The Last Burden

by Chatterjee, Upamanyu

  ‘But you’re insane! Joyce does detest you and Ma, but only in jerks and snatches, and not without basis, and she’s congenial with me. And her churlishness with you has no link with Ma’s fan!’ Even in his resentment, Jamun perceives that they both are bearing themselves idiotically. One element in him hopes that the other inhabitants won’t overhear their deranged tussle; yet another that they will, will flurry in from diverse parts of the house, wary at the voices spiralling to hysteria, will stand about superfluously, and unwillingly salute his chill articulation under stress. Urmila has resumed her sapless and fidgety mewling, ‘Jamun! What’s wrong! Jamun!’

  The stub of his reason importunes him to quit the room, but the blood in his skull, the breathlessness, quickens him to be glacial and barbed, to waste his opposer with the balefulness of cogent argument, to reinforce his self-discipline with the debris of the restraint of others. Urmila’s disquiet goads him the more. ‘She was cheerful a minute ago, and now you’ve launched her off afresh.’ He stretches his voice for the further room. ‘No, Ma, nothing, merely Baba’s routine depraved thinking.’

  Pista’s Corporation Bank footrule – cast off every day in the least foreseeable crannies of the house as slag from his home-work, a withering token of his pick of place of work for that afternoon, the selection itself intimating his derision at the very idea of homework, the dereliction in addition offering him a stratagem to defer his homework on the succeeding afternoon, when he will bum around the house ruffling everyone by dolefully enquiring whether they have sighted his footrule anywhere – is now in Shyamanand’s fist, bobbing like a chastiser’s irate forefinger. ‘Depraved, oh yes, I am so and you’re not. You warm to those who spurn your parents, your fount. When they kindle our death, over our pyres you can clink glasses of the champagne that you couldn’t share with us tonight. Depraved – you pig, I ask you who is depraved! You procure your loveboys from the wastepipes of slums, survivors with scabby skins and ancient eyes, who squirm their waists in front of your face for your money – you sleep in their diseases, you cheep and baa over them and feed them like a woman – and I’m depraved?’ The sallow, agape befuddlement on Jamun’s face infuriates Shyamanand the more. ‘You itch for that artful Joyce -I know it! You hurtle home every three months for her. Your goofy mother presumes that you scuttle home for us, for her, but the quarry is Joyce – hapless Burfi, noosed between unrivalled wife and brother. You’ll die fumblingly, of some contagion that your traits’ll sow in you –’ The penduline flesh beneath Shyamanand’s beard starts to shudder unrestrainedly.

  Noisy oversize inhalations, tears jolted out of him, sweat irking his armpits and collar, and a lumpish fury within Jamun that now intends to hack apart his sinful flaccid body, and spirt out. He is queasy, as though a vigorous talon has gashed through his muzzle down to his belly and is foraging in his guts. His calves bubble but the warm tears feel easeful, like cleansing. His father looks shrivelled and appalling, but something baneful and primal in him craves to flail back, monster versus monster. He snarls snatchily, spite stifling rage, ‘You bastard – we should thank God that we are sons. If you’d hatched a daughter, you’d’ve bedded her – you fucking ingrate – this as recompense for what I’ve done for you –’

  ‘Jamun! Have you no shame!’ Urmila, buoying herself against the wall – appalled eyes, but her voice conveys more dread than indignation; she censures somewhat dedicatedly, as though she will be chided for not excoriating with sufficient zest, panicky in the meanwhile that without warning, without motive as usual, both husband and son will enervate each other and instead beleaguer her.

  ‘Oh, hold your tongue – ’ for through his sniffles and gulps, Jamun tastes solace when he carps at his mother; because in his animus, carping is easier than winnowing those words for his father that are sure to stab; yet he detests himself when he recognizes on her face the blind slackness of deep hurt, and he knows that he will loathe himself even more when Shyamanand at last is also gutted by the prongs of his son’s words.

  ‘Savour your handiwork, our sons. Fostered for decades to hate me. Like a perfect mother, you’ve kneaded them against me. You’re the saint and I the demon, but notice, they damn you too.’

  Burfi hears some of the particulars of the squabble and snickers, ‘My bout next, I imagine, with Baba.’ The next morning, Jamun, in the verandah beside the kitchen, liking the sea gusts on his inflamed forehead but not conceding so even to himself. A leaden, toss-and-turn night for Shyamanand and Urmila, in their shunned rooms, but Jamun has enjoyed the numbness of the sozzled and overtired. Urmila in the kitchen, pottering, warming milk for her husband and herself: ‘Jamun, he’s a worthless husband, but a good father. Jamun, the anger of parents is never anger.’

  ‘You suppose she’ll die? Or return?’ To use the word ‘die’ for his mother is hard, but for Jamun the euphemisms – ‘pass away’, ‘breathe one’s last’ – are impossible. From the gate Shyamanand and he gaze at the car that carries off the others – Chhana, Burfi, Pista’s aya – and Pista and Doom too, who beseech, are rebuffed, wail, are screeched at, blubber, pule and are finally permitted – to the nursing home. Shyamanand doesn’t respond. ‘She looked so . . . meaningless this morning, like . . . Burfi said you’d told him that you were convinced she’d mend. I hope you’re correct. She looked so ill.’

  Shyamanand hobbles away from the gate. Jamun stalks him. Shyamanand was too exhausted to go to the hospital. As is his nature, Jamun felt uneasy at forsaking him, and remained behind too, deeming that his father would be covertly glad for his fellowship. In like conditions, Urmila would have been patently so. Plus, Jamun wished to converse and himself be allayed.

  They subside in the uncomfortable garden chairs. Shyamanand has no idioms of solace for anyone. Too old. Jadedness has coated his soul. ‘Just five days. Getting through to you was hopeless. So we despatched the telegram. Chhana was much easier to contact. Within a minute. On the first night, Burfi stayed till sunrise in the car in the hospital parking lot because she was on the edge.’ Shyamanand slackens off. Enunciation is bone-wearying. He craves to be in a warm snugness, in darkening and silence. ‘I should die before she does, that is my leading, hoggish thought.’ Jamun wonders how he had looked for alleviation from his father who so bitterly needed alleviation himself. He feels silly. The deathliness that soaks down into them is chafing, a sandpaper presence. He intuits that he should sneak off from Shyamanand before their dispiritedness pricks them into words that they’ll afterwards unwish. ‘I’m going to doze,’ he mutters. ‘I’ll be up before dinner.’ On his pillow, he feels sinful that he is trying to snooze when he should be heeding his sinking mother.

  Twilight. Beyond the window grille six feet away, the heavens like the sea, leaden and minacious, like the back of a torpid beast. A figure against the sky, sloping against the railing of the verandah, gazing seaward. Without his spectacles Jamun can’t discern who it is. He can fuzzily distinguish a sari the shade of dusk. He is positive, without reason, that the form is smiling. For the one unearthly instant upon waking at an unfamiliar hour, before the understanding clicks into position, he imagines that the shape is his mother, in good heart and euphoric, grown larger because of ruddiness. A section of the form stirs up and down unhurriedly, in intervals. In another second he spots the tip of the cigarette, in his bedimmed vision like a fulgent tangerine snowflake under a microscope. He puts on his spectacles for an instant and verifies that the contour is Chhana, puffing bemusedly against a cavernous, half-dead heaven. Tousled thoughts hustle one another when he is once more in the twilight blur of his vision. Is this a harbinger of some ghoulish eventuality, his imagining a shape in the half-light to be a restored, healthy version of his dying mother? From whom none could be more different than Chhana, surely. His sickly sight, his snap awakening, the receding span of day, the sky like a gunmetal sea – all these have hampered him from recognizing her. Chhana. Who has mothered Urmila’s firstborn. Who is arid, unwed because she was born without a womb, a
freak of sorts.

  ‘So you are up,’ gleams Chhana. ‘Your mother’s now conscious. Was asking after you.’

  On the wall beside the elevator that always appears to run only for the liftman’s guffawing cronies, sags aslant an oversize photograph of a ponytailed girl. Her eyes gape like ink spots on white saucers, or black poached eggs, her dextral forefinger presses against her roseate, schnozzle lips, tip of finger upending nose, her fist like a bubo on her chin – fervidly shushing the world. The legend beneath the photo enjoins: ‘Learn to exist with silence.’

  ‘How mournful!’ warbles Chhana, warping her features to nudge her spectacles up for a better squint. ‘But doesn’t that snap recall Belu – the same lips and expression?’

  Shyamanand doesn’t react, concentrates instead on negotiating the hospital corridor. Jamun scrutinizes the picture anew. Belu as a duteous pigtailed girl? Belu is just one of the numberless relatives whom Jamun (and Burfi) have never met, whose photographs they have never viewed, who have never visited and have rarely corresponded, yet whose nicknames have bobbed up from time to time in the retrospections of their parents, and who have been mentally modelled by the listeners after those particulars of the recollections that have hoodooed their imaginations. Over the years, Jamun has hatched Belu to be fleshless, sombre, introspective, with mines for eyes, a creature in a grievous romance.

  Urmila’s tale, unfolded now and then, whenever she is at ease in her immediate woe, to whomever chances to be within hearing.

  ‘In the age when I was idiotic – the feverish mugginess of a midsummer in Calcutta, sweat spiking yesterday’s sweat – your father and I were rendezvousing thick and fast, he befuddled, occasionally disinclined – before office, during and after too, ambling on Chowringhee, scrabbling for an unoccupied bench in some park, just tramping because there was no spot where we could be alone. Nearly everyone at my house disliked your father. But my sisters detested me too. Moni spited me further that April to August because your father was good looking. But Belu was almost afraid of him. Belu was the sole person in my family who cherished me, and not the salary I carted home – all, all family narratives are despicable, hideous – if they’re faithful to the essential life – aimless rancour for one another, the most guileless event milks from us our watchful malice – living together merely to thrill in unkindness, marrying, mounting and spawning because we’re all afraid of being corporeally alone. My sisters derided Belu, were ashamed of a brother, supposed him crazed, because he hadn’t voiced a word for some twenty years, vowed to silence after that rat-poison episode – you recall that? – he burned for some beastly slut, lowly caste, pined to marry her – “Baba, I can’t live without her!” – huh! – my father lashed him with a fine bamboo switch, for hours, I was seven then. We all watched. Belu’s twiggy forearms twitched – like exhausted butterflies – to shield his face and skull. His saffron kurta ripped inch by inch. Flitting about in thirty square feet of space, bawling, sobbing, pulling, “Ma! Ma! Release me! Ma!”

  ‘“Yes– I shall pound you enough for your shrieks to retrieve the dead!” So my father snarled with each whack, but he also was weeping, and, “I’ll purge the harlot out of you. She’s in your blood, you swear, but your blood’s mine, isn’t it –” And the scourge whistled down, over and over, like stealthy, camouflaged queries from beyond your window from a chum whom you’re prohibited to meet. My father tired, pulled up to wheeze. His heaving mingled with Belu’s blubbering, the gasps and snivels whamming against my eardrums, no other vibrations in the universe. Moni time after time was needling my father, murmuring, atremble, “The sides. Lam the ribs. From the top you’re just smacking his forearms.”

  ‘Hours, perhaps one. Belu slumped into a clod on the floor, a knot of bloodied shreds, hair. My sisters cuffed me about lightly, forbade me to help Belu. I didn’t. I was utterly terrorized by the trouncing, the screams, the disarrayed pile on the floor, like clothes for washing, its stillness. I gaped. I was summoned away.

  ‘At some juncture Belu hobbled and tottered away to drink poison, to requite himself. After these years I don’t accurately remember how he got the poison, or what it was. Luckily, he panicked almost instantly after. He lurched towards the courtyard, spluttering my name. Amidst the weals and drying gore on his face trailed pellets of cold sweat. We couldn’t puzzle out his slur. His lips spumed, and his exhalations ferried a dreadful stench. He had to be hospitalized. My father laid out sizeable amounts of cash to bribe our neighbourhood police, the Station House Officer especially, not to register a case of attempted suicide.

  ‘Belu was half-paralysed. Nonstop aching since then, and creeping involuntary movement, for more than fifty years now. He settled in his bed, his room, hushed. Would infrequently come out at dusk, or after, like a wraith, perhaps to stare at the rain. He conveys the essentials through practically unreadable notes. His survival intensely discomposed us all. When we weren’t writhing with guilt, we were half-yearning for his death. He’s the Chhana of our family, the grand embarrassment. I scarcely ever ventured into his room. Throughout my girlhood, behind the grass-green doors of his room sneaked the ghouls of my twilight, the bogeys that bullied me in sleep. When I suffered my first period, the maiden blood, even in my bewilderment, my terror, I was convinced that the gore had dribbled out from behind Belu’s doors and into my guts.

  ‘On the single occasion that your father visited my family, Belu was in the courtyard. Owl-light, late evening. I couldn’t introduce him! He lingered in the gloom, like an incubus biding its time. That night he sent me through the cook a note: Do not marry that evening-man, and at the foot of the fragment, as a tailpiece: Remember the picture – is it picture, or portrait? – of Dorian Gray. The words “Dorian Gray” were in English, I think. I wasn’t even sure if those were exactly his messages – Belu’s script had become so unreadable. In his normalcy he’d once in a while echoed from that book – How horribly real ugliness made things – something like that. He’d all along recoiled from and discredited goodlooking persons. After two or three months of my marriage, I wrote to him sketching it – a ululation from a dungeon to the one least likely to snigger on hearing it. He didn’t reply for months. Then suddenly another note: You used to bleat, to flit from my family, I’d even wed a demon. In your husband you have a better dispensation.’

  Jamun has time out of number been the audience for the parable of Belu. To him Urmila has sometimes appended, in a coda, ‘But you oughtn’t to judge all marriages by the corrosion of ours. I know – that you don’t wish to marry because you dread that you’ll tail off like us.’

  ‘And if I don’t marry,’ banters Jamun, ‘I’ll end like your Belu? Really, Ma – you flatter yourself. You and Baba haven’t contaminated me that much! And you reap what you merit – why did you marry in the first place?’

  ‘Don’t counsel like a grandmother. Now and then I imagine that you’re faintly scornful of us because we married even when we were so inconsonant. But not to have married would’ve been unthinkable – we were everywhere together – I would’ve gained disrepute, a thirty-plus woman, perhaps thumbed and dumped – you remember the buzz about Kuki’s mother, and she was only a divorcee. I too was incubated in that middle-classness – no oddball outsider, me!

  ‘Jamun, inly you’re so puffed-up! Being unmarried, you suppose, makes you objective, the deadpan eyewitness, but bachelordom’ll bleach you.’

  With his mother Jamun is softened, but does not expose his chastening. To Burfi, however, on a different occasion, he comments, ‘Ma is no rebel. She herself sweats the same prejudices that she grieves squelched her in her youth. No one learns. You’ll never forget her outcry at your marriage, as though you were hitching up with Whitney Houston or something.’

  ‘And she wasn’t,’ rejoins Burfi, ‘turning any younger. She was thirtyish then, which for her generation connoted forty. She must’ve funked. But her perspective’s so queer – I pattered to her once that remaining single was simpler nowadays, and she repl
ied, of course, but that’s also because we now stay in houses that are set apart, and not snarled into one another.’

  At the glass doors of the Intensive Care Unit, Chhana sternly impedes Shyamanand from shedding his sandals. ‘You look old and adequately eminent, so the underlings won’t block you. If they do, try to look even more eminent.’ Within, behind inky glass and nondescript tapestry, in a creaky, seared voice, subterraneanly familiar, like an intimate ditty on the brink of one’s hearing, Urmila is catechizing the meaty nurse with certain exacting questions. ‘Why haven’t I seen you before? Who’s changed these curtains? When did this hurt in my left arm start? Why don’t you respond instead of just skimming about like a mosquito? What’s the date today?’ Blessedness and grief eddy through Jamun at the slurred, unnatural tones of her remembered voice.

  Urmila’s eyes are now leaden, with unfocussed dots of amber. The striated desert face, toasted gashed lips that won’t cap her teeth, and the extremity of a whitish tongue that whisks over the ruts of her lips like a gecko’s. Shyamanand evens the silvered hair away from her forehead. ‘How long you all took to come and see me,’ she mumbles. Jamun nears the top of her bed. She pirouettes her head at the movement. ‘Jamun?’ Her eyes centre above his left shoulder, but for an instant her features splinter into a childlike smile. ‘Jamun.’ An ashen hand on the coverlet throbs heavenward. Jamun touches it. Her fingers hug his like chilled talons. Chhana detonates into sobs. A sliver of Jamun’s mind ruminates whether it’s right that a husband’s niece rather than a son should, at such a moment, bawl so.