The Last Burden (25 page)

‘Yeah, sure, but later. These two bloody words can’t be that hot if bloody even you haven’t heard of them.’ After a few more lines of that killing essay, he eyes his father over the edge of his reader. He looks downcast, befuddled. ‘You mean Radhakrishnan’s English is better then yours?’ His expression discloses to Shyamanand that, for Jamun, the question could be pivotal to his appraisal of his father; its reply might decide Shyamanand’s worth as a wellspring of sagacity for this world.

‘Well, yes, I think. He’s a very learned man. A savant. A humanist. Look, for example, at the words he uses. Putative. Phenomenal. A genius.’

The disappointment in Jamun’s features is more a commiseration at Shyamanand’s having to concede his secondbestness. ‘And Nehru?’ shoving his chin out at his text. ‘Nehru also knows more English than you?’

‘Oh, no no. Nehru didn’t know anything about anything – except to pluck roses for his jackets – however could he be a model for English?’

Now with his head on Kasturi’s tummy, his fingers dilatorily guiding the gooseflesh on her thighs, his body disgorged and twingeing, his mind becalmed like the sea, Jamun gazes at the afternoon cloudburst sketching streamlets through the smudge that July has deposited on the windows. Kasturi and he’ve been in bed upstairs, muted and ravelled, since the early morning. Now that their rut has enervated itself, he wants her to leave so that he can return to his other lives. He tranquilly waits for her to suggest that she should be going. They’ll slink out the way they sneaked in, through the side door and over the boundary wall, and feign that they’ve at that very instant returned, all fagged out, after eight hours in the university.

Shyamanand is not immediately visible. Jamun wonders
whether he’s once more snapped up a handful of Calmposes to while the afternoon away. He
is
in his room, characteristically supine. ‘Hi. Just got back. Phew, what a day –’ A half-gasp as Shyamanand haltingly swivels towards him a haunted, stranger’s face.

Shyamanand has sat in the varandah, blindly observing the rain, struggling to disregard the dreadful, ice-cold uneasiness that oozes all over him, as though a bulky stopper, somewhere in his belly, has been brutally unplugged. He’s looked down at his body, at his hands, curled like foetuses, in his lap. His flesh and frame seem alien, an oppressive lumber that he has to tote as a duty, a final responsibility, to his room; if only he gains his bed, he feels, he can yield this frightful incubus, and at last be still.

He finds that he can’t get up from his chair. The bidding to rise somehow never reaches his limbs, instead becomes clogged in the benumbing sludge that is now his blood. When sitting, insensate, grows more insupportable than the idea of standing up, he, with a prodigious effort, lunges upward, and instinctively, crabbedly, clutches at the wall to check himself from tumbling. His left leg does not take any weight, and feels like an outsize cricket bat trussed to his hip. He supports himself against the wall and on his right leg. In his bewilderment, he’s bitterly scared.

Heaving himself along the wall, he reaches the door of his room, and drags himself past the cupboard. Its mirror stuns him. A frenzy of ivory hair above the features of a nightmare. The entire left half of the face has been zestfully yanked down, as by a malevolent child; the eye, crimson and terrified, balloons out like a caricature. He touches his cheek, and tries to prop up its skin. It feels glacial, as though wafer-thin frost has veneered his real skin.

He slumps on to his bed, on his dead hand. His nerves seem sound enough, he thinks confusedly, to transmit pain. He jerks up his left leg with his good hand, and topples on to his pillow. He is shuddering with dread and fatigue. The bounty of two
prime sons, but where are they when they’re needed the most.

Between his stroke and Jamun’s appearance, time must’ve glided by, but Shyamanand doesn’t sense much of it. At one point the Jaico wallclock that Chhana’s gifted Urmila and him seems to say two-thirty; at another, seven-fifteen. He time and again shut his eyes, praying that when he opens them he’ll again be back in his old world. He writhes and twitches about in a hundred different positions; each is intolerable after a breath or two. His throat is altogether dry, and he again and again swallows his spit, audibly, like the lapping of the sea on shingle. His mouth won’t shut, his lips have withered.

He knows, but can’t face, that something hideous has happened – is happening – to him. In the tumult in his skull also skirrs the notion that the crucial symptom of a heart attack is an insupportable pain in the chest – perhaps he hasn’t suffered one.

A blood clot somewhere in the brain, proclaims Haldia. But getting Shyamanand to him isn’t that easy. Jamun can’t drive, he’s never shown the least interest in learning how to, so their own car is of no use. He telephones two local taxi stands; at one, the cabs refuse to drive towards Dost Garden. They won’t, grouses the lout on the phone, come across any return fare in that part of the city. At the other, no one disturbs his siesta to pick up the receiver. Jamun calls Haldia and ashamedly explains. Haldia surprises him by despatching his own car and chauffeur.

Who – podgy, safari-suited, smartassed – helps most unwillingly to shoulder and haul Shyamanand from his bed to the car. While Jamun and the driver struggle with his sandals, Shyamanand, clenching Jamun’s shoulder for support, mumbles to him, ‘I’ll be too heavy for you. When we move, I’ll rest my weight on this fat bugger, as much of it as I can.’

At Haldia’s clinic, a swarthy, hirsute matron badgers Jamun with, ‘Have you arranged for a night sister? Who’s to tend to the patient at night? Give him his water and his bedpan? Isn’t he your father? Maybe you yourself’d wish to stay. I could
recommend a tip-top nurse though – my own daughter, terrifically seasoned, fifty rupees a night, most reasonable.’

Haldia and his perfume waft by. The redolence seems to exude from the doctor’s downy skull. ‘Nothing at all to fret about, dear . . . Your papa hasn’t lost his consciousness – just a tiny cerebral thrombosis . . . His speech’ll pick up not to worry . . . Only his left side’s packed up, which is – I mean, had his right failed, would’ve been a deal more nasty, his memory and perception might’ve been damaged, he wouldn’t’ve been able to do a good many routine things – ’Haldia halts on his way out to think of a truly dire example. ‘Couldn’t’ve signed a cheque, for instance. Have you contacted your mamma, dear?’

Jamun telephones Kasturi and telegrams his mother and Burfi. Kasturi says that she’ll come over right away. ‘I’ve arranged for a night nurse for my father,’ Jamun declares, grasping her by the shoulders in his ill-disciplined excitement, ‘so we could spend the nights together, at least till Ma returns. She and Burfi’ll receive the news only tomorrow – at the earliest. Posts and Telegraphs can also be banked on to fuck up the text of the telegram: “
BABA STROKING NURSES AT HOME. COME SOON
.” And then there’s Indian Airlines, the Ol’ Faithless, a multicrorerupee Russian Roulette Corporation. For your mother you could cook up –’

‘But aren’t you,’ Kasturi looks truly, disagreeably perplexed, ‘anxious firstly for your father? I already feel sinful that he was becoming paralysed downstairs at the very time that you and I – all but plumb above his head – were billing and cooing to each other. Like Mohandas mounting Kasturba in the adjacent room while his father snuffed it. I’d’ve presumed that, with your lofty driving forces of duty and compunction, you’d’ve darted to stay the night beside your father.’

But she moves in anyway, for two nights, carting her derision and her unease with her. In the mornings she sets out for the university and Jamun for Haldia’s, to replace the night nurse, and to listen to Shyamanand’s slurred bellyaching against her incompetence and his own condition. Then he feels guilty at
having lain with Kasturi all night – but a guilt not insupportable, indeed a sinfulness unspokenly acknowledged as the spinoff of a greater pleasure. ‘I could doss down here at night, Baba, in place of that cretin, but then who’d guard the house? Ma’ll be in this evening, then we’ll change things.’

Kasturi drives Shyamanand’s Ambassador to the airport. Urmila looks dulled with uncertainty, but in her eyes seems to slink the tint of a sort of triumph. Burfi is markedly more reassuring. ‘Terrific job, Jamun,’ a thwack on the shoulder. ‘If you hadn’t returned in good time from college, God knows how much worse Baba would’ve been by now.’ Jamun notes, as always, how Kasturi perks up whenever she meets Burfi.

‘Now that Burfi’s going to drive, we could maybe drop Kasturi home, Ma, on the way to Haldia’s?’

‘Uh . . . I want to reach there fast. Kasturi can easily grab a taxi or an auto from the nursing home.’

In the car, while Burfi belittles its state of disrepair, Urmila declares, in the voice of one who wishes her hearers to swallow that she’s speaking only to herself, ‘I should never, never’ve gone away. He needed me, though now he’ll never concede it.’ She reaches out to touch Jamun. ‘Could Haldia get closer to the exact time of the stroke, to how many minutes or hours passed between the attack and your discovery of him? No? Because that’s crucial, I was told, every second matters in the cure of thrombosis . . . Dreadful if he lay benumbed for hours and you were in the house somewhere and didn’t know. Didn’t your Baba beseech you at once to summon Chhana?’

She and Burfi are horrified when they see Shyamanand. Urmila begins to weep, chilled by the thump with which his paralysed face recalls that of Belu on the evening when, over forty years ago, he deadened his body with a glut of rat poison. Shyamanand’s mien underneath the disfiguration, like Belu’s, looks despairing and forlorn. He gawps at Urmila without blinking, but can’t stare Burfi in the eye.

He stays in the nursing home for a fortnight. Despite Haldia’s stratagems, he neither sleeps nor defecates for six days. ‘Not to
worry, my dear,’ mews the doctor. ‘I’ve known bowels which haven’t moved for forty whole days.’

‘At the butt end of which,’ breathes Burfi into Shyamanand’s ear, inciting his entire body to shudder with laughter, ‘the bowels themselves began to resemble Haldia.’

Who calls in diverse electroand physiotherapists, cardiologists, neurologists, to survey Shyamanand; each stays for seven minutes, asks the same questions and, while waddling out, sotto voce to Jamun, charges the earth. Shyamanand hates them all, and on the fourth day, after the quicksilver visit of a dietician with gulletgagging bad breath, begins to demur, with a singlemindedness and cogency that augurs well for his wits, that he’s frittering away time and hard cash at Haldia’s, and that he craves to return home. Each such clamour of his is parried by the vinegary curtness of the bewhiskered matron and the adamantine yellowness of the doctor’s dentures.

Chhana telephones from Calcutta on the second day; Jamun says that he’ll check with Shyamanand and let her know the following evening; Shyamanand pooh-poohs the notion, or rather, mumbles his pooh-pooh: ‘Nonsense. She need not waste a good many hundreds just to come and goggle at me on this bed, struggling to defecate.’ So Jamun tells Chhana, ‘Rush. He declares that you needn’t show up, but I presume that he’s just acting gruff and cute; he’s in fact dying to have all of us bob and bustle about him.’

The solicitous faces of his niece and his sons around his bed – a rare sight that swathes Shyamanand’s soul in warmth. Chhana tries for a while to dredge some information out of the doctor on duty, but he – obese, leucodermic, stagnant – has no clue about anything. Burfi strokes and pinches Shyamanand’s icy foreleg, and exhorts him to struggle to budge it. ‘Can’t you shift this bloody mace at all? Even a few inches?’ Shyamanand can, and swerves his foot about on the crumpled hospital sheet like the death spasms of a plump reptile.

‘I can’t
raise
my leg though, not more than an inch or so, and not without bending my knee.’ Shyamanand’s new voice is
screechy, more whingeing. He moistens – almost smacks – his lips for each syllable. His facial muscles – all blubber and skin – wobble alarmingly with the strain of enunciation. His buckled face maroons as he struggles again with his leg.

Burfi, ever on the lookout for novel, arduous callisthenics to test his body with, clasps the big toe of Shyamanand’s left foot with his thumb and forefinger and, at arm’s span, without crooking his elbow, tries to lift the benumbed limb to the height of his own shoulder. ‘Boy. Oye, Jamun! This is a fantastic exercise!’ Burfi cocks himself up on his toes and arches his back to yank Shyamanand’s leg to a crest before restoring it to the mattress. ‘Phew. Bugger, you should try this. Super for the forearm and tricep.’ Chhana and Jamun cluster around the bed; to the snarllike chortling of Shyamanand and the derisive encouragement of Burfi, Jamun begins chancing his arm with his father’s leg.

Not since their puppyhood, it appears to Shyamanand, when they used to lark around together, indivisibly, before their irrevocable maturation tugged them adrift, have his sons sported with him in as joyous, as artless, a manner. He shuts his eyes and feels with delight Jamun snort and wheeze over his toe; he should die just then, he realizes with a sudden, extra squirt of rapture, in that very breath, for he’ll never happen on a more opportune time. He blurredly recalls that a poem, or a line, that unerringly images his present sentiment, exists somewhere, that he can, perhaps, even recollect the phrases if he slugs his wits about a bit. ‘Jamun, you boob. You’re bending your bloody elbow.’ Shyamanand’s leg thuds down on the foam cushion. ‘Oof – careful, you bugger! If you can’t handle it, then lay off, but don’t fuck up the leg.’ ‘Fuck you right back. You think I did that deliberately? Just fuck you.’

This kickoff of a squabble between his sons – once an everyday stridency, now rare, and dulcet, because it seems to recall a shard of their pasts – prods Shyamanand afresh to share with his children his gladness, and his fancy of death, but his tongue is too turgescent, lumpish, to be malleable.

He watches, with his grimace of a smile, Jamun riposte Burfi’s
vocal lunges. The brothers set themselves out in leisured positions about the room to keep up their slothful, trashy wrangle. ‘Bloated namby-pamby fucker. If you didn’t frig four times a day, you’d’ve been able to heave up Baba’s leg.’ ‘Better than you, VD. At least, the entire world never shrieked with laughter whenever it saw the results of any exam that
I’ve
ever taken.’ In their genial slanging match, they seem to’ve forgotten his affliction. Nothing had changed, it was good.