‘I’m going to make myself some tea,’ she announces, intentionally altering her tone and the subject. ‘Would you like a cup? And have you nibbled at anything since the morning? Because you look ghastly as usual, peaked – as though you’re tuberculous. You’ve totally lost the cherub of your adolescence . . . Ask your father whether he too wants tea. Now that you’re back, you can bicker with him, and keep him off my back awhile.’
Yet Shyamanand is no rogue. He only hankers after the love of his children, and is befuddled and piqued that they plainly prefer their mother; of course, he can never grasp that she’s simply a better human being, softer, more merciful. Instead, the years of fosterage creepingly persuade him that the fondness between mother and sons is potent only because it’s genetic, is the primal sexual bond between father and daughter, and mother and son; this conviction itself pillories him because it is he who’s always yearned to sire sons, and chortled in triumph even at the birth of his grandsons. ‘How’ll you escape,’ he whoops to Burfi, ‘the bliss of manliness? So what if your wife, that dear adorer of matriliny, pants for daughters?’ He’d been apprehensive in Jamun’s case, jittery that a second male child would be a godsend beyond his portion.
Hence he’s exquisitely taunted to see his sons cleave unto their mother, and the eldest crawl from her to his wife.
‘Please don’t bother me, Jamun, with this drivel. All that I implore of your mother is that she not speak to me, on any matter. Is that too much to hope for? I want to sidestep all discord, friction. I’m sorry, but your mother frets me dreadfully. Her droopy, doleful face, her washed-out voice – a martyr hanging on despite indescribable torment – the monotony of her world, all tea, food and TV – her entire disposition, her stodgy questions that drag out the day – Should she cook curry or fry the fish? Would you like chillies in the dal? – fatuous questions because nothing in our house improves, ever – everything about your mother galls me. She conducts herself as though without her I’d croak, instantly, and at the same time, the tuckered out tedium on her features when she’s helping me with anything – my bath or my clothes – far exceeds the irksomeness even on yours. You know full well that the most well-meaning exchange between your mother and me can detonate a squabble, so I wish to shun all dialogue with her.’
‘Great, but your heroics won’t work, not with your body in this state. With one operative arm and leg, you just have to depend on Ma and me. And we aren’t really hellhounds, are we?’
When Pista and Doom start to fidget, Jamun proposes that they return home. ‘We’ve been here for almost forty-five minutes. Not bad, considering the fuss you kicked up.’
But Urmila seems averse to struggling up from the bench, to losing three peaceful listeners. She’s begun her analysis, voiced scores of times in the foregoing two months, of exactly how Shyamanand has expended some of his beloved money on resurrecting her, only because he yearns for someone to needle and goad, and because he realizes that he’ll be gradually abandoned by his brood on Urmila’s death, like an object no longer of value, a fusty dressing gown, or a gramophone when one has bought a CD, etcetera.
‘That’s your wishful thinking,’ Jamun caustically interrupts her, half-nettled because he isn’t certain that she isn’t correct; he credits her with singular, impressionistic astuteness because she trusts the heart.
‘In those horrible years when I didn’t have the cash for soap and bread, when my salary was chewed up by the ridiculous claims of middleclassness – income tax, school fees, Provident Fund subscriptions, titanic deductions for loans for this house – Aya’d ever so often sizzle at me, “Tell your damn husband not to squirrel away his small change for the future. There is no future. Assert yourself against this farcical arrangement, by which he stashes away his money while yours frisks out of your fist like a frog.” But I could never carry weight with anybody – your father, Aya, you two, anybody. And dredging cash out of your Baba is as smooth as milking a bullock – or Burfi, I should add. Now – how derisive it is! – life will jeer at him again and again.
‘I’ll never forget one particular scene from his hospital spell a decade ago. His limbs were lumpish, stagnant. His left eye started out like a marble embedded in a jelly of blood – crimson and cream. His left cheek’d been yanked down, and reminded me somehow of linen being tugged off a clothesline by a grumpy servant. In his paralysis he didn’t want to be gawped at by anyone, I guess, because he strained to curl himself up, away from me, when I neared the bed, but he couldn’t – his entire left flank was frozen. He moaned with the struggle, a gentle, dull mewling. The notion then jolted me – that with minds, with souls, like ours, the real miracle was that our bodies didn’t warp and buckle for decades! Within us all twitches and froths so much wrath and envy, malignity, churlishness, yearning – all weltering – that the body must, by and by, slump, moulder to express this enervation. At last, Baba’s frozenness seemed to declare, this is the real me, undistorted; in this ice flesh is sheathed the real life.’ Urmila, silent for a moment in remembrance, then tousles Pista’s hair and murmurs bemusedly, ‘You two need haircuts. Come, time to shuffle back, check what your grandfather’s been up to.’
5
THE COLD SWEAT YEARS
Jamun was then seventeen, or thereabouts, at the start of the cold sweat years. In fifteen months much befalls his family. Burfi marries Joyce – altogether confounding Shyamanand – and is yanked away from home by work. At fifty-eight, Shyamanand retires from government service. Urmila endures the ordeal of a perturbingly late menopause. They quit their government flatlet of a decade and occupy their very own shred of earth, of rock and desert sand, by the sea. A dying Aya is shunted to a charitable TB clinic. Jamun and Kasturi, for the first time in their lives, mount each other, love it, and reconnoitre thereafter, for ever and ever, for cloistered space. Urmila rebuffs Shyamanand’s conditional offer to repay her debts. She surprises everyone by agreeing to spend a fortnight with Burfi two thousand kilometres away. In her absence, a blood clot gags an artery somewhere in Shyamanand’s skull and benumbs his left arm and leg. The stroke also chokes his vocability, shrinks it to a sort of slurred moan.
July. Hot rain in the afternoon. Shyamanand presumes that he’s alone at home. He feels intolerably listless, subsides into a basket chair in the downstairs verandah. Other houses, unsightly in their incompletion, have sprouted all about him. He likes the notion of frenzied brick-and-cement activity in the neighbourhood; it suggests that he’s done well to raise a house when and where he did. Yet he’s also peeved that in the last few months he’s lost a prospect of the sea. The rain seems to immure him in its mugginess.
Jamun and Kasturi are upstairs. In the new house, Jamun can presume the entire first floor to be his own – a heady reverie – can daydream how, when, in what position, he’ll have it off with whom, in which room. While Urmila’s away, he can even effectuate a hunk of one fantasy, cajole Kasturi to undress upstairs, convince her that no one ever ascends the stairs, ever fetches up on the first floor save in the fake-winter weeks, when they come looking for the sun.
Both of them say ‘bye to Shyamanand quite early in the morning. ‘Just can’t skip today’s classes. Too crucial. Don’t forget at lunch to finish off that leftover kheer, and if that bastard electrician shows up, please remember the bulb in the fridge.’ Then they exit by the gate, but slink down the long flank of the house, scramble over the boundary wall, edge in by the side door and, snickering with the tension of proximal sexual fulfilment, tiptoe up the stairs.
After his retirement, Shyamanand has in fact become the watchdog of his newly-built house. On weekdays, after watching Jamun hare off to the university virtually at sunrise, he mooches about till Urmila scoots, at nine, all helter-skelter, for her office bus. Till six in the evening, when she returns, he’s alone, friendless but for his anxieties and the instructions for the day that his wife and son assign to him. ‘Don’t pay the dhobi until he satisfactorily explains that violet blotch on my bedspread.’ Th
is injunction, for instance, will flounder in his mind alongside the concern: if I don’t bribe the Corporation Surveyor when he drops in for the taxes, by how much will he jack up the dues for this year? ‘When the electricity vanishes for three hours this afternoon, will you remember to boil the milk?’ Burfi is now distant, unlikely to return to this nest other than evanescently; in due time Jamun’ll also take wing: then what’ve I struggled to erect this house for? A home is for one’s children. When Urmila and I die, who’ll occupy and care for this house? For a dwelling needs to be fostered as much as a child or a parent. My sons, empty of sentiment, will lease the house out to some moneyed stranger, who’ll be displeased with its tectonics, will propound hideous alterations, to which they’ll readily assent; our edifice will be as effaced as our remembrance.
Watchdog. Day after day after day, for months, Shyamanand positions himself behind the curtains of the drawing room to spy on the gate, or the outmoded tallboy in the dining room to watch the boundary wall of the house, and five yards beyond it, the compound wall of the estate, behind which infringe the fishermen, the beach and the sea.
He rather enjoys the cameo of snooper, though his misgivings about vandals are not wholly groundless. The housing colony is new – even unexpected, since it’s been erected on land that the Corporation never objectively believed could be reclaimed from the wastelands that sprawl, like layabouts, by the sea. Within months surge on that barrenness imitation chalets, villas, manors, lodges and, diffident among these vulgarities, the smaller, shyly imaginative bungalows of those who, like Shyamanand, raise a home with some of a mother’s passion. The stir of construction over a good many acres – precisely the steadfast bustle of ants about their business – allure to the colony the wastrels, scroungers, tramps, the irremediably down and out, all rooting about for the odd job, their daily bread, the fast buck; some of these become the inept nightguards of timber and expensive stone, and the observers of the unlatched backdoors on some yawning afternoon. The buzz of the neighbourhood – of an audacious midday housebreak in the outlaying quarter of the estate, or of gold earrings gashed off a screaming housewife on the colony’s most teeming street by a deft pillionrider, or of the knifing at his doorstep, of the acquaintance of an acquaintance, by a rebuffed salesman – disconcerts the residents; at fifty-five plus, most of them only half-relish the notion of being pioneers, as it were, in the colonization of some acres of wasteland. Many of them, disinclined to view their prudence as panic, cordon their verandahs and pattern their windows with iron grilles of hideous design. ‘These grille patterns of all these houses,’ observes Burfi on his first sojourn, ‘would instantly send any thief for a long shit. Quite brilliant.’ A handful of families pick up enormous curs with tongues out of a cartoon strip; deplorably, the curs are scared shitless of the neighbourhood strays, are adroit only at furtively fucking the local bitches; other households economize and, though dogless, append dictums of warning on their nameplates: ‘Chandrakant Mohanty. Joint Medical Superintendent (Retired). Former Additional Health Officer. 64 Sagar Estate. Beware of Dog.’ For those who don’t comprehend the caution, beside the bellpush, perhaps, will be a portrait, on a tin plate, of a cur, usually a hybrid of Mickey Mouse and the Phantom.
Possibly Shyamanand doesn’t wish to squander any money on a pet, or on admonitions against it, electing rather to spy on his own house from within – to twitch at each jangle of the doorbell, every clang of the gate, to suspect, and wrangle with, and scoff at the assertions of identity of, unknowns through closed windows: of inspectors of the Corporation water supply meters, and footweary saleswomen (salespersons!) from the local bakeries vending cookies that stink of egg and vanilla, and fund collectors for vicinal welfare organizations – to garner for the evening, when Urmila and Jamun return, alarmist anecdotes of the day, of larcenies and thuggery snookered by his cleverness.
Now and then, Urmila and Jamun do return home together, if by four in the afternoon, Jamun is nauseated by the route of his day – by the company, the smut and hilarity, the stupefaction of pot – he buses the ten kilometres to his mother’s office so that they can both take her department bus home.
He enjoys the long ride with her, snug, becalming; his guilt at shunning his parents for the whole day is dulled. Her usual moroseness is magically effaced whenever she sees him at the door of her room. However, when they plod the few steps from the bus stop to the house, they feel – at the image of Shyamanand immured in the house, rambling from room to room with his unsociability – shyly dejected, much as though they’ve been whooping it up at his expense, as though he’s incarcerated himself only so that they can junket without a care.
Jamun presses the doorbell, but hears no responding tinny first notes of Jingle Bells. The bell is one of the million items of dissension between Shyamanand and his son. Jamun considers it vulgar, a bell befitting that sort of household in which the refrigerator, television, telephone and stereo system are all crammed into the drawing room, as luxuries to humble the visitor with. On this subject, as on practically all others, the sojourning Burfi sides with Jamun against Shyamanand, and Urmila is weakly neutral ‘Jeez,’ Burfi remarks, ‘Jeez. Thank God I don’t stay in a house where the doorbell tinkles out fucking Jingle Bells. Why doesn’t Baba prance around dressed up as Hanuman instead?’
No electricity. ‘Revolting,’ grumbles Urmila, subsiding into a verandah basketchair. ‘No more voting for me. Our electric meter’s probably ticking away, though – perhaps they’re charging us for sweating it out.’
‘We could complain, if you like, to the Department of Maya and Public Grievances, heh-heh.’ Jamun continues to knock on the front door, louder each time. His knuckles start to hurt. ‘What’s the matter with Baba? Without the fan, he can’t be snoozing that heavily.’ He thumps the door a couple of times more, and bridles himself from glancing at Urmila. ‘I’ll check the back. Perhaps he’s in the loo or something.’
On the wall alongside the lately transplanted cactus, with the juice of a few squeezed neem leaves, has been illegibly scrawled a couple of Hindi words that Jamun intuitively knows to be smut. Brow corrugated by anxiety, speculating confusedly over which visitor to the house could’ve scribbled the filth, he tests the side and rear doors. Bolted. He hears Urmila pummelling on the front door. He has to resolve the problem somehow, if only to stall her dreadful buffeting.
He ends by clambering up to the first-floor rear verandah by way of the grille and the overhang of the kitchen windows. It isn’t easy. He’s further enervated by his uneasiness and the lassitude of the ebbing elation of marijuana. The door to the verandah is luckily unlatched. He lurches down the steps three at a time. Shyamanand is in bed, unmoving, with eyes shut. Jamun halts only to check whether his chest is heaving, then darts to let Urmila in.
Shyamanand is asleep, a dead, macabre hibernation. They stare at him, both rattled and relieved, half-scared to wake him up. The febrile stillness of the room is disturbed by the stifled stridor of traffic and Shyamanand’s sluggish, rasping inhalations. Urmila, never to remain quiet for long, begins, with a few clucking sounds, to murmur the expected anxieties. ‘How can he doze like a corpse in this swelter? . . . Through all that thwacking on the door . . . Is it his medicines, should we call in that new quack that he’s been . . .’
Jamun yanks back the dusty curtains. He suddenly notes that Shyamanand’s face appears unusually dark. He isn’t certain whether the light is beguiling him, or whether his father’s skin has actually blackened – without warning, overnight – or again, whether the overshadowing has in fact been a stealthy process of weeks, and Jamun it is who is marking it even now. But the darkening is eerie, direful. The blood seems to’ve curdled just beneath the skin of the face and, in a manner, decided not to return to the heart. The jellying appears to’ve softened the skin too, like that of an overripe fruit.
About his hairline are huddled some grey, translucent slugs. In a second Jamun realizes that they are globes of cold, cold sweat, marshalled on
Shyamanand’s forehead like snails at a symposium. The largeness and viscosity of the pellets spellbind him. They seem exudations more from the brain than from the skin, like the oozing on the lid of a faulty, scalding pressure cooker, as though the tumult in the cauldron of his skull has concussed him into this comatoseness that surpasses heat and sound, has vaporized through the skin to cool and coagulate on his forehead, each cold slug a token for every thousand dis-appointed desires of a long, miserable life.
A faded T-shirt, Burfi’s reject, now soaked in sweat; a chequered lungi so shabby that even Jamun would’ve dithered to wear it to drop a letter in the dark; but Shyamanand is a monumental hoarder of trifles, to each of which is affixed for him an evocation, a sentiment; he would’ve lived abundantly better had he learnt to transmit the feeling from the objects to the creatures connected with them, but he’s always found it easier to cherish the inanimate rather than the vital.
‘I’ll just change my clothes and return,’ whispers Urmila. ‘Don’t wake him.’
Jamun subsides into the chair behind his father’s writing desk. He’s been frightened by the entire episode. He reminds himself that it’s not yet done with. He glances now and then at Shyamanand’s profile, overshadowed, goodlooking, dormant. When his father dies, he broods entangledly, the circumstances’ll be identical; Shyamanand will be alone, impounded by choice, in a prison house of his own making; the electricity will unofficially fail; to Shyamanand, the mugginess around him will, somehow, arbitrarily, image the vanity of living, he’ll slouch about the house, sweating, opening cupboards and unlocking memories till, overmastered, he’ll gulp down a handful of his Calmposes, and abate into this numbness; and, sluggishly, cold, opalescent, plump maggots of sweat will foregather on his forehead.
The Last Burden Page 20