Such are my imaginings. But enough of them, and of my being alone. I’ve frittered away the past few days in struggling with the bank over your mother’s pension. The extra money would be useful for such domestic trials as the cook’s raise; she’s uncivil and indelicate, but over the years I’ve inured myself to her cooking. Otherwise, as before, in the evenings I nest in front of the TV without registering anything. Though Sunday afternoon featured a first-rate BBC documentary on penguins in the Antarctic, and some of it set me off again, particularly how male emperor penguins foster their toddlers in exceedingly hostile weather, and how those funny birds enjoy just three months of quiet between two breeding cycles – the outworn, knackered question dispirited me all afternoon and evening, that wasn’t there more to life than this, this dreadful procreation, this motiveless fecundity?
You never write first. Now that I’ve written (twice, if you count the inland!), will you at least reply soon?
With all my love,
Baba
Jamun is aware that Shyamanand’s letter doesn’t afford a complete picture of life at home. If he telephones Burfi in his office, for instance, he’s likely to be fusilladed with just how fiendishly difficult their father has been. Jamun is unhappy that Shyamanand is unhappy, but he’s also vexed by his own guilt, and by the selfish, emotional demands that his family members make on one another even in absence. He is sad, too, at the swiftness with which his mother’s augury – about Shyamanand’s misery after her passing – is being vindicated; at moments, he detests both his parents, one dead, one dying, for continually coercing him to choose between them; always, in their weaning of their sons away from each other, Shyamanand (as in the letter to Jamun) and Unmla have both, mindfully or semiconsciously, fibbed to them, or at least hidden from them bits of the truth.
Which neither Burfi nor Jamun’ve ever appealed to the other parent to fill in; frankly, Jamun’s been fearful of wounding one with the covert disclosures of the other. For instance, on the morning of Urmila’s second heart attack, when she divulges to Jamun, while arranging roses, that she’s aborted thrice in her life – and each time because of Shyamanand, twice because he wasn’t ready to marry her, and once because he abhorred the idea of a second puling infant in the house – what first flashes into Jamun’s mind is that he can never accost his father for corroboration; only secondarily, after a moment, does he reflect that Urmila might be lying without being wholly mindful of it, that she has for so long been musing on the wretchedness of her marriage that she’s started to adulterate the actual with the imagined.
But that was a queer morning, wasn’t it, in which Urmila dynamited an amicable silence with, ‘You should’ve married Kasturi – since you can’t curb yourselves even after she’s become someone else’s wife.’ Her hands cradle Doom’s porridge mug; her head and shoulders are black against the bright window. ‘But I’m glad that you’re keeping the baby. I myself’ve lost three.’ Altogether unruffledly, as though she’s chatting of buttons. ‘Two before Burfi, and one between him and you. There could’ve been five of you. After the second abortion, Belu named me ratnagarbha. That hurt badly too. Years ago, when we used to stay in that government flatlet, your aya and I squabbled over something, and to spite me, she blurted out to Burfi my ratnagarbha life. I remember distinctly, we were on the roof, sevenish in the evening, Burfi was working out with his weights, and hating this wrangle distracting him from ten feet away. Perhaps he wished to squash my stunned embarrassment, or maybe he really detested the disturbance, or he presumed that Aya was lying, because he simply carried on with his puffing and grunting, and a moment after her outburst, wheezed, “Wise of you, Ma. With three extra arses in the house, the scrimmage for the loo every morning’d’ve been unendurable.”’
Jamun is baffled and fuzzily wounded that he hasn’t, and Burfi has, known for years these snips of their mother’s past; after her death, one evening, when he gets back from visiting Kasturi at home on her return from hospital, he’s even more befuddled to hear from his brother, ‘Big bloody deal. Joyce wanted to abort too, and we wouldn’t’ve had Doom, so what. These aren’t horror stories, they’re just sad facts. I mean, most horror stories’re just sad facts. And beneath the faces on the street and on television, in the shops and buses, within buildings, and bungalows, underneath the hornrimmed spectacles, the lipstick, dentures, necklaces, earrings, cufflinks, watchstraps – inside everybody are scuttled these hundreds and thousands of trivial catastrophes. A woman gets knocked up – twice – before her marriage; she isn’t growing any younger and when she does marry, her husband’s not too crazy about her; he itches for his niece instead – his sister’s daughter – and jockeys for her to lodge with them, on the pretext that he can help her with her studies while she lends a hand with the bundle of joy, i.e. yours truly; the brood of their mismarriage, of course, is not planned – accident upon bloody accident – and sex dries up after three abortions and two sons; the husband has a cockeyed go at a fling some years – Ma talked to you about that?’
‘What’s curious, Burfi, is that I probably sat beside her on the flight here – a Mrs Shireen Raizada, though now I can’t recall her features – certainly sixty plus, and not Baba’s type, whatever type that might be. She seemed as though she could’ve held her own against, say, the incivility of a Caucasian air hostess – it isn’t a common name. What are Raizadas? Gujaratis? Would’ve been bizarre had I know then – I could’ve slewed round to her once in a while and simpered foxily.’
Jamun would’ve found precious little to say to Ms Raizada. Only that she, some thirty years ago, for a couple of months, had been three rungs above his father in the same office, that Shyamanand had taken to her, but that (Urmila was confident that) his lower-middle-class diffidence had bridled him from acting upon it (just as it had hobbled him from thrusting himself on to Chhana – beyond the persistent avuncular squeezing and tweaking during English lessons, beyond the graceless deflection of conversations to her infertility so that he could tingle in her awkwardness); that by that stage of their marriage, husband and wife had forgotten what coition was, and bedded down in separate rooms, but that on one feverish July night, Shyamanand, unrecognizably drunk, had tottered into Urmila’s room and on to her bed, mumbling, spluttering, ‘Shireen, you can’t, you will, Shireen, like a calm mother you will, my Shireen,’ had mounted Urmila, who’d struggled confusedly under him for the two minutes that he’d taken. Jamun was born exactly nine months later, exactly.
‘Most of the time, Ma fretted more for you than for Baba – particularly after your flame Kasturi married that other guy. “Who’ll take care of Jamun when he’s old?” Not realizing that you need babysitting right through your life. Your acute pronouncements on how to live fucked her up a lot. “I’ll marry only after the two of you cop it . . . What do I want with children? . . . Aren’t you my children?” Well, now that just one of them remains, why don’t you cart him off with you, hero?’
December. Shyamanand and Jamun correspond regularly. Shyamanand’s letters are a detailed account of his leaden days. January. Kasturi’s first letter, in her usual ghastly hand, that the baby is fine, and has he mulled over any names. On the first Sunday in February, Burfi phones Jamun at Hegiste’s to declare that his and Joyce’s transfers to Bombay have come through, and so what about Shyamanand? ‘He’s cracked up,’ continues Burfi excitedly, ‘shrivelled up too, lost weight, totally insomniac – he’s fixed a buzzer next to his bed, which he presses a dozen times a night, and when one of us goes down he blubbers that he can’t sleep, and begs that someone stay and chat to him. I’m being driven up the wall, man. Last Tuesday – some bloody school holiday – he asked Pista to help him bathe, and inside the bathroom to soap his balls for him. I mean, what the fuck. So Joyce’s hit the ceiling and forbidden both kids from hanging about Baba. I don’t see why you can’t keep him for –’
‘But his letters are okay – heavyhearted, that’s all. He hasn’t – ’
‘What’s wrong with
you? Ma suffered a heart attack and you took four days to show up! D’you like them only when they’re well or what?’
Quiet for a moment or two. ‘How’ll you send him? His BP’ll very likely prevent him from flying. A train?’
‘Yes.’ Burfi is of course calmer now. ‘Your Kasturi’s husband – an okay guy – is pushing off on the twenty-second for Madras. By the – I’ve forgotten which train, but it halts at your town. Kasturi’d phoned for your pincode or something, and we chatted of this and that. Her husband’s agreed to escort Baba down. You’ll no doubt be at the station–
‘And the house?’
The house is to be locked up, because they all abhor the idea of somebody else occupying it. Both Burfi and Joyce are rooting about amongst the hirelings in their offices for a diffident bachelor with a housing problem who can be convinced that to become a caretaker-sentry for their house will actually be to his benefit. Two months later, Burfi will start to bellyache that by not renting it out, he and Jamun are forfeiting thousands of rupees per month, but that’s two months later.
Jamun tells Kasibai of the date of Shyamanand’s arrival. ‘We’ll give him my bedroom. Put the TV in there. Vaman might’ve to doss down on the floor in that room for some days. He’ll have to help my father bathe and all that. We should all welcome him at the station. It’ll please him.’
‘Don’t worry. The old are really fairly simple to manage. I wore out some months once, tending one great-grandmother. Their demands can be elementary. They begin to doze more and more every day, and to drink mugs of warm milk; when they turn seventy-two,’ they sigh and set their sights on seventy– three, I know them.’
On the twenty-third, Jamun tries to call the station from Hegiste’s, but can’t get through. ‘Fucking telecom. Let’s just presume that the train’s on time.’ Kasibai wears a biscuity sari that he hasn’t noticed before; she of course puts it on the Maharashtrian way, with one pleated end that swoops down her fat crotch and up her rump to be fluffily tucked into her dorsum, therefore her bum looks like a Herbie-car. Her peerless scion is in one of Jamun’s jeans, altered rather tastefully by Kasibai; he’s pruned, oiled and brushed his hair, and appears ghoulish, but wellmeaning.
An amiable, almost horizontal drizzle while they wait on the platform. Hegiste shows up at eleven-thirty with a shaky wheelchair of the gynae hospital. The train is fifteen minutes late. Shyamanand is in his creamish kurta-pyjama, crumpled and all-anyhow after the journey. Jamun is stunned at how much his father’s withered in three months; he is, or appears, a couple of inches shorter than he was. His once-silver hair is now acidyellow, and he takes a second or two to recognize his son. The fancy flashes into Jamun’s mind that his father has been supplanted by a scifi clone from another globe, the inhabitants of which are slightly smaller versions of ourselves. ‘Hello, Baba, you look good.’ He touches Shyamanand’s feet and they enfold each other. ‘Hi, Agastya. Many thanks. How was the journey?’
Shyamanand doesn’t budge, but waits for the chair to be hauled and jolted into place under him; he feels so tuckered out that he can’t even rely on his right leg any more, and he mustn’t make an ass of himself in front of Jamun’s friends. Amidst considerable confusion – hissed directives and yanking of paralysed limbs – Hegiste and Vaman help Shyamanand into his seat.
The hoot of the train. Jamun once more thanks and says goodbye to Agastya. He turns after the train starts to glide, and sees the last frame of one phase of his life – Kasibai stooped in front of Shyamanand’s wheelchair, touching his sandals. Shyamanand’s hand hovers over her head in uncertain blessing. Behind them is a gossamer rain. Well, not a bad beginning, reflects Jamun.
Acknowledgments
I thank the British Council (New Delhi), the Charles Wallace Trust (India) and Darwin College of the University of Kent at Canterbury for enabling me to spend the Michaelmas Term of 1991 at Darwin College as a writer-in-residence. A large part of this book was worked on there.
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First published in Viking by Penguin Books India 1993
Published in Penguin Books 1997
Copyright © Upamanyu Chatterjee 1993
Cover photograph by Vidura Jang Bahadur
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