more. They both wait again, Urmila recumbent, Jamun upright, wishing to teeter with the champagne, ogling upwards. ‘It was at 3, I moved it to 1, this is now 2.’

  Urmila murmurs, with ample misgiving, ‘This can’t be 2. See – isn’t it stopping altogether?’

  The fan groans more torpidly and sonorously. Its axial disc, like a giant, waxen carrom striker with three fine, concentric, silvery hoops, and its circumambient chalky blur, which is like a whitish gramophone record when at superspeed, decelerates to a three-limbed figure cartwheeling at the same spot. The brims of the arms of the fan are maculated with measureless fly droppings. At the close of several winter afternoons, Jamun has observed scores of flies rendezvous on the verges of fans, commingle and parley, as in a congress of houseflies.

  He clicks the switch to 3. The groans of the fan spurt into full-throated whines. ‘The knob’s now veered round to where it was. 1 is too slow and 2 doesn’t work.’

  Urmila vents the tuts and clicks of discontent. ‘I’ve reminded you all time and time again that this fan regulator needs repairs, but if others ever listened to me, this’d be a different world.’ In dereliction, she swivels her neck and slumps her face against her four pillows. Jamun manipulates the knob once more and hopes that he isn’t going to get cross over a matter so footling. Yet what chafes him ever so often is the defencelessness in his mother’s utterance, the leverage over him that she and his father command through goading his pity. For more than sixty years, he muses untidily – gazing at the meagre, rickety neck, the askew sari, the calves the tint of old newspaper, the frowzy, turgescent feet, the soles scissioned like famined earth – you have lingered, laboured, ripened, mated, tussled, hated, and nurtured two children, and yet the selfsame you has to clamour for me to adjust the speed of the fan above your bed.

  ‘I’ll leave it at 1.’

  He’s at the door when Urmila implores, ‘Can’t you open the window just a little? So that the cat can’t breeze in? You could twine the window handle to the grille.’ She adds when she glimpses his face, ‘I’m sorry for vexing you.’

  ‘Where’ll I find some string?’

  ‘All right, forget it.’

  ‘No, just point out to me some string.’ Blood swirls into his temples, and all at once he is set upon honourably concluding the matter witout articulating even one syllable of acrimony. He battens down his teeth till he feels a sort of hardness against his eardrums and
half-believes that one jaw will dislodge the other.

  ‘On the second shelf in the J. B. Mangharam box. If the twine isn’t there, then forget it.’

  The whole task is executed in roughly two minutes; the two inches of open window hint at a night breeze, Urmila purrs in expectation of ease, and Jamun is happy that he has won against himself. Release and triumph make him motherly. ‘Anything else? Are you positive?’ He kisses her forehead.

  From his bed, Shyamanand, not removing his eyes from the science quarterly to which he has subscribed ever since his adolescence, probes, ‘What was the problem?’

  In his ascendancy, his tenderness, Jamun is luxuriantly insouciant, light-minded. He simpers and drawls, ‘Oh, Ma was being her usual, exquisitely infuriating self. She was squealing for the fan to chug around at a speed that doesn’t exist. Yet marvels do happen and she’s at ease now, content.’

  Shyamanand rejoins, sedately by design, ‘How brazen of her, to let her distress yank her son away from his merrymaking, and from his sister-in-law.’

  Jamun is stunned. His ears flame with blood and a pinhead of ache bulges deep underneath his left nipple. His wellbeing fissions; choler inundates him. ‘That’s gibberish – ’ and then, for he hasn’t voided himself enough, ‘Only you, lout that you are, could’ve mouthed that –’ and again, because Shyamanand doesn’t rebut and his own bile doesn’t abate, ‘I’m – we all are – so disgraced by you. When will you understand that?’

  Shyamanand lays his magazine and his reading glasses aside, and hauls himself upright in bed, as groundwork for interminable hostilities. ‘What I utter, certainly, is a disgrace, and what you do, of course, is praiseworthy. You should, for sure, feel ashamed for me while I should, doubtless, swoon with rapture for you, thus is your generational canon. Your own mother merely appealed to you to flip a switch to help her to pass a comfortable night, but that makes her “exquisitely infuriating” because it muddles for a minute your tippling some champagne, and impedes you – for a moment! – from those fulsome anecdotes of your paradises and the society of your Christian sister-in-law, whom you nibble on the cheek when you greet and nibble when you part – that should not be you! She already reigns over your brother’s face underneath her – but you!’ Shyamanand’s face glows with blood. The veins in his temple now sprawl like maggots of sputum. Evocation has hacked away all mockery from his features and his voice. He quavers, in a tongue tinny with fury and indelible abasement, scrabbling for articulation, ‘They’ve nonstop been so horrid to us, your mother and me – they bake and sauté a good many savouries upstairs – all those smells drift down to us, but they’ve never offered us any, never! They’ve coached their boys to keep away from us. Whenever Pista or Doom is with us, he’s becked upstairs by the screeches of the aya or the mother – you know that, you’ve witnessed that yourself countless times –’