The Last Burden

by Chatterjee, Upamanyu

  ‘Your mother will not be taken.’ Fossil eyes with capillaries like red-hot webbing. ‘For where in the womb of time will she meet with another son like you?’ The other wrinkled lushes amen.

  Daybreak, the tint of ashes. The impatient honking of lorries at the liquor joint – truckdrivers topping up and laying in for their stretched day’s journey into the shadows of the next dive – disturbs Jamun’s frightful nightmare, the rubble of which nevertheless rattles him all day. Nothing in his perception connects with it, yet its matter seems intimate, and so more frightening.

  He is in a kind of rowing boat, closing in on the waterline of a river, or a lake. Everything is in focus, the keen night, the deathliness, the swish and suck of the oars and the water, the hush. Then the clotted ooze of the bank, like phlegm and mud. The lights on the salt knolls loom ice-blue in the moonlight, the livid white of the tubelights hemming the road pale into the wetlands. Other contours in the boat, intimate yet shadowy. Jamun is wearing his customary clothes, jeans etcetera, and somehow knows that in everyday light the sand will be oystergrey and not brown. (How was he privy to those settings, runs in his head hourly – why had he sensed that on those flats he was no stranger? Perhaps he tacks on some minutiae later, in the discursive light, but the gooseflesh defies the day – he had trodden those sands before; on that ashen alluvium he had not lurched.) Perhaps the hours just before dawning. The two boatmen (Jamun is an extra for that one particular crossing) are of a piece – diminutive, swarthy and rock-hard (like those labourers who transit past his kitchen window at daybreak tea on their route to some sweat-and-blood slog. Jamun observes them over his teacup. Tits of black plastic like large headphones, and eyes stale, absent, with a strain of amber). Jamun and the two boatmen beach, and with the oars start to bludgeon the heads of the others in the boat. The oars are ponderous, and as he pivots and lunges, Jamun slumps in the wallow. His crazed gasps clash harshly with the stodgy thud of wood on forehead bone. None demur, but all look thunderstruck. Jamun knows them all, but for the life of him cannot recapture a sole face in his waking hours. He jets sweat, but the oarsmen are passionless. Next, with the punts they are ramming heads into the ooze, like shepherds mustering a flock, and striving to extricate themselves from the talons of frenzied arms. The heads struggle up again and again, about six or seven of them, less than ten at any rate. Their features are veiled, but the victims are indeterminately rural, in dhotis and short saris. The boatmen have butchered before – their looks, as deadpan as their biceps, are witness – but whether Jamun too has been so hellish, and whether he has commissioned them, is not plain. Do the heads all scuttle? But he is swarming up a sandbank hand over fist, a precious few feet, white with panic, as though one of the heads has hinged itself to his leg like an auxiliary knee. Steps, inexpertly incised in the mud. He senses gore on his person, manifest to all but himself, on his shirt front and chin, like milk from an upended cup at the lip. On the knoll (is the sand hump by the river artificial, a boneyard?) is a cottage, and a splendent sulphur light from a box-like verandah, tiny and featureless, of perhaps a Lower-Income-Group flatlet. A door creaks into a newish and characterless bathroom – but Jamun is positive that underfoot and beneath the tiles and pipes slink the snake and the scorpion. He must scour himself, but which portion most feverishly his terror cramps him from tracking down. And then a female frame at another door, somewhere, in a transparent dress, with a rank and succulent thatch full up to the navel, and she grimaces, and he tries to hide. Then the truck horns hit upon him at the end of a warm, flesh-pink tunnel and yank him out to the slate and steel before sunrise.

  He opens his eyes and tastes an illimitable and opulent easing which stills him for most of that third day. Yet quick as thought, he time after time experiences his hands weighted with oars whamming heads into pap, and is rattled by the sleep that can spawn such bogeys. Complicity and fright squawk in his brain – these ogres of randomness and he must connect somewhere, in some hoop, for otherwise how did they slink past his forehead?

  But to Mrs Hegiste in the afternoon, when he goes down to phone, he merely chinwags. He dials a clear line quite soon. ‘Burfi? Jamun. How’s she?’

  No tangible alteration. She has groaned once or twice, and threshed her head about in some iceberg world, but her pulse has not steadied. Burfi sounds distrait and ineffably rushed, as though the exchange with Jamun is stretching beyond forbearance a raving urge to piss. ‘You should know – she in fact died. I mean her heart stopped beating and she was just dead. Then we thwacked her chest like in a roughhouse, and her heart kicked off again – like an Ambassador taxi. We’d determined to give you the details when you came, but you’re so long coming. Baba boohooed like an infant when her heart started up again – his breakdown was a crumb of comfort.’

  At the time the attack comes about, Urmila is alone upstairs, in that jittery slumber particular to mortals on the wane. An inflamed late-August afternoon. Burfi’s elder son Pista returns from school, saunters about the house to circumvent his lunch and the aya, sheds his uniform in a hideyhole which he doesn’t reveal to her until her fury seems authentic enough to menace him just a bit, and pushes on to rouse his grandmother to irk her into dabbling at chess with him. He calls, next hoots into her ear, jerks her. Shyamanand downstairs is hauled out of his fretted torpor by the shrill pinging of a bell. Pista stands hard by him with the bell that is customarily at Urmila’s beside, staidly pronouncing, ‘Thakuma has snuffed it.’ Shyamanand takes unconscionably long to get there. He stares at her and with the first spasm feels as though, somehow, an ice-cream sky with tendrils of chilled cloud has ambled into the room. With his right fist he bludgeons and pounds her heart, the bile of panic vaulting with each thump. He then slumps on to the floor and breaks down. Pista could never have conceived his grandfather in that situation. He goggles at his grandmother inhale and wheeze like snorting wheelwork. He is instructed to telephone his parents’ offices. Neither is in. Shyamanand’s tears frighten the boy; he scampers to Aya. Both, after boundless rummaging, exhume Dr Haldia’s telephone number, whose answering service enchants Pista. Shyamanand, run-down on the floor, waits for some being to relent and be benign. Aya brings water and wad for Urmila’s brow. Pista wishes to listen to the answering service again. Aya tramps out for counsel from her neighbourhood comrades. A timorous Pista dogs her. Shyamanand watches the water drip from the wad into the ashen hair that camouflages the ear, the rictus mouth, the slate skin at the temples, the gashes on either side of the mouth scored by exhausted time, the crescents of ivory where the unseeing eyes lurk beneath the lids, the penduline skin at the throat, the disordered sari, the naked gasping, the wasted, scissioned hands, the pewter-and-burgundy bangles. He trembles with helplessness and almost craves to be in her position where doubtless this exhaustion would not harrow him. He has not the self-mastery to rise from the floor. Two sons and a bloody daughter-in-law – but where are they now?

  ‘Burfi. Are you high? You sound strange.’ Jamun is mindful that they have already expended ample long-distance time on Mrs Hegiste’s telephone.

  A tee-hee, discomposing. ‘Baba and I have squabbled, so what’s new. This afternoon Joyce had almost agreed to look in at the hospital, but he carped, it isn’t proper to send her, I should go in her stead, Ma at this hour should not be girdled by outsiders, by Christians who do not care for her, even in these circumstances don’t her sons rank her worth their time – his usual drivel, but so untimely in this wretchedness that I – well – let fly.’

  Jamun is fearful. Burfi has always been hot-tempered, and in his tizzies has ever so often flattened out only other people’s belongings. But his essence, his marrow, is buoyancy, and he ordinarily inclines to break with the past. He is in this manner distinct from his father.

  At their last booze bout, on his birthday, Burfi, sozzled legless, has stretched out a hand towards a disinclined Joyce, and blazoned, ‘I don’t hanker after a single breath of my past, not a sole second.’

  Nobody
heeds his words, or so it seems, until some prattle later, Shyamanand without warning says, ‘Why should you be hungry for your past, you who like a darling pet has been tutored to forget?’

  Urmila, strained and miserable, has lain down betimes, to writhe and twitch on the bedlinen till morning, as is her custom. Shyamanand thinks ill of drinking, yet is intent on brightening a birthday with his sons. Tippling at least congregates them. Otherwise for days he doesn’t come upon them at all, scarcely sights them as they bundle off to and fro office, or some errand, or scurry downstairs in the mornings for the newspaper.

  The geniality dissolves at Shyamanand’s remark. Joyce shifts to wooden and quits the room. Jamun bides equably for Burfi to cut up rough before following her. Burfi’s face stales. He crinkles his lips and glowers, circumventing other eyes. ‘You’ve again squashed our spirit, our good humour by your rottenness.’

  ‘By saying what’s correct? Why should you languish for your past – your puppyhood and your pubescence? Your wife was no chunk of that.’ Shyamanand’s head wobbles in extravagant disillusion. ‘Underling, bodyservant. Chattel, instructed not to remember.’ He flails out in this style, head to wind, whenever he is tight.

  Burfi breathes a squirt of abuse, muted but unmistakable, then trudges upstairs. Jamun smirks to himself, with unwitting guile. The sons are regularly chuffed by the dispraise of their parents, and once in a while stoke it. Jamun says, ‘Now you can let your bile boil over on me.’

  So parent and sons chat, shabby to one another without motive or zest. When Jamun plods up to get his spectacles, he overhears Burfi summing up to Joyce, ‘ . . . is past bearing! Inly he’s so misshapen and scrunched up that as a father . . . ’ Burfi decrees thus about once every fortnight.

  Joyce declares, ‘Not mad, but mean.’ She half-relishes and half-rouses her husband’s choler against the family, in particular when their boys are listening in.

  When Jamun goes down, Shyamanand is loudly reminiscing to the supine Urmila in the adjacent room. He is addicted to sporting with memory. ‘. . . put a sliced egg in each of their tiffins. I wrapped salt and pepper separately, in Britannia Bread paper – Jamun never tried the pepper; in the evenings in his tiffin the tiny wad was all along unopened, but when I discontinued the pepper he was bitterly resentful: Burfi’s tiffin has pepper, why have you denied me mine? Occasionally I salted and peppered the bread-and-butter. I furnished Jamun his lunchbox for roughly a decade. Burfi scorned tiffin when he was about twelve – too old, he said, which actually meant that his contemporaries were ragging him for being so dull as to cart food from home. In place of tiffin, he claimed cash.’

  To jolt the chatter on and so to gladden his father, Jamun asks, It was you? But I somehow recall Ma handing over our tiffins – we bypassing baths and ever so often toothbrushing too, and squelching our hair down by dabbling water on our heads, and she in that first light half-gloomily bellyaching of scant time and little help while cramming eggs and the night before’s dinner into our two Kookwel aluminium boxes. Yes, Burfi mutinied in good time against tiffin, and also stopped recognizing me in school; confessing to a tiffin-chomping, bespectacled sibling was even more embarrassing than being a boy without a father, like Kuki.’ Jamun is on the divan, frolicking with a derangedly overjoyed Doom.

  His hush (but Jamun doesn’t mark it) is a statement of Shyamanand’s befuddlement. ‘Your mother?’ he in the end falters. ‘Very well. Excellent.’ He gazes at the convulsed Doom. Jamun is chivvying the child’s yielding, perfumed belly with his nose. ‘Is your memory that supple? Your mother made over your tiffin! How can you expunge me in this way? She laid out your breakfasts and uniforms while I crammed your lunchboxes.’ As usual, he is dreadfully stung.

  ‘How does it matter?’ Jamun chortles, boozily. ‘Practise to forget. In our prankish memories, you can’t win over Ma, in spite of your extended ratfight to woo us away from her. You should’ve spawned daughters in our place.’

  Yet on that late-August afternoon, forsaken on cement flooring, with his wife outmatched and insentient – the whispers from an ice-cream sky and outside, in a lucid light, the cawing of a million birds – he, Shyamanand, sweats to rescue her for the twinges of mortality. She cannot escape. He pulls away her pillow, aligns her head, strives to knead her feet, chill and lumpish, wets with the wad her desert face and tries the phones again. Dialling is all but hopeless. A clear fear has clenched him. The notion baits him that his sons and Joyce have juggled matchlessly to incarnate before him their mother’s conviction that in extremity, when he craves them most, they will vanish; when thus forlorn, his vanity in his wealth of sons will atomize to stubble. He explains birdwittedly the emergency to a voice in Burfi’s office. With his faculties pirouetting, he converses with an intelligent daughter in Haldia’s house and receives phone numbers that he cannot retain. He hobbles and subsides leadenly beside his wife’s head. Her exhalations are sweet, like purulent molasses. Next, Time mislays its meaning till Aya and Pista flood in with a knot of locals. Still, easing swells through him like maiden rain on desert sands. Now he cannot be upbraided for her dead heart.

  Jamun’s eyes ache. Very likely because of the rot on TV, he says to Mrs Hegiste’s grandfather, and wanders out to the verandah. He slips off his spectacles and enjoys the matt-finish rain. His eyeballs itch to twist themselves free. He hopes that his vision isn’t worsening. In twenty years, near enough as many opticians have pronounced that sight wilts leisurely, but that with him, the decline should’ve ended with adolescence.

  How memory twines and enlaces value into the slivers of one’s past. Whenever Jamun wonders about his eyes, he involuntarily rakes up a green blackboard and copperish pubescence on buttermilk skin.

  He is eleven, and he has almost conceded to himself that his vision is falling apart. For several prefatory months, he hasn’t been able to read the blackboard from the terminal rows in class. In these circumstances, he’s censured the teacher’s handwriting to his classmates. After the vacations of summer, the new blackboards are bottle-green in colour. On the first Monday, the sun singes but the skies rain too. Jamun is yet taking to the new board when the initial drops sprout on the windowpanes with a rat-tat that he takes a breath or two to match with them.

  ‘Ohhh, rain!’ whoops Kuki in the bench ahead of his and next the window. Very unforeseeably, Kuki bobs up and sets to shedding his uniform! The class gapes. Copper-brown shorts and cream shirt are abandoned on his Radiant Reader Part Two. Jamun notes that Kuki does not believe in undies. Then the play of light on a toasted fleeciness, on the flour skin at the crotch, as, naked, Kuki corkscrews to the window. He means to scurry off to cavort in the rain, but the thunderstruck teacher butts in at that instant. She is Mrs Jeremiah, meaty and baleful. Jamun abhors her with the ecstasy that one tastes with those whom one derides by day and is hot for in the camouflage of night. She is perhaps (alas, who can tell?) turned on by Kuki’s nakedness, for she lumbers up to him, whinnying with arousal, and thwacks him a sledgehammer on his right ear. Kuki begins to pule some seconds before the clout; after it, he, yowling, lurches away from Arsehole (thus Mrs Jeremiah is felicitously named), across the room and out the door. Mrs Jeremiah brays that he be intercepted, and twenty-seven scholars leave their seats for the exit, of which twenty-four are dissuaded by her succeeding snarls.

  It is in this atmosphere that Jamun is directed to rise and fill in the blanks on the board. He is unable to read a single letter. He stirs from his bench to make towards the board but his steps markedly exasperate Mrs Jeremiah. ‘You’ll stop right where you are! Read from your place!’ she bawls, and struts up to him, udders and hams jouncing like ill-congealed pudding.

  ‘We are now starting an eye test,’ she proclaims to a breathless class, and positions an exercise book over Jamun’s right eye. ‘Read!’ But his eyes are stitched to the spectacle of her hunk armpit, inches from his thorax, a meaty spread of talcum and sable stubble.

  Mrs Jeremiah deduces that Jamun is being saucy, therefore
she clobbers him till her meatloaf arms enervate and he mellows into a puling ruin, his lubricity having pelted Kuki’s way with her very first whack. In his school diary, she carps, ‘Has taken to impertinence lately. Also has some difficulty with his vision. Requires an eye check without delay.’ To Jamun she suffixes, twitching a cautionary forefinger like a prick in rut, ‘You’ll get· the bashing of your life if you don’t show up with spectacles tomorrow.’

  Neither parent endorses Mrs Jeremiah. In the evening, Urmila is sluicing the washbasin, office sari kilted at the waist. ‘Ma, Jeremiah said today I must have glasses.’ She stares at him, dismayed in an involuntary sort of manner. Shyamanand is gasping and glutting himself with the chill leavings of a watery lunch. ‘Nonsense. But what roused her to say so?’

  ‘No idea.’ After a pause, without enthusiasm, condensedly, recapturing Jeremiah’s uppercuts and maledictions, ‘But I can’t make out the board too clearly from where I sit.’

  ‘Can the others?’ Afterwards, Shyamanand bears up a newspaper a few feet from Jamun and invites him to read an ad. Jamun crooks his head left and right, elbows his chin out, then into his throat, withstands the itch to slither two paces forward, and is mute. Shyamanand is bitterly surprised, somewhat malcontented, and wavers awhile that Jamun is befooling him. Finally, ‘We’ll undergo an eye test at the KGH this week.’

  Dinner is zestless and incidental, drudgery Aya irks in the kitchen, half-fudges a tantrum, and flits. Urmila’s face tousles. Burfi is enmeshed in Kuki’s house, playing high. Shyamanand samples the dal. Its tastelessness goads him into murmuring, ‘Everybody’s eyesight in my family is first-rate. But Jamun at age eleven needs spectacles.’

  Urmila checks her nibbling and stares at him. Her gullied brow is margined by oversize livid veins. Her mouth warps and she mewls, ‘No one in my family puts on glasses either!’ In reply, Shyamanand budges slightly to squint more finically at the afternoon newspapers. Urmila feeds herself through her tears. Jamun exits to frig on the roof underneath a hyaline night sky; Kuki has enlightened him, and he has accepted, that his onanism and his flaccid vision are twined together, but at that moment he doesn’t upset himself with the notion. He routinely vanishes for his handpractice when he intuits a wrangle between his parents. Urmila evacuates the table. Her abandon has fattened and pulped the skin beneath her eyes.