The Last Burden

by Chatterjee, Upamanyu

  Shyamanand subsides against the bedrest alongside Urmila’s head and watches the hushed confusion of the room – much like a venerable, yet still Argus-eyed watchdog, of the species which fealty recalls from retirement for one last, dauntless vigil. On one of the times that Jamun passes the bed on some chore, Shyamanand hisses to him, ‘Have you noticed that the Christian isn’t present? It is significant, you realize, that at the instant of your mother’s death, Joyce wasn’t at home, or even in the city.’ Pista slouches up to Burfi. ‘Baba, can I go outside and play with Ramu? I’ve finished my homework.’

  Jamun telephones and notes, with a kind of drab, distant surprise, that the voice from the crematorium is discerning and sympathetic, and that, seemingly, one can incinerate the dead without a bribe, without queueing up for days, without being badgered for one’s School-Leaving Certificate and the corpse’s Civil Supplies Card, and without filling in sixteen different forms in Hindi.

  The van from the crematorium draws up at four in the afternoon. On the first-floor verandah, Aya, clutching an unenthusiastic Pista to her udders, starts to bawl most dreadfully as Urmila is shouldered out. Pista’s neighbourhood chums sidle up a couple of paces with fistfuls of petals for Urmila, chicken out and chuck them instead at her loadbearers. ‘But where are the other women of the family?’ demands Mr Naidu, fantasizing, perhaps, that Joyce, wildeyed and threnodic, should be sagging over the railing of the top verandah, with arms outstretched in doleful yearning to tug the cadaver of her darling mother-in-law out of the departing van.

  A mammoth hall, black with burning. Pigeons fluttering and whirring away their lives near the ceiling; the several windows, expansive, munificent, are open to ensnare the dying light. Burfi haggles with six unclean adolescents and finally selects two. They are all priests attached to the crematorium, or so they gabble as they crowd one another, and for two thousand rupees will blether some decorous Sanskrit verses over Urmila before she is shoved in. Since he doesn’t appear to be paying, Burfi at first is not disposed to bargain. Luckily, Jamun points out to him in time that Shyamanand and his sons are aiming to split the costs. Burfi whittles the two scummiest urchins down to a hundred rupees. They moult their Bruce Lee and Ninja Turtle T-shirts and anoint their foreheads with what looks like shit. The contused, purple lips and fleshless chest of the senior lout, by reminding him of Vaman, inflames Jamun with a spurt that makes him shudder at himself. He watches the sleazy stripling more than the dead face of his mother in the thirty minutes that the jokers waste over her remains.

  ‘We should keep back the blood relations of the deceased,’ commends to Shyamanand a podgy hireling of the crematorium, a sort of master of ceremonies. He hasn’t pushed his belt through the loop above the seat of his biscuity trousers; the belt has capered up his dorsum, thus shaping a corniculate beige pouch over his arse. ‘Where are they? Now and then we light on some near and dear ones whom the state of things whips up, and they lose their marbles, and at the very last moment, just before the body slides in, they do their damnedest to hitch a ride on it.’

  Urmila is trundled into an outsize furnace at five forty-nine. The condolers shuffle up to Shyamanand, Burfi and Jamun, look manful and dribble away. The three of them drive home in a kind of sad, relaxed quietness, as though they are returning from a railway station, to which they’ve frenziedly careened to get a beloved friend to board on time, fearful throughout the rush that they won’t pull it off, and after they’ve made it, have been thoroughly sucked out by the backwash of tension. Aya and Pista are perched on the culvert beside the gate, a bit timid of the darkened, empty house. Burfi and Jamun swathe themselves in their mourning dress, namely, yards and yards of unstitched cream cloth. Neither they nor Shyamanand quite know whether there exists a correct and tasteful way of enveloping oneself in a sort of bale of lining. They try out diverse styles; all look cute, Vivekanandavian. Burfi, vain even in sadness, starts to posture in front of the full-length mirror that’s set in the cupboard in Shyamanand’s room. ‘Hey, this actually looks pretty neat . . . . especially if you drape the stuff over one shoulder and under the other . . . Not bad, huh? . . . Are we to have these on for twelve days or thirteen? . . . You mean, continuously? . . . But how the fuck am I going to exercise with this outfit on? . . .’

  Aya reminds them that for the days of mourning, they’ve to eat plain, vegetarian food, and, to stave off Urmila’s spirit, wear iron next to the skin. ‘An easy method’d be to slip a twine about your neck with an iron key or something on it.’ She and Pista are sent off to forage in various shelves and canisters for iron objects; they can’t ferret out any. Pista is fairly eager to see his father and uncle with some unwieldy thing about their collarbones, so he asks whether Shyamanand’s ancient shaving mug’ll serve. ‘Couldn’t you two put it on in turn? One in the day, the other at night? Shouldn’t I also wear something? If I had my Rambo Special, I–’

  ‘Shut up. Besides, it’s enamel, not bloody iron . . . Let’s just forget this entire iron business. Can’t we, Baba? As it is, I could never be petrified of Ma’s spirit – not Ma’s, at any rate, if you know what I mean, and I don’t mind if it hovers about my ears for the rest of my damned life.’

  ‘And certainly, when Joyce returns from Bombay tonight, you’ll be somewhat abashed to face her in this finery – and whatever will her exemplary Christian upbringing make of some obscurantist iron about your neck, bicep, or third finger?’ Shyamanand pauses because Burfi doesn’t seem to’ve heard a single word; with his back to the looking-glass, legs solidly apart, he’s swivelled his nut around to a yogic degree to study what his bum looks like in mourning. ‘The sonofabitch,’ he is communing with himself, ‘must fall well, like fucking water – God, this looks as though my sphincter’s going nuts straining to hold back a whopping squirt . . . Sorry, Baba, were you saying something?’

  ‘No, nothing important . . . The two of you’d better gulp down something before you zip off to the airport. It’d be unfair to expect of Indian Airlines that Joyce’s airbus’ll touch down on time – they haven’t averaged a punctual plane a week since the moon landing. You might’ve to cool your heels there for hours. Did Aya remember to check when she bought this lining cloth how much was needed for each person? . . . . Had Chhana been here, I’m positive that she’d’ve known what else one has to abide by during mourning. Did you read her last letter in which she’s tried to explain why she can’t come? Most dubious . . .’

  At the airport car park, Burfi declines to debouch from the front seat. ‘Not in this gear, please. We look like the fucking terrorist wing of some new, homosexual Buddhist sect. You watch. They won’t even let you in.’

  Jamun crosses the asphalt, feeling more selfconscious and awkward than melancholy. He is certain that in the saucers of amber light from the compound lamps, he must appear freakish, a tragedian out of a neighbourhood playlet. At every step he dreads to hear exclamations and derisive guffaws. ‘To carry off togs like these,’ Burfi has professed on the drive out of the city, ‘you need the mug of a Chink.’ Because he seems to have on his hands far too many yards, Jamun has wrapped the cloth about his legs so often that, he now discovers, he has virtually immured them; each tread of his carries him only a few inches forward. With these short, twinkling paces, like those of a very fat creature in a flurry, he fetches up at the foot-high rails of the enclosure and finds that his dress does not offer his legs enough leeway for him to step over them. A woman in a nearby car cackles, and he is sure that she’s glimpsed him. Grinning to himself in embarrassment, he raises his robes to just below his crutch and hops over the spikes. But an idle cop, an undesirable, saunters up and wants to know what is what. By the time Jamun manages to persuade him that he isn’t a Surd or Assamese or Mizo or Kashmiri or Pakistani or Tamilian or Sri Lankan terrorist, the board announces that Joyce’s flight is forty minutes late.

  In the car, Burfi unthinkingly gnaws his lower lip and starts to blether, ‘Too late as usual, isn’t she? She couldn’t wait – “I’m e
ntombed in your house,” she spumed and bubbled, “by illness, death and the evocations of those who dislike me.” She wasn’t here, and Ma’s gone, she’ll never lay her eyes on her again, and now everything’ll come apart –’ He fidgets, tries to light a cigarette and, all of a sudden, gives way to tears. ‘Every bloody second, I’ve been thanking my stars that I didn’t chaperone them to Bombay. As long as you see her every day, she’ll remain alive. I should’ve pushed that further. As long as you’re at hand, watching her, she’ll live. As long as you rivet your eyes on her, and never blink, she’ll revive.’ He scrabbles about for a rag to blow his nose into, once or twice fingers the fringes of his mourning outfit, and finally settles on the flannel in the glove compartment. After honking endlessly, he sighs and slews to an easier subject. ‘One’s diverse allegiances yank one – at the same time – in so many different directions. I mean, to whom is one first pledged? Is there any one to whom one is more beholden than to others? Parent? Or guardian? An aya? Spouse? Or one’s favourite floosie? Or one’s child? But which of them? One’s first son or fourth daughter? Tchah.’

  He potters about the house for half an hour the next morning, asking his brother whether he should exercise, suffixing that he’d feel better for it, and that life must go on. At eleven, in nipping, sunny weather, they all – Shyamanand, Burfi, Joyce, Jamun, Pista and Aya – drive to the crematorium to collect Urmila’s ashes. Shyamanand and Aya remain in the car. The others are steered to a tiny, arid lawn. It is fringed by a slatternly hedge and two half-dead jacarandas. On a concrete bench, on its side, lies an open, blackened, queerly shaped container, much like the extracted glove compartment of a gigantic car. It contains some charred and ashen deposits, like the sooty flakes and chalk at the end of a long barbecue. Diffidently, Burfi stretches out towards the bench the bowl of burnt clay that Aya has picked up for them to be Urmila’s last vessel.

  Burfi has at first wished the receptacle to be in brass, ‘or bronze, or some such metal, you know, class. This mud pot’s damn lumpen, as though we didn’t want to spend too much cash.’ But Aya has illumined him, declaring that we should revert to the potter in a chastened shell, etcetera.

  With a kind of spatula, an orderly spades a handful of ashes into the bowl. Burfi roofs it with an earthen saucer. They all stand about undecidedly. They’d blurredly supposed that they’d return home with every fleck of Urmila’s remains, and not with a modest cupful. Or rather, in their befuddlement at an unprecedented experience, they’d supposed nothing, but when they actually face the singed chips of her bones, feel bizarre to be forsaking some ninety per cent of her to some hireling’s whimsy.

  ‘Any other service, saab?’ asks the attendant, with the inflexions of one who covets a fat tip and your prompt, subsequent disappearance. His tone rouses them into simpering their thanks at him and sidling away. Burfi cradles the urn close to his chest, and snaps at Pista not to get under his feet.

  Pista can’t wholly believe that his grandmother is now an accumulation in a smudgy box, of cinders, scorched bones and ashes, and that his father is bearing away a slab of her, perhaps her foreleg or left shoulderblade. He begins to feel less awestruck as they shuffle further away from the orderly and his container, and to disgorge his inquisitiveness in an accelerating strafe of unanswered questions. ‘That black box was really Thakuma? . . . but I thought once you burnt someone, he never came back . . . Can I take a bit of the ashes to school? . . . Can I travel to Haridwar with you, please? . . . Didn’t you say that they burn many bodies a day? Then where’re the others? . . . How d’you know this one was actually Thakuma? Could easily’ve been somebody else, couldn’t it? . . . Couldn’t some stranger have substituted his wife’s, so that the cops never nose out her body? . . . What happens to the blood when it burns? It should become fat and thick, like kheer at Diwali . . . And the hair? . . Was that white stuff bone? How do the bones shatter into such small snips? . . .’

  No one hears the boy’s questions. He registers with Jamun now and then, tottering as he tries to mince only on the limewashed stones that edge the footpath, tossing his interrogations into the air, ricocheting them off the sparrows and the gulmohars, with each tread the lank strands bobbing on his sizeable dome. Jamun realizes – but leadenly, dully – that Pista is in fact fairly pleased at his grandmother’s death. Jamun isn’t goaded enough to dissect why, but out of a kind of illwill, he slants towards Burfi and murmurs, ‘Pista seems pretty thrilled, doesn’t he, with this business. Gruesome little bugger.’

  Burfi nods, without having seized a single word, At that selfsame instant, Jamun, all at once, is dreadfully ashamed at having divulged to Burfi his impression of Pista. It betokens to him both his balefulness and his lack of control. Malice, he jumbledly recalls, was the one sentiment that his mother’d never expressed, and certainly the only way to commemorate her was to emulate her, was to release oneself from the instincts in one that’d never been fostered by her. One had to atone for her passing by bettering oneself. Jamun reaches forward and tousles Pista’s hair, but the dolt doesn’t even wheel about.

  On the drive back home, Shyamanand expressionlessly examines the earthen bowl and, gazing blindly out of the window, remarks that most of the ashes that Burfi has so reverentially carried to the car are actually bits of gutted coal.

  Kuki shows up at eight the same evening, sleek, well brushed, in a shirt the shade and texture of his skin. ‘I was away yesterday,’ he stutters to Jamun, almost in self-defence. ‘I didn’t know till this afternoon, when Haldia phoned me. Sorry.’

  ‘Can you curb yourself today from swigging your routine six pegs? We’ll amble down to the beach instead, and I’ll stick you to a daab or two.’

  Casting about for a vacant bench, they saunter past the wastrels, the dope fiends, the turtledoves, the hawkers, the promenaders. ‘Kuki, Haldia might not’ve told you, but at Ma’s last checkup, which was the day before she was carted off to Intensive Care, he messed me up by declaring that her pacemaker was defunct because its batteries were oozing or were dud or something. But before I could figure out what I was to do with what he’d told me, she’d had her heart attack. I’ve been wondering this past week, you beefeater, whether you dumped on us a dildo for the price of a pacemaker.’

  ‘Hey, don’t fuck me up like this.’ On the right fringe of Kuki’s upper lip sprouts a rash like smeared lipstick. I’ll definitely quiz Haldia on what he confided in you, but those pacemakers aren’t toys, you know, cobbled together in Ulhasnagar or Kalyan by dropouts who chomp their fingernails and daydream of breakdancing in a Hindi movie. They’re A-one stuff, and in my eight – no, nine – years in this racket, this is the first time that I hear of leaking cells in a pacemaker. Tell you what, give it to me, and I’ll have Haldia test it; if it’s sound, I could flog it again. Save you a cool fifteen thousand. But how’re you all travelling to Haridwar? Have you worked that out?’

  Changing the subject, Jamun senses, is Kuki’s way of stating that to propose, after a death, to the supplier that his defective machine triggered off that death, is both futile and tasteless, because wholly speculative. Jamun can’t decide how to react. ‘We’ll fly to Delhi, and rent a taxi or something there. A flunkey from Joyce’s office is getting us the plane tickets. Us means Burfi, Joyce and me. My father wants to accompany us, but we aren’t so certain that he’ll be able to endure the three hours with Indian Airlines and the five in a cab. Let’s see.’

  ‘Have you arranged for the drive from Delhi to Haridwar, or should I fix a car for you?’

  ‘Could you?’ A rotund girl hoots and points Jamun and his outfit out to a younger, even more rotund boy whose face, from cheeks to chin, is hidden behind rubescent candyfloss. ‘Kasturi’s husband is mooning about in Delhi nowadays. She’s asked him to organize a taxi for us, but he seems a fairly hopeless guy.’

  For the next two days, he and Burfi potter about the house in their pendulous and impure white, confronting the faces of commiseration. The rooms feel dreadfully silent. Jamun s
eems to hear only the drag of Shyamanand’s left foot as he aimlessly shuffles about from room to hushed room. Father and sons sit for hours about Urmila’s bed, and feel sad and companionable. In the sunlight that sidles in through the windows, swathed in the yards of homespun, Jamun begins to realize how befitting his clothing is. His dress, that he is to wear continuously for thirteen days, makes him feel penitent and unclean; only its wrinkles and limp crumpledness seem real, and in a manner venerable. After sundown, in the days of mourning, when he ambles down to the beach to take stock of what he knows of his mother’s life, his vestments of sorrow make him stoop and cringe his shoulders. He feels that his feet, as they sieve through the sands, are particularly cracked and unclean; his robes appear to mantle him in a kind of sacredness, and he senses that in a way he’ll miss them after he’s peeled them off.