He isn’t accustomed to seeing his parents in any surroundings other than those of their shabby flat. Unmindful of the sun, he watches them in the shade of the gulmohar tree, down which pelt two squirrels, and behind which is visible their neighbour’s kitchen window, from which eructs the trendiest Oriya film pop. All at once, everything seems unprecedented – the lawn, the house, the mould around the tap in the boundary wall, the faces of the neighbours, the lingo on the roads – everything. They even cause the heavens and the sparrows to appear newfangled. The diverse, extraordinary components of the entire setting are telescoped in his parents looking like strangers. He senses, fuzzily but forcefully, that he doesn’t know them at all – not their essentials – their past, whom they yearned for at fourteen, and what they dreamed of at thirty-one – the kernel of their humanness; creation itself then seems without context. Jamun feels as though he has been cosily swimming underwater, and on gushing up for air has faced an altogether new world, and an outlandish light.
‘So,’ says Shyamanand pawkily, returning the letter, ‘after dissipating the ticket money that you posted, Burfi now implores you to “be a sweetie, a sugar” and send him “at least two hundred”, since the issue is of “life and death, and bloody Baba’d never understand”. Certainly, Baba doesn’t understand, not when life is jiving till dawn in some discotheque, and death is deviant sex with godforsaken hippies. As the world’s champion mother, you’re bullied by your conscience, no doubt, to exhort Burfi to carry on; especially when, as an upshot, he detests his father even more for not being like his poppet mother. Do despatch him the cash. What’s two hundred rupees in these days of inflation? Borrow from peons and typists, thresh about under their oblique derision, but feel saintly, bolster yourself with: I distress myself so that my deserving son can hold his head high in a discotheque. Five years later, will Jamun be as profligate as your elder son?’
Urmila is weeping by then. Her children have seen her sob night and day, to them, her lamentation has become piffling – now and then bothersome, vexatious.
Since that forenoon in Bhubaneshwar, Jamun has time and time again speculated on Burfi’s improvidence and Urmila’s outlook on money, for the attitudes of both have irked him. When he wasn’t yet ten, he would listen with rapt horror to Burfi, then thirteen, composedly cobble together – to bare acquaintances, to anyone who couldn’t verify – the most preposterous yarns about their wealth at home, or homes, for he endowed them with several: a kind of ranch outside New Delhi, with its separate swimming pool for the servants; a sort of chalet in Ooty, to which they retreated in the summer; a six-bedroom penthouse suite in Cuffe Parade; etcetera. His father, who smoked a pipe, planned to buy a building or two in Manhattan, but his mother wouldn’t allow him, because, she asserted, how would the nation press on if we showered our money upon foreigners? Of course, Burfi next had to compose sinuous excuses to stymie his disbelieving auditors from visiting him at home, or homes. Jamun would hear his brother fabricate with the misgivings that one senses when a loved one, unready, performs on stage.
When he was nineteen, Burfi’s buddies were the anglicised, modish children of rich men. The affluence of his friends made him sneakingly ashamed of his own family. On weekday afternoons, since his parents would be at office, he and his girlfriend, or a hippie-adventurer, would frequently fetch up at the flat for an hour or so of coupling. They would habitually encounter Jamun, aged fifteen, dawdling in the house in shredded vest and discoloured undies. The sight of him always discomposed, dampened and peeved Burfi. He would bellyache in the evenings, “Why can’t he dress less like a servant? He’s embarrassing.’
‘Why should I stew all afternoon in pants and shirt just to appease Burfi and his soulmates for the one second that they glimpse me?’ Jamun, disputatious, would demur. ‘They can shut their eyes and sniff their way to his room.’
At fifteen, and at twenty-eight, Jamun recognized the disparity in what money denotes to him, and to Burfi – rather, at fifteen, he was witheringly certain; at twenty-eight, he fancied that a difference in their attitudes might exist, but also that it might not matter. He himself-gauges money to be wily. If he has the money, he’ll buy chewing gum, or condoms, or a refrigerator. If he doesn’t, he will muzzle himself to do without; the self-discipline becomes in itself quite piquant. But for Burfi, deprivation is failure, a cudgel to his self-esteem.
‘Why don’t we suggest to Baba that if he truly can’t manage the pacemaker business by himself, we’ll both pitch in?’
‘Obviously,’ snorts Burfi, as they drive into the hospital ‘but you pitch in first.’ When they park, he reminds Jamun, ‘Check with Kuki about the pacemaker.’
That night Jamun reports to Shyamanand that his sons will share the costs of Urmila’s healing. Jamun himself can immediately part with twelve thousand rupees. ‘Yes,’ falters Shyamanand, ‘that’ll greatly help.’
After dinner Jamun trudges down the back lanes to the beach. Past the fisherwomen and the offal, through the fetor of the sea, of fresh and putrid fish. The heavens black and lumpish, the waters thin and scummy, like black kerosene in a wobbling, transparent can. Through the night rovers, the queens, flashers, gynanders, old-world floosies, the lonely hearts, Jamun casts about vainly for a sequestered, unsoiled nook, from where sky and ocean will appear to be one, like a boundless cinema screen seconds before the show. Maybe he will be treated to spangles of lightning, beguiling advertisements from some other life.
He is very happy that he has given Shyamanand twelve thousand rupees. He feels unburdened, blessed. He believes that in the nursing home his mother somehow knows what he has done, and is smiling in her numbness. He plods on, wallowing to his ankles in the sand.
Whenever Urmila has lacked cash, Jamun has reminded her of the crisp, virgin banknotes entombed in her trunk. ‘Every time, over the years, that you’ve received a brand-new note, of whatever value, you’ve interred it in your trunk, never to use it. You must have more than a thousand in there, among the folds of saris and the leaves of unread, sacred tomes.’
‘No, Jamun, I can’t spend money that looks so clean. These notes are like starched, lily-white saris after a cosy bath on a warm winter morning.’
Urmila’s views on opulence and solvency have been moulded by the innumerable beastly humiliations that she has twitched under for need of money. In her later years, when money is no longer anguish, she feels towards it contempt, and sometimes repugnance. She begins to live freely; money is vital no more. ‘You’ll notice, Jamun, money’s never within your reach when you need it the most. I’ve witnessed how the itch to hoard dominated both my father and yours. I merely hoodwinked myself – that if I spent bountifully on the deserving things, then somehow my kitty would be replenished. That happened just once – remember? – when I parted with three thousand to your aya for that Kishori rape incident? I was left with about five hundred in the bank, and the whole month to see out. I borrowed, of course – and, ludicrously, from Aya! – but soon after, a cheque for more than eight thousand – from Moni! that viperous crosspatch – my share for some lands of ours in Balasore that I didn’t even know of, that were bought by I don’t know whom – most sisterly of Moni to spare me my portion, but God knows what I was entitled to. I gawped at the cheque, I wanted to whoop and coo – and instead, burst into tears. It appeared such a victory for me, though the event was no victory, of course, merely a miracle, never repeated, though it should’ve been. For I don’t spend on myself – you can’t deny that, Jamun – but to reap some stillness, respite, caring – these can be paid for.’
‘This morning’s horoscope in the Express,’ responds Jamun, ‘states that Sagittarians are total lemons with money. That fits you – zip through the cash in your hand, and mañana to the leftovers.’
‘Because of previous debts, I’d no money in that racking year in Bhubaneshwar. I was alone, utterly friendless, away from my children, in a defunct, unfamiliar town, regularly pondering why I was living, and every time prompting
myself – oh, who’ll then see to your children, and, more to the purpose, who’ll then pay back your borrowings? Next, when your father was transferred to Jamshedpur, he famished himself to stow away some money towards building this house. He too was alone, friendless – but he adores squirrelling, and salting away.’
On the beach, Jamun recalls that both Urmila and Burfi are positive that, for Shyamanand, conserving money is exhilaration – ‘his bank deposits are his uppers’ is Burfi’s vitriolic remark. In his retirement, forenoon upon forenoon, unbathed, with his vitals paddling in litres of tea, Shyamanand has calculated and notched up figures in a large black diary, and has striven to sway his sons into sharing his enchantment with those numbers. The diary contains the particulars of his bank accounts, tidily jotted down in distinctive inks – green for name and location of bank, blue for rate of interest and duration of deposit, red for amount deposited and date of maturity, black for the run-of-the-mill reckoning, the withdrawals and accretions. Shyamanand jabs away for hours at the pocket calculator that Joyce has half-sardonically gifted him; now and then, never failing to jolt, like thunderclaps of delight, he will plangently whack his thigh or the table if his summations are roseate – if in May, they indicate that by July he’ll’ve scooped together a few more thousands in interest to open yet another account. If his computations augur against him, Shyamanand will remain glum till his further study of them touches off a new brainwave to swell his revenue by a thimbleful.
The costs of Urmila’s rehabilitation have already blighted Shyamanand’s savings plans. Yet no one condoles with him in the least. He bickers, noon and night. ‘Don’t you follow? If I discontinue a deposit today, I pay the bank to allow me to touch my own money, whereas as soon as the deposits mature, I’ll repay you bloody all.’ And, ‘Isn’t my money yours? After I die, won’t my money be yours?’
‘We don’t want your money. Not that compellingly anyway. Wade into it now, when it’s needed the most.’
Kasturi’s telephone at eight-thirty the next morning. ‘Hello, Jamun here . . . Thanks for waking me up . . . Sorry, I couldn’t contact you earlier . . . Oh, she was yakking chirpily last evening. They mean to hustle a pacemaker into her . . . I’m meeting Kuki about that this evening . . . will you come too? I could pick you up.’
He isn’t certain that he’s glad at Kasturi having called. When he’s away from her, he believes that their friendship should moulder to nullity. They’ve been intimate for over a decade. After her marriage to someone that her grandfather found for her, Jamun’s slept with her twice, frenziedly, without fondness, trying to bludgeon with his phallus his own tension and rage. Neither much relishes alluding to those two misadventures, though silence will never whittle down their import. Yet every time that either’s taken a break at home – he, in particular, when repelled by his Kasibai life – one has dropped a line to the other, not to hint at a rendezvous but just to inform of one’s where-abouts, as a compliant child will to a domineering mother. But when they meet, their talk is just flotsam.
Urmila despises Kasturi, without intelligible cause. Kasturi’s maiden visit to Jamun’s house, years ago, was a catastrophe.
A holiday, about four in the afternoon, tea. Jamun’s parents are at the dining table. He introduces Kasturi.
Shyamanand behaves with his wonted civility towards guests. ‘Do please sit down, Kasturi . . . Are you two in the same college? . . . Ah – Political Science, certainly a formidable subject . . .’ Urmila doesn’t acknowledge Kasturi in any way, and, after the preliminary chit-chat tapers off, woodenly observes, ‘I’ve no more tea.’ She then rises to her feet and starts to clear the table.
Kasturi, wholly taken aback, begins to disclaim that she needs any tea. Jamun, to cover up, patters, ‘Oh, I’ll make some more. Baba, woud you like another cup? Ma?’ and steers Kasturi to the drawing room. ‘Perhaps I should leave,’ offers a still startled Kasturi.
‘Rubbish. If you slink off, imagine how tickled pink my mother’ll be.’
Jamun’s sangfroid seems further to madden Urmila. When he crosses her with the tea, she remonstrates, in a stridor squawky enough to carry to Kasturi in the other room, ‘Those biscuits are not for that woman. Put them back!’
Jamun can devise one explanation for Urmila’s conduct, but is sure neither of its accuracy nor its need. Why should he at all interpret his mother to Kasturi? To himself, he therefore defends himself by arguing that locution and inflexion are slippery matters, and that he might misrepresent one woman and rile the other. Kasturi remains composed through her tea, and does not touch a single biscuit. Jamun doesn’t insist.
He doesn’t badger Urmila either, later that evening. He prefers, like his father, that his silence should voice his contempt. After dinner, Urmila, penitent and prurient, murmurs, ‘Your Kasturi looks much older than you. In a few years, the flesh on her jowl’ll slump, like toffee in the sun.’
To disconcert and distress her, Jamun declares, as though inadvertently, ‘True. But Kasturi’s terrific in bed.’ He then discerns the wound of affront on Urmila’s features and knows that he has deeply wronged both his mother and his friend. (At the same time, the imp in his head reminds him – with a snicker – that Kasturi is not terrific in bed; she’s bloody passive and shy – and unwilling to learn; the only things going for her are her coffee-with-milk skin, and its tremulousness.) Infuriated with himself, he detonates at her, ‘I know you too well. You observed Kasturi for an instant, and, from the way I spoke to her, baselessly deduced that she’s dazzled me, that I burn to marry her. That dismayed you. Not only because every parent recoils from the marriage of his son, loathes the pliancy with which he yields to his interloper-wife. But because Baba’d sneer, how shoddily our sons’ve married! Their wives’re older than they – and one’s even a Christian! Our grandsons’re being reared as Catholics, have been baptized, and their measly father has not demurred! Now Jamun’s scented out for himself another nymph. First-rate. Then Baba’ll arraign you, his whipping boy. You’ve goofed everything. You’ve not fostered your children rightly. They’ve discounted their traditions, culture, parents – because of you. As a mother, as a mortal, you’re a disaster. Task consumated, Baba’ll then roll over in bed, fart, and return to his journal. Instead of hissing his twaddle back at him, you’ll start sobbing – because you’d snivel even if a toddler accused you of bumping off both the Kennedys.
‘Therefore, to stall – or just to defer – the next squirt of Baba’s toxin, you were so uncivil to a stranger, a guest, this afternoon. Under Baba’s nose, at the start, you wanted to manifest that you disliked Kasturi, so that – you reasoned – even if Jamun marries her, you could never be reproached with having encouraged us. “I? But I behaved so wretchedly with her the first day! However could I’ve put heart into them!” But creation is much larger than Baba’s sentiments. I know you to the core, Ma.’
‘Set against you, even your father’d pass for a cherub.’ Urmila’s face, like putrid fruit, has pulped with gall and misery. ‘You are the cruellest person I know. As though in my womb you’d laved in venom.’
In the car, Kasturi maunders about her husband and herself but, weltering in his inexorable retrospections, Jamun hears not a phrase. ‘. . . will turn up for the last weeks of my confinement. But you won’t remain here till then. And you haven’t met him since the wedding. When d’you return? Of course you can’t foretell, how silly of me.’
Kuki has ballooned in the months that Jamun hasn’t met him. His blowzy, stretched skin looks about to slit, like a mouth for a yawn. Over whisky (and a nimboo pani for Kasturi), Kuki exhibits to them a thin, dove-grey, two-inch metal case, like a ritzy cigarette lighter. ‘This is the pacemaker. The cobbler that Haldia gets for the job’ll position this just beneath the collarbone.’
To discover how it feels, Kasturi props the dummy pacemaker underneath her collarbone. ‘As a wily trafficker in medical gear, Kuki, you might even know when a pacemaker’s truly necessary. Or are we just easy money for Haldia?
And for you!’
‘No one jokes with stuff like pacemakers, oaf. Your mother must need it if her heart’s kaput. Haldia’s reputation is topnotch. Mind you, a pacemaker can never harm. Of course, the combination of Haldia and pacemaker’ll be extortionate. Are the costs stinging you?’
‘No, certainly not,’ demurs Jamun, and focuses on his fourth peg. He and the others of his family would have been harrowed if, by and by, they themselves began to assume that they were bedevilled more by the expenses of Urmila’s healing than by the uncertainty of her restoration. To enquire about the pacemaker is just to flabbily betoken to themselves that, even in an extremity, they stay composed enough to probe the fitness of each counsel. The truth is that the rut of the preceding one week – the two trips every day to the hospital, the arranging for Urmila’s particular diet, the superintendence of the house in the desolation of her absence, the comfortless palavers with Haldia and his lieutenants, the sons’ imperceptible shunning of Shyamanand’s despairing mien, and the evocations of the hospital itself – the pale corridors dully dispersing the ice-blue of the tubelights, the pong of carbolic, the careworn faces of those who wait in the bucket seats outside Intensive Care, the sly orderlies Argus-eyed for a fast buck, the grudging, strutting nurses, the unpunctual specialists, Urmila’s ashen wrinkled face, her gripes about agony and neglect, her accusations of their tardiness which irk them because true – have enervated and bludgeoned them to automatons. They persevere in their new routine, outwardly, in Chhana’s phrase, ‘hoping for the best and ready for the worst’, but inly, too inert to speculate. At home, the void of Urmila’s absence is abominably dislocating. Each thing – tea in the early morning, the sere flowers in the vases, the dust on the face of the TV, the reckoning of the dhobi’s monthly dues – reminds her husband and her sons of her. But the remembrance of her is now unbiddenly embroiled with the impressions of the nursing home. Hence their entire existence seems to recall only their visits to the hospital; to summon up with solace the trip just completed, and with gloominess the trip to come.
The Last Burden Page 8
