He is further unmanned by the responsibilities that his father’s infirmity devolves on him. Minor, inescapable, enervating chores – learn the car; fret in the heat and welter of the workshop as the mechanics, sluggards all, open up the vehicle, listlessly run it down, and then forsake it to amble off to lay open some other car; fume punily in the electricity office against an outlandish bill; try halfheartedly to fathom the snarl of Municipal Tax laws; beat down prices at the fish bazaar.
Self-pity, their own disquietudes and Shyamanand’s crusty demeanour, in the main, impede Urmila and Jamun from worrying inordinately about his affliction, about the paralysis itself, about how it must feel to have, without warning, one-half of one’s body die, and yet not go the way of all flesh, to have to heave about leaden dumbbells in lieu of limbs. Most of the time, the stodgy businesses of living and nursing hinder them from any abiding sympathy for his trauma; and now and then, whenever Shyamanand is, or seems, outrageously peevish, they feel that his infirmity is a befitting visitation, even that the deities have let him off rather easily.
Once in a while, however, the derision of the deities for Shyamanand startles his wife and son out of their careworn apathy. Jamun, for instance, is stabbed, glancingly, by shame when he happens on his father struggling to grasp a bottle of hairoil in his left hand so that he can wrench open its seal with his right. ‘Why didn’t you call me?’ he upbraids him as he takes the bottle away.
‘Because I’m tired to death of having to wait and wait for someone else to tch with vexation before he plucks a few seconds off from mooching about to be kind to me.’
‘Phew, that’s a killer. Great, in some ways, you know, that the stroke whammed you and not Ma, for she’s already pulped, and had she been benumbed like this, she wouldn’t’ve endured, I think, her wits would’ve caved in within weeks –’
‘– and she wouldn’t have been able to bear the compassion – or compunction? – of her flesh and blood sour, with time, to exasperation and tedium, yes?’
‘Vitriol. They should bottle your wit and peddle it as the wonderworker against the crud in a loo.’
But even as he kneads a palmful of hairoil into Shyamanand’s scalp, with a vigour that is almost malevolent, he recalls and assents that time and time again, his father it is who’s knuckled under the scourge of his affliction, and of the indifference of his family.
‘I want to die!’ He’s pounded his impotent left arm and, with the snarling, warped features of a hysteric, screeched out his powerlessness. ‘Please, please let me . . . die.’ He’s then blubbered something like that; very few would’ve understood him entirely, for his lips are still too buckled, and his steerage of his tongue too babyish, for him to enunciate lucidly; besides, the turmoil of the storm has smothered all other sound.
Late August. Sixish in the evening, the heavens grumbling, uneasy. Nevertheless, with considerable help from Jamun, Shyamanand, for the first time since his stroke, struggles up the stairs to survey the world from an easychair in the first-floor verandah. Urmila, certain that Shyamanand’s abandonment of his bed denotes a complete recovery within weeks, and hence aquiver with excitation, leaves him to snuffle and wheeze and exclaim at the new world, and herself scurries down to make some tea. Jamun is on the phone with Kasturi when, from the sea, the high wind attacks.
In a wink, without warning, a hideous clatter as the lavatory window slams and splinters into a thousand slivers; the squall seems to thwack Shyamanand in the chest like a blow; he can’t inhale. Dust, leaves, paper frenetically pirouetting in the air; saplings and the boughs of bulkier trees curtsy distraughtly and, because the gale thrusts the sallower undersides of their leaves into view, look an anaemic green; large, hard splinters of rain, like warm glass on naked skin; and, suppressing all other sound, the boohoos and whoops of the wind. Gates clang and doors boom as adults scamper in and children dart out. By the time that Jamun reaches his father, Shyamanand, stunned by both the suddenness and the punch of the squall, is snivelling with fear. Jamun too is shaken by the storm, in particular by the smashing of the lavatory window – and by the expression beneath Shyamanand’s lush stubble of a few weeks – a face like a chasm, like a child’s at the instant of losing its balance. In that tumult, against the sting of the rain, he strives to heave him up, but his father has disintegrated too much even to stand, even with Jamun’s support; they totter against the railing of the verandah. He then hustles and tugs Shyamanand in from the squall, clenching his jaws against the whimpering. ‘Enough . . . I should die . . . This helpless . . .
And Urmila? She careers helter-skelter up the stairs (seemingly having sloughed in the kitchen her piles and her arthritis), screeching out her anxiety: ‘Jamun! Your Baba in the verandah! Oh God!’ But upstairs, she sees her husband being aided on to Jamun’s bed, and since she never wears her spectacles if she can survive without them, doesn’t mark Shyamanand’s shell-shocked face and, from relief, starts to gabble. ‘Oh I’m so glad you’re in, I feared that you’d still be outdoors, thrilling to the thunderstorm, not recognizing that this rain can be so perfidious, so I said to myself, this tea can wait, let me just first scuttle up and check whether they’ve shown the sense to creep in out of the –’
‘God. God.’ Shyamanand’s moan halts her. ‘Jamun, please ask her to go away.’
A slap wouldn’t have stunned Urmila more. But then Shyamanand begins to snivel anew, as though his entreaty to his son had blitzed him all over again, to thresh about on the pillow as he was wont to under electrotherapy, ferally to wallop his dud arm with his sound one. His eyes bulge preposterously, as in a cartoon. Jamun is riveted by this transfigurement of his father into a hideous, bestubbled nursling. ‘Please, God, I crave to die, please!’
In the seconds that Jamun, unmindful of the storm, from the foot of the bed, witnesses Shyamanand writhe, a something – a black curtain, a band of dark metal – is clawed off from just behind his forehead. So this was his father, his begetter, once beautiful and sapient, who’d shepherded him when he, a child, had been bullied by the dark, who’d piloted him through the middle of Calculus, had taught him how to cycle and swim – this accumulation of blubber shuddering on the bed, mentally annihilated by a storm, so this was his father, who’d begun, in his paralysis, to urinate in his jittery sleep – had once even defecated on the floor of his room because his sphincter hadn’t held out till the lavatory, after which he’d slumped against the wall, half in his ordure, mumbling, ‘Sorry. I’m sorry.’ This was how we finished, reflects Jamun in a ferment, abandoned by our basest faculties, needing a son’s arm to be guided to bed; this was the end of the wheel of life, its full circle, its fatuity before one’s eyes when father became child in the years before dying.
The unexpectedness of her husband’s incivility bruises Urmila the most. She does slew away, instinctively, to withstand Shyamanand’s harshness; it registers with her that even in this, his extremity, his wits’ve found the time both to detest her and designedly to express his loathing. The ridiculous disparity between what she panted upstairs to expect and what she actually received pricks her to tears. She retorts almost ravingly, unwittingly, in a kind of self-defence. ‘Then why don’t you die, instead of just bleating about it! Your death’d at least release our lives –’ She stops, appalled.
Shyamanand stops too – snivelling, that is. In that instant Jamun recognizes exhaustedly that he’s, for the millionth time, going to witness a purposeless, enervating squabble between his parents, and that he’ll be importuned by both of them to take sides.
‘Yes, good. At last you reveal yourself. Good. Yes, of course I should die, what claim have I to want to –’
‘I didn’t say that! You know I didn’t mean that – I –’
‘Liar. You don’t even have the spirit to own up to your real self.’ Shyamanand turns to Jamun, gnarled features crimson with triumph and detestation. ‘Now you bear her out, you mother’s son. Assert to my face that she didn’t screech just now that my death’d be welco
me – come on, let me hear you fib.’
His mother’s face decides him, as always. ‘Well, Ma didn’t intend to spout anything like that. Your asking her to buzz off was so heartless that she . . .’ Jamun peters out when he discerns from his father’s mien that he’s been hurt enough. He has, with the curious acuity of late teenage, from time to time apprised Shyamanand that the tussle of fathers with mothers for the love of their sons is, for the fathers, hopeless from the start, because son is yoked to mother more sinewily than even daughter to father.
‘Heartless! When compared to you cherubs, for sure I’m unmerciful, sadistic . . .’ And so on, till the weeks accumulate into a decade. Shyamanand recuperates, by and by, sufficiently to be able to hobble about without help; walking sticks as an occasional gift for him become quite popular with Joyce, presents that he gratefully uses, but not without discomfort, since he likes to presume that he’s too straightforward to relish giving to and receiving from those he abominates.
The years trudge by, Jamun plods through university. Fearful of the dispiritedness that his parents beget in him, he confusedly spends more and more time apart from them. When at home, he glides away upstairs and affects to study while listening to the stereo – for hours, or until Urmila’s next spell of sobs tugs him down. In those years, he and Urmila continue secretly to chafe with guilt whenever they are lauded for their devotion to father and husband. With only one active hand, Shyamanand finds shaving irksome, hence he cultivates a lush beard that straggles down his chest and of which he becomes tolerably vain. The stroke alters his body in inconsequential ways too. The nails of his left foot and hand, for instance, begin to grow much more slowly than those of the right; they are pared half as often. In due time, the fact of the impairment does ooze through into his subconscious, for at ten one winter morning, he discloses that in his frightful dream of the previous night, in which he’d lain in the sludge at the bottom of a punt that was crewed by two noiseless, swarthy, wiry oarsmen – in that nightmare, he’d been transfixed even though he hadn’t been bound, and within the dream itself he’d recognized, without surprise, that he could not stir because he was wholly paralysed.
6
THE MOST FATEFUL EVENT
‘Last evening, at his house, whatever’ – asks Urmila, as she rearranges Joyce’s roses in Doom’s porridge mug – ‘did Haldia keep you back for? Did he want more money? You know, I don’t think he’s understood my pacemaker one bit. I can make that out by the amount he smirks.’
But, ‘Look! Look!’ avidly yelps Pista just then from the door, thus delivering Jamun from a response. The kid can’t even wait till his grandmother and uncle’ve swivelled, but immediately thrusts his right foot forward, sways insecurely before transferring his weight on to it, and seesaws yet again for balance before daring to shove his left foot ahead, and so on, crabbedly across the room, remembering to huff and snuffle before and after each tread. His right arm, braced, bent at the elbow, relies heavily on an invisible walking stick. His forehead puckers with befitting intentness and strain, though at each step the imp also titters in triumph, and looks askance at his grandmother to note how she’s taking his parrotry of her manner of walking that morning. Doom stalks his brother, sniggering distraughtly, trying to ape the mimic, but failing because of the ferment of impatience. Shyamanand stands at the door, cackling his encouragement. Both Urmila and Jamun laugh, because Pista is imitating his grandmother so well as to be almost cruel, and simultaneously Jamun does wish, unwittingly, that the brat’d forthwith knock off the mimicry.
Pista fetches up at the bookcase, pirouettes, lurches and totters forward a few more paces, declares, ‘Watching Thakuma struggling to walk this morning was so funny – like a kiddie trying his first steps – even Doom walks better! Thakuda says that when Thakuma moves, she’s as steady as a drunken cripple! Like this!’ He begins to parody his grandmother’s walk again, pausing now and then to chortle teasingly at Urmila.
When his mimicry stops being droll and instead starts to drag a bit, Jamun and his mother, after commending the bugger’s perception and flair for travesty, revert to the roses. The two monkeys mooch off to forage for an audience that’d be appreciative for longer.
Jamun next comes upon them about an hour later, when he descends for lunch. Urmila lies in her room. Pista ambles about her bed, repeatedly beseeching her to play chess with him, tch-ing with vexation whenever she responds that she wants to rest till lunch and then, out of boredom and balefulness, spoofing her steps again. ‘See! See – this is how you plod – like a drunken cripple!’
‘Oh, leave off, Pista. You’re pushing up my BP like . . .’ An adequate simile eludes Urmila, and she turns over, hoping perhaps that a view of her compressible, cushiony back will rebuff her grandchild. Plainly, she’s been trying to deter him for quite a while, but he very likely has interpreted all her bids at dissuasion as stages in a game, for he prances up to the bed and starts to poke her in the back, as though inspecting its pliancy. ‘Thakuma, d’you know how you looked when you went to the hospital? See – you looked like this,’ and his eyes gyre up underneath their lids, his jaws unbrace, even his face seems to blench a bit in a first-rate imitation of an insentient countenance.
‘That’s enough, Pista. Stop riling Ma, and let’s move for lunch.’
Perhaps Jamun’s tone is too disdainful, withering, too abrupt, perhaps the boy is rankled by this dampening of his expectations, but Pista, before gliding away from the bed, without warning thwacks his grandmother in the spine.
‘PISTA!’ Shyamanand screeches from behind Jamun, from the door, so deafeningly, with such fury, that they all involuntarily twitch. He hobbles into the room, face lurid with rage. ‘You beast. So this is what your damned parents knock into your head upstairs, is it – to wallop your grandmother – we don’t matter at all, of course –’ His arm jerks – the first motion of upraising his walking stick – but Jamun touches his father’s shoulder long before his intent can be plain to Pista. Shyamanand’s body shudders with passion. After a moment, poor Pista’s legs fail him. Wholly stunned, he lurches forward two paces, slumps against the wall, slides to the floor, all elbows and knees, and begins to bawl soundlessly. ‘You behave with us in this manner only because your parents treat us so dismissively, because you note every day that what we believe, speak and do doesn’t penetrate them one inch. And you know that if I complain this evening to your father that you boxed your grandmother, the statement won’t even enter his skull. And your mother’ll probably gift you a chocolate for it . . .’ Shyamanand peters out. For some seconds the room fills with his exhausted breathing. Jamun, who hasn’t yet totally recuperated from his mother’s straggling disclosures of the forenoon, glances at her, but she, seemingly insensible, gazes on them all without expression. Pista, still snivelling, revives enough to slink away and upstairs. Jamun clears his throat and suggests lunch. ‘Later,’ slurs Urmila drowsily, and labouredly curls up away from them.
Lunch, like every other activity in the house, is a delicate, fatiguing enterprise. For years, on weekdays, when Urmila’s been in office and Jamun in the university, the menial of the month has, at one p.m. sharp, helped Shyamanand to stuff himself and, at two-thirty or so, has, amongst the flies in the kitchen, tucked into and pilfered prodigious quantities of leftovers. On the many days when the flunkey’s played hookey, Shyamanand has had to look to himself with only his one good arm and leg (two and a half limbs actually, if one counts his left leg). Notwithstanding his tearjerking protestations, one can manage to care for oneself, tolerably well, with just one half of one’s body alive. However, feeling tragic, he stands in front of the fridge and, with his right hand, gouges out and gulps down the gelid leavings of dinner – rice, dal, curd, fish (to the morsels of which are attached, like minuscule, tawny ice floes, frozen chunks of cooking oil), some vegetable mash, and whatever else the refrigerator might that afternoon contain – cheese, tomatoes, a sweet or two (more likely two). Later, ignoring the slight nausea of the hog
, he telephones Urmila to inform her of the drudge’s truancy, and then equably listens to her commiseration.
For years, on holidays, and when teenage despair prevents Jamun from attending at the university, lunch is a listless, potentially inflammable venture. He always tries to eat alone, but his parents, sick of each other, hoot and yell for him from the stairwell to come down and eat with them. He bellows back, ‘I’m not hungry!’
‘Well, come and sit with us while we eat.’ And be the biased referee, is what they mean.
Then, after years, at their table for six, when the entire family is together, occasionally eat Shyamanand, Urmila, Burfi, Joyce, Pista, Doom and Jamun. From these meals, only the wiliest, the most vigilant, milk nutrition. They seemingly believe that the dining table is a sort of Hobbesian world in miniature, wherein only the fittest survive, and that, too, more on mutton and fish than rice and lowly spinach. The fittest are, in order, Burfi, Shyamanand and Jamun. Of these three, whoever first clutches the ladle masses up his own plate like an ideal growing boy in an advertisement for some wonderfood. Whoever grasps the ladle second, unspokenly detesting the first as the loser the champion, and fuzzily searching for revenge, while nattering with the less fortunate at the table, heaps up for himself an amount even more mountainous. Thus those who help themselves last usually feast on just rice and dal. Very swiftly, Joyce tires of the food habits of the house, and on her visits Chhana (sedate and dreadfully vain, who believes that to be slow is to detain the attention of others for longer) becomes more and more irregular at meals. Joyce sets up a separate kitchen upstairs, into which the ingress of those other than her brats and her aya is not encouraged, from which debouch, on holiday afternoons, the magical fumes of Occidental cooking, and from which goulashes and fondues gravitate to the dining table downstairs only when they’ve gone off a little.
The Last Burden Page 23
