The Last Burden

by Chatterjee, Upamanyu

  Shyamanand, Burfi, Joyce and Jamun fly to Delhi. Urmila is hand baggage, wrapped in a luridly-checkered kerchief, tied in jute string, eased into a dazzling, Perfection-Silk-And-Saree-House polythene bag. Burfi has demurred against the kerchief, preferring ‘something less LMC, or we could leave the earthen bowl be – like, you know, ethnic,’ till Aya’s theatrically demanded of him whether he wishes to send his mother naked to her god. Burfi and Jamun are astonished to discover that Indian Airlines can provide Shyamanand a wheelchair after being supplicated just once. In the aircraft, a tubby woman with a mug like a fist all but dumps her dung-coloured attaché case on the ashes. ‘Idiot,’ Shyamanand snarls at her without explaining why. Inflight, transcending their sadness, they wolf down every fleck on their trays; Jamun angles for a second lemon tart, but is rebuffed so peevishly by the SC hostess that he demands of her a complaint slip, which she eventually fetches and flicks into his lap with a snicker of such insolence that he has balls left only to doodle freudianly on it.

  A dove-grey Ambassador at Delhi airport, a ruffianly driver with tranquil eyes and a placard with Kuki’s name on it. ‘If you wish, we could first drive to Kasturi’s husband’s uncle’s, waste some time there – you could shit, etcetera – and then shove off to Haridwar.’ But Shyamanand maintains that his sphincter can see to its charge all day without help, thank you.

  Four hours to Haridwar – dry, balmy, and frequently scary, for the tranquil one drives as though his pubis is being singed. One unsightly town after another amidst miles of nondescript fields. Sugarcane terrain. Wafts of new gur, and numberless Tikait types on charpais, farting the day away. Rural, and therefore unfamiliar, sights – of smoking brick kilns and bullocks hauling a pagoda of hay – and sounds – of the needlelike click-click of the motor of a distant rice mill, like Time running out. For lunch, and for a thirty-minute breather for Tranquil and his Ambassador, they pull in at a hoarding that shows the sniggering face of some peculiar creature, half-gazelle and halfJerry Lewis, with a blurb alongside its antlers that splashes in outsize crimson letters: ‘WELCOME ONE AND ALL TO DEER PARK!’ The Park presents itself as one lime-green cafeteria and a succession of pissers against its north wall. Joyce asks Shyamanand whether cheese sandwiches can be eaten during mourning. ‘I’m not sure, but we’d better not.’

  Then once more the somnolence of the long drive. ‘Perhaps Pista should’ve come along,’ suggests Jamun to the back of Shyamanand’s cranium. ‘He’d’ve loved this trip’ – but Shyamanand has nodded off. Pista, indeed, has cajoled and beseeched that he be allowed to accompany them, and has been nonplussed, besides being miffed, at their refusal. In fact, the boy’s been puzzled by much that has occurred after his grandmother’s death. His parents, for instance, have become more attentive towards those they’d formerly overlooked. Every evening, well after dinner, Joyce has trickled downstairs with a mug of steaming cocoa for Shyamanand, and sat and made polite conversation while he’s slurped it. Top quality pc – on the insinuation of a shiver in the night air, foretokening December, on Pista’s dreadful performance in Mathematics and Hindi, of which the brat isn’t even remorseful, on the recent lunatic increase in municipal taxes, on Aya’s latest demand for a salary hike, and on yesterday’s terrorist carnage in Punjab. An uncommon sight, Shyamanand and Joyce small talking – in ten years they couldn’t have spoken to each other for more than three minutes at a go without one wilfully misunderstanding the other and freezing with outrage. Shyamanand too adjudges Joyce’s conduct to be uncustomary, and comments to Jamun on the fourth evening, ‘Her solicitude is a strain for her, and it discomforts me, for it seems to suggest that only the absence of one person was required to bring about care and consideration in this house, and that one person the most guiltless of us all, totally bare of malignity and deceit.’ Two mornings later, on a Saturday, after Burfi’s taken his father and his elder son out in his Maruti for a rare joyride, Shyamanand, with a kind of halfsenescent fixity, repeats the idea. ‘Couldn’t Burfi have driven us about while his mother was alive?’

  ‘You aren’t being fair. Burfi’s – and Joyce’s – current considerateness is but natural after a death.’ Unhappiness gushes up his gullet and muzzles Jamun. Grief spouts most easily, and it is welcome. The plainest discussion about Urmila, particularly with Shyamanand, suffices to ungag it. ‘We should all try –’ But he doesn’t want to discourse, or prescribe. He truly and fervidly hopes that his mother’s death will better their conduct with one another. Yet assertions such as Shyamanand’s dispirit him, trouble him with the chasm between the perspectives of father’ and son. He then ponders whether, with Urmila’s passing, Shyamanand is suffering at all – at least, in the way that he ought to suffer – and whether he’s forgotten, or has ever recognized, the misery that he himself begot

  Not that Shyamanand exhibits no sign of sorrow. On the contrary. He irritates his sons a bit because they feel that he overdoes the desolation. For the first few evenings, he doesn’t roost in front of the TV from six p.m. onwards, as had been his and Urmila’s custom for years because, presumably, the thought of watching the crud recalls, with intolerable ache, how much they’d relished running it down together. Burfi and Jamun, however, on some evenings, do, in their creased, cream robes, park themselves before the box with its volume at zero; whenever Shyamanand spots them, he voices nothing, but seems to whisper – in the tap of his walking stick, the lumpishness of his dud arm, in the drag of his left foot – his heavyhearted, shocked rebuke of their conduct.

  Yes, doubtless, Shyamanand misses his wife, but for sure not in the manner that his sons wish him to. Misery – a sort of rudderlessness – pricks him to try and situate the causes of Urmila’s death in individuals other than himself. ‘The churlishness with her – unvaried for years – of my daughter-in-law destroyed her. The feebleness too, of her son before his wife. Though with their own parents the sons are regular tigers.’

  ‘Fuck,’ hisses Burfi, seemingly to himself, ‘what a mind,’ gathers up his dress, and clumps off upstairs. Shyamanand peers at the doorway and introspects, after a while, ‘Does he cry out for her at all? Do you?’ He hesitates. ‘The house feels altogether strange. Every object is familiar, commonplace and yet . . . peculiar, as though the rooms’ve been rearranged, the light fittings changed.’

  ‘I feel differently.’ Jamun speaks to delect his father. ‘I still sense Ma, everywhere, in a comfortable way. I imagine that at any moment I’ll hear from an adjacent room the rustle of her sari, the clink of her bangles, or one of her wellworn questions: “Jamun, has Aya left for the bus stop to fetch Pista? It’s almost one-thirty.”’

  He voices the truth but sketchily; for at those points of the day when he’s very tired, or dispirited, or when – as in the small hours, at the instant of awakening – his guard is down, misery immures him like a prenatal fluid. He feels besmirched, as though something disgraceful has befallen him, a bane, a chastisement that now and for good has changed his placement in the world – and now and then as though an edge has sliced his bowels, and he’s adrift, with the sea at his throat.

  At such times, he pines to close his eyes in some pale room – the yawning windows of which are mountings for separate panel watercolours of the darkening sky – and have a large, warm palm batten down upon his eyelids and the ruts in his forehead, and remain there long after he’s ebbed into a dreamless sleep.

  Those moments of wretchedness do slip by, of course, sooner or later, for life is always there, isn’t it, around the corner? The telephone will ring, or a Maruti, eructating some vulgar music, will almost run over his toes, yanking him out of his numbness, and compelling him to yawp some scurrility at its sunglasses-like windows. But he introspects – naturally – time and time again, on his sadness. All parents die, so every human being must experience the anguish, or the discomfiture, of their passing, of the snicking of a cord. No, obviously not every. Not those without memory. One’s reaction to such a death was controlled by one’s maturity and one’s clos
eness to one’s parents. Kuki’s father, for instance – if that ugly family yarn of Kuki’s was at all true – oughtn’t to have felt a jot of sorrow at the exit of Kuki’s grandfather. Perhaps one was ravaged, even if just for a time, only by the first death of a parent, and the second was like seeing your guest off at the end of the housewarming. Maybe one honestly lamented only a mother’s passing, because one’s body and soul never forgot that one was of her flesh. And certainly the sensation of having lost a part of oneself – as though the chunk beneath the left ribs had been gouged out, so to speak – was keener in his case because Urmila had hinged on him emotionally – as Shyamanand still did – like a kid to its mum. He’d now been grazed by death, and it would return, time after time after time, for Shyamanand, Aya, Burfi and Joyce, Kasturi and Kuki, even Pista and Doom. Surely each demise would muddle him less and less, toughen him till he could bestow neighbourly counsel on others at their bereavement. Surely.

  With Urmila’s death, they’ve grown, for the time being, gentle with one another. Jamun recognizes that this recent considerateness of theirs will not endure, and that its abatement will signal the close of their mourning for her. But in Shyamanand, alongside this caring, her departure appears to have planted a more persistent acrimony, so that when one death leads him to reminisce of others in his long, undistinguished life, of the deaths of his stepmother, his father, an older brother who yielded to diphtheria at the age of seven, he unwittingly dwells on – rather than what he might’ve reaped from each experience – more the comfortless, bitter sensations kindled by each event. ‘When my father died of cholera, I was twenty-three,’ he recounts to Jamun over their dinner of chapatis and hot milk, ‘and two thousand kilometres away, in Simla, I received an unintelligible telegram, two days old, and fathomed that my father was sinking. Three more days for the journey by mail train and bus. Five whole days from the despatch of the telegram. In my suffocating third-class compartment, amidst the droppings of toddlers and the trunks of jawans, I prayed and craved that I’d see my father breathing. But he’d been cremated on the third day. Just his ashes and my brother’s strained, unshaven face waited for me. I could’ve died with regret. I wasn’t in any way certain what I was sorry for – all that I felt was that if I could’ve only met my father before he died, touched his feet, kissed his forehead, held water to his mouth, I’d’ve been reprieved for my transgressions against him. What transgressions? Simply our thousand trifling harshnesses against one another, daily, for a lifetime. That’s why I feel that the two of you won’t fret like I did, from guilt, because I wasn’t at hand. What d’you think?’

  Well, Jamun thinks a fair deal, in a scrambled, keyed-up manner, about his mother’s passing, but exchanging his notions appears inconceivable. Would Baba or Burfi sympathize, for instance, with his sentiment that a mother’s demise somehow behoved him to acquit himself better, more humanely, with all living beings, that he now felt, and keenly hoped that he’d continue to feel, towards all, a passionless and ascetic dutifulness? For passion was vexation and sorrow, and he’d now to set about to accomplish a stolidness even towards that sorrow. Truly, a death made one brood, didn’t it. And if one scrutinized the matter, looked it in the eyes, and full in the face, then doubtless the value, the drift, the purport of existence was a burden likely to make one lose one’s marbles. Of course, for that reason, if one were wise, one wouldn’t reflect on the subject of the pith of death for more than a couple of seconds at a stretch. One could use Ma’s case as an illustration. What had her life been for? Why had she come to life, and why had she survived for over sixty years? Surely, at bottom, for nothing? The aspiration of her existence had for sure not been happiness, which appears to him, uncertainly, to be one feasible vindication for living, the single glow amongst the anguish, malevolence, rancour and rage. But Ma’d never conceded to an instant of any species of delight in her drab childhood, her toilsome youth, or her catastrophic marriage. On this feature of hers, Baba’d once in a while observed, from his bed, from behind his journal, that individuals such as she wouldn’t recognize joy even when it perched on their nose and nibbled at their cheeks. Yet whenever she’d been pumped, circuitously, on what she felt about these things, she’d steadily advanced that her life had been fruitful because after all, hadn’t she fostered two good sons?

  Haridwar. Bald recumbent hills, knolls. A scrubbed, piercing sky, and cloudlets like elfin white birds in a watercolour. Joyce’s head pillowed on Burfi’s shoulder. ‘Where d’you wish to go?’ demands the driver, swivelling his dome round at Jamun without decelerating an inch.

  Jamun realizes with surprise that Tranquil hasn’t been instructed on the object of the journey. ‘We have to douse my mother’s ashes in the Ganga.’ The driver nods and the car careens away to the right at breathstopping speed.

  Imperceptibly, the highway has whittled down to a lane. The bullying lorries and white Ambassadors have melted away. The town, however, is nowhere discernible. They scud past infirm saplings on what might be an embankment, and through buffalo, openmouthed children, oxcarts of gur, dungsmoke from invisible sources, dust. A bend or two, and they untidily pull up at what appears to be a fairsized canal. A handful of concrete steps between them and the avocado-green water. Hawkers, operating beneath awnings framed out of rent dhotis, spiritlessly bleat out the attractions of their wares – the commonplace pilgrimage stuff, rudraksha beads, shell pendants, statuettes, figurines, sandalwood sundries, vials and phials of the water of the Ganga. Burfi helps Shyamanand out of the car. Tranquil torpidly attempts to shoo away the fine-eyed urchins who foregather to gawp at the patriarch. The town – in the main on the opposite strand of the river, swarming up the hillocks like boy-scouts on a crosscountry, predominantly in yellow and rosepinks blanched by the sun – looks pretty. They all feel tired and dull. ‘Are we at the right place?’ Shyamanand asks the world. ‘The bustle seems to be all on the other bank. I don’t even spot any touts here.’

  ‘Maybe they’re feeding somewhere. A two o-clock lunch of bananas and ganja at some temple.’

  As though he’s been tipped off, one does steal up to them just then – spindly, hairy, in a singlet and skull cap – and quizzingly shimmies his eyebrows at Jamun.

  ‘No, we don’t want a priest, no, for anybloodything . . . Is there any particular, sort of reserved, spot on the river for chucking ashes? . . . You sure? . . . But are you certain? . . . Baba, the bugger says that we can immerse this’ – Jamun raises the earthen bowl in his hands an inch or two – ‘anywhere. And should I ask him to find us a priest? But I’ve an inkling that he doubles up for one himself.’

  This surmise is immediately ratified by the hairy man; to further validate which, his accessory, a skeletal adolescent, naked but for sodden carroty undies, with hydrocelic balls and elbows the girth of knees, hoarsely pronounces to Shyamanand, ‘For the Ganga is the most sacred of mothers; for it, procreation and death are but one.’

  Burfi doesn’t like the situation. ‘But we should line up a recitation or something, shouldn’t we, an incantation, some Sanskrit verses?’ But Shyamanand looks dreadfully old and uncertain, so they all shuffle again towards the steps. Joyce pulls out her camera, a gift from Philip Jonas, from her handbag, and begins clicking away. ‘I guess we could dunk the remains even without the om mani padme hum or whatever,’ suggests Jamun. He slips on his sunglasses in a sort of goofy protest against Joyce’s and Burfi’s ardour to freeze on snapshot even what he considers the most inappropriate events. The tout is deflected just then by the arrival, with a mewl from its brakes, of a crimson Contessa with black windows, the sort of car one’d reckon would be owned by somebody resembling any one of those four Hindujas.

  Naked, pubescent urchins in the water, who leave off their romping for a time to watch Joyce, in her lilywhite sari, crouch and stretch for the dead-on angles. On their right, at the foot of the arch bridge, sits a compact, pinkwashed temple; its wall portrays a mammoth ad for hairoil – a visage that fuzzily recalls Shirdi’s Sai
Baba, and spurting away from his dome (and from his ears), like black, undisciplined waters, a squall of turbulent snakes of hair. Shyamanand is markedly indignant. ‘How can they advertise hairoil here, of all places? Couldn’t anyone deter them?’

  ‘Jamun, can you duck back a step, please? I could then snap you and the ashes against that lunatic composition.’

  When they’d brought Urmila back from Haldia’s, and’d tugged and shoved to lay her down on her own bed, remembers Jamun, and he’d trailed off to rummage for the incense that Urmila always used to possess, he’d tousledly reflected that he appeared to command more selfrestraint than Burfi, didn’t he, because on the drive from Haldia’s, with Urmila’s head in his lap, Burfi’d smoothed the strands about her ears and permitted himself to sob undismayed. Yet one could never, never be sure of people, for when he returned to his mother’s room to declare that the incense didn’t seem to be anywhere and that he, or someone else, or perhaps Burfi, would have to trudge down to that huckster on the beach for it, he was jolted to see Burfi behind his camera, focusing on Urmila’s stonedead face, murmuring, ‘Too still. We should’ve borrowed Kuki’s Handycam.’

  ‘But you don’t shoot the dead!’ Jamun had unguardedly exclaimed and, responding to Burfi’s taken-aback, caught-inthe-act face, continued more measuredly, ‘I mean, I don’t think it’s done – it looks pretty odd, as though we want to remember her most this way.’ He’d stolen a glance at Urmila. Her complexion had blackened, and her lips seemed to have receded even more. ‘I mean, I don’t know, with a photograph of her like this in the family album, every time you stumble on it, you’d flip the page. You can’t –’