‘We must begin a short stroll every morning, starting tomorrow. That’s crucial. We must also meet more frequently. We are not cronies who gather once a month for bridge.’ When they’re at the door, Dr Haldia suffixes, not looking up from his desk, in a pitch outrageously casual, ‘Ah . . . Mr . . . Will you wait a second, please? . . . No, only you . . .’
Haldia’s consulting room has no cobwebs or smudges on its citrine walls. No matter where, Jamun always, unpremeditatedly, matches the room he chances to be in with those of their own house – for cleanness, for taste, warmth. Haldia presumably paid hundreds to some cocksure lackeys to empty the wastebaskets in good time, to clear teacups with treacly dregs off his table, to spot that the curtains ought to’ve been laundered weeks ago, to swab the flyshit off the fans. Would he’ve preferred such a room to be his own? With its burr of airconditioning and room-freshener-air? Jamun’s questioned himself thus in a thousand rooms, and has always responded with a no; he’s richly maudlin about the house that his parents’ve raised. He’s lived with them in it for long, and their pride in their possession – for whatever it is – in their affixture on their mote of earth – has sidled into him as irresistibly as his past has soaked into the cupboards and the blotches in the whitewash, like winter benumbing one’s bones; the house has not affected his brother so. Whenever he quizzes himself whether he covertly prefers other houses and rooms to his own, he feels sweetly sinful, as though in a fuzzy way, he’s being false-hearted, unfilial; each such occasion overhauls his affection for all that’s his own.
In fact, he can’t even see himself tenanting a room as aseptic as Dr Haldia’s. He’s been fostered in, and so has become habituated to, has even, in a way, grown to cherish, this household world of bedraggled counterpanes, speaker tops so dusty that his finger doodles on them the serpentine courses of caravans across a desert, askew picture frames, lamps with fused bulbs, switch-boards with missing screws, clocks with dissynchronous faces, all out of time, walls that are canvases for the exploratory pastelry of burgeoning nephews, last year’s newspapers yellowing in knolls underneath the stairs. Unlike Burfi, he’s never hankered to inhabit the gloss of the rooms in an ad for distemper.
‘Your mother’s pacemaker batteries are leaking. I thought you should know. Of course, the patient mustn’t be told.’
After a pause, Jamun, ‘What does that mean? Isn’t the pacemaker working?’ His very first reaction is that Kuki, by dumping on them for twenty thousand rupees a dud pacemaker, has avenged himself too prodigally for Jamun’s having once dubbed him a fucking beefeater.
‘Now, we mustn’t harass ourselves. When next you come, we’ll examine her again, meticulously. Shall we put off our assessment till then?’
‘Why did the fucker blab to me, Kasturi, if he isn’t certain? What am I to do with the news? Tell Baba and observe his befuddlement? If I check with Kuki, he’s sure to fib to shield himself. He’ll assert that Haldia’s mistaken; he’ll then coax that testicle to concede that he is. After all, they’ve been accomplices in business for ages. Hence next week Haldia’ll profess that the pacemaker’s running tip-top, that this evening’s diagnosis was half-ripe.’
‘If the pacemaker’s packed up, your mother’s too feeble now, I guess, for a second operation – for a replacement.’
‘A third. Before this pacemaker shambles, Haldia’d slashed her piles off. Perhaps we should call in another quack. But even for that, I’ll have to confide in Baba.’
‘You look as though you’re going to eat here. Tell me, because then I’ll scramble together an extra something. There’s practically nothing in the fridge.’
‘And all but no one in the house. If we can stash away your grandfather in the fridge, I could show you what I really want to eat. Isn’t that a response worthy of the smuttiest adolescent?’
‘And since when haven’t you been that, sweetie? “Sweetie” is what my sister’s new boyfriend calls her. He’s bloodcurdling. D’you remember BF and GF? In our nonage? I was ardent about widening your mind, whammed down on you all kinds of books – potboilers, antinovels, opuses – but you doted only on Ring Lardner. Remember?’
‘But your husband was for starters to’ve hitched up with your younger sister, no? At least, so your grandfather’d worked out. Queer how things ripen. He couldn’t endure your sister’s jabber, leered at you instead, and you peeled off your panties – you’d mooched about long enough with Heidegger and Max Weber.’
Kasturi’s lips curl with minimal mirth. ‘What stakes, please, that you’ll start your pawing in ten minutes?’
Jamun stares at her from the verandah door, but she shuns his eyes. ‘Why didn’t you hold on, last year, when I proposed that we marry just after my parents die?’
For minutes the lull of recollected discomposure. He dawdles about the room, recapturing a white-hot afternoon, eleven summers ago, in this same room, when he’d gawkishly, naked, lain down in Kasturi’s warm arms and had shammed that he’d tumbled and entwined with other women before. With his face weltering in the fleeciness beneath her ear, in the balm of the expectant, susceptible skin of her throat, the heat from her riven lips, ravished by the ecstasy with which her thighs’d scissored his hips in an intuitive, immemorial rhythm, bewildered by the notion that the miracle was actually, truly befalling him – him with his spectacles and womanish haunches – he’d, all at once, been stupefied by a thankfulness to her that’d felt like a double dose of molten blood in his forehead, and all over him, just underneath his skin. In his gratitude, the delirium of which’d waned with the shrivelling of his rut, he could’ve attempted anything, flagrant, infernal, to laud the bewitchment of the coffee-with-milk dunes of her body; could’ve bedecked her pudenda, tongued her leavings.
Later, languorous, he’d taken in the new world. The same four-poster had then faced the windows; the curtains’d been prettier, bleached-blue with flecks of white. The fan had gone off. Emboldened, he’d rolled over and tasted the sweat on her throat.
‘I remember how you ducked my questioning. By citing Isaac and Rebecca. Slickly flipped the subject into the absurd. Is she gaga? Why the fuck does she connect with the Bible all the time?’ At the remembrance he snickers like a ham, blood-andthunder blackguard. ‘And Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent, and took Rebecca, and she became his wife: and he loved her: and Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death. When you quoted that through your fake sniggers, you actually jolted me. Maybe she does believe that only after my mother snuffs it will I itch for another woman. Perhaps that’s how I register with other people – as though always groping about for an udder to nurture me.’ He halts in front of her, seated, with ramrod spine, on the bed, abdomen overblown, hard, like a mammoth globe. ‘Why don’t you lie down, Kasturi? Please?’ He’s taut with misgivings and hunger.
She simpers uneasily, rises from the bed like a beast of burden, murmurs, ‘Don’t be foolish,’ and, with her heaviness, shambles towards the verandah. ‘And the Lord God said, Jamun, it is not good that the man should be alone: I will make him an help meet for him. I’ll have to station verses from Genesis between us to head you off from knowing me. Tch, you don’t look a bit tickled. Why don’t you marry, Jamun? Since you’ve been so solicitous for your parents and their sentiments, beseech them to pick a Mrs for you, so that you don’t have to wait for them to croak before you can, as my husband says, get vour sex on tap.’
They shuffle out to the verandah. The night gusts from the sea trace them among the highrisers.
‘Shall we run up to the roof? Ogle at the stars and listen to your unseemliness?’
Among the forgotten junk and TV aerials of a hundred apartments, they share the stump of a lychee pudding. He watches her spoon pudding into her yawning mouth. ‘Since when’ve you begun using your right hand for anything?’ She’s the most lefthanded creature he’s ever met. He’s never been able adequately to reason to himself why he’s so extraordinarily charmed by her sinistrality. A warmth ruptures in his belly when
he watches her do the most commonplace things – scrawl a telephone number down, brush her teeth, draw the curtains – only because she uses her left hand.
In an irregular line, in the bottom inches of a curtain of patchy blue-black, nod the motes of light from the tankers and liners too mammoth for anchorage in the harbour. A mettlesome breeze, and haphazard halfhearted stars. Traffic easing along hundreds of feet below like ants with torches, other overnight highrisers prodding the sky like the monumental, upraised arms of the contentious and dispossessed bawling for a chunk of the sun. Jamun banks himself against the parapet and inspects the vertiginous drop. ‘Say something viperous, Kasturi, now that my mood’s mending.’
She giggles and, from the back, enfolds him, lolling her head against his shoulderblade. ‘Can’t we be friends and enjoy a radiant relationship?’ She sniggers again. ‘Jamun.’
‘Does Genesis have any of those? Male and female soulmates who don’t hump? Unlikely.’ He revolves to confront her. His rut has whimsically attenuated to a dryness against himself. Inwardly snickering, in a manner abashed, he deduces that he isn’t going to mount anyone other than his matronly Kasibai, that he should hence return to her swiftly, that he should bear himself more charitably with her, in particular because he possesses no one else. ‘Your Genesis is pretty ravening and queer, isn’t it? You thwacked it on my head, hissing, read, pore over, evolve your psyche, its passions are most Asian. So I waded through it, and was overpowered, out and out, by the hard porn and the way-out dollops of fornication, harlotry, defloration, gang bang, buggery, pederasty, incest and bestiality. Wow, who doesn’t, in the Bible?
‘But its soul is not a bit Asian, I remember cavilling to myself; we – the humans I know – aren’t like that in the least. Malevolent familial discord, the totally capricious, arbitrary conduct of kinsmen towards one another, one parent whimsically favouring one child, brother versus brother without any cause other than a communal blood – Esau and Jacob, Abel and Cain, Lot and his daughters – quite flummoxing. If we’d inhabited that world, Kasturi, and I’d there mooted to you that we marry just after my parents die, you, in the span of two verses, would’ve diced them up and whirled me off to bed, where you’d’ve commenced knowing me. Or if you’d married another, the dreadfully knotted life of this marvel in your tummy’ – he palms her – ‘of course hatched in possessed heat while your husband was away, would be vaticinated by the direst omens – black falcons tittering and crunching off the heads of infants, that sort of stuff. Aren’t we much gentler than those patriarchs of the Pentateuch, more tolerant, and less sexy?’
‘You’ve been with me, and absent from your home, for some three hours now. Unbelievable. Oughtn’t you to scamper back to the arms of your drooping parents? Or have you miraculously reversed your trait of a decade – of fucking off instantly after either shooting off all over me, or as soon as you realize that that day’ll be armistice? Or perhaps you’re still waiting for me to knuckle under, to shimmy on the floor with desire? Since when has your other life – as you style it – stopped becking you back?’
‘Fuck you, Kasturi, in as many ways as feasible.’ He slants forward and kisses her warm cheek. He can still divulge those emotions to her that he can’t to his parents or Burfi. ‘In one of your sermons, you discoursed to me that when I feel love or its synonyms for someone, I’m disposed to secrete away or overlook the instinct, because at bottom I’m afraid. Don’t you recall that afternoon?’
She squints at him for an instant, smirks.
‘For sure you do. An infernal summer – when isn’t it summer, Kasturi, in our city? I’d ferreted out a tour de force titled Love without Fear. Burfi’s consistently and incisively disclaimed its ownership. One of the more delectable memories of those lurid undergrad years. Chapter Eleven was succeeded by realistic line drawings of some of the Kama Sutra catalogue. I was ghoulish about one position which required four roly-poly bolsters beneath the male. Nice bolsters.
‘But you were considerably jittery about being the Upstairs Floosie. Doesn’t your mother ever come upstairs? Only in the afternoons, to dodge my father, to grab some sun. But they must be curious about what the two of us’ve been up to in your room for hours. Kasturi’s going to wrap up Hegel for me, so please don’t disturb. I’m not your mother’s soulmate, as it is. So you whined, bleated, croaked and wailed, and I struggled to divert you with proposals of the bolster callisthenic. You sweated to dodge me and zoom back home to – I imagine – Deuteronomy. I was breaking through, though, when you sprouted your homily. If I truly cherished you, I’d – instead of exhorting you to mount me – usher you home. I was propelled only by love for my own self. For my id or my ego? – but you couldn’t illuminate. I must treasure the world outside me, the creepy-crawlies of creation. Masterly, because my hard-on puckered into my scrotum.
‘You weren’t, of course, mouthing anything revolutionary, but whether I’m here, or at my job, with Satyavan Hegiste, I find it a tenet too exacting.
‘These last few months I didn’t write very often to my parents or to you. Barely twice or thrice. There seemed nothing to convey save my trite ennui and my visor of unconcern. Then in snap spurts I’d dash off to them that I missed them. Now and then I even felt that I was declaring my yearning for them just to string out the letter, so as not to waste the rich, milk-white paper. I wasn’t actually shamming, but I was professing that I needed them because there was nothing else to voice, no other sentiment or notion – the choice was silence. Now that I’m here, I’m not certain that I pine for them in the least – because here at home I don’t spend much time in their company. I do mooch about a lot in the house, but am not with them for more than half-an-hour, totally, in the entire day. So, I muse, what then do I actually hanker after when I’m not here, am mopish elsewhere? Kasturi, you bitch, you’re bored.’
‘Only to a sort of death, sweetie. Which shouldn’t distress you, since you all but chopped my skull in two last year when I disclosed to you my marriage plans.’
‘What lies. You’re a bloody fib factory.’ He grins at her, but when he continues, his inflexions whisper at disingenuousness, as though he articulates on one subject only to forestall all allusions to another. ‘And when I do sit with my parents, I feel as though I’m foundering into becoming like them. In the evenings they’re positioned in front of the TV, and answer me in monosyllables, but if I shift channels they don’t notice. They grouse gracelessly against whichever of their sons is absent – and chiefly because they in fact yearn for his companionship. And thank God our small talk is minimal, for any phrase, even the most aboveboard, can trigger off a blustery quarrel between any two of us; each of those slanging matches tails off with my mother sobbing, and her whimpers and snivels rile one of the other two to spatter any residual bile on her. So what’s new.’ Their ashen faces touch off in me many ugly ideas, so that I feel both rancour and remorse at them. If I marry, will I also clock out like them, sightless in front of a TV? Why won’t I? The same blood, isn’t it. Even Burfi’s marriage is annihilating; he’s glided out from beneath his wife’s thumb for some systematic two-timing. So why won’t I? Won’t my life ripen after my begetters die? Be released? Will I be able to break down over their bones, when they are burning? ‘I mean, love must be all, but it’s awkward to profess – and easier from a great way off, than face to face. I’ve a hunch I must mend, Kasturi.’
‘All in a good time, dearie. Do your parents still bully you emotionally with that tripe that used to screw you up those days – that no one else will be as happy as they to see you? What? Never’ll anyone want your society like they? You replayed the phrases to me night and day, so they incised themselves in my skull.’
‘We all seem to command the memories of either wise elephants or ninnies, depending on how much we wish to bugger the character we’re chatting with.’
‘I’ve harangued you a thousand times before, that if you’d kept away from home for a few of your seminal years, you wouldn’t have this braindamag
ed idea of your familial responsibilities. Truly, in a sense, Jamun, your formative years haven’t petered out yet. At seventeen Philip Jonas fluttered into Vietnam on hash and Haight-Ashbury, he said. Contrast yourself. At seventeen, had you weaned yourself off your mama’s lap? That’s why, after school, I scrammed from Calcutta and my parents, and fetched up here for college. We all just have to break away.’ Next, in an everyday voice, ‘Shall we go down now? We still have to figure out our dinner – and I’ve to bustle around my grandfather as well, while he stuffs himself with the food he criticizes.’
On the following morning, Jamun hauls Urmila out for the initial paces of a stroll. Commandeering her to consent is Hercules’ thirteenth. Before he begins the gruelling process of prevailing against her, he divulges to Burfi Dr Haldia’s disclosure of the evening before about the pacemaker.
‘What the fuck does that excreta mean? Does he want more cash or what?’ Burfi’s just completed his forty-minute work-out and – as is his practice – is now scanning his torso, appraising whether its muscles can spellbind the world. Every morning, for five minutes or so, he poses for himself in the mirror. This is the single time of day when he can be reckoned to be in a good mood. ‘Look, just look at that bicep. Wow.’
The Last Burden Page 16