The Last Burden

by Chatterjee, Upamanyu

  For she’d been a fairly pious – though hardpressed – votary once, and had installed her josshouse in the middle shelf of her clothes cupboard. For years, in the mornings before she boarded her office bus, for a minute of two, she’s mumbled some Sanskrit and fiddled about with the copper things before the gods and, at the same time, fulminated under her breath against the living – and Shyamanand in particular – for not conceding her more time for them. After her retirement and Shyamanand’s stroke, her prayertime slides to the early afternoon, after her bath and before her spouse’s lunch, which without warning has begun to start precisely, dead on, at one –

  Tch, every piffling event and matter is knotted with every other bloody event and matter. You see, Urmila can’t pray, obviously, before she bathes, and she can’t, that is, doesn’t wish to, bathe until Shyamanand has done with his morning crap – in case he tumbles in the bogs or can’t rise from the loo seat or feels giddy or suffers his second attack or something and blubbers for help; entering the lavatory to assist him’d certainly make her feel dreadfully unclean, and insupportably so if she’s already freshened and deodorized herself by then. But Shyamanand has from his cradle been frightfully constipated, and would’ve shat once a month and been content had he not been harangued from his puppyhood that all eupeptic mortals move banana-like turds just once diurnally, and that too in the morning. He is a lazy man, and his thrombosis has retarded him even further; thus his morning can tarry uptil twelve-thirty (id est, he is not a morning person!); after farting prodigiously till that hour (swilling tea, charmed by his bank passbooks) – most of his omissions are SBDs, altogether masterly, Silent But Deadly – he hobbles into the john, lugubriously (like a tailender inching out to grapple with a quartet of West Indian pacemen), grunts, sighs, groans, snorts and mutters for a time, and hobbles out and towards the dining room for lunch at one. I’m trying to systematize my life, reasons Shyamanand, but Urmila suspects (and Jamun seconds her against her father, as always) that he is systematizing simply to infuriate her, which is possible because for sixty years he’s been markedly more – well, Hindu – about time and punctuality.

  At one Shyamanand ferally pitches into – to belittle and wolf down – whatever is on the table. Urmila must be there, to help him to help himself and to accept the shit. In the cold sweat years, most of her mornings, therefore, are spent in waiting for him to move his bowels; she gains only a few minutes for a bath and a prayer. She doesn’t pray the day she hears, from the bathroom, Shyamanand stagger against the refrigerator. She chugs out, half-scoured, gabbling, ‘God! What happened! God!’ In the minutes that she telephones Mr Naidu to send his servant to heave Shyamanand off the floor, her slapdash, routine devotions to her idols become trifling, almost ludicrous. She continues with them, however, till the Saturday that Jamun returns from the cornershop with a new brand of atta in a really cute canvas bag. Both its sides depict Krishna and his chicks stencilled in violet. To prevent herself from forsaking the bag to the creepy-crawlies in the kitchen cupboard, she introspects all afternoon on what to stow in it that will be valuable enough to match the cuteness of the bag, and decides finally on her gods.

  At the bottom of the trunk, amongst old petticoats and what looks like a mosquito net, lie the silver rattle and Urmila’s paperback of The Good Earth. On its flyleaf, Jamun reads his mother’s maiden name and the year ‘1947’, and beneath, in a more indigo ink and a faintly different script, her married name, ‘1950’. At the foot of the page, she’d once more, in her disciplined hand, inscribed her married name, but this time with Shyamanand’s, ‘1950’. Jamun gazes at the page for a while and feels despondent. To him, the names, scrolled in two antipodal phases of Urmila’s life, compress her wistfulness that perhaps her marriage’d turn out all right. All at once, his eyes brim over.

  And in the book is stowed away the black-and-white snapshot that he hasn’t seen for fifteen years, a frontal of Urmila at sixteen, in pigtails and an impossible oldworld dress that looks like a creamish bra over a coloured blouse. It is the solitary photograph that her children have viewed of her past, of her existence before Shyamanand, for the chronicle of the family photo albums begins with the birth of Burfi.

  The picture of the maidenly Urmila the sons clapped eyes on fortuitously; it had been mailed by Belu and put by, decades ago, in the Pearl Buck as a bookmark, and stumbled on to by Jamun while he’d been foraging in his mother’s handbag for change for cigarettes.

  ‘Wow, she was quite a bomb,’ Burfi, aged twenty-one, mews. Into his eyes slithers a kind of reverence at how much time can ravage. Jamun in a sentimental fit ousts, from the right side of the hinged photoframe above the fridge, of the two portraits of the youthful Shyamanand, the simpering profile, and eases into its place Urmila’s snap. The effect of the switch is quite marvellous, for then from the photoframe two radiant and young faces gaze out at the world together, as though made for each other, deeply in love. Certainly, Shyamanand is peeved that one of his flattering closeups has been so dislodged behind his back; Urmila is thoroughly incensed when he appears to suggest that Jamun has swapped the photographs at her beseeching.

  About the lips there slinks the breath of a smile. At sixteen, for the camera, for the second, the eyes speak a contentment that they’ve never expressed in life. A girlish fleeciness across the forehead. Jamun’s brow corrugates as he tussles with the sudden, elemental idea that this virginal, innocent girl didn’t deserve what the years apportioned to her. Doubtless, his reaction is merely emotional; yet, he is humbled. ‘Ma,’ he mutters to the photograph, smiling in an upsurge of affection for her, ‘the dictums about death are bloody true.’ I mean, where are you now, exactly? How far have you roved in this fortnight? A billion kilometres, beyond Carl Sagan? Or have you only shuttled off to Benares? Or are you right here, in the dust of this room, amongst your analgesics and antacids, as invisible as your memories, and do you perch like a sparrow on these pelmets to observe us? From wherever you are, Ma, you are going to teach me, aren’t you, and knock into my head till it clamps there, that death too is vanity?

  The family splinters with Urmila’s passing, and Shyamanand is abandoned – no, rather, Shyamanand feels that he is abandoned – by his sons. In the car from Haridwar to Delhi, they start to conflict over the sharing of the costs of Urmila’s treatment. Jamun begins it, perhaps guilelessly. ‘I shall have to get down to all those receipts, who shelled out how much to whom for what. A killing business, but we’ll need to set ourselves in order, sooner or later.’

  ‘What’s the hurry?’ Burfi smirks at him. ‘We should let these sensitive issues be.’ His pinks Jamun’s thigh with his forefinger and, pointing to Shyamanand in the front seat, frowns at his brother to shut up.

  Shyamanand waits for a minute to allow Jamun to continue, then asserts, without swivelling his head, ‘No, those receipts should be scanned pretty quickly, and the total divided by three. The longer we shelve it, the more gruelling it’ll be for some of us to lever out our share from someone we all know.’

  Joyce, Jamun and Shyamanand begin to snigger. Burfi remonstrates, unpremeditatedly. ‘But Chhana isn’t around. We shouldn’t split the expenses in her absence.’ The other three chortle even more, and Shyamanand snorts, ‘Chhana! Touch her for a pie! She’s been bountiful enough to all of us.’

  ‘No, balls-balls, so what. She’s been ungrudging because she has the cash. If we judge by our bank balances, she could probably bear all Ma’s costs without blinking.’ Burfi breaks off, manifestly gagged by the uncharitableness of his own remark.

  Joyce pushes in to veil the gawkish moment. ‘You should remember, though, that Burfi’s bank balance is zero for all activity but the buying of outlandish clothes. Four thousand for a zoot suit is a bargain, while fifty rupees for a textbook for Pista is daylight robbery, a disgrace.’

  ‘That’s because schoolbooks and Pista square with each other like acid rock and Vinobha Bhave. I mean, I – we – must slop hundreds and hundreds of rupees every year on
tomes for that bugger, but is our concern ever reflected in his bloody annual report card? He’s like –’

  ‘I’ve been calculating’ – Shyamanand thus prevents Burfi from slewing the conversation away – ‘my personal expenditure on your mother, and it’s close to forty thousand – bucks, as Pista has now begun to say. Jamun has laid out another fifteen thousand, but you –’

  ‘We can discuss this later, please. We’ll have loads of time once we return to the rut.’

  ‘No, no, we won’t,’ horns in Shyamanand, unexpectedly. ‘I know, I know.’ He sniggers in the attending silence. ‘You’re all taking wing, beetling off, I hear – and our house and I are the sinking ship! You fancy that I don’t have ears on your floor! “Now that Ma’s turned up her toes, sticking on in this house will be intolerable . . . At last we can quit this place . . . This epidemic greyness here is most unhealthy.” So shouldn’t we settle accounts before you march out? Perhaps you mean to hustle me out and lease the place to some Sindhi for a whopping sum. You shouldn’t’ve any trouble with that after you fish up her will.’

  ‘Did you glimpse, a moment ago, those eucalyptuses by the road, draggling, withering? That was the – well – vitriol of your sarcasm . . . Look, Baba, I’ve been away from work for nearly three months now, and I should get back, shouldn’t I. I showed up opportunely, and what I came for has occurred, so now I should return. I don’t know what Burfi’s plans are, but you mustn’t assert – or feel – that you’re being discarded. You know that’s nonsense, and that your jabbering in this way only stings us. We’ll work something out – you can come and stay with either one of us, or if you don’t wish to leave home, we could arrange for someone trustworthy to be with you – a twenty– four-hour sort who’ll make you your tea and escort you on your walks, foster you. The future isn’t a rally of insoluble problems, but let’s face them one by one. Shouldn’t we therefore look to the remaining rites – the sradh, the nutshaving – and ensure that they’re correctly observed?’

  A thread of assuaging half-lies – this speech. For the brothers’ve been talking their futures over for some evenings now, and Shyamanand has featured in the chats mainly as a peripheral impediment. Joyce has pronounced that she’s sick of being sapped by the demands of Burfi’s family, and that she wishes to quit, at once, the house and, in the near future, the city; she’s already applied in the office for a transfer, thereby forcing Burfi to reflect on doing likewise. ‘After your rituals are finished – and they themselves are preposterous, for your distance from them – I’m not hanging around in this stinking place for even a second, please understand that.’

  Jamun dislikes her using the word ‘stinking’, and is dispirited that he cannot riposte forthwith. Cocktail time, and he and Burfi are swilling tea. ‘We need a break from one another, I feel, and this seems an apt time for parting.’ Burfi lights a cigarette and is in two minds about offering Jamun one, and finally does so only because his hesitation was fairly clear. ‘Have you decided when you’re returning?’

  Jamun departs two forenoons after the sradh, his skull pallid and cool because of the shaving. Chhana has telephoned from Calcutta to confirm to Shyamanand that she isn’t in the least certain of the ins and outs of the various rites, but trusts that they are all being abided by; in their next letter to her, they enclose a photograph of Jamun, with glabrous cranium, slanting selfconsciously against the wall beside the cactus. Burfi doesn’t razor his head because Joyce has stated that she’ll shudder at seeing him without his hair, because then his ears’ll stick out even more, like bloody trainsignals; so Burfi tells Shyamanand that he truly believes that the woe of bereavement can never be even fragmentarily – and hence shouldn’t be at all – articulated by any symbolic externals.

  ‘It’ll look odd that of two brothers, one doesn’t perform a rite for his mother, and that too the elder. Chat to Jamun, check if he’s earnest about calling the barber tomorrow morning. Either both should or neither.’

  Burfi is surprised by Shyamanand’s counsel, and even more by Jamun’s reaction; he’d rather go through with the shaving, because to him it seems a befitting symbol for starting anew.

  ‘But it’s okay even with Baba if you don’t – as long as we both do the same thing!’

  But Jamun is steadfast and sits the next morning in the barber’s chair at the back of the house, beneath the mushrooming mango tree. The razor scrapes against the virgin flesh of his scalp, and behind it sneak in wafts to titillate the newly exposed skin. The windows of Urmila’s room are open. The sun is good. The sparrows in the mango tree carry on a bedevilled chirruping. A transistor in the neighbourhood yowls out the commentary on some cliffhanging moment in some one-day cricket match. A pliant and pleasing inertness under the barber’s hands. He feels clean and holy. Pista all but starts to bawl with envy when, on his return from school, he sees the new Jamun. He screeches at Aya when she proposes lunch.

  For Jamun, some of the goodbyes are undemanding. Telephone calls in the morning to Kasturi and Kuki, kisses, hugs and waves to Doom and Pista as they (Pista with sandwich in one hand and left shoe in the other) scoot for their school bus, and to Joyce and Burfi some two hours later as they scamper through the gate to Burfi’s office car, each livid with the other for having delayed him/her. Bidding adieu to Shyamanand, however, is somewhat messier.

  For one, he looks pretty ghastly this morning – ashen and insecure, and his eyes continually dart away from Jamun’s features like a tongue. ‘Oh . . . So you’re pushing off? . . . Of course you are . . . Have you called for a taxi?’ Jamun touches his father’s feet. Fumblingly, almost tottering on his stick, Shyamanand kisses him on the forehead and the cheeks. His munificent beard tickles his son’s face. ‘You turned up in time for your mother, will you do the same for me? Or will you instead despatch a condolent telegram? . . . You should’ve married while your mother was alive. She’d’ve been jubiliant . . . Don’t forget your bottle of water for the journey.’ He tails Jamun and his travelling bag out to the verandah. ‘This is the first time that I see you off without your mother . . . She’d’ve softly nibbled your left pinkie and, while you cavilled against her mumbojumbo, mumbled a prayer for your passage . . . Can one use “passage” for a train journey? I think not . . . Yesterday, you remarked that I’m luckier than many because I still have my sons to care for me – and if I wish for a change of air, or when I squabble with Burfi, I’m to phone or wire you, and you’ll hot-foot up to whisk me away – and in any case, if Burfi and Joyce are transferred, I’ve to wean myself from this house and shift to your muggy, forgettable town . . . Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdest thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest; but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shalt gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not . . . Jamun, there truly does come a time to die. When the Brahmin sees the son of his son, he is to perceive that the day has arrived for him to withdraw from the household and recede into the forest. Eternity does not exist; rather, it too has its season, and immortality is only continued existence in one’s issue, and in the seed of one’s issue . . . Will you ever get hold of this house again if you lease it out to a Marwari? They’ll battle you in court for fifteen years, bribe everyone in sight and romp home . . . You can’t even bolt and lock up the place and push off, because Naidu related to me a horror story last Sunday when he dropped in to swill our tea and exhaust my evening. It happened in the block between ours and that mosque. One family’s been away from their house for some months – a commonplace tale, one parent dead, the survivor packed off to where he won’t be a pest, none of the children greatly Concerned about the property, and in any case they’re dispersed all over the globe like a fraternity out of the Pentateuch. When one son returned to the city last month and rolled up to check on their house, he found complete strangers inhabiting it. People he’d never laid eyes on before – can you imagine? I’d’ve croaked on the spot, at my own front door. They haven’t settled matter
s yet, Naidu avers, because the bastards who broke in and didn’t glide away – and they’re a family! woman and children, a bloody sorority of thugs – have now produced signed and stamped rent receipts as proof that they’ve been legal tenants of the house for months! The owners apparently’ve had to trudge to court, and one of them’s suffered a heart attack. While Naidu waffled away, I kept imagining that much the same’d befall us when we forsake this house – my sweat of four years slopped just to finally lodge some housebreakers.’

  Jamun’s missed a chunk of Shyamanand’s diffuseness because he’s been keeping an eye out for his taxi. When he concentrates on his father again, he all at once appears to see a cruelly older version of the person of five minutes ago. Shyamanand’s eyes have filmed with the tiredness of distress, and the skin – on his cheeks, throat, collarbones, forearms – has shrivelled and slumped, as though the meat beneath it has ebbed. His voice is reedier and more fretful. Jamun is ashamed that his foremost response is a kind of triumph for his mother, who’d time and again distraughtly, screechingly augured to Shyamanand that she’d predecease him, that he’d recognize her worth, her virtue, only after her death, and that, Godwilling, she’d return from There to attend his tribulation.