The Last Burden

by Chatterjee, Upamanyu

  ‘Your father needs a wretch,’ she’s times out of number asserted, while combing her hair or picking up the comics that Doom has sprayed all over the drawing room, ‘whom he can pester and harass for twenty-four hours of the day – “Ah, wouldn’t this be Paradise if I could drink a glass of icecold Rooh Afza now? But who’s there to make me one?” – That’s him being crafty. After I’m taken, he’ll have nobody to badger, and the absence of a victim will finish him off. Unless you all can recruit a slave only to be a buffer for his nonsense – “Hey, you, put on my shoes for me . . . Hey, you, how dare you sit on a chair in my presence!” – but such a patsy’ll be difficult to find, and’ll demand a wage of a thousand – and deserve one of at least two thousand – rupees, which amount neither your father nor either of his prodigal sons will pay.’

  Jamun tries to point out to Shyamanand the sunnier side of things. ‘You’ve Pista here to divert you, and Doom too – when-ever Joyce looks in. Your bank accounts are here, your Term Deposits, Postal Savings, and . . . everything. Your own house, You won’t be happier elsewhere.’

  Shyamanand is a bit startled and hurt at Jamun’s synopsis of his, Shyamanand’s, interests, and’d like to know whether he’s being derisive, but the taxi draws up just then and begins honking at once, and he still has much to say, or so he’d fancied. ‘But you’re leaving me with Burfi. That bonehead’s marriage appears to be on the rocks – so he’ll have no time for me . . . Write as soon as you reach, or shall I telephone your neighbour tomorrow, the man with the queer name. . .’

  Jamun’s train is on time and Hegiste – dumpy, swarthy, a sweating Gioconda – and his child, cola in hand, are on the platform. Embraces, pats on the head, you-shouldn’t’ve-bothereds, most-sorry-to-hears. A rickshaw through the dank, high-density streets. A livid sky, swollen with rain. Past the cooperative bank, the unfinished municipal auditorium, Reddy’s Superstores, the hooch kiosk, dead at nine in the morning, the donkeygrey gynae hospital. From each spout on the roof of their block of flats, the rain for weeks has marked its course down the walls – cascades of moss and slime on a once-yellow backdrop The lawn of the block is still a tract of mud and bleached crabs. Kasibai is hanging up washing in the verandah. From the rickshaw Jamun can see only her mammoth belly between white blouse and white sari. She sights him when they alight and hoots his arrival into the flat. Vaman debouches on to the balcony, waves fatuously and bobs indoors again. He capers up to the rickshaw to take Jamun’s bag. He’s wearing Jamun’s shorts and T-shirt. The shirt is actually a seven-year-old discard of Burfi’s. It was originally lime-green, and its thorax reads: ‘Tough Guys Don’t Dance. They Hustle.’ Vaman is sniggering with foolish exhilaration. He now parts his frizzy hair, Jamun notices, on the left, and his upper lip – puffy, purplish – is bedecked by a tentative, ridiculous moustache.

  In the verandah, Kasibai sets before Jamun a cup of her tea – thick, sweet, dark, like diluted molasses – and asks how his father is taking his mother’s death. Her Hindi is adequate for just the most primary communication.

  ‘Ah, you’ve raised an uppermost matter.’ Jamun unfolds, in his ghastly Marathi, that Shyamanand might come to live with them. While explaining why, he suddenly breaks off because he just can’t visualize Kasibai and his father together, in the same room – he sipping tea, she banking against the doorpost – or in the same world. Like matter and antimatter – he, without warning, confusedly, recalls his Higher Secondary Physics – the two simply cannot meet. Kasibai is gazing at him. A blunt nose, a virile, leathery face. ‘So how was Yavatmal? Did you win your land back?’

  When Jamun received the telegram about Urmila’s heart failure, Kasibai and Vaman had been in their village hundreds of kilometres away in the district of Yavatmal. They’d had to scoot there because Kasibai had all at once learnt that squatters had begun to encroach on the pocketsize cultivable land that she possessed. Thus she informed Jamun on his return from office on the Monday before the telegram.

  ‘Oh, that sounds dreadful. Did you get a letter or something, or did someone from the village show up?’ Jamun suspects her of fibbing, and on their afterdinner amble, Hegiste confirms to him that Kasibai is skirring home for altogether another reason. Like Kasibai, the Hegistes are Maharashtrian, and Mrs Hegiste routinely ferrets out from Kasibai the more covert stuff. Kasibai’s never been rightfully married, and the man she steadily refers to as her husband, i.e. Vaman’s begetter, is only the village stud whom she’s cohabited with, off and on, for several years. Every time, more or less, the he-goat’s inveigled a second nanny to move in with him for some months, Kasibai and her dunderhead lovechild’ve been turfed out – to bum around the countryside, to go to glory, or to an aunt, to sign on in the Congress Party, or whatever. From wherever she is, Kasibai’s kept tabs on the jock – who is giraffelike and marooneyed, with a dacoit’s whiskers sprawling across his jowls like a verdant pubic thatch, and is immutably cantankerous because of acidosis; she’s careened back to him at every vacancy. ‘She learnt this afternoon, from a visiting fluff from her bit of the world, that the cock’s last sexpot snuffed it some weeks ago – encephalitis, deduces my wife from Kasibai’s reportage.’

  ‘But surely she can tell me the truth, instead of this bull about poachers on her land – unless coyness pricked her into a euphemism there, even though she’s usually as bashful as the slut in a herd of rhino. D’you suspect she fears that I’ll be jealous or something? Priceless.’

  Hegiste simpers, but voices nothing. The links are convoluted here. He knows full well that Jamun tumbles his elephantine domestic; indeed, he itches for her himself, and Jamun and he are fraternal enough to discuss her with comic bawdiness.

  Within bounds, of course. Jamun, for example, will never divulge to Hegiste what he actually feels about Kasibai, and how hard he was thwacked in his vitals when, the first time, she swallowed him, gulped him in like warm honey, grunting with relish. Never once in the hugger–mugger years, has Kasturi not spat him out, demurring sheepishly that she dislikes the taste, or contending laughingly that the hormones in semen’ll give her a beard. With Kasturi, he’s pumped himself out, all along, on the coldness of his own belly or the hollow of her throat, forsaken after love. But Kasibai has unclenched him, made him feel opulent, as though his juices – his lymph, his spittle – were inestimably precious.

  He can never disclose to Hegiste that sexually, in his mind, his maidservant has thrown open the doors to towering caverns. One dark Saturday afternoon, he is underneath her, tonguing her, feeling her beginning to undulate, her thighs snuggling his ears, when the doorbell jangles, twice. She, muttering, gets up off his face to answer. Continuing to grumble, she slips on her blouse and sari in seconds and lumbers out of the room. The front door opens and Jamun overhears her snap. ‘No, isn’t in.’ She returns, peeling off her clothes, dreadfully irate, and, naked, surmounts his face once more, hissing in Marathi, ‘Your bloody Hegiste. I told him you weren’t at home. The next time he ogles me, I’ll clamp my thighs around his loaf and suffocate him.’ And then, leering at the face beneath her corralled by her thlobs of puckered blubber, a googlylike modulation to a frightful bashfulness, ‘Now where were we, my Jamun saheb!’

  For months, the memory of that afternoon – both droll and carnal – sends gooseflesh cavorting all over him. It is her conduct, her deportment, that is so piquant; cunnilingus for her seems a bit like watching on video a Hindi blockbuster weepie – a familiar and wholeheartedly delightsome amusement, from which one resents being distracted by irritants like the doorbell and the telephone, and to which one returns at the earliest, within seconds if practicable, matter-of-factly, to carry on exactly from where one’s been interrupted.

  But the convoluted links. Mrs Hegiste, for sure, knows that Jamun tups his washerup and housekeeper, but even after months, doesn’t quite know how to react. She’s always believed – or, rather, presumed – that only weirdos – widowers, lonelyhearts, dissipated and dispossessed feudal lordlings, misogynists with
incurable afflictions, cranks traumatized in childhood, bachelors with insanity in the family, oddballs like, that – actually sleep with the lower orders; in contrast, Jamun is young, healthy, middle-class and seemingly sensible. She dislikes Kasibai – because of the expression on the faces of her husband and even her bloody grandfather whenever they sight her. Yet Kasibai is the only other female Maharashtrian in the vicinity, her sole interlocutrix for a chinwag in Marathi.

  And Vaman. Hegiste is downright certain that Jamun, now and then, also has it off with his maidservant’s son, that the urchin is inseparable from his mother and very likely lies with her and Jamun. Neither Vaman nor Kasibai is sure of his age, but he enjoys the wits of a twelve-year-old, and his physique seems an underripe seventeenish. He’s presumably never known anything other than kink, for Kasibai has once or twice implied to Mrs Hegiste that to torment her, in front of her eyes, Vaman’s father the stallion has, ever so often, mounted his own son. Hegiste never alludes directly to Vaman’s ruttish links with Jamun, and Jamun customarily disregards all the innuendo – his winks, the asides and cautions.

  Sometimes, however, he does respond, perhaps to a whisper during lunchhour gossip at the office, or a nudge during a saunter for cigarettes, when he’s introspecting – on nothing specially, but in a vague manner, on diverse families – Kasibai’s, his own, Burfi’s, Kasturi’s, – and the fearsome intricacies of fosterage. ‘Well, in a family, the most hideous things can happen without the wider world knowing – without even other members of the family catching on, and if the incident – the misadventure – has been adequately distanced by Time – the real cock of the walk – then it doesn’t even remain grisly; it becomes sort of spicy.

  ‘Consider, for example, the yarn of Kuki’s family. Kuki’s a childhood friend. We went to the same school in the same bus, and we’ve kept in touch all these years. He’s now engaging, sleek and unscrupulous. His parents are divorced, and they split up while Kuki’s mother was carrying. Curious, isn’t it. The marriage failed because of Kuki’s grandfather, who sounds redoubtable by any standard – and certifiable too. Forthwith upon his son’s marriage, he wished to enjoy his daughter-in-law – and presumably requested his son to direct her to his room after dinner or something. Kuki’s father is a ninny, because he actually blabbed to his wife the old satyr’s designs. When she declined, the maddened and horny – always a feral combination – father-in-law, for some days, importuned his son to woo her. When that too didn’t come off, the venerable ogre buggered his own issue, Kuki’s father, instead. The tale stupefied me for days. I was flabbergasted that I – ordinary, commonplace me! – actually knew someone whose family background was this fable of horrors. And knew damnably well! Kuki and I’d been neighbours, we’d flown kites together, and when we’d run out of milk or tea, our aya’d usually send one of her sidekicks to their kitchen for replenishments. Out-wardly, they were like us – though richer, of course – they’d been to Singapore, and had a fridge and TV almost a decade before we did, or could – and I suspect that from then on, I accepted that rectitude and lucre were connected, that Kuki’s grandfather couldn’t’ve conducted himself so had he not been on the gravy train, had he not viewed everything – individuals, events, relationships – materially. Kuki’d tell me that his mother frequently stated that her father-in-law – the fiend! – used to declare that his son was, after all, his seed; what was the son’s, ergo, was also his, the begetter’s. Apparently, Kuki was pricked enough by these pronouncements to demand of his mother why, by their reasoning, his grandfather hadn’t used his son’s toothbrush and his undies.

  ‘“But he did, and mine too,” was, ostensibly, Kuki’s mother’s reply. “He’d glide into our bathroom when I wasn’t in, and swipe my lingerie off the towel rack.’’’

  Hegiste doesn’t intend ever to snoop into his friend’s precise relations with his domestics; besides, he’s pretty certain that his most lascivious imaginings will more approximate the reality than anything that Jamun might confess to him. Thus, if he and Mrs Hegiste, for instance, are disturbed at three a.m. by the detonating of Jamun’s front door, the noisy snivelling of Vaman as he rattles down the stairs, by the titter of Mrs Hegiste’s insomniac grandfather as he watches, from the verandah, Vaman trudge through the gate, Hegiste, six hours later, when they amble off to office, won’t tease Jamun with any questions about the night; instead, he’ll only curl up against Mrs and drowsily murmur, ‘Jamun’s riding his hippo and the stripling hasn’t been allowed to join them. If he chooses, he can kneel by the bed, with one paw on his tool and a pinkie up his arsehole, and pirouette. So he’s spurted off in a tizzy to presumably jerk off into the well behind the hooch kiosk.’

  But if Hegiste ever pumps, and Jamun is straightforward, he’ll concede that the most exacting bit of his carnal life is the interlocution with his participators. Times out of number, he’s craved for a likeminded soul to share this grisly comedy with, to marvel with him at the chasm between the mentalities of his playmates and his own. Vaman, in particular, continues to jolt Jamun with the unintelligence, the callow materiality of his concerns. He is passive and vain before, during and after coition – indeed, throughout the day. He is most often found on Jamun’s bed, lolling, emptyheadedly simpering at the looking-glass, waiting to be inflamed, or to be biffed on his skull by Kasibai and walloped off to some overdue chore. From time to time, in his unmodulated, grating hoarseness, his barbaric Marathi-Hindi, he’ll sniffle or sigh, ‘If you give me the cash, I could scoot off to Bombay, tuck into some healthy food – chicken biryani, mutton chops – so that my chest broadens, then ‘I’d proffer myself for a superfine role . . .’ Or, ‘Do I need a haircut? Off Rocket Maidan, a new hairdresser’s opened up, with all the dandy styles. Twenty-five rupees per trim – that’s how skilled he is. Why don’t you . . .?’ For sure, Jamun ignores this drivel as best he can (or shoos the sluggard out for biscuits or cigarettes), just as he is deaf to Kasibai’s tireless demands for a few thousand rupees to redeem some ten godforsaken square inches of land in Yavatmal.

  ‘But I’m flat broke, Kasibai. Why don’t you deposit the whopping salary that you lever out of me every month in a bank and pick up some interest instead of stashing it away in your pussy or spilling it on that dildo of a son?’

  It is enervating, though, to speak smut to your maidservant because you believe that she’d like to hear the lingo that you presume she’s been reared on, and then to observe her blanch with hurt. Jamun feels droopy and immature, ashamed of his existence. When he isn’t enkindled by them, he is frequently disgusted by their boorishness, by the smacking sounds that Vaman emits while he chomps, by Kasibai’s thunderous hawking and expectorating first thing in the morning; for the months that he’s known them, he’s haphazardly striven to educate them for his own peace of mind (‘Flush, you fucker, flush! Why don’t you ever remember that this handle is not fucking decorative! . . . Kasibai! Whatever’re you – but that black isn’t grime or crud! – you can’t scrape – it’s the material – oh, fuck your mind –’, derisorily caving in here at having to hatch Hindi-Marathi equivalents of ‘non-stick’, ‘frying pan’ and (phew) ‘teflon’), but without conspicuous progress, principally because he isn’t interested in them as fellow creatures. Which stricture Jamun himself will parry with, ‘Balls, they aren’t my family, or anything like that. . . I’m not yoked to them by blood, or nurture, or the years. In any case, all these shackles can splinter; what endures is only a blind and unreasoning notion of duty. If we acquitted ourselves with others as they merited, then we wouldn’t’ve abandoned our aya in a charitable hospital with just her TB and her diabetes for company. She wasn’t us, so we exonerated ourselves.’

  With a second tea in his hand, Jamun dawdles about the flat, pointing out to Kasibai the evidences of her slackness in his absence – the grime on the curtains, the crud in the kitchen sink. The furnishings are minimal and comfortless. On a desk borrowed from the office squats his turntable that revolves at bloody 30 r.p.m. Unde
rneath the window that looks on to the verandah lies the divan without a mattress on which he turns in when he’s put off by K and V. Alongside the kitchen door dangles last year’s calender of the National Gallery, London, displaying for June Degas’s Beach Scene. Had Kasturi ever cohabited with him, the flat would’ve bloomed with tulips and gladioli, warm rugs, and bamboo curtains to lineate the light. Such had her own room seemed – cordial, vivid – when he looked in on her the evening after mourning.

  To finally cast off the yards of cream linen feels momentous. ‘For good,’ Jamun declares to Burfi as he stows away the folded, wrinkled cloth in the chest in the drawing room on which roosts the TV. ‘Oops, sorry, no, once more yet – one down, one to go. Though I gather from Chachacha that you can’t wear these robes ever again. Doesn’t peeling these off truly feel like moulting? With a new skin, through into another life?’

  ‘I presume that these subtleties’ll suggest themselves to you afresh when Baba passes over. Meanwhile, when’re you going to begin swilling again? Chhana phoned this morning to check if we’d nosed out the will; I fenced with: “Is this evening okay to resume vices on? Thank God Ma and I didn’t inhabit different time zones – figuring out when mourning finishes, in that jumble, would’ve been phew.”’

  The shirt and trousers feel peculiar too, as though he was decking up for an occasion – an interview, or a colleague’s wedding reception. Kasturi’s parturition has been right as rain – a couple of hours or so of labour – and she and her healthy baby have returned home on the fourth day. Jamun shows up there at eight to run into the entire family in the living room – her husband, her babbling sister, the parents, her cadaverous grandfather. He congratulates them and they condole with him. Kasturi’s husband is still bearded, but appears to’ve fattened a bit since his marriage. ‘Kasturi and the baby are resting now,’ leers the grandfather; he’s always loathed Jamun. ‘No, she awoke some fifteen minutes ago,’ confutes the husband, ‘and is at the moment only gawping besottedly at her effort. Would you like to chat to her right away or d’you want to watch some minutes of the night cricket first?’