The Last Burden

by Chatterjee, Upamanyu

  ‘Huh. You’re a grandmotherfucker, greatgrandmotherfucker and a dogsucker.’ Kuki leers at him with inexhaustible disdain. ‘I bet you don’t know what fucker means. I bet! You do? Yeah? What does it mean, fucker?’

  ‘I won’t tell you, why should I?’ squawks Jamun in indignant panic. ‘You can ask your fucking mother!’ He’s rather chuffed with the timeliness of his retort.

  But not for long, because Kuki flashes back, ‘You don’t know, you don’t know what fucker means! And until you tell me, you can’t come to my house.’

  Which is truly dire. Jamun will be bereaved of airconditioned afternoons, Monopoly, Yahtzee, outlandish foreign confectionery, the allure of lolling in other interiors, and the likely proximity of Kuki’s mother, with her redolent odours and her upper arms that seem to thrust out their meat, like cheeks, into Jamun’s face, no matter where he gapes.

  Kuki and he have arrived at that age and mood when bawdry entrances, even when it is incompletely understood. For them, communication appears to slump to a pretext for the swapping of smut, the syllables of which titillate them into tee-hees. In time, ribaldry and the hams of Kuki’s mother are augmented by Jeremiah’s blubbery thighs, the inciting fetor and impudent simper of a grocer’s handyman, the two issues of Playboy that the intrepid Kuki taps from his father’s mine (along with a shrieking-coloured German glossy with foldout pages, each pleat of which discloses one smirking participant of a prodigal orgy, the whole of which splays into a chart of eight stripped, living souls, twined to one another by vagina, mouth, penis, anus – the sight of which seems to crunch open Jamun’s skull and stuff it with a kind of obscene turgescence) – and persistent, breathless parleys, speculation, joshing exegeses. In time, percolate into Jamun the notions that between a woman’s thighs lurk neither a sort of ineffable maroon wodge, much like some primate’s arse, nor a second bellybutton; that coition isn’t quite Kuki’s seismic theory of an ebullient penis gnawing apart a female navel furiously enough to hustle some shit through her anus; that everyone – his mother, his father, Jeremiah, Kuki, his aya, the ophthalmologist who examined him, the bilious driver of the school bus, their fish-wala, he himself – everyone had copulated, or would copulate, and that some of these numberless couplings would beget.

  ‘I don’t know, Kasturi, how you learnt about the carnal life – in the usual lurching way, I suppose – but isn’t that really, truly the hatchet job on innocence? Just the knowing that these layers of clothing only veil a prick and a pussy made to lunge at each other – that that’s the crux, the heart of the matter, the rest is sludge?’

  ‘Phew. My parents do lunge at each other a lot, but not out of libido. Haven’t your parents ever slugged each other? Mine swat ‘n clout roughly once a week, as clockwork as shampooing your hair. They wouldn’t brawl in front of you, but then who lathers his nut in the living room?’

  ‘Well, in my presence, my parents – my mother in fact – let fly at my father just once. Some seven years ago.’ in the summer when, having freshly stumbled on to the phenomenon of coitus, Jamun assiduously watches his parents for weeks for the most gossamer tokens – the graze of a touch perhaps, or a shared chuckle, an instinctive glance of communion, or an inadvertent hundred-pace stroll – the most shadowy clues to an extant comradeship, no matter how inert, that can be construed to be the precipitate of an expired infatuation. Of course Jamun senses no such sign. Urmila and Shyamanand comport themselves like two uncongenial hostelers constrained to room together for fifteen years. Certainly Jamun’s never really expected – has instead only, fancifully, fitfully hoped that his parents, like some other parents, would be observably fond of each other – that on an anniversary Shyamanand perhaps would take Urmila out to dinner and their third viewing of The Sound of Music. He’s wished for a glimmer, a whiff, of an indication that between his parents had once lived a sensation more human than the periodic rut of primates, that Burfi and he were engendered by an emotion less evanescent than carnality. Yet he can’t even envisage them prodded by lust to pat and cuddle each other, to cavort like donkeys on heat in the thick of a thoroughfare.

  Midweek. A cauldron of an evening, when everything chafes like nylon on skin. Urmila and Shyamanand return from office, tuckered out, droopy. Shyamanand slips into pyjamas and subsides at the dining table to wait to glut himself to lull his peptic ulcer, rapping out on the decolam with fingers, spoon, ladle and tea-strainer a signature tune of impatience. Urmila sheds her handbag on the divan and sets to in the kitchen to worm some food out to cram her husband’s maw with. Aya is AWOL, so Jamun informs her, has lumbered off to the movies directly after lunch to dodge the heat and her chores. The kitchen – minute, sleazy, fusty, vermin-plagued – at first glance seems to contain nothing edible. Like a harpy limbering up in his belly, Shyamanand’s ulcer gnaws him increasingly every minute. He rises turbulently. ‘There must be something, some leftovers from the afternoon – scraps. What did you lunch on, Jamun?’ But Jamun can’t recollect.

  Her skull, it appears to Urmila, will, in a wink, gash open in a discharge of curdled blood. Her eyelids seem congealed, her head appears to wobble like a sentry dozing on his feet. The enervation of a long day, its sapping mugginess, the ineffable dispiritedness of a routine midweek evening, her piles, the abrasiveness of her husband’s presence, the tension of waiting for the next squirt of his derision – all intertwine to make her sluggishly rummage through the kitchen without quite remembering what she’s seeking. After some minutes she unearths, with a kind of unmindful relief, underneath a sloppily flung tea cozy, a plate of wizened chapatis atop a bowl of sour curd. The two’ve been abandoned there by a miffed Aya after they were spurned as inedible by her chum Kishori; to woo him anew, she’s hauled him off to a blockbuster weepie.

  Shyamanand dunks a good many spoons of sugar into the curd and, before plunging into glutting himself with it, debunks it as outright rancid. Near the bottom of the bowl, half-alive and certainly kicking despite a marathon smothering in a universe of curd, lie, on their backs, two enormous, mocha-brown cockroaches, their legs and antennae orbiting as though they’re pedalling, upside down, two invisible bicycles. They look altogether content, all but about to coo to each other.

  Urmila, in her blouse and petticoat, is at the door of the lavatory, clenching herself for the ordeal to come. Yet (like Jamun at that point of his maturation!) she, in a manner, likes to visit the loo more than once because, as she’s times out of number apprised her tittering children, without any glint of waggishness, it’s the one pocket of the house where she can be free of them and their father.

  She pauses when she hears Jamun ask, ‘But are they bad for the health? What if you fry them crisp, maybe they’ll taste yummy, like fingers of chilli-chicken.’ Chin on fists, elbows on table, tubby face scanning the cockroaches like Jehovah spying on Adam and Eve.

  ‘Inform your mother, Jamun, that my food habits differ from hers. When I begin to relish cockroaches, I shall intimate her. Until then, however, she must not presume that we all will stomach whatever she smacks her lips over.’

  Jamun snickers at Shyamanand’s timbre – frosty, disciplined, like a champion skater on thin ice – and at his precision of idiom. With his wife Shyamanand is never inarticulate. He’s most at ease with her, and hence most himself too, just as one doesn’t square one’s shoulders when one slips on an outworn, favourite dressing gown. Jamun glances at Urmila for her reaction and, foreseeably, watches her features buckle into tears. Even a mother’s woe ceases to rend a heart when it becomes as commonplace a sight as the gashed graffiti on one’s school desk. Her brood has viewed on Urmila’s face a handful of the well worn countenances of grief; her wretchedness is not manifold enough to be perpetualy appealing.

  ‘I nibble at cockroaches, is it! After drudging in the office, I scoot home to chomp cockroaches. Yes! For sure! I manage to endure your loathesomeness only by spooning in cockroaches – live, baked, griddled, poached, minced, curried, stewed – an entire menu, along with spider
s, toads . . .’ Urmila ebbs away into hushed, unintelligible moans, like the soughing of the sea on distal sands. Measuredly, like a dulled, ironwilled drum, she begins to pound her forehead against the doorpost of the lavatory. The clockwork thud of bone on wood, the gentle mewling and spastic snorts for breath, the tears on her scorched-earth face – these vents of her inarticulation run on for some seconds, yet without sorely incommoding either husband or son.

  Shyamanand then rises, murmuring, ‘This is a real hoot. I’m a villain because I declare that I don’t need cockroaches in my food. I’m still hungry, though. Is there anything in the fridge, Jamun, that I can chew these chapatis with? Cheese? Honey?’

  Urmila shambles forward, atremble. ‘But how can you be so beastly? To presume that I was trying to shovel cockroaches into you–’

  Shyamanand screeches at her. Some particular about her, or her entire being – the thin, penduline meat of her upper arms and thorax, her unfailing expression of harassed grief, the ageing shapelessness beneath petticoat and blouse, the belly distended, thickened by parturition, the brow ploughed by the aeons of discord, the mulish, strangled psyche – gals Shyamanand to lose his habitual soberness. ‘SHUT UP! I don’t want to talk to you at all, on this or any other subject! Please get back to the lavatory, for that’s where you belong!’

  So Urmila sloshes his chest with the ladle of the curd bowl, unpremeditatedly. She could never’ve designedly clouted any creature; she’s too chastened. The unexpectedness of Shyamanand’s snarling nearly concusses her; in reflex, to stave off further horrors, she bats him with the first object at hand.

  The cockroaches hotfoot down Shyamanand’s vest (trailed sedately by crawling driblets of curd), bound on to the table, and scurry away like two triumphant spearheads fleeing their demented fans at the cliffhanging close of a football tie.

  Stillness, for a minute. Urmila totters back a pace or two, exhausted, appalled at herself. Shyamanand, almost as disturbed, stares unmindfully at the dabs of curd on his chest, resembling stranded alpinists on a precipice. The solitary thought in Jamun’s skull at that instant is (in the manner that we have, when thunderstruck, of conjuring up only the ridiculous, the fantastic) that if Shyamanand thwacks Urmila in requital, she, infirm that she is, will never be able to retain her clenched sphincter.

  ‘Oh, but that’s no tiff,’ that’s bloody foreplay,’ pooh-poohs Kasturi, ‘compared to how my parents maul each other. Though they still do have it off – maybe twice a month. I know, because ‘I’ve spotted condoms in my father’s wallet, in slithery pink plastic packaging. You positive that your parents don’t sleep with each other, say, twice a year? At Diwali and Holi or something? So what if they’re fifty plus? Because they all itch to mount and tup, even when they loathe each other.’

  Jamun spends twenty minutes rooting about the house for a vase that won’t leak and finally returns to Urmila’s room with Doom’s porridge mug. His nephews dog him like the bogies a train engine, and huddle around him, ghoulishly curious, to gape at him compose Joyce’s anniversary roses. He notices that Urmila’s eyes are open, that she appears to be observing him, but he says nothing. ‘Aya’ll be livid,’ pronounces Pista joyously – ‘livid’ is one of Joyce’s pet words – ‘when she finds out that you’ve used Doom’s porridge mug for these flowers.’

  ‘What time is it?’ asks Urmila.

  The brats instantly forsake the roses to crowd her bed. ‘Ten-fifteen,’ replies Jamun. ‘You must be feeling too flaked out to even contemplate that stroll.’ Urmila pulps the meat about her right collarbone and looks befuddled, inert, far away, adrift; so he plods on, ‘We could step just fifty paces – even twenty . . . We’ll pull up the instant you feel wobbly . . . The kids’ll accompany us, Doom could even ride his tricycle . . . The weather’s terrific . . . The sea air’ll fumigate your head, it’s more wholesome than the jadedness of your room . . . . Today’d be a super day to launch Haldia’s cheapest advice on – your anniversary . . . Joyce’s roses are even lovelier than the gladioli – weren’t those lanky ones gladioli? – that Philip Jonas colourwashed your hospital cubicle with . . .’ Thus he natters on, because Urmila voices not a word but, compliant like a sleepwalker, acquiesces in whatever he pilots her to. So she slips on Pista’s gym shoes (which nip her toes ludicrously, but the novelty, the sentimentality, the bounty of the offer she’d never’ve been able to withstand), tidies up her sari, unsnarls her hair, practises her weight on one of Shyamanand’s walking sticks. She vivifies and speaks only when Jamun hands her her spectacles. ‘No, I don’t need them.’

  ‘Of course you do. You won’t make out where you’re trudging to, or on what you’re treading. Spectacleless, you’ll return with even your ankles daubed with the droppings of various organisms. To sidestep the turds of pissed fishermen is more important, wouldn’t you agree, than to appear in front of them as evergreen, lustrous-eyed and sexy?’

  ‘I am not exerting myself and stamping out somewhere only to goggle, in razor-edge focus, at the pus, sputum and nightsoil on these pavements. Spectacles aren’t, at my age, meant to help me to peep at yuk, to wince, shudder and swerve!’

  ‘But this is India! Heh-heh. Wisecracks aside, let’s march. Your first constitutional shouldn’t be stalled by either my measly wit or your worthless vision.’

  He doesn’t exhort his mother any further to put on her spectacles; he knows that she abhors her pair as much as he his, that she’s, time and time again, sought to mislay them, shatter them, or forsake them in thronged places. In this matter, neither mother nor son are swayed wholly by vanity; they, ever so often, actually like the snugness of blurred surroundings, the fuzzy sensation of existing in a mammoth, tepid, soft-focus womb, wherein skulks no peril, for in that indistinctness – in which a fulgent sword and a silver hawk are one, and a human skull can well resemble a white clown in dark glasses – all contours of menace can soften to appear cosy, like those of a timeworn, favourite pillow with its individual smell.

  ‘Besides, you’ll be there, Jamun, alongside me when I totter and plod. Can’t I trust you to keep me apart from the shit? After all, what are sons for?’

  ‘Well, Baba isn’t tagging along with us, if that’s what you mean. Though he should – it’d profit him too.’

  Urmila, Shyamanand’s walking stick, Jamun, two gambolling, factious nephews and one cherry-red tricycle. Shyamanand shambles out to the ground-floor, and Aya to the upstairs, verandahs to spectate, root for, and chuckle. Urmila – shrivelled, roundshouldered, befuddled – falters twenty steps to the gate, halts and begins to plead exhaustion, giddiness, twinges in her joints, murmurs in her heart, proximal death. She and Jamun bicker till she starts to snivel; then, peeved with each other, yet muffledly pleased with their wrangling, continue their amble, down the lane, through the wicket in the boundary wall of the housing estate – and thence into the hurly-burly, the snarl, of the hutches of the fishermen.

  Scattily mumbling and squeaking her strictures, Urmila, spectacleless yet Argus-eyed, inches past the hovels (of brick, mud, asbestos, pilfered boards, cardboard, canvas, jute sacking, motley flapping polythene, yesteryear’s newspapers) crested by TV antennae, the yawning sewers of rank, pestilential ooze the tint of pus, the scrum of round-eyed urchins, with turgescent tummies and moustaches of snot, frolicking, playing hopscotch, marbles, a sort of cricket, the standby and laidup dinghies, scummy, mouldering, at close quarters disagreeably large and seemingly unwieldy; the fishing nets, their measureless rhomboids of cord somehow resembling a sea of sloughed off snakeskins desiccating in the sun; the paan stalls, all mirror and white tile, like a loo for the villain of a Bombay movie (but with a paan wala in it! – perhaps crosslegged on the commode, with his paan leaves in the sink), whinnying out the trendiest Hindi boogie-woogie; about the stalls, dawdling, the lotuseater generation, in Ulhasnager Calvin Kleins, painstakingly scruffy, mincing and posturing as though modelling for cigarettes, aftershaves, condoms, shunning till lunch their warrens, their mothers and the chores that�
��ve been deferred for weeks,’’ clutching, cuddling, squeezing one another’s hands, waists, thighs, arses, genitals, in that lubricity wherein anything will momentarily sate, even a straggling pig, as long as it tussles; the sickly, knackered palms; the yards of washing on the shingle behind the shanties; the squash of housewives in the quagmire around the handpump, scouring puling toddlers who forget to blubber when they spot Doom’s tricycle; the fearsome pong of a billion fish parching on perplexing cement slabs the size of double beds; the stridor of shrewish bickering, of matrons snarling at plastered husbands, of a hundred bicycle bells, the unthinking yawping of dulled hawkers, cubs squealing bawdry and arraigning one another with cheating, the undying Hindi film muzak, which, by the time Urmila fetches up at the hem of the row, has melted into a syrupy ghazal with a timbre whose opulence seems to ooze from the wrinkles between the crooner’s anus and scrotum; then, sensing before feeling on their skins the muggy breeze, they tack with the compound wall to squint at the calloused sands and a steelish sliver of sea.

  ‘Oof. Some stroll,’ bleats Urmila. ‘I’ll sink into this for just three minutes, try and revive before returning. Oof. Never again.’ She and Jamun subside on to a pink-stone bench on which, over the donor’s mawkish proclamation, has been etched by a zealot: ‘JESUS IS COMING SOON’ beneath which has been postscripted by a wag: ‘TO HELP US CUNTS WHAM PAKISTAN IN CRICKET, AND HOCKEY, AND WAR’. Pista and Doom, tricycle forsaken, scamper away to gawp at the monkeys jig and whirl; rather, Pista lopes off and Doom wobbles after him, mighty dome and jumbo rump touch and go on his isthmian shanks.

  Jamun watches him totter away. Doom’s podgy gawkishness irrepressibly reminds him of the distresses of his own puppyhood, when he too was derided for ungainliness, for nosediving without reason every five paces, for losing every single scrap that he was baited into, for bawling at all nicks to his body and his heart, for being hopeless at marbles, kiteflying, treeclambering, for being selected for a game always at the butt end, just to eke out a side. Jamun had assumed that Doom would intuitively cling to him, simply because Doom raked up Jamun’s own puppyhood, and therefore in disposition they must be one. He’s rancorously tickled to elicit from the years that tenderness between kin is never instinctive, never just a spinoff of cognation, that Pista and Doom do not adore him out of some fathomless consanguineous sympathy, that fondness – among uncle and nephew, and parent and issue – has to be assiduously fostered, like a dimpled babe on its back, on a fresh sky-blue sheet, ogling its mum and gurgling.