The Last Burden

by Chatterjee, Upamanyu

  On Urmila’s thirty-seventh wedding anniversary, Shyamanand and Jamun are burping away their lunch and Jamun’s puffing away at a cigarette when Doom, looking uncertain, sidles up to them, scratches his right knee out of a kind of misgiving, and quavers, ‘Thakuma’s on the floor, and is not getting up. I shouted in her ear, but she’s not getting up.’

  Breathless with the exertion, Jamun and Aya heave Urmila. back on to the bed. She has urinated in her petticoat. ‘You kids buzz off so that we can change Ma.’ The kids don’t budge. ‘Pista, can you bring me Haldia’s phone number? Thanks.’ Shyamanand collapses on the bed and strokes Urmila’s ashen strands back from a brow puckered with some gagged agony. ‘Now what?’ he falters to himself, twice. ‘Now what?’ Her mouth is open, like a cave on the face of a mountain. ‘Maybe she’s snoozing,’ moots Pista unsurely. Her each inhalation seems the outcome of a slow and turbulent contest. Pista chats twice with Haldia’s answering service. Burfi says that he’s zipping home that very minute. After some fifteen minutes, just before the doctor calls back, Urmila starts to twitch and groan, gently. Her groans sound like shrieks from a remote dream.

  Her sons stand about her bed. Jamun, worrying his lower lip, loosens the strings of her petticoat. ‘What’s she saying?’ mutters Burfi, sallow with anxiety. ‘She wants something, doesn’t she? Something’s pestering her.’ Then, bending over her gunmetal face, long fingers rambling across her cheek, ‘Ma, it’s me, Burfi. Ma, what is it?’ He straightens, grimaces at the wall, and shakes his head theatrically.

  The moans swell in urgency, become quicker. The ruts in her temple deepen with the struggle, her eyes half-open, but sightlessly, her lips slip off her teeth, her skull starts to thresh about like a fish scooped out of a rivulet and tossed on to some shingle to die. Burfi clutches her shoulders, as much to bridle himself as her. ‘Ma, what is it? What’d you like, tell me. Do you want water? Ma, are you thirsty?’ A hint of a shift in pitch in her moaning, a sort of adjustment in its phasing, connotes that no is the answer. ‘She understood me, God, what a relief . . . Ma, is the room too muggy? Shall I open another window? . . . What, d’ you feel cold? Would you like me to switch off the fan? . . . I can’t follow you, Ma, what’re you trying to say . . . D’you want a third pillow? . . . Are you comfortable? Or shall we roll you over? . . . Is the light upsetting you? Shall I draw the curtains? . . . Maybe she’d enjoy a cold-water compress . . . Is some part of your body chafing you? . . . Oh shit, what an idiotic question. . .’

  They continue to watch her purgatorical face – the skin the pallor of the sky at dawn, the dishevelled hair, the gullied forehead, the rictus of anguish on her lips, the string of gold about the neck – and the bloodless, forsaken hands, the cracked feet. Beside her, Shyamanand’s spine has looped over in defeat. ‘She won’t return from Haldia’s this time. I know it. In my bones, I know it.’

  All at once, Aya squawks, rattling them all, ‘Of course, I know what Ma wants!’ She lunges forward, clacking distraughtly, ‘She wants her hair combed! That’s what she’s missing! Don’t you remember? After lunch she always sinks into that easy chair by the window and combs her hair for some fifteen minutes! Then in the evening, after her bath and before subsiding in front of the TV, she plaits and buns her hair – I know it! If you make her sit up, then I could brush down her hair.’

  A flutter of Urmila’s eyelids, like moths on the wing, and, amidst the twitchings of her head, a distinct affirmative nod. Burfi and Jamun tug her up from her shoulders, but Urmila can’t sit straight in bed, and instead keeps listing over like a tipsy lush in some slapstick. Doom starts to titter. Finally, Jamun squats behind her and grasps her arms. Aya, murmuring in triumph at her own discernment, begins to unsnarl the luxuriant salt-andpepper tresses. Urmila’s moans mellow into weak purrs of cosiness. Her forehead eases, the jaws slacken, and over her features glides a sheen of light like a shadow across water.

  Before they start out for the hospital, Burfi and Jamun climb up to the roof of the house to puff a hurried joint. Burfi’s proposal – ‘We’ll need to be high, you realise, to grapple with those quacks and that carbolic acid. After all, it’s Ma, and not just an aya or something’ – readily assented to by his brother Shyamanand quaveringly wails from the foot of the stairs, ‘How much longer will you be? Every second is vital at this stage.’ Jamun brays back, ‘Coming, Baba! Burfi’s pretending to rummage for some cash, hoping that we’ll lose patience and beseech him to forget his contribution.’

  The sons cart Urmila out to the rear seat of the car. She seems to be an abominably heavy, shoddily clothed, broken doll. Burfi sits in the back, her head in his lap.

  At Haldia’s, on the single visible stretcher at Reception, sprawls an orderly – uniformed, bestubbled, with feet as malodorous as his yawning mouth, into which Jamun rams a hundred-rupee note.

  ‘Ten rupees’d’ve been enough for the fucker,’ grouses Burfi as they trail the attendant, virtually waltzing behind the stretcher.

  Doom’d been idling about when Jamun’d packed an essential bag for Urmila. To leaven the air, he’d bunged a foil of sedatives at the child. ‘Here, have some of these, Doomdoomo, they’ll develop you as an individual. Leonardo has four of them with every meal.’ But Doom hadn’t even picked up the strip from the floor. ‘No, why should, I? I’m not dying,’ he’d retorted pipingly, and clumped out of the room.

  At Intensive Care, Urmila and Malodorous are swished in. The bewhiskered matron shoves her knockers out at the brothers and orders them to wait beyond the glass doors. Burfi proposes that they find a spot where they can at least smoke a cigarette. ‘Here we go-o-o again,’ he warbles, and then appends, drily, ‘being milked by Dr Rotunda for thousands and thousands and thousands of rupees. Shit. What a life.’

  Jamun is chastened by his extreme exhaustion. Nothing else appears to wriggle into his skull. This is the real life, he ruminates messily, this fatigue, these aching calves, this bedpan world. We’ll never know for certain whether Ma wished for anything other than the braiding of her hair. A primal remorse oozes through his veins. We can never express the true sentiments – love, devotion, kindness – we can never act humanely, while those whom we cherish are healthy and alive. At that moment, to Jamun, this thought seems as indubitable as the precept of Genesis that a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh, and shall spawn a litter which in due time will leave its father and its mother to cleave to and be one flesh with a spouse. Thus existence has trundled along for thousands of years, and will chug on till Time itself peters out, and its hellish and dreadful designlessness is at last immaculately clear when one witnesses, at close quarters, the sickness of death.

  The waiting room down the corridor is steel-blue and lugubrious. Jamun blows smoke rings at the nearest No Smoking plate, and watches Burfi whizz through a magazine. All at once, Burfi stops at a page, frowns at it and starts to read. Must be an article on kinky sex, muses Jamun.

  ‘Listen to this, Chutiyam Sulphate . . . “Pierson is one of the three hundred or so children each year across the United States who murder one or both of their parents. Fathers are most often the victims . . . In court more and more children are arguing that they acted in self-defence, admitting readily to the crime but pointing to years of abuse that left them fearful for their lives . . . Sociz” – however that’s pronounced – “Junatanov, who worked in his father’s restaurant, hired a thug to kill his father. When the knife-wielding assailant failed, Junatanov’s girlfriend crept into the hospital disguised as a nurse and injected the wounded victim with battery acid. That attempt also failed. Junatanov lined up another contract killer to finish the job – but this time the hired assassin was an undercover Los Angeles police officer . . . Last year a jury in LA acquitted him of all charges after hearing lurid testimony of years of physical, emotional and sexual abuse by his father. ‘The jurors came up and hugged him,’ said the Defence Attorney . . . In another case, Ludwig initially denied that he
had been abused . . . ‘Kids are so ashamed,’ explains a psychiatrist, ‘they even try to convince outsiders that they deserved the beatings. These kids are like prisoners of war. They can’t think straight any more’ . . . well over ninety per cent of children who commit parricide have suffered physical, sexual and mental abuse . . . Most such children are found to be suicidal . . . Pierson, a quiet and somewhat immature teenager, says that her 240-pound father began sexually abusing her when she was about eleven, progressing until he was having sexual intercourse with her as often as three times a day. She claimed that he even molested her in the car on the way to the hospital to visit her mother, who died some years ago . . .” Sombre stuff, isn’t it? Baba should wade through this, and remember it whenever he bleats that in our time, the spaced-out Hindu tradition of undisputed reverence for one’s elders has been degraded by the influence of the sordid West, where a child hasn’t yet learnt to esteem its papa in between his four daily rapes of her. But then the West is youthful, and has much to imbibe on the subjects of tolerance and maya. Daddy’s squat prick, looking much like the Police Commissioner in Mandrake, grinding into her mouth after every meal or something – that ingenuous, Polish, second-generation American must realize that Papa’s phallus does not exist, that it’s actually in her head, and not between her teeth.’

  Jamun wishes to demur that he doesn’t need to be diverted from their immediate extremity in this manner, but he isn’t certain that Burfi’s approach to the crisis isn’t the correct one; if one conducted oneself as though one were only waiting in an anteroom for an inconsequential interview, or to endorse one’s train tickets, then perhaps one could really push off after a while and not return morning, noon and night, day after day after day, just to stand about for a death.

  They can see their mother only the following morning. ‘She’s better now, much better,’ affirms a charlatan whom they haven’t encountered before. He is colossal, in a turquoise safari suit and an Alfred E. Neuman face. He expresses himself in Hindi, Punjabi and English – by the sound of it – all at the same time. ‘I declared her out of danger at’– for some reason, he peeps at his watch, which is about the size of a planet – ‘four this morning. She’s half-conscious, and her speech is somewhat intelligible. For sure, she’ll tend to confuse time and space for a while – for instance, she fancies that she’s at home now, and once or twice has asked after some Kishori and one Ratna Garbha – your maidservant or something, I presume. The instant that her system stabilizes, we’ll ferry her off for a Catscan’ – simpers – ‘to worm out how her blood’s been trifling with her brain.’

  An interrogatory moan as they file into the cubicle; they can’t discern much in the half-light that transudes through the black panes. Urmila’s face is the ashen tint of the room.

  ‘Ma, it’s me, Burfi. Ma.’ Her eyelids quiver, but she doesn’t swivel her head towards the voice.

  A twilight brain in a twilight room, a drugged sluggishness, a webbed silence. What rest, in an incorruptible, measureless freedom. In that pillowed owl-light, Urmila confounds her sons with her physicians, and twice demands of Neuman why Jamun doesn’t come down for his tea. ‘He fritters away all his time upstairs with Kasturi, shunning us,’ she grumbles, or they presume she does. She wants to know whether twenty rupees has been deducted from the sweeper’s pay and why Burfi has not remembered to turn off the pump after the cistern’s topped up. So she unveils a subconscious that is almost wholly –and embarrassingly – cramped and domesticated; yet these rodent-like scamperings within her skull seem unthinking, mechanical, and despite her slurred murmuring (what Alfred E. calls her ‘strenuous cerebral activity’), in her insentience she is untrammelled and altogether free.

  The Catscan den is elementary sci-fi – ochreous domes, winking computer screens, courteous bleeps, lubriciously gliding, rubber-swathed slabs, crystalline, schematic light, soundless footfalls, bespectacled moustached whitecoated whizzkids. Orderlies slide Urmila from her stretcher on to a ledge. Jamun marks that the left side of her face has buckled, much as Shyamanand’s had more than a decade earlier. Had it not been for her extinct, half-open eyes, the askew features would, for a moment, have looked pawky, sardonic, even attractive. She groans deeply, from her bowels, while Alfred E. struggles with and at last twists off her golden earrings. ‘Can’t have metal underneath the scanner,’ he chortles. Jamun wants to stretch out and, like talons, clench Neuman’s mammoth wrists, impede them from arousing an agony that skewers even Urmila’s numbness and extorts such groans from her vitals. ‘Old-fashioned earrings, these,’ deplores Newman, pushing his upper lip all but into his nostrils, and spilling the rings into Jamun’s palm. ‘Like diffident virgins, they don’t nestle in your paw without a little force.’

  Elfin, golden marigolds. Jamun’s eyes fringe with tears as he thumbs his mother’s earrings. They are exceedingly dainty, patterned with mastery and restraint. As a thumbsucking toddler, he’d incessantly yawped and whinnied to be carried so that he could be within mauling reach of these rings and the flesh that had encased them. But that flesh had now departed, and in his hand the marigolds were heartrending, the terminal remains, like dice abandoned in the dupe’s palm after a punishing and brutish game. He tries to hide his tears from Neuman’s embarrassed glance.

  In his initial days in the insurance office, Urmila’d telephone him now and then, chiefly to chuckle, and to ‘see how it feels to hear you in a job, to conceive you actually jotting things down in a file, you, my own child. I should call your boss and disclose to him that you’re horribly cantankerous and, not so long ago, regularly flew off the handle because I wouldn’t permit you to tweak and grind my earlobes while you sucked away at your left thumb . . . Ah, but what’s twenty years, Jamun . . .’

  In the week that Urmila wastes away in hospital, his wits, in their disorder, ever so often conjoin the queerest, most disparate images. Her leaden countenance one forenoon, for example, with its unseeing eyes, which are flecked with the grey of a sort of bitter fear, suddenly, without reason, recalls for him the face of the lawn at home when it’s not been hosed for days, when, beneath the chalklike topsoil, he’s visualised the crust to be skeined, by fissures, like an omnipotent’s chastisement of their neglect. Other unrelated impressions also prod him to the brink of tears. When he stands futilely beside her bed, her exhalations waft to him the weakened fetor of carrion, as though her entrails are merrily rotting away. Throughout that day (and in his understanding, the two happenings – her breathing and the impression that his features have skewed – are cause-and-effect) he is overwhelmingly convinced that the left side of his own face has petrified and yet, somehow, at the same time, sagged dreadfully. Its skin feels glacial and inanimate. Time and time again, he buoys up his left cheek with his fingers, and (adopting the manner of a narcissist unthinkingly caressing his own face to encourage his dilatory introspection) unobtrusively massages it.

  Hindi film ditties on television one evening. The sons, the daughter-in-law, the grandsons, easefully viewing and sneering at the beggary of the music. A weepy sixties idol cheeps and warbles to this screen goddess that she’s far-out, a damn sight more gorgeous than the swollen moon, and much sexier than some Urdu word that Jamun surmises means a come-hither simper on the face, of a sexbomb, and that Aya contends denotes simply the sun. Shyamanand wolfs down his dinner by himself in the dining room. After he’s burped and wheezed the food down, he hobbles past the television on his way to Urmila’s room. Perhaps the very sight of Joyce, her dome slanted in vacuous vanity, eyeing the screen with a daydreaming half-smirk, looking quite through her father-in-law, vexes him, because he abruptly draws up to ask the loungers, ‘Shame on you all. Is this the hour that you consider suitable for Hindi movie muck? While your mother’s dying in hospital?’ He limps on across the room. He’s begun to doss down in Urmila’s bed from the evening of her departure for Haldia’s, an act the irony of which bitterly entertains his children. ‘What’s he aiming to prove?’ Burfi has scoffed. ‘That
he can glide into Ma’s bed only when she’s away in a nursing home? So he loves her only when she’s absent and dying?’

  ‘There’s nothing unseemly or sinful,’ counters Jamun, tense with guiltiness at Shyamanand’s comment, ‘in lolling in front of a TV while Ma recuperates in Intensive Care. She isn’t Indira Gandhi, you know, that we’ve to hurtle out into the streets and thwack our tits to voice our grief.’

  ‘Grief! How can you even conceive,’ sneers Shyamanand from the door, ‘of sorrow in your bogus, looking-glass age? To you, a wimp in a Hindi movie, tweeting the tropes of intimacy, is more moving than your sinking mother.’

  Was it that same evening, or the following, that Naidu and his hound look in to ask after Urmila? ‘So? Is she on the mend?’ bays Mr Naidu, wobbling on the balls of his feet in the centre of the drawing room, fuzzily hopeful that if he contracts his tummy and thrusts out his boobs, his five-foot-four’ll somehow spiral to six feet, at which Joyce’d swoon with lust for him, instead of simpering witlessly at the television. ‘Who’s with her now?’

  ‘God, I imagine,’ murmurs Burfi, struggling to comb Doom’s hair.

  ‘No, I mean, who of the family’s in the nursing home at this moment? Because I notice that all of you are here.’

  ‘We assumed you knew. Ma’s in Intensive Care and they head off relatives in there; we aren’t needed in that situation either, just mooching about outside the glass doors, burning for a fag –’

  ‘But someone should be there.’ Surprise in Mr Naidu’s inflection, and a gentle but distinct reproach. ‘A blood relation should be with her all the time, a husband or a son. What are all of you slouching about here at home for? What if she – Heaven forbid – expires right now? A nurse’ll telephone you to suggest that you zip across at once, because the case in Cubicle C has passed away. Would you like that? And if she regains lucidity and asks for one of you, she’ll be told that her sons are at hand only at eleven in the morning and at sundown, so she’d better surface once more round about those times.’