‘What a septic tank. I’ve picked the shit end of the stick, hooked by parents into staying with them. They grouse day in and day out about Joyce and me. “You don’t spend any time with us . . . Your wife” – never Joyce, fuck them! – “takes no notice of us. You whiz to work at eight every morning, and when you hobble back it’s unduly late in the evening, your temper’s beastly, and in any case, you plod straight upstairs, without a second for us. If we snuff it downstairs, you all, upstairs in that dinning rock music, wouldn’t even know.” I’ve suffered that one about a thousand times. Fuck, does anyone wish to hear such shit at thirty-four? So I’ve retorted once or twice, “Unlikely that both of you’ll croak together. When one cops it, the other can ring us on the second phone upstairs, and then leave the corpse be, join us and let his – or her – hair down to some vintage acid rock.” This sort of exchange can fuck you up for a week.
‘By staying here, Joyce and I lose three thousand rupees every month as Residence Allowance! Baba should repay me that. Staying with them is screwing my marriage up.’
Whenever Shyamanand overhears Burfi in this tone, he soon after grumbles to Urmila or Jamun, ‘What’s preventing them from clearing out? Please beg them to leave. Why does Burfi pretend that we’ve manacled him to us? They could leave the brats behind. I’ll nurture them.’
The listener placates Shyamanand. ‘Never mind. Burfi’s just a child.’
And now and then Jamun striates his brow and submits undecidedly, ‘Burfi doesn’t really intend to budge. Three large rooms for nothing – he won’t have it so good anywhere else. When I arrive on holiday, it’s a squash only for me. I survive out of a suitcase in the drawing room, and feel like I’ve registered in a camp for evacuees or something.’ The bitter deadness on Shyamanand’s face dries Jamun up. Shyamanand prizes the house that he’s raised and any remark on its insufficiency stings him.
Indeed, for Burfi, staying with his parents is fairly gainful. For one, it is substantially cheaper. Until cornered, he never contributes any money towards staying alive; when he senses that he’s going to be accosted (by Urmila, or by Shyamanand through Pista – ‘Baba, this afternoon Thakuda handed me this water bill to give to you. Could you send someone from the office with your cheque?’) he slopes off even earlier to work, remains upstairs, jerking his dome to the earphones of his Walkman, or, whenever he can’t dodge his parents or his sons, gabbles, with a heavy, forbidding countenance, of the dreadful lumber of office affairs that’s hampering him from looking to domestic matters. Burfi’s chief bestowal on the superintendence of the household is his desultory censure; this taxes neither his mind nor his purse. Thus he never actually, determinedly, prospects for another house, though on weekends, now and then, eluding Joyce’s eyes, he proclaims that he’s off to househunt, and melts away for the day.
Other blessings too. He can evade the exhaustion and the costs of entertaining; when chaffed on the issue by his pals, he can, and does, reprehend his circumstances. ‘No space, man, like living in those colossal PWD sewer pipes underneath some flyover. We live with my parents. They need me.’ His grimace, his shrug, the lugubrious delivery, could’ve depicted the slaughter of an intimate.
And certain benefits of staying where they are Burfi and Joyce do not concede even to themselves. When they return from office, they are usually dejected with fatigue, and the twingeing in the skull that now a different life will have to be administered – Aya’s crabbing against Doom or Shyamanand, and Pista himself – having outgrown his Aya, and being six whole years older than his brother – was the boy lonesome, and did he pine for his parents in the day? What did he actually do, and mull over, and makebelieve; was he burgeoning well, would he consummate creditably? Why didn’t they command more time for him, and yet what span of time would be ample?
On some evenings, at their return, Pista is enjoying himself at chess with his grandmother. She sits shapelessly on the couch, while he bobs about the room, trotting up to hurl invisible, wicked balls at timorous champions among batsmen imagined against the walls, contorting his spine and skying his arms in yawps of ecstasy as their wickets explode – from all of which Urmila drearily lugs him back, again and again, for his next coup on the board. At the entry of his parents, Pista looks joyful enough, and skips up to greet them and be cuddled, but returns in a wink to the game.
‘Chess is more lovable than your mama, is it?’ grins Joyce, but Pista is more agog to exhibit to her how utterly he’s drubbing Urmila in that tussle. Of course, neither player is at all certain of the elementary operations in chess, and Pista dabbles only with his grandmother, because she’s the one adversary whom he’s fairly convinced of trouncing – or badgering into yielding. Urmila detests the game because it summons up her brother Belu, but she never declines Pista, for only chess seems to bring the boy to her. Further, with the brat capering about, there is another being in the room to tug away Shyamanand’s regard, which, when trained at her, customarily expresses scorn.
On other days, if they are early, their parents spot Pista and Doom in the straggling garden, planting saplings for their grandfather. Aya will be in the first-floor verandah, much like a muezzin on a minaret, yowling to the heavens for the children to be benign and come upstairs for the dual horror of warm milk and homework. Not to be winched up by her stridulation, to exile it from his universe, Pista clenches his jaws and savages the earth with his trowel as though she, Aya were spread in front of him. Shyamanand, guiding his grandsons, smirking, winking, proposes, ‘If you disobey Aya, I’ll reward you with chocolate or bubble gum, whichever you wish. If you remain downstairs till dinner, I’ll gift each of you both.’
And Doom, Pista feels, though ridiculously young, does have his pluses. He potters about the house after Pista, hauled by the overriding enchantment of the four-year-old for the activities of the greenest of his elders, bawling when Pista apprises him that his tommy gun is immeasurably superior to Doom’s idiotic Smith and Wesson, and that Doom won’t be permitted to so much as touch it, squealing when Pista asserts that he’s decided to be both Thor and Hiawatha, but Doom can’t be anything because he’s too young, short, fat and too dense, so there. On many a sultry afternoon, from divers corners of the house, this shrill wrangling of Pista and Doom, and Aya’s screechy, disregarded shushing, filter through Shyamanand’s half-snooze, and make him fuzzily marvel at the vitality in the young.
Urmila, Shyamanand and Doom: for a year and a half, Pista buds in warm company. His parents, however, never concede this notion, do not acknowledge it even to themselves as a ground for not shifting, that Burfi’s parents are beneficial to their boys and so to them. For both, living with one’s parents is a sort of embarrassment, a dreadfully lower-middle-class practice, like conspicuously relishing epic television soaps.
‘Ma and Baba can’t be discarded, Burfi, like rundown chappals. We could slice them, and one could be despatched to Chhana’s. Baba, I suppose, since everyone else aches for a respite from him, Ma most of all. I mean, in a race for The Nation’s Most Disagreeable Bong, he’d be streets ahead of the rest of us. You’d be second, though.’
‘What about giving us a break, fucker, and packing both of them off for a time? In that peace, we could even overhaul the house, painting, with-it fittings, throw a party, let our hair down. But they’ll never leave this house, even for a holiday.’
‘Astute of them, if a vacation involves yielding the whole house to a sharper like you. When they return, you won’t allow them in, or you’ll exact rent or something. But jokes aside – a firstrate idea, to sunder them for a few days – they can rediscover how much they detest each other. I’ll probe them.’
‘A priceless suggestion, worthy even of Burfi at his most witless. You imagine that I’ll abandon to him and his wife your mother in this state? You’re very stupid, Jamun. When we hankered for you to bear us away with you, you seesawed, submitted rubbishy pretexts – that the climate there’s noxious, malarial, the cook’s boneheaded, there’s nowhere to visi
t, we’d bore ourselves forthwith, we’d yearn for the snugness of this house, etcetera. Your lukewarmness crumpled up your mother – doesn’t Jamun want us with him? He too? She was wholly correct. And now you propose that I should unwind for a bit at Chhana’s. Whatever for? We don’t need any breathers, thank you.’
The answer lies in part in Satyavan Hegiste’s letter. Hegiste writes a cultivated Marathi, as one who aspires to polish his reader’s knowledge of the language.
My dear Jamun,
More than two months’ve slipped by since you left. I received your letter, and by the time you get mine, I’m confident your mother will’ve recuperated greatly. My grandfather-in-law too is assured of this. In the evenings, lolling in his pet venue – the courtyard of the liquor den – he continues to proclaim to his comrades, ‘Jamun’s mother will definitely revive. For where in the maw of time will she happen on another son like him?’ Awed by this proclamation, the chums then – as always – drain an extra peg to you.
Office has ticked your leave, most regretfully. Chhupa Rustam sanctioned it only when your beloved colleagues dared him to differentiate between your presence and your absence.
Your Kasibai and that teenage street arab Vaman returned one afternoon last week. They apparently possess a key to your flat. I was about to slip back to work after lunch when Kasibai fetched up at our door, mammoth and snuffling, perturbed. ‘Where’s Saab?’ Presumably, the cobwebs and dust had told her that you weren’t in office, or out buying cigarettes. Anyway, I left her to my wife. In the evening, a foxed Mrs disclosed that Kasibai had wanted to telephone you and actually chase you a thousand kilometres away to your parents’ house! Well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well! – is what I observed to myself. However, my Mrs suggested, stalely, that you, muddled that you are, have probably not paid her for some months. She’s informed Kasibai that pursuing you across the country wouldn’t be necessary since you were returning within a fortnight. Aren’t you?
In your flat they play the transistor day and night. Bhojpuri skits, or the weather in Kannada, or something, interrupts, once in a way, Bombay film pop From the roundabout, through the yawning doorway, the sluggards (i.e. seventy per cent of our citizenry) observe Vaman the yahoo playact, to that howling from the radio, in front of your cracked mirror, the Hindi blockbuster hero. He jives and shimmies, shadow-bludgeons a hundred rogues, scrutinizes his braced muscles for that pit-a-pat effect, tries outlandish coiffures, declaims filmdom’s ageless, purple passages, for hours without pause, in tight T-shirts and your – presumably junked – sea-green goggles. That bum’s sole worth is as farce.
Whom do I play Drama In Real Life with, now that you’re away? I’ve stacked some for your return. Take one.
A havenot – subsisting two kilometres beneath the latest Poverty Line – in a trashy town – like ours, for instance – soaks up buckets of venomous hooch on payday, and cops it. Two hundred dead in the country’s worst liquor tragedy, squawks the press – the worst liquor tragedy since last Tuesday, that is. A pillar of the community ordains an enquiry, and an ex-gratia settlement of three hundred rupees on the kinsmen of each cadaver.
‘Ex-gratia?’ hoots the local Member of the Legislative Assembly, who is from the Opposition. ‘Its idiom itself exposes this witless gerontocratic government to be still mentally besmeared by colonialism!’
That was local colour. Now, on with the tragedy. Our cadaver’s son, aged thirty, befuddled and happy, capers off to collect the money, which he means to drain on vats of a rice beer the virility of which his defunct father had been scornful of. Ah well, will there never be any unanimity between generations? The local Revenue office implores him for a bribe. The goofy son starts to explain that he has no money to bribe with. ‘What, not even a naya paisa?’ demands the clerk, incredulous, his eyebrows like horseshoes. For them, quite often, it’s not the cash that counts, but the principle. So, shaking his nut, and emitting clucking, ‘poor you’ noises, the clerk discloses to Goof that to process his case, he is required to submit, for starters, seven certificates, three affidavits and one testimonial, all in triplicate.
Next. An erring sister– HIV bubbling out of her pussy – affecting to be the liquor tragedian’s loved one, turns up as a rival claimant for the compensation. She proffers herself most prodigally to the entire Revenue office. Afterwards, she peacocks past Goof, tucking the notes into her tits.
Now what should our protagonist the scion do? Should he dart after her, bleating that he too works in the Revenue office, but that he’d missed out because he’d zipped off for a shit while she’d been spreading herself out on the Head Clerk’s table, and that it wasn’t fair? Or is he tragic, and hence will he bend over in the courtyard of the office, tug down his striped drawers, and screech, ‘Behold! Can you see the real me?’ Your answer, as always, to be propped by forceful argument, please.
I hope to see you soon. Even my son appears to be missing your evening saunters with him. My best wishes again for your mother.
Satyavan
Now that Kasibai’s returned, Jamun itches to go back. But forsaking his parents to Burfi he likens to gifting an heirloom – a grandfather’s fountain pen, or the family gramophone – for a plaything to a three–year–old.
‘Ma, I was considering returning to work. You’ve rallied now, and in any extremity Burfi’s always here. I was wondering whether, for a change of scene, you or Baba’d spend a week in Calcutta. I sounded Baba, but he declined. Sarcastically.’
‘Have you squabbled with him? Perhaps Burfi has. Because he edged in about half an hour ago, faltered about, and without warning urged that I revise my will, and not bequeath the house exclusively to you two – add me also as a beneficiary, he suggested, otherwise, if you predecease me, what’s to curb my sons from turfing me out from what will lawfully have become theirs? Then where will I stray? he demanded histrionically. On the sands? “Whom have you bickered with now?” I badgered him. Incidentally, Jamun, where is the will?’
‘Oof, Ma, I’ve no idea, and that’s not what I want to chat about. Are you longing to laze about at Chhana’s? Without Baba?’
‘You do recall the will? Mr Naidu and your Kasturi attested it, around six years ago, and we continually wondered whether, since neither witness was a psychiatrist, the will would be illegal. Nobody seemed to know what to do with it, and now it’s lost. But before anything else, will you find out whom your father’s wrangled with? Never any peace in this house.’
Shyamanand has quarrelled after all, and with two people, and both on the telephone; long-distance with Chhana, and with Burfi in his office. Jamun is moderately riled. ‘Scrap on the phone? Isn’t it easier to disconnect?’
Dredging details out of a reluctant Shyamanand is particularly onerous. Nevertheless, Jamun fathoms that Burfi’d wished to inform them that his mother-in-law wanted to visit Urmila, now that Urmila had mended.
‘So?’ Shyamanand had asked, quite justifiably.
‘Joyce spoke to me from Rani’s a short while ago, to check whether her mother’s dropping in on you all would be okay. Of course, I retorted, why shouldn’t it be, but she sort of assumes that you detest her so much that you’ll be stand-offish and inhospitable with her mother. This visit appears so totally dispensable – of course, that peeved Joyce considerably, because for her, Joyce Senior is a kind of matronly Jesus . . .’
An assessment of his mother-in-law that Burfi himself lukewarmly accepts. Jamun has for long been covertly appalled at the psychological governance of his brother by his wife. Burfi, in Jamun’s expression, is a ‘gone case’. His opinion on virtually everything – on every topic save money and sex – on education, religion, therapeutics, vocations, his upbringing, the family – has been recast by his marriage.
At a routine rum session, Burfi will proclaim, after the Old Monk has laved his tongue, ‘Hard for us to size up our parents undistortedly. Ma and Baba, you realize, are really quite unexceptional – self-centred and unwelcoming. You notice how
they’ve no friends? They haven’t learnt to give.’
‘Who has?’ retorts Jamun vexedly, despite conceding the unsociableness of his parents. His booze carousals with his brother have steathily slackened after Burfi’s marriage; by the time Jamun grows unconcerned at this falling off, he’s started to brood, now and then, over how little he now shares with Burfi – only a handful of years of a past the import of which is ebbing apace, the seconds of which are cascading like sand through the sieve of memory. Doubtless that both have always lived their distinct quadruple lives, but once upon a time they’d also shared, or had appeared to share – or perhaps it now seems, and only to Jamun, that they’d once shared – a fateful chunk of living that had fostered their existent form, and that hence their present being was embedded in an affinity that it was wrongful of them to slight.
Jamun has noted that whenever Burfi bleeps the sentiments of his wife, he frequently glances out of the corner of his eye at her – as though for benediction. Perhaps, had he wheedled and supplicated Kasturi, and yanked her away for the nullity that she had wed, he too would’ve begun to view Urmila and Shyamanand in an unforgiving light, with Kasturi’s eyes, be lorded over by her loins and her mind. Or he could peter out like his parents, friendless, inexpectant of the future, intuitive that the other’s passing would wither the survivor, yet pottering about in a house all day to shun each other.
Closeness dies, between parent and seed, always. In his case, Shyamanand imputes this attrition in part to the uxoriousness of his elder son, and so abhors his daughter-in-law. Yet the unmarried Jamun also admits, but secretly, to the slump of his own fondness for his begetters. This acceptance melts and yet assuages, seems to release him. His brother has already whittled himself down to an acquaintance, his nephews command memories of no consequence, his mother is dying, his aya is dead; what remains for Jamun seems to be to front his father with his overblown trollop and her ragamuffin son. Grotesque.
The Last Burden Page 13
