The Last Burden

by Chatterjee, Upamanyu

  ‘You’re going to bounce back. You’re going to snap out of this.’ Shyamanand is gabbling, clenching Urmila’s shoulder like a predator. He raises up her frozen hand and inspects her decoloured fingers. ‘Then when we reach home, we’ll blink at the TV, and if Jamun can spare us so many hours, we’ll play Cutthroat Bridge before dinner. You’ll sham an unwillingness to join, and all through’ll never concede that you enjoy it. You’ll bellyache for the thousandth time that you vehemently resent chess and bridge because Belu and your father both were such zealots about them that they skimped the remainder of living. And if a tipsy Jamun entreats us to swill a peg or two of Burfi’s fancy New York stuff, we won’t decline, even though you’ll continue to tch-tch in reproof. When I gain a rubber, you’ll grouse of giddiness and twinges in your chest, and I’ll gibe, “Oho, the green-eyed monster, so this is your gimmick to jam the game!” You’ll be miffed, and we’ll bicker. But hereafter, when you grumble about your ill health, we shall all consider you soberly, and Burfi won’t twit, “Oh, leave off hamming like a hypochondriac,” or, “like an untended grandmother in some factious joint family!” And we’ll all bear ourselves so caringly that you won’t need to slide back into hospital merely to point out to your family that it’s neglected your danger signals.’

  Endearing prattle, and exceedingly rare, as Shyamanand scuffs around the bed, impeding the nurse, badgering her about the readings on the electronic cardiograph, scrutinizing his wife’s limbs, spiking diverse localities of flesh with his index finger to verify for hollows, carping about the airconditioning, the water carafe, the pillows. Urmila’s smile is a snarl wedging apart her jaws; at the same time, the halves of her face appear to be skewed, as though it had cracked down the middle. She doesn’t register three-quarters of what Shyamanand babbles. She surrenders Jamun’s hand. Her tongue darts over her lips without stopping. Jamun introspects, as he has done before, gazing at his parents, one with her bubble life, the other mentally worn, futile, too late her protector, which of them will be the first to slip away, and which of them he will ache less to see off first.

  Across the years, he has time after time imagined himself alone in a modest, maroon cinema hall. Time has made the sequence more distinct by accretion. He is seated in the geometric centre of the auditorium, clearly visible in the reflected, ice-blue lambency of the screen. Usher-like shadows seem to huddle at the doors. The screen displays a gargantuan close-up of a man’s face – small, mellow eyes, a ten-foot-high nose, lips like violet pythons. Jamun recognizes him to be a celebrated cinema villain of a previous age. He speaks to Jamun in donnish Hindi, in the gentle, prudish tones of a specious believer in persuasion through methods other than thuggery. ‘Jamun, sweetie, you understand that your dear mother and father are being indecently tortured even now in this chamber. In a moment the camera will rove to bare to you what is being done to them. Such feral acts sicken me. We have slashed off the sound so that their shrieking and puling do not divert you from me. That would vex me with them. We could halt if you divulge to me which of your parents you hate more. We would then fix just that one. All mortals hate one parent less than the other. Raise your right hand for your mother, left for your father. If you cannot decide because you are squeamish, then we shall have to kill both. If you crave more time, I could grant you some, though you should be able to resolve this promptly.’ The fiend’s mien modulates from august malignancy to finger-wagging, chiding naughtiness. ‘I realize what you are imagining, you darling corrupt boy, that what if you put up any one hand only to settle your macabre bewilderment, and we fathom your gesture, and realize that you have despatched a parent to his – or her – or is it his? – death without even fretting yourself with brainwork, and, to chastise you, choke the remaining parent too? Would that be better? Or shall we leave the survivor be? How will you confront her – or him – and yourself? Quick, which hand now?’ The face falls back gradually. Jamun spots a whitish jacket lapel and cravat, and about the ears an indeterminate sky-blue backdrop. ‘To help you to select, we will now show you your parents.’ The face swerves to off-screen. The voice edges to command. ‘On sound.’

  The hallucination routinely peters out at this point, presumably because Jamun wishes to know no further. He can never recapture precisely when he visualized it in its bud, and how. Very likely in pubescence, that dishevelled season of awakening, perhaps in one of those numberless, exquisitely perturbing dreams. He is not unduly discomposed by this one, for he has visioned a good many hideous things. He isn’t even certain whether the minutiae that he has afterwards crammed in are the upshot of cognitive and slothful musing, or are the disclosures of assorted nightmares. In his earliest recollections, for example, the seats in the cinema hall were toneless and sombre; some time later, he notices that they have shifted into maroon. However, what the hallucinations, or the nightmares, do tousledly urge on his soul is that the duty of waiting for the extinction of one’s source is unconditional, and that such passing sires a desolation that would never fade, were it not overlaid, mercifully soon enough, by Time’s desert sands and the accretive lumber of living.

  The fat nurse is cranking up to shoo them out, ‘Enough now. Patient must rest.’ But Dr Haldia twiddles in then, in an opulent-yellow safari suit, suave, lubricious, like a freshly opened can of cheese. ‘Hello, hello, and how’re we this morning?’ The fat nurse tries to look demure and dextrous at the same time and nearly drops a bedpan. ‘We’re chatting unsparingly today, aren’t we?’ Dr Haldia tilts against the head of the bed, crosses his legs and simpers dotingly at Urmila, like the besotted and knavish lord of a fortress and Urmila his tearful hostage, recaptured after a shot at deliverance. Dr Haldia has been to Europe and the United States umpteen times. After virtually each visit he has had to reprint his visiting card, and jack up his consultation fees. He returns radiant from his jaunts, clutching four or five letters of the alphabet, seemingly selected out of a hat, and the abridged name, in brackets, of (presumably) a European or American centre of learning. The letters and the abbreviations are tacked on to the others on his card, like extra bogeys for a slow train. Thus FIVN (Zur.), DBTP (Lond.), MAKG (Berne), OCSE (Bos.), etcetera. His six telephone numbers have had to be hustled to the reverse of the card. ‘We’re fairly set upon recovering and buzzing off from Dr Haldia’s today itself, aren’t we?’ (His idiom, expectedly, exasperates Burfi. ‘Where the fuck did that shaved arsehole pick up his English? Unless one of those degrees is for a course in Bedside Manners – Take Their Money, Not Their Shit. Isn’t he an FRCTTMNTS (Edin.)?’)

  ‘An admirable recovery, Mr –’ to Shyamanand. ‘She’ avuncular chucking under Urmila’s chin – ‘grappled with her disorder like a redblooded boy.’ They meander out like a politician and his groupies. Outside Intensive Care, Dr Haldia discourses to a dozen strangers – relatives and sympathizers of those held in his half-nelson, their faces naïve with anxiety – while Shyamanand, Chhana and Jamun wait. At last Chhana asks when they can shift Urmila home. The good doctor chortles, pronounces nothing, motions to them with his stethoscope to go and sit in his office, and joins them there, refulgent, after thirty-eight minutes.

  Dr Haldia has no time to be genial with those who have waited long for him. ‘Hahn, your Mrs’s case . . . infarction . . . angina . . . coronary thrombosis . . . intense hypertension . . . clot . . . embolism . . . dyspnoea . . . cardiovascular murmur . . . phlebitic arteriosclerosis . . . arteritis . . . high blood pressure, dogtired heart, pacemaker . . . surrogate, standby, booster . . .’

  ‘Is my mother strong enough for the operation? You remember, you cleared her for the piles operation, and she caved in because of the strain. How much’ll this one cost?’

  ‘I see no alternative,’ declares Dr Haldia glacially. The glabrous cheese surface gullies. ‘There was no choice to the piles operation either.’

  Shyamanand is somewhat twitchy on the way home. ‘Twenty-five thousand for the pacemaker. Does she need it? Can she bear it? We should consult a second specia
list.’ Through the car dawdle the drugged, moist breezes of September. ‘I don’t have twenty-five thousand in ready money. I’ll be forced to break a bank deposit, borrow – and pay interest to the bank for using – my own savings.’ He shrugs dispiritedly.

  ‘Before we do that, let’s just check – with Burfi – how much we can pool. Doubtless we can –’

  ‘Burfi! Huh! My child, isn’t he.’ After a while Shyamanand adds, ‘You ask him. I won’t. Also confirm with someone else this pacemaker business.’

  ‘I’ll sound him this evening. If you recall, you wanted to amble in the Municipal Park today. We could drop you there, and on the hospital circuit I’ll discuss the contributions with Burfi.’

  Dusk by the time they leave Shyamanand, Chhana, Pista’s aya, Pista and Doom at the gates of the Municipal Park. Shyamanand is downhearted. ‘Too late to enjoy a stroll here. Please return in good time. Too often’ve you discarded me in different gardens for what has seemed aeons.’ The women and the children pad into the park. Shyamanand plods towards a towering pipal beyond the gates.

  ‘Ironic,’ decrees Burfi, as he forages in a picnic basket at his feet. ‘Baba’s first love, his money, will now be gobbled up by this hocus-pocus to extricate his first hate, his wife.’ With a ‘tch’ of incontinence he evicts from the basket and dumps on the car seat a coppery flask of mutton broth, a turquoise flask of milk, and a canteen of a milk-and-banana mash. With an ‘ah’ of accomplishment he educes whisky, water, glasses. He pours himself a peg. Jamun waits until he’s certain, then asks, ‘Won’t you pour for me? Or put back Ma’s dinner in the basket?’ and yanks the basket over, to himself.

  ‘Cheers. Here’s to things mending,’ proffers Burfi. After a while he runs on, ‘Baba’s already paid out a good many thousands in the piles fuckup. He’ll disgorge more yet – his is an old chastisement. You and I remember Ma boiling over time and time again, gnashing her teeth – Pista does it too, identically – she’d then curse, “His money’ll damn him,” and, “As though he’s going to carry his money over with him when he croaks.” None of us has any accurate idea of how much cash Baba’s squirrelled away in his bank deposits. The sum’ll be lightweight, nothing to holler about – one lakh or so – the lifetime hoard of a commonplace creature, who never had the daring or the adroitness to speculate. Oof, such a dismal lower-middleclass exercise, a babyish sport – to mothball the interest on a Fixed Deposit – never to wade into it – with that interest after months to archly open a Recurring Deposit, and with the interest of the Recurring Deposit to start some Term Deposit, or National Savings – like playing Trader or Monopoly.’

  ‘Rubbish. Let Baba and his money be,’ retorts Jamun, shifting his eyes off the road for a swig from his glass. ‘Even if we were on the breadline, Burfi, you’d never lay out a pie to pluck any one of us back from death, except possibly Joyce, and that only after she overrides and shushes your protests.’ Burfi grins like a bashful cherub and bawdily ups his thumb at Jamun. Jamun continues, ‘Phew, you and money are like a junkie and his fix. Do you remember, on my last visit, one usual evening, you and I imbibing upstairs – as Chhana would say – steaming bloated weather, skin like a fine cactus, but you were beaming – what’s a sandboy? – in the Bermudas that you’d bought in Kuala Lumpur. You’d proposed that the three of us – minus the brats – should dine out and then your mug showed that you’d begun to worry that if we did eat out, who’d foot the bill? From another room we could overhear Joyce fulminating against Pista.’

  Well, Burfi half-remembers, but is certain that, since the recollection is Jamun’s, it won’t be to his credit.

  Pista’s aya has complained to Joyce that in the afternoons Pista never alights at the apposite stop from his school bus, but gets down instead with friends at their stops. Pista’s aya then wastes a wearying half-hour on the telephone trying to ferret him out. Pista has already had his dome chewed off for this failing, but since it’s chiselled out of adamant, this time Joyce is underlining the terrors of being kidnapped. ‘Hellish men will twinkle at you, offer you lollipops and toffee, and carry you off from your bus. Nobody’ll protest because you’re always getting off the bus at the wrong stops.’

  ‘The lunch that those men’ll give me will any day be better than what Aya gives.’

  ‘Ha! For lunch they’ll fatten you with beatings, for tea and dinner also.’

  Pista is silenced, then, more considered, balancing the unknown horrors of days of thrashing against the ascertained horrors of his aya’s lunches, ‘What kind of beatings?’

  ‘First one villain – looking much like your Hindi teacher, what’s his name? – will hack apart your mouth and bully you into draining a hundred large glasses of milk. Next, twenty-five injections, one upon another, half of them in your gums –’ From the squeaks and squawks that succeed, Burfi and Jamun gather that Pista has leapfrogged on to his mother and is pummelling her. Then Joyce runs on, primly, like a godfearing Catholic schoolmarm – she uses the identical tone with Burfi too, frequently – ‘Pista, you must promise me that you’ll never ever straggle anywhere else from school without having earlier informed one of us in the morning.’

  At that moment, suddenly, Burfi bobs up and tramps in from the verandah to instruct his wife and child on the cardinal point that she has omitted. ‘But consider the money, Joyce! Listen, Pista, you piglet, if you’re abducted, do you know how much cash we’d have to fork out to retrieve a bugger like you? You’re not to greet any stranger or bum around anywhere with anyone, ever! My God – they could exact lakhs! In a burst all, all our savings gone – plus, we’ll be driven to borrow! We’ll be paupers, rag-pickers – and we’ll have you back – some solace! – gadding about with new strangers, who’ll be coolly hatching a second abduction just so that we can be flattened out for ever and ever.’

  At which Pista, ‘Will Mama also be flattened out, or only you?’

  Jamun sniggers callously at the memory. ‘Neither Baba nor Ma, fortunately, believes in primogeniture; otherwise, if they will the house to you, the instant you possess it, you’ll bundle me out and sell it, eh, Burfi?’

  ‘My attitude to money isn’t the issue, you bugger – the question is, what’s Baba doing with his cash? Both of us, at different times, have hissed at him, with varying intensities of rage, that we won’t miss his money. Maybe we won’t, really – even though a windfall of money is one of this world’s appealing things – because somehow we’ve made it, even you, you fuckpot – even though you angled for a really weird deal with Baba, ha-ha. You remember? You can’t forget! He was so non-plussed when you proposed. “You make over your money to me, and I’ll remain with and foster you and Ma for the remainder of your lives, but I’ll need to be financially independent” – some compact for a joker in his twenties! Of course he refused – “Don’t be so slothful!” – and you gravely pronounced, while everyone else was holding his sides, “Even when I urgently need money, I shall not thumb yours. When you feverishly need me, I won’t be within reach,” a forecast that didn’t awe Baba much!

  ‘Look – we’ve felt the pinch – Ma and Baba have, and because of them, I as a college yob – but the terrible years are done, and the future now is no more the withered winter for which Baba had to salt away – just pull up somewhere for cigarettes, Jamun . . . thanks . . . Gold Flake, twenties, are now so bloody expensive . . .’

  Jamun remains quiet as his brother rambles on. Like his mother, he is wary of money, for he too has witnessed its bestial clutch on others.

  Nearly two decades before, Urmila had stayed alone in Bhubaneshwar for about a year. She was transferred there. Missing her children, she remitted them the fare for the train tickets so that they could spend part of their school and college vacations with her. Jamun recalls that in her absence their government flat became drearier, more dishevelled and soulless, like a slummy hostel. They must have pined for her too. But Burfi didn’t go because he snapped up his ticket money in staying alive with his prodigal chums. Shyamanand whee
dled a few days’ leave to convey Jamun to his mother.

  From that holiday, the scene that abides with Jamun for years is Shyamanand’s leave-taking of Bhubaneshwar.

  A Saturday forenoon. The adolescent and his parents stand in the sliver of lawn outside the tidy, diminutive house that Urmila has had to rent for a considerable sum. Shyamanand and Jamun are about to start out to scout for a rickshaw when the unshaven, cross-eyed postman flings in a letter at the gate. It is to Urmila from Burfi.

  The familiar, ingenuous long hand on the envelope greatly disquiets Jamun. That his brother communicates with his mother independently of their ritual, joint, monthly letter (‘Dearest Ma, How are you? I am fine. Yesterday, at badminton, I thrashed Kuki 15–10, 15–7, even though he cheated . . .’) in itself is astounding; it seems inconceivable that between two habitants of his intimate world might exist a link of which he is unaware. The concomitants of Burfi’s handwriting – his sallow, breadstick fingers, Urmila’s scarlet Parker pen that he’s snaffled, his desk that he won’t humour his brother to touch – are lacking; instead, there is the wispy grass and the gulmohar tree.

  But that is not all. Jamun intuits that Urmila is loath to let Shyamanand read Burfi’s letter. She doesn’t open it there and then; indeed, she doesn’t even appear especially pleased to have received it. Shyamanand has unthinkingly stretched his hand out for the letter, but Urmila affects not to notice. It is at this point that his parents, the most familiar shapes of Jamun’s world, begin to look unaccountably unfamiliar to the boy.