He finds that he can’t get up from his chair. The bidding to rise somehow never reaches his limbs, instead becomes clogged in the benumbing sludge that is now his blood. When sitting, insensate, grows more insupportable than the idea of standing up, he, with a prodigious effort, lunges upward, and instinctively, crabbedly, clutches at the wall to check himself from tumbling. His left leg does not take any weight, and feels like an outsize cricket bat trussed to his hip. He supports himself against the wall and on his right leg. In his bewilderment, he’s bitterly scared.
Heaving himself along the wall, he reaches the door of his room, and drags himself past the cupboard. Its mirror stuns him. A frenzy of ivory hair above the features of a nightmare. The entire left half of the face has been zestfully yanked down, as by a malevolent child; the eye, crimson and terrified, balloons out like a caricature. He touches his cheek, and tries to prop up its skin. It feels glacial, as though wafer-thin frost has veneered his real skin.
He slumps on to his bed, on his dead hand. His nerves seem sound enough, he thinks confusedly, to transmit pain. He jerks up his left leg with his good hand, and topples on to his pillow. He is shuddering with dread and fatigue. The bounty of two prime sons, but where are they when they’re needed the most.
Between his stroke and Jamun’s appearance, time must’ve glided by, but Shyamanand doesn’t sense much of it. At one point the Jaico wallclock that Chhana’s gifted Urmila and him seems to say two-thirty; at another, seven-fifteen. He time and again shut his eyes, praying that when he opens them he’ll again be back in his old world. He writhes and twitches about in a hundred different positions; each is intolerable after a breath or two. His throat is altogether dry, and he again and again swallows his spit, audibly, like the lapping of the sea on shingle. His mouth won’t shut, his lips have withered.
He knows, but can’t face, that something hideous has happened – is happening – to him. In the tumult in his skull also skirrs the notion that the crucial symptom of a heart attack is an insupportable pain in the chest – perhaps he hasn’t suffered one.
A blood clot somewhere in the brain, proclaims Haldia. But getting Shyamanand to him isn’t that easy. Jamun can’t drive, he’s never shown the least interest in learning how to, so their own car is of no use. He telephones two local taxi stands; at one, the cabs refuse to drive towards Dost Garden. They won’t, grouses the lout on the phone, come across any return fare in that part of the city. At the other, no one disturbs his siesta to pick up the receiver. Jamun calls Haldia and ashamedly explains. Haldia surprises him by despatching his own car and chauffeur.
Who – podgy, safari-suited, smartassed – helps most unwillingly to shoulder and haul Shyamanand from his bed to the car. While Jamun and the driver struggle with his sandals, Shyamanand, clenching Jamun’s shoulder for support, mumbles to him, ‘I’ll be too heavy for you. When we move, I’ll rest my weight on this fat bugger, as much of it as I can.’
At Haldia’s clinic, a swarthy, hirsute matron badgers Jamun with, ‘Have you arranged for a night sister? Who’s to tend to the patient at night? Give him his water and his bedpan? Isn’t he your father? Maybe you yourself’d wish to stay. I could recommend a tip-top nurse though – my own daughter, terrifically seasoned, fifty rupees a night, most reasonable.’
Haldia and his perfume waft by. The redolence seems to exude from the doctor’s downy skull. ‘Nothing at all to fret about, dear . . . Your papa hasn’t lost his consciousness – just a tiny cerebral thrombosis . . . His speech’ll pick up not to worry . . . Only his left side’s packed up, which is – I mean, had his right failed, would’ve been a deal more nasty, his memory and perception might’ve been damaged, he wouldn’t’ve been able to do a good many routine things – ’Haldia halts on his way out to think of a truly dire example. ‘Couldn’t’ve signed a cheque, for instance. Have you contacted your mamma, dear?’
Jamun telephones Kasturi and telegrams his mother and Burfi. Kasturi says that she’ll come over right away. ‘I’ve arranged for a night nurse for my father,’ Jamun declares, grasping her by the shoulders in his ill-disciplined excitement, ‘so we could spend the nights together, at least till Ma returns. She and Burfi’ll receive the news only tomorrow – at the earliest. Posts and Telegraphs can also be banked on to fuck up the text of the telegram: “BABA STROKING NURSES AT HOME. COME SOON.” And then there’s Indian Airlines, the Ol’ Faithless, a multicrorerupee Russian Roulette Corporation. For your mother you could cook up –’
‘But aren’t you,’ Kasturi looks truly, disagreeably perplexed, ‘anxious firstly for your father? I already feel sinful that he was becoming paralysed downstairs at the very time that you and I – all but plumb above his head – were billing and cooing to each other. Like Mohandas mounting Kasturba in the adjacent room while his father snuffed it. I’d’ve presumed that, with your lofty driving forces of duty and compunction, you’d’ve darted to stay the night beside your father.’
But she moves in anyway, for two nights, carting her derision and her unease with her. In the mornings she sets out for the university and Jamun for Haldia’s, to replace the night nurse, and to listen to Shyamanand’s slurred bellyaching against her incompetence and his own condition. Then he feels guilty at having lain with Kasturi all night – but a guilt not insupportable, indeed a sinfulness unspokenly acknowledged as the spinoff of a greater pleasure. ‘I could doss down here at night, Baba, in place of that cretin, but then who’d guard the house? Ma’ll be in this evening, then we’ll change things.’
Kasturi drives Shyamanand’s Ambassador to the airport. Urmila looks dulled with uncertainty, but in her eyes seems to slink the tint of a sort of triumph. Burfi is markedly more reassuring. ‘Terrific job, Jamun,’ a thwack on the shoulder. ‘If you hadn’t returned in good time from college, God knows how much worse Baba would’ve been by now.’ Jamun notes, as always, how Kasturi perks up whenever she meets Burfi.
‘Now that Burfi’s going to drive, we could maybe drop Kasturi home, Ma, on the way to Haldia’s?’
‘Uh . . . I want to reach there fast. Kasturi can easily grab a taxi or an auto from the nursing home.’
In the car, while Burfi belittles its state of disrepair, Urmila declares, in the voice of one who wishes her hearers to swallow that she’s speaking only to herself, ‘I should never, never’ve gone away. He needed me, though now he’ll never concede it.’ She reaches out to touch Jamun. ‘Could Haldia get closer to the exact time of the stroke, to how many minutes or hours passed between the attack and your discovery of him? No? Because that’s crucial, I was told, every second matters in the cure of thrombosis . . . Dreadful if he lay benumbed for hours and you were in the house somewhere and didn’t know. Didn’t your Baba beseech you at once to summon Chhana?’
She and Burfi are horrified when they see Shyamanand. Urmila begins to weep, chilled by the thump with which his paralysed face recalls that of Belu on the evening when, over forty years ago, he deadened his body with a glut of rat poison. Shyamanand’s mien underneath the disfiguration, like Belu’s, looks despairing and forlorn. He gawps at Urmila without blinking, but can’t stare Burfi in the eye.
He stays in the nursing home for a fortnight. Despite Haldia’s stratagems, he neither sleeps nor defecates for six days. ‘Not to worry, my dear,’ mews the doctor. ‘I’ve known bowels which haven’t moved for forty whole days.’
‘At the butt end of which,’ breathes Burfi into Shyamanand’s ear, inciting his entire body to shudder with laughter, ‘the bowels themselves began to resemble Haldia.’
Who calls in diverse electroand physiotherapists, cardiologists, neurologists, to survey Shyamanand; each stays for seven minutes, asks the same questions and, while waddling out, sotto voce to Jamun, charges the earth. Shyamanand hates them all, and on the fourth day, after the quicksilver visit of a dietician with gulletgagging bad breath, begins to demur, with a singlemindedness and cogency that augurs well for his wits, that he’s frittering away time and hard cash at Haldia’s
, and that he craves to return home. Each such clamour of his is parried by the vinegary curtness of the bewhiskered matron and the adamantine yellowness of the doctor’s dentures.
Chhana telephones from Calcutta on the second day; Jamun says that he’ll check with Shyamanand and let her know the following evening; Shyamanand pooh-poohs the notion, or rather, mumbles his pooh-pooh: ‘Nonsense. She need not waste a good many hundreds just to come and goggle at me on this bed, struggling to defecate.’ So Jamun tells Chhana, ‘Rush. He declares that you needn’t show up, but I presume that he’s just acting gruff and cute; he’s in fact dying to have all of us bob and bustle about him.’
The solicitous faces of his niece and his sons around his bed – a rare sight that swathes Shyamanand’s soul in warmth. Chhana tries for a while to dredge some information out of the doctor on duty, but he – obese, leucodermic, stagnant – has no clue about anything. Burfi strokes and pinches Shyamanand’s icy foreleg, and exhorts him to struggle to budge it. ‘Can’t you shift this bloody mace at all? Even a few inches?’ Shyamanand can, and swerves his foot about on the crumpled hospital sheet like the death spasms of a plump reptile.
‘I can’t raise my leg though, not more than an inch or so, and not without bending my knee.’ Shyamanand’s new voice is screechy, more whingeing. He moistens – almost smacks – his lips for each syllable. His facial muscles – all blubber and skin – wobble alarmingly with the strain of enunciation. His buckled face maroons as he struggles again with his leg.
Burfi, ever on the lookout for novel, arduous callisthenics to test his body with, clasps the big toe of Shyamanand’s left foot with his thumb and forefinger and, at arm’s span, without crooking his elbow, tries to lift the benumbed limb to the height of his own shoulder. ‘Boy. Oye, Jamun! This is a fantastic exercise!’ Burfi cocks himself up on his toes and arches his back to yank Shyamanand’s leg to a crest before restoring it to the mattress. ‘Phew. Bugger, you should try this. Super for the forearm and tricep.’ Chhana and Jamun cluster around the bed; to the snarllike chortling of Shyamanand and the derisive encouragement of Burfi, Jamun begins chancing his arm with his father’s leg.
Not since their puppyhood, it appears to Shyamanand, when they used to lark around together, indivisibly, before their irrevocable maturation tugged them adrift, have his sons sported with him in as joyous, as artless, a manner. He shuts his eyes and feels with delight Jamun snort and wheeze over his toe; he should die just then, he realizes with a sudden, extra squirt of rapture, in that very breath, for he’ll never happen on a more opportune time. He blurredly recalls that a poem, or a line, that unerringly images his present sentiment, exists somewhere, that he can, perhaps, even recollect the phrases if he slugs his wits about a bit. ‘Jamun, you boob. You’re bending your bloody elbow.’ Shyamanand’s leg thuds down on the foam cushion. ‘Oof – careful, you bugger! If you can’t handle it, then lay off, but don’t fuck up the leg.’ ‘Fuck you right back. You think I did that deliberately? Just fuck you.’
This kickoff of a squabble between his sons – once an everyday stridency, now rare, and dulcet, because it seems to recall a shard of their pasts – prods Shyamanand afresh to share with his children his gladness, and his fancy of death, but his tongue is too turgescent, lumpish, to be malleable.
He watches, with his grimace of a smile, Jamun riposte Burfi’s vocal lunges. The brothers set themselves out in leisured positions about the room to keep up their slothful, trashy wrangle. ‘Bloated namby-pamby fucker. If you didn’t frig four times a day, you’d’ve been able to heave up Baba’s leg.’ ‘Better than you, VD. At least, the entire world never shrieked with laughter whenever it saw the results of any exam that I’ve ever taken.’ In their genial slanging match, they seem to’ve forgotten his affliction. Nothing had changed, it was good.
To the father, friction between his sons is a pointer to their affinity; that is, they are close enough to each other to, now and then, spit sparks. With the years, Shyamanand recalls sentimentally, Jamun’s trained himself to more than hold his own against his elder brother, to match him jab for jab. ‘Chuck me a cigarette, yaar, Walldrooler – shit, one can’t even smoke in here – come, shall we step out for a drag? Will be back in a second, Baba.’ Walldrooler. A happy coincidence, that Burfi’s used the very nickname for Jamun that dredges up out of their pasts the scenes that Shyamanand himself has been, at that moment, daydreaming of, of the time before Jamun’s articulation had ripened enough for him to parry with speech alone, when he’d banked instead, for expression, on clenched fists and the squeals of rage.
When he’d been four, and Burfi eight, and of an evening had played ice-pice together – or rather, Chhana and Jamun’d fruitfully wheedled his brother into joining them, because Burfi was eight, and far too weathered for silly ice-pice, and at least acquiesced only because his brother and cousin agreed to play the game in a novel way – wherein both Burfi and Chhana became dens, shut their eyes and, snickering, counted till hundred, while Jamun, atremble with excitation, waddled off to hide.
They nosed him out within seconds, every time, and hooted and cavorted about, while he, riddled, with tears tipping his eyes, goaded their guffaws to fuel him to detonate.
Months of this ice-pice before Burfi begins to feel really just too dreadfully adult, and once for all to wind up the witless sport, discloses to Jamun that as long as he keeps to his obnoxious, and comical, habit of licking the wall wherever he toddles, he’ll never be able to camouflage himself from anybody, because the damp, rapidly evaporating smudges of his licks, like the trace of the moist heels of small shoes, will immutably guide his stalkers to him.
Good to hark back in this fashion to the years of their nurture, Shyamanand doughtily reminds himself, it’ll keep his senses from his present frozenness. He observes Jamun push his spectacles up the bridge of his nose to read better the level of the glucose in the upside-down bottle above the bed. But nurture was frightfully labyrinthine, and one never knew what accrued from what. As a parent, for instance, one hadn’t been opportunely aware that one’s child savoured the lime on walls because he was probably deficient in calcium; when, less than a decade later, the boy needed glasses, one wasn’t certain whether his vision’d been damaged by the negligence of a faulty upbringing, or whether it was true that, in any case, the children of thirty-five-plus mothers tended to physical weakliness.
So Shyamanand returns home in two weeks, uncontrollably happy. Joyce has attempted to transfigure his room – drape his bed in vivid linen, locate on his desk a few uncluttered inches for a carafe of gladioli. Burfi and Jamun half-buoy him from the car to his easychair by the window. They are startled to note that his rapture at returning home has edged Shyamanand to tears. ‘When I suffer my next cerebral – no matter when, three months, or twenty years later – I’m not stirring from this room. All of you, please remember – next time, no Haldia, no hairy matrons, no enemas, no shock treatment. If I’ve crashed to the ground somewhere, just haul me to the bed, draw back all these curtains, play crescendo on your stereo that Gershwin that I like, and open, open wide these doors and windows, so that sparrows can streak in, with the moist wafts from the sea. That’d be enough for me. Then Heaven can wait.’
Shyamanand mends, but really stealthily, inch by inch, over years. That is, from being totally bedridden, he is able – with effort that is fitful, lengthened across a good many seasons, that is countered by prodigious bouts of morose, downhearted torpor – finally to hobble about aided by his thick bamboo walking stick, unescorted within the compound walls of his house. He improves because the hankering to live never actually abandons his limbs, despite his, from time to time, yawping and snarling out the opposite; furthermore, he recognizes, little by little, that with time the anxiety of his flesh and blood for his condition shrivels – through the routine stages, in waning order, of solicitude, inconstant care, weariness, irksomeness – to a variable blend of tedium, dutifulness and tempered vexation; the dwindling concern of Urmila and Jamu
n for his wellbeing disciplines Shyamanand to bank more and more on himself. But he recovers only up to a point: for the residue of his life, his left arm remains wholly, and his left leg in part, dead.
Urmila and Jamun privately dub them the cold sweat years – the sluggish, interminable, unremarked decade between Shyamanand’s first cerebral stroke and Burfi’s return on transfer to the city of his fosterage. Jamun conceives the phrase, and Urmila considers it so felicitous that all at once tears film her eyes when she first hears it; for her entire existence in those years has seemed to her to’ve been tyrannized by a medley of fear – terror that Shyamanand’ll die on her hands, when she’s alone in the house and floundering, in a cold sweat, with the telephone book for the right numbers; palpitation, like a clutch around her heart, that the others, the world, will squarely base the culpatibility of his death in her lubberliness; a disquietude with every breath that his strictures, as harrowing and as unexpected as arrows, incited by any subject under the sun, or even by the absence of subject, will maul her right now, this instant, or the next, or the next; an undercover trepidation that she herself will peg out most untowardly, with momentous chores undone, without having tasted the delight of a moment’s repose.
Jamun is menaced too, in those years of cold sweat. The disconsolateness that exudes from Urmila’s soul seems to’ve fattened like a contagion throughout the rooms, bedimmed and sullied them, so that the house itself demoralizes and appears to coldshoulder him. Her apprehensions, fuzzy enough in themselves, dribble into him too – after all, he is his mother’s son, and has been engendered out of the marrow of his fosterers – but with even more fuzzy contours. Hence he also is secretly chilled, for instance, that both his parents, designedly, will die just when he alone is about, too sapped by panic to stall their deaths.
The Last Burden Page 22