While Urmila natters on, unheeding whether Jamun listens, gratified (though shell never concede it) to lounge in the sun and breeze of a tepid November, he, with a smirk of empathy, observes a maddened Doom frisk about the hem of the knot of slackers around the monkey-man, doing his damnedest to ferret a route through adult hams and adolescent haunches to the epicentre for an eyeful of the cavorters.
Filial love. To bewail its attrition is the singularity in Shyamanand that his sons, times out of number, have smirked at, cocksure that they themselves will never ache likewise, that cognate fondness is passé, outworn, hardly the burden of those who dab their armpits with Halston and encourage an illjudged Americanness to bespatter their enunciation when they converse with all foreigners: ‘. . . Jeez . . . shucks . . . bucks . . . geewhiz . . .’
Show over. The scroungers diffuse across the beach before the monkeys can paw them for a tip. From the dumbshow in the near distance, and from a commonality of experience (by which what befalls Pista and Doom at any sole instant only seems to rerun, in essence, what issued with Burfi and him some twenty-five years ago), Jamun recognizes that the monkey-man is trying to sweet-talk the brats to scamper across to the bench for a baksheesh for him. Doom, at ease, eyes Pista for guidance in the matter; Pista, recalling his father’s derision of those who kowtow to pestering entreaties for tips, and yet joyously bewitched by the monkey-man’s personality – the witchery of which is his livelihood – simpers witlessly at the universe. Tenderness goosefleshes Jamun as he watches his nephews scoot, and flounder, back to Urmila and him. Will his memory – as wilful as a circumspect cat – salt away this instant of his fondness, this frame of two laughing children haring across nondescript sands, against a shoddy sea, to meet him? Won’t he rather smack his lips over the thousand inevitable instances of their heedlessness, when they’ve been too up-and-doing with living to remember to give tongue to love, have deemed that a grandmother or an uncle will eternally be there to ease the flapping of the heart, have assumed the philanthrope’s bench across a few feet of sand?
Pista of course fetches up first, cherry-red, huffing, touches the victory post of Jamun’s knee, and twirls to boo Doom’s tottering progress – ‘Roly-poly-snaily! Roly-poly-snaily!’ Jamun is quckened to countermine, ‘No, no, don’t listen to him Doomo! C’mon Doomo, you’re really zipping Doomo! Abibe Bekila, Doomo!’ Chortling irrepressibly, breathless, with ecstatic eyes in a carmine face, Doom scuds up to tumble into his uncle’s lap. Jamun cuddles him hard, and nuzzles the warm, plump, talcumed neck. Pista, needled perhaps by this show of love to a kind of neck-and-neck jealousy, disregarding Urmila’s bogus protests against his weight, plonks down and starts to rock on his grandmother’s knee. How piteous Shyamanand and his sons are, reflects Jamun turbidly – with his chin roosting on Doom’s head, palm spreadeagled on the soft child-chest, feeling through the cotton the heart thudding like the diesel engine of a rice mill across miles of field – for nurturing their remembrances of one another on instances not of unprompted affection, but of putative affront – doubtless not wholly putative, which was even more piteous, that in one’s fosterage, with one’s blood, with whom one is entirely naked, one shows more balefulness than charity, just because with them one is snug, and can be oneself.
The notion didn’t dishearten Burfi in the least. ‘You take any fucker. Any fucker anywhere in the world, he’s secretly vindictive, viperous with his what are called near and dear ones. It’s natural – like shitting once a day if your tummy’s okay. With those we’re completely restful with, in front of whom we can loll and fondle our balls through our lungis – with them we’re time and time again feral, churlish, baleful, till our vitriol pricks us to contrition and pity – which is what tenderness is when untouched by carnality. Libido brews well with loathing, don’t you think, a sort of malevolent rage at the golden body that one hungers for. That’s what I believe, at any rate – we find malignity comfy, we’re rancorous just so we can goad ourselves into love. Thank God for the family. Without it, how could we grapple with the world?’
Flattered that Pista is comfortable on her knee, Urmila, with her shrivelled hands on his back, sighs and continues her natter. ‘Have you read Chhana’s last letter? No? You brothers’ve done with communicating with her or what? It arrived some four days ago. I know that Burfi hasn’t riffled through it, your father refused last night to hand over the letter. “It’s not meant for you, Burfi,” he sneered, “it’s only from a lower-middle-class niece to her lower-middle-class uncle.” Of course Burfi mooched upstairs, quite riled. All this while we were wasting our time and money at Haldia’s. Really, who’s more infantile, your brother or your father? You do remember that rumpus between Burfi and your Baba?’
‘Which of them, Ma? In the past twenty-five years, the rest of us together ve achieved, on an average, one earthshaking and three frivolous wrangles with Baba per week. You and Burfi head the charts, neck and neck. The one about our letter-writing manners was ages ago, wasn’t it, just after Burfi married, when the savour of Joyce’s world seemed to grate him with what he concluded was the coarseness of his own past.’ Yes, Ma, I remember. We are our parents’ sons. If the recollection is ugly, we never forget: we tack it on to the anthills in our minds.
The family’s always written common letters to one another. If from Amsterdam, for instance, Joyce addresses a picture postcard to Jamun, the other inhabitants of the house can rightly suppose that her ‘Wish You Were Here’ is equally meant for them. Burfi writes to Urmila, and Shyamanand replies: ‘Received your letter of 16.4; your longhand’s even more illegible than before . . .’ They unthinkingly slit open one another’s letters when they recognize the handwriting to be parent’s, brother’s, son’s’. Envelopes from acquaintances who are aware of and beguiled by this communion in correspondence are sometimes marked: ‘For Your Eyes Only’. Nobody in the family thinks the quirk queer, leave alone shameful, till Burfi marries, and Joyce, stupefied, gawps at Jamun rip open Chhana’s letter to her husband.
Afterwards, Burfi, plainly goaded by his wife’s derision, strives to expound to his brother how wedlock has refined him. ‘You see, Jamun, people of class simply don’t tear open others’ letters, just as they don’t burp and gurk in public like fetid volcanoes. I’m certain –’
‘People of class? Phew. I’m appalled’ – Jamun is now eighteen, when ‘appalled’ sounds really good – ‘that I’m actually related to someone who can, without flagellating himself like a Muharram freakout, actually use the phrase, “people of class”. Whom do you–’
‘– that none of your soulmates apologizes after belching into your mug, and up your nostrils, perhaps because your face deserves it. But do they even know that to burp in front of others is as vulgar as to fart? Bet they don’ Not even that new bomb of yours, Kasturi, that squat one who wants bad. Her eyes become like damp pussies whenever she peeps at me. Have you fucked her yet? Bet she and you suspect that fuck means to burp into each other’s noses without warning. Joyce was zapped – and how fucking embarrassing, that she had to hiss at me, “in the presence of my friends at least, please don’t belch like a Guinness Book hopeful. Jesus, I feel so goofy proposing to a husband that he burp less, that he finish each eructation with an Excuse me, or Sorry, or something.’’ Would you enjoy hearing that from a wife?
‘Then Joyce has spotted Baba writing postcards to Chhana. Baba’s not exactly her honeybaby, you know. Why doesn’t your father, she asked, use envelopes and inlands? They aren’t – she couldn’t resist suffixing – that prohibitive. She was correct in her raillery – she’s brainier than me anyway. Postcards, burps, to dip into others’ letters, to slip into lungi and sandow vest the instant you return from office, to wear striped string drawers instead of elastic undies, and use homemade STs of discarded sari swatches and newspapers, and two languages for interlocution at home – your own lingo with your parents and their age, English with your own quartet – all, all that we were was so squalidly LMC: the castoff bedlinen f
or curtains, newspapers for tablemats – I’ve defined for Joyce what we were, how in Bhubaneshwar, repaying the housing society scrunched up Ma’s salary, and month upon month she hocked, pawned, borrowed, to buy her provender. Joyce understood in a wink, she’s really quick-witted’ – asserts Burfi in the besottedness, the early lambency, of his marriage – ‘how we, you and I, hauled ourselves – the family, I mean – out of the ooze, just by making good, so that Baba and Ma, correctly, can show us off, like the first colour TV in the locality.’
Jamun at that age thrills in the origination of discord; so he forthwith recites to Shyamanand that the new Burfi has just declared that his wife’s graces have disclosed to him the shoddy, outrageous lower-middle-classness of his previous avatar. Afterwards, Shyamanand and Burfi squabble halfheartedly, and Shyamanand, for corrupting his firstborn so, notches up yet one more grouse against Joyce, of which there already exist a dozen; when he’s downhearted, lonely, feels untended, overlooked, he reanimates, any one grudge, and consequently declines a rare airing with his grandchildren in Burfi’s Maruti because he senses that Joyce won’t welcome his presence; or he’s peeved that Burfi hasn’t asked after a recent letter from Chhana, infers that even the shrivelling of his care for his kin is due to his wife’s straddling of his wits, next acquaints Burfi with the arrival of the letter, but does not hand it over, maintaining that it’s too lower-middle-class for his wife and him; which doesn’t disquiet Burfi immoderately, for Time’s sedate sledgehammer does lame the bonds between kith and kin, but as creatures of the beaten track, he and Shyamanand just can’t permit a chance to bicker to glide by.
‘Chhana’s so thoughtless,’ runs on Urmila, in a relaxed whine. ‘At the end of the letter, simply because she must eke out at least one page – otherwise an eight-line note after weeks looks too ludicrous – she’s scribbled: “Last week, I suffered a spurt of piles, but after a day or two the sonofabitch subsided, thank God. I’ll write again soon. My love to all,” etcetera. So goofy; she should know that piles is not like, well, electricity – it doesn’t just come and go. And why must she use expletives in her letters to us? And which sane person’d chat about her piles in a letter? So much for your father’s immaculate family – Chhana was fifteen when she first showed up to stay. She’d spent three years in the same class in school. Your Baba swaggered to his sister, “Send her to me. In six months, I’ll reform her into a brilliant student.” Huh. And to me, he shammed, “She can lend you a hand with Burfi.” Huh! And he jeers at my family, exploiting Belu’s freakishness as an instance! “If I hadn’t been charitable enough to marry you,” he blubbered at me once, “you’d’ve lurched into the sewer, where you and your kin rightfully belong” – but you were there when he – yes, you were, that frightening squall on that September evening, some weeks after his stroke, of course you were, because you half-heaved, half-hauled him out to the verandah for the sunset. I was hotly restless at the tension on your face, and he by then had a fertile stubble, silvery . . .’ like a venerable Hollywood POW, recalls Jamun, masterminding an enthralling getaway from under the ice-blue Aryan eyes of a fiendish, Teutonic camp commandant.
He doesn’t interrupt Urmila, even though he dislikes her indiscreet commentary in the presence of her grandchildren – perhaps because her tempered whine is almost lulling, at one with the warm wafts from the sea and the smirking sun. Her husband is her obsessive topic – his incivility, his nutrition, his gluttonous appetite, in that peculiar order. For thirty-seven years she’s been harrowed by her catastrophic marriage. So has her husband. That he needs her company only as a butt for his derision, as an ear for his ridicule of the absent, gnaws her beyond repression. Her mien, the bleakness in her features, her being itself, envenoms him too. In turn they crab about each other to whichever of their sons is disposed to listen; Urmila crabs more than Shyamanand.
For days he won’t speak to her or answer her, even when her questions concern his welfare, his nourishment, his existence. ‘Since your tummy’s upset, will you drink a glass of lassi at lunch? . . . That shirt that you’ve been rotting in for ages – why don’t you send it to the dhobi?’ In reply, he slouches even more implacably over the bank passbooks on his desk, or hoists the science periodical in his hand to wall off her lugubrious face, or, with irksome staginess, as a final expedient, hobbles out of the room. She weeps almost every time from impotence and rage; her pulped face is as much an image of home as their diminutive unkept garden, or the leavings of lunch on the dining table that Aya won’t evacuate till dinner; Urmila’s subdued lamentation is as household as the tearfulness of a widow being bullied by her petulant daughters-in-law in a Hindi weepie on Sunday TV.
Times out of number, in his featureless college years, Jamun has returned home at an unpredicted hour to stumble on his mother huddled in their house’s most sombre room, blubbering, or quiescent after sobbing – a shadowy contour in the owl-light of the downstairs drawing room, with ashen strands all anyhow about her bloodless face, as though a giant fist has randomly lobbed her into a nook. ‘What is it this time? Your favourite ogre? Or your BP? Piles? Corns? Arthritis? Aya? She isn’t letting you clean up her droppings, or what? Or is it a letter from Burfi, trying to cadge the entire savings of the softest touch in the cosmos?’
When the pique spawned by the day has thus been voided on her, the family sink, Urmila’s features disintegrate afresh; hearing her sobs, staring at her delicately shrivelled skin, Jamun inflames with the tenderness of contrition and, without warning, finds that the root of his throat has gorged. Then, hugging her, nestling against her neck, nosing the striae of Pond’s Dreamflower talcum on her throat, kissing her tears, feels marvellous, like a virile, veined forearm bridling, cradling, hushing the thunder in his heart. ‘What’s it this time, Ma? Please tell me. I want to see you smile. Through your tears, I want to see your smile, like the sun.’
Seven times out of ten, Shyamanand’s fathered her woe.
‘Oof, you’re such a goose, Ma, for allowing us to harrow you in a thousand ways.’ He kisses her eyelids. ‘We must’ve harangued you numberless times to retaliate, return like for like, but you’re as mulish as an ass – oh, how idiotic that sounds. But if Baba’s not speaking to you, then don’t ask him a thing! He must learn through discomfort how vital you are for him. When I’m sullen, and heartless, and abusive with you, you only dribble tears and call me my father’s son. Instead, you must draw blood in return, lash for lash. Though your tears’ – he twinkles at her, hoping to rouse her to a smile – ‘are a passable weapon. Yet you’ve never ever practised our advice on any matter – stop that daylong nibbling at that cheap clay, it’ll enrich your mouth with cancer. Stop threshing about all the time over Baba’s welfare – he isn’t worth it. Did Baba sleep well last night? Is Baba constipated today? Phew, wouldn’t you rather mull over some other subject? Perhaps you wouldn’t. But isn’t it enervating, killing, to be rebuffed time after time by every single creature around you? By Baba, your children, Aya, Aya’s cronies, your relatives in Calcutta who write only when they’ve to grouse against you? Your one retort is that all mothers are decreed to be the family punching bag. Oof, Ma, you’re an A-one bore.’
‘You shouldn’t say such things to your mother,’ she murmurs with pensive disapproval, between blowing her nose into the fringe of her sari.
Her inflexion surprises him. Her sons’ve belittled her as tremendously dreary a thousand times before. As she trudges to the door, she suffixes dispiritedly, ‘And if your Baba hears that you called me a whore, he’ll, instead of rebuking you, scoff at me even more for not having nurtured you rightly.’
‘Ma! You’re insane!’ He is flabbergasted, as though, wholly without warning, invisible talons have clenched at his heart, tried to puncture it into repose. ‘God. I didn’t call you a whore, I said Bore – B.’ He can’t swallow the leadenness of her retort. Her deadness alarms him. ‘But if your child calls you a whore, you should be livid, berserk with fury! How can you react so lumpishly!’ He even
starts to kindle. ‘And you actually presume that I could use smut to describe you? My God, Ma, what sort of a ghoul of a son d’you imagine me to be?’ He checks himself out of a kind of terror as his mother begins to blubber anew.
‘Blame me! Taunt me! Day in day out, till the death of time, all of you jeering at me, thwacking me over the knuckles, licking your lips at each pinch, gunning for me as for balloons at a fair! D’you fancy I don’t know? “Ma, you still haven’t stitched that button on my shirt . . . Ma, you forgot to give Baba his afterlunch capsules . . .” Ma this, and Ma that! I can’t – no, don’t touch me!’ She screeches weakly at him and, with untypical spiritedness, jounces off the hand that he, to hearten himself more than her, unconsciously extends forward. In the snarl of his wits careen the grisly thoughts that perhaps he doesn’t know his mother at all, that, very likely, the ordeal of fostering a paralysed husband is stealthily deranging her. He at least enjoys the allures of college – Kasturi, Kuki and his other chums; he can steal away at six-thirty in the morning to jam himself into the university bus, can skip all his classes to trip for four hours on marijuana in an anonymous hostel room, can dishevelledly speculate whether and where he can that afternoon unclothe Kasturi, can, enervated and sullen, return home at any hour between seven p.m. and the next dawn, always to find his mother waiting – bloodless, careworn and waiting – sometimes to hear Shyamanand forebode, ‘In your entire life, no one will wait for you as we’ve waited. To no one else will you matter even a fraction as much’; can extenuate his truancy with mumbled lies – the bus conked out, or he lost track of time amidst the leathered tomes in the library. He thus can slink away from his responsibilities; Urmila, however, has no byways of deliverance.
The Last Burden Page 19
