The Last Burden

by Chatterjee, Upamanyu

  ‘Are you chatting with me or with your tit? Burfi, please be attentive. I’m confiding in you because I felt that someone else in the family must also know – I can’t be on my own with this info. Sure, Haldia’ll finally decide only next week, but don’t we act until, then? Consult some other charlatan, or cram Kuki’s mouth with his balls, or something?’

  ‘If Ma’s feeling okay, then let’s hold on for the second bout of Haldia’s bullshit. Fuck, I must zip now. Shall we discuss this again this evening over a rum? Why don’t you also sound Joyce out? That reminds me – since you loll about all day itching for that pigmy bomb and frigging, why don’t you instead be helpful, amble out in the afternoon and buy a rum?’ and Burfi glides into the bathroom behind Joyce. They frequently bathe together. ‘Saves time, hot water and electricity,’ is his reasoning. ‘To save even more time, like a PERT CPM for our reaching our offices punctually, I even shit while Joyce showers.’ He now and then divulges such snippets to disgust his brother. He usually succeeds.

  ‘Help me’ – on his way downstairs, Jamun invites his nephews – ‘to persuade Thakuma to stroll down with me to the beach.’ But the brats don’t even hear him. They scoot to the closed bathroom door and huddle against it. Pista, in a raucous whisper, exhorts Doom to demand to be let in. Doom, globose and gullible, obliges. ‘Mama! Mama, I want to see!’ . . . ‘Mama, please come out in your nightie! I want to see you please in your nightie!’

  ‘The bloody horny bugger,’ Burfi purrs half-appreciatively, ‘panting for it at four.’

  ‘Oof, kink and smut, does your skull store nothing else! To Doom, my nightie denotes that I’m not stirring out anywhere, and deserting Pista and him, that in my nightie I can curl up in bed with the kids, natter with them, answer who’s mightier, Hanuman or Superman. Doom’s a lonesome child.’

  ‘Balls balls. You’re just being churchy, too goody-goody to concede that the imp’s plainly, naturally randy.’

  The ground floor contrasts hellishly. Indistinctness, silence, dust. Urmila a death’s-head on a weathered counterpane. ‘Please get up. You and I’ll step out for a very short stroll.’

  ‘Not today, Jamun. I don’t feel at all fit. Butteflies in my heart all morning. Simply because I never bellyache, you assume that I’m as hale and hearty as an American black at some Olympics.’

  ‘Once, only once in your entire life, please listen to another human being. This seems the single aftercare with which Haldia isn’t milking us. Unless he sneakingly plans to dump on you some gym shoes for five thousand rupees.’

  ‘Let me see. Perhaps next month.’

  ‘That soon? What about next decade? Or in the year 2525? Ma, just a hundred paces. Fifty. We’ll use one of Baba’s walking sticks. If you funk and pussyfoot, I’ll board the earliest train to work.’

  ‘Doubtless, merely to bounce off at the next station.’

  ‘At this tempo, Ma, you’ll in no time yearn for TV’s nine o’clock slot for a sidesplitting turn. I’ll inform Haldia next week that your bad heart’s metamorphosed you into a desi Lucille Ball.’

  ‘Huh. What do my sons know of what I might’ve been? Had it not–’

  ‘Aha, that cataclysmic marriage, that impeded both your and Baba’s blossoming into geniuses! Ma, if you yes a stroll, you’ll at least dodge Baba for its span. You can also bitch about him till your heart’s eased. I swear to snitch to him only the spiciest bits.’

  By and by, Urmila submits. What finally prevails with her, perhaps, is Jamun’s singular solicitude for her wellbeing. The news lugs her grandchildren down from Burfi’s room, where, spellbound, they’d been staring at their parents dressing for office. ‘Are you really?’ demands Pista, smirking witlessly. Urmila’s bashful nod pricks both the imps to dinning, deranged laughter, enchanting to hear. ‘Stop that squealing,’ grins Jamun. ‘Instead, escort us on our walk.’ ‘Even if it’s just to the gate,’ snorts Shyamanand, coltishly jolly that his wife has assented to the inconceivable – a saunter towards her recuperation – but striving, out of habit, to muffle his delight.

  4

  A WALK TO THE BEACH

  But Aya stumps into Urmila’s bedroom then, grinning ebulliently, two prodigal bouquets of wine-dark and white roses, like twin sucklings, in her arms. ‘Happy Birthday of your marriage, from Joyce-ma,’ she beams at Urmila and Shyamanand. On cue, Joyce sidles in after her, en route to her office car, breakfast sandwich in hand.

  Urmila’s jaws slacken in astonishment and pleasure. ‘For me? Joyce, what exquisite flowers! Ohhh! Glorious, gorgeous . . .’ Cradling the bouquet, she titters like a child at her daughter-in-law.

  ‘For me? But I’ve never,’ demurs Shyamanand, with a confused half-simper, ‘received any flowers in my life. Why me? You needn’t have, Joyce.’

  ‘But isn’t today your wedding anniversary? The thirtyseventh? Or have I goofed on the date? The eleventh of November, I’d thought.’ She lists against the door and, to veil her sheepishness, tousles Doom’s hair, and pushes a third of her sandwich into his unwilling mouth.

  Shyamanand detonates into whooping, rumbustious laughter. With each guffaw, he seesaws like a puppet bowing to the hurrahs of encore. His face maroons, his spectacles perch awry, he all but overbalances. Yet his thunderclap hooting – which shudders his paunch like the touch of the electrodes of shock treatment, which nonplusses and even disquiets the children so that their half-smiles do not spread beyond uncertainty, and which Jamun sizes up as histrionic, overdone and selfish to the full – expires only when he begins to heave and wheeze.

  Jamun explodes too, despite himself. ‘For God’s sake, Ma, don’t blubber, he’s not cackling at you!’ Incensed with himself for boiling over, he then corrals her with his arm and tries to steer her to her bed. She is weeping mutely and unrestrainedly. She shuffles compliantly enough with him, the roses in her arms like a lifeless child. When he glances up, Joyce has glided away, the kids, pop-eyed, have edged closer, and Shyamanand’s face is crimson and still.

  ‘Why the hell does Joyce, without warning, give you flowers? She knows, no, that you’ve never celebrated even one of your wedding anniversaries or birthdays, even one, in all your lives, unless it be to bicker with more than everyday malevolence.’ Jamun pauses to bridle his voice. ‘Which other duo would acquit itself like this on receiving flowers on an anniversary – with faces like the tragic and comic masks of Greek theatre? What remains for you both now is to flail each other, maybe with these flowers for starters. We’ve never spotted you touch each other from fondness, you could instead begin with hate.’

  He keeps his arm around Urmila, corseting her, silently willing her to stop sobbing, willing Shyamanand to quit the room. In the disagreeable silence beneath her snivels and the ephemeral sounds of the world, Shyamanand does hobble towards the door, but before he leaves the room, he haltingly swivels to assert, ‘Your dishonest memories’ve always pampered your mother. She did lunge at me once – with a ladle – under your nose, just because I asked her why she was feeding me dead cockroaches – jumbo-sized, too. You ought to recall the incident, since you were ripe enough then to prance to her defence with the signal thesis that cockroaches are a significant source of protein. If your mother asserts that I’ve clouted her too, ever, then she, as usual, is fibbing. Everything about me gnaws her – my mind, my clothes, my condition – quite naturally, my laughter – the idea that I’m enjoying myself, am joyful – propels her round the bend.’

  At his receding back Urmila snarls, ‘I remember, even if Jamun doesn’t! I remember each of your million feats of churlishness.’ Fury dumbfounds her, like a child. Beneath his arm, Jamun senses her whole body tauten in the struggle for articulation. Her face buckles, her teeth chomp down again and again on her striving tongue. She starts to mewl the short, stealthy ululations of impeded rage. Though cramped by Jamun’s arm, she also begins measuredly to reel back and forth. The domes of the brats wouldn’t’ve twirled from her even if Joyce had minced past them naked, her boobs dunked in chocolate
.

  Jamun, miserable and unsympathetic, waits for his mother to recover. She, once in a way, is racked by assorted tantrums and fits, the existence of which has always been overlooked by all, probably because Urmila the human presence is so unaweinspiring, longsuffering, so lulling, that no oddity linked to her can ever kindle any disquiet in her family. In the core of a rare might, Jamun the featherweight sleeper might be winched out of slumber by the hushed yowls and yaps that she splutters in her nightmare. But no one’s ever been unnerved by her; tch, it’s only Ma, he’ll dozingly enlighten his pillow. She herself, on the morning after, or at any other hour, never acknowledges her volatile paroxysms, her ravings. ‘Don’t discuss the matter with her,’ Shyamanand has counselled his sons. ‘Don’t disturb her during a spasm, you might convulse her. In any case, she suffers these fits once in a blue moon.

  ‘I did try to jostle her awake once or twice, in the first months of our marriage, when we still bedded in the same room. My God, I muttered to myself in a cold sweat, when I heard her pule, gaped at her shudder in her apprehensive sleep – my God, what’ve I married? I jogged her, and the throes stopped; she seemed to tumble from an immense elevation into an abysmal sleep. A sort of transition of colour – or light – or expression – percolated across her features, like a blackboard being swabbed, or a film of skin being peeled. I jerked and prodded her until her eyes opened. Her pupils were atoms of light in blobs the shade of evening, like the pinpoints from a liner on the skyline, winking at dusk. She appeared to be gazing at me from some other time. I probed her the next morning, but she couldn’t remember. More wouldn’t than couldn’t, because she did stiffen at my questioning. I suspended it then, and supposed her seizures to be a sibling characteristic, a freakishness in their blood, for which there was her brother Belu to vindicate me.’

  Urmila slackens against Jamun’s shoulder as though punctured. He lays her down and hauls his unwilling nephews out of the room, wondering what stock they’ve taken of the bizarre.

  ‘When Mama presented the roses, why did Thakuda laugh like that, Jamun, like a screwball?’ Pista.

  ‘Because Joyce – like some kneehigh buggers of this house whom we all know – forgot to scrub her feet before hopping into bed last night. As you know full well, toejam overnight comes by a life of its own, and by daybreak shapes itself into numberless, microscopic, woolly spiders which, snickering with delight at the windfall of life, scuttle away from the toes to new sanctuaries. This morning, they happened on – and lost their hearts to – Joyce’s roses. You must remember that even after they become spiders, they preserve the pong of toejam; so they’d – naturally – idolize the balm of roses. From the bouquet they romped into Thakuda’s beard, lips, nostrils – they adore the adventure of untried habitats. They also tickle and itch like crazy; so Thakuda wasn’t really guffawing – he was yelping because the spiders’d begun to prickle him.’

  Jamun watches his nephews dismiss his reportage of the world’s workings; had Burfi sketched the yarn, they’d’ve bought it outright, for Burfi has a way of distending the imaginations of children, a wizardry that Jamun too has inherited, in some measure, from Shyamanand, who, in the nonage of his sons, scarcely ever enlightened them with the prosaic when the fantastical was accessible. Hence, for some of his unfledged years, for instance, Burfi accepted that only when, during a thunderstorm, a male and a female, standing naked – for whatever reason – in the open, cheek by jowl with each other, were whammed on their bums by lightning – only then were eunuchs born, or, more accurately, forged.

  ‘But Thakuda and Thakuma don’t celebrate their birthdays? They do have birthdays?’ Pista’s inflection transmits a tinge of alarm at the inconceivable.

  Yet at Pista’s age, Jamun’d never reflected on why his parents didn’t commemorate their own birthdays and anniversaries. He’d accepted that they simply didn’t, just as he’d acknowledged that God was exactly what his Moral Science textbook imaged Him to be – chubby, in a white kimomo and a silverwool beard that dribbled down to a sort of rope about His waist, sixtyish; with twinkling eyes and outstretched, welcoming arms, with woolpack clouds tingling His ankles, He perennially stood, simpering. Indeed, Jamun’d surmised that no parent, no adult, actually, ever observed such special days, that with Time the zeal to honour its passage ebbed. Thus he was baffled to learn that the world viewed the subject rather differently from his parents, that Kuki, for example, loped off on a unique day every year to buy for his divorced father a card and perhaps an aftershave.

  ‘Don’t you even know your parents’ birthdays?’ Kuki in turn is startled too.

  ‘Of course I do,’ fakes Jamun. ‘Ma’s is seventh February, and Baba’s twenty-eighth October,’ and he eyes with curiosity the downmarket aftershave in Kuki’s hand; it betokens another universe. At home he badgers, ‘Why don’t we ever remember your and Ma’s birthdays, and give presents?’

  ‘Who’s stopping you?’

  Yet son is nearer the mark than father. Jamun’s question is really one of a suit that recurs to him in a thousand contrary ways over the decade. Why don’t you and Ma display at least some signs of intimacy, of charity, towards each other, acquit yourselves a little like some other married couples. Why don’t you stop scuffling with each other for the affection of your children, and instead ferret contentment out of yourselves. Your brood is not yours just because you’ve fostered it. After all, since no wily go-between hitched you up, once upon a time, between the two of you must’ve lurked some kind of concupiscence; well, whatever happened to that heat, that lukewarmness. If it stubbed itself out, why didn’t you cut adrift, instead of averring that parting is impossible once the litter is spawned. Or is your disaffection itself that cohesive a yoke. Is amen your retort to the other’s silence, and do you both invoke Time’s desert sands to be your buddy and your spouse’s foe.

  Unhurriedly, as though the years needlingly tug at a veil, Jamun fathoms that his parents share several ugly attributes of their marriage with millions of others. Some of this perception is disclosed to him as late as when he enlists in college, ‘Certainly, my parents wrangle, day in ’n day out, you ninny,’ snickers Kasturi at his ingenuousness, over their sixth cup in the coffeehouse, ‘because all couples abrade each other.’

  ‘Yours too? But they certainly don’t bear themselves like cat and dog.’ Yet he grins involuntarily at Kasturi, because she’s giggled, and he’s been startled by a kind of easing that the shame of a joyless household doesn’t sully him alone, that a matter as stealthy as parental incompatibility can be debated, and even partnered with smiles. He can’t, however, gauge how much to disclose, ‘Kasturi, my parents don’t exactly bicker and wrangle – they don’t chat to each other at all, not like other people, like you and I natter – of the day, of how horrid the bus conductor was, and how you had to dit from your tutorial because the rain was pummelling the windows and the tutor was so unsexy – my parents in contrast are sort of webbed in a glacial, spleenful hush. They swap just a handful of phrases per day. “Dinner is ready . . . Have you signed the cheque for the electricity? . . . This tea is cold.” Beyond these expressions squats the silence. And the most inoffensive statement can sizzle in seconds into a brutal tiff, which routinely closes with my mother sniveling, and my father’s brow crimsoning like a dam against the blood; then we assume that these rows wound her more than him.’

  Too early in their companionship for him to divulge to Kasturi his parents’ sexual relations, though he’s all at once prurient about the intimacy between her mother and father. In his seventeen years, Urmila and Shyamanand have never gone to bed in the same room; in the tiny government flat in which the family whiled away more than a decade, Shyamanand customarily bedded down with Jamun; Burfi commandeered one entire room for himself, the ingress into which of his parents and brother exasperated him fiercely; Urmila turned in on the divan between the dining table and the Philips radiogram; thus, that, innumerable wedded adults all over the world actually doss down together, in
beds that are joined, night upon night, never dawned upon the subteenage Jamun.

  He is spellbound when, with pubescence, he learns of sex, of copulation, how babies are spawned, when he twigs, openmouthed, that Shyamanand must’ve mounted. Urmila at least twice to hatch Burfi and him. The notion seems inconceivable, seismic, like the seas spiralling, out of hand, to peck at a skyline of skyscrapers. At first, Jamun balks at visualizing Urmila and Shyamanand together in one bed, mother naked, heaving, jammed; but he can’t corral his fancy for long, and it prances back, time after time, to try and piece together, from the slivers of his apprehension, an abiding, tenable image of their coition; yet his imagination always sideslips to other countenances, other bodies, integrating the two to beget, not his parents, but the unbridled satyrs of burgeoning desire.

  Shyamanand has enlightened his younger son on how babies are hatched. On the nights when the moon is full and simpering, Jamun, thousands of dwarfish, swarthy oarsmen forage through the damp shingle of scores of riverbanks for a curious species of minute, vermilion crab. Before the moon pales away, the boatmen scuttle about and flick the crabs down the nostrils and into the tummies of snoring, married women. The crabs that sneak in through the left nostril ripen into daughters; through the right nostril trickle in future sons. ‘What about twins?’ Obviously two crabs edge in simultaneously. ‘Then why do we call you Baba?’ Because before they withdraw, the sweating oarsmen purr into the ears of the napping fathers guidance for the morrow – on pocket money, homework, ablutions, fealty, football, ‘Why boatmen? Why not batsmen?’ Because decades later, when you’re taken, you’ll need someone, and it’ll be they who’ll pilot you down the river.

  Certainly, in the imaginations of his sons, Shyamanand’s mythopoeism is to grapple with the waxing insights of boyhood, and erode in the tussle. ‘You’re a bloody motherfucker,’ Jamun, aged nine, informs a scornful Kuki.