The Last Burden (26 page)

To the father, friction between his sons is a pointer to their affinity; that is, they are close enough to each other to, now and then, spit sparks. With the years, Shyamanand recalls sentimentally, Jamun’s trained himself to more than hold his own against his elder brother, to match him jab for jab. ‘Chuck me a cigarette, yaar, Walldrooler – shit, one can’t even smoke in here – come, shall we step out for a drag? Will be back in a second, Baba.’ Walldrooler. A happy coincidence, that Burfi’s used the very nickname for Jamun that dredges up out of their pasts the scenes that Shyamanand himself has been, at that moment, daydreaming of, of the time before Jamun’s articulation had ripened enough for him to parry with speech alone, when he’d banked instead, for expression, on clenched fists and the squeals of rage.

When he’d been four, and Burfi eight, and of an evening had played ice-pice together – or rather, Chhana and Jamun’d fruitfully wheedled his brother into joining them, because Burfi was eight, and far too weathered for silly ice-pice, and at least acquiesced only because his brother and cousin agreed to play the game in a novel way – wherein both Burfi and Chhana became dens, shut their eyes and, snickering, counted till hundred, while Jamun, atremble with excitation, waddled off to hide.

They nosed him out within seconds, every time, and hooted and cavorted about, while he, riddled, with tears tipping his eyes, goaded their guffaws to fuel him to detonate.

Months of this ice-pice before Burfi begins to feel really just too dreadfully adult, and once for all to wind up the witless sport, discloses to Jamun that as long as he keeps to his
obnoxious, and comical, habit of licking the wall wherever he toddles, he’ll never be able to camouflage himself from anybody, because the damp, rapidly evaporating smudges of his licks, like the trace of the moist heels of small shoes, will immutably guide his stalkers to him.

Good to hark back in this fashion to the years of their nurture, Shyamanand doughtily reminds himself, it’ll keep his senses from his present frozenness. He observes Jamun push his spectacles up the bridge of his nose to read better the level of the glucose in the upside-down bottle above the bed. But nurture was frightfully labyrinthine, and one never knew what accrued from what. As a parent, for instance, one hadn’t been opportunely aware that one’s child savoured the lime on walls because he was probably deficient in calcium; when, less than a decade later, the boy needed glasses, one wasn’t certain whether his vision’d been damaged by the negligence of a faulty upbringing, or whether it was true that, in any case, the children of thirty-five-plus mothers tended to physical weakliness.

So Shyamanand returns home in two weeks, uncontrollably happy. Joyce has attempted to transfigure his room – drape his bed in vivid linen, locate on his desk a few uncluttered inches for a carafe of gladioli. Burfi and Jamun half-buoy him from the car to his easychair by the window. They are startled to note that his rapture at returning home has edged Shyamanand to tears. ‘When I suffer my next cerebral – no matter when, three months, or twenty years later – I’m not stirring from this room. All of you, please remember – next time, no Haldia, no hairy matrons, no enemas, no shock treatment. If I’ve crashed to the ground somewhere, just haul me to the bed, draw back all these curtains, play crescendo on your stereo that Gershwin that I like, and open, open wide these doors and windows, so that sparrows can streak in, with the moist wafts from the sea. That’d be enough for me. Then Heaven can wait.’

Shyamanand mends, but really stealthily, inch by inch, over years. That is, from being totally bedridden, he is able – with effort that is fitful, lengthened across a good many seasons, that
is countered by prodigious bouts of morose, downhearted torpor – finally to hobble about aided by his thick bamboo walking stick, unescorted within the compound walls of his house. He improves because the hankering to live never actually abandons his limbs, despite his, from time to time, yawping and snarling out the opposite; furthermore, he recognizes, little by little, that with time the anxiety of his flesh and blood for his condition shrivels – through the routine stages, in waning order, of solicitude, inconstant care, weariness, irksomeness – to a variable blend of tedium, dutifulness and tempered vexation; the dwindling concern of Urmila and Jamun for his wellbeing disciplines Shyamanand to bank more and more on himself. But he recovers only up to a point: for the residue of his life, his left arm remains wholly, and his left leg in part, dead.

Urmila and Jamun privately dub them the cold sweat years – the sluggish, interminable, unremarked decade between Shyamanand’s first cerebral stroke and Burfi’s return on transfer to the city of his fosterage. Jamun conceives the phrase, and Urmila considers it so felicitous that all at once tears film her eyes when she first hears it; for her entire existence in those years has seemed to her to’ve been tyrannized by a medley of fear – terror that Shyamanand’ll die on her hands, when she’s alone in the house and floundering, in a cold sweat, with the telephone book for the right numbers; palpitation, like a clutch around her heart, that the others, the world, will squarely base the culpatibility of his death in her lubberliness; a disquietude with every breath that his strictures, as harrowing and as unexpected as arrows, incited by any subject under the sun, or even by the absence of subject, will maul her right now, this instant, or the next, or the next; an undercover trepidation that she herself will peg out most untowardly, with momentous chores undone, without having tasted the delight of a moment’s repose.

Jamun is menaced too, in those years of cold sweat. The disconsolateness that exudes from Urmila’s soul seems to’ve fattened like a contagion throughout the rooms, bedimmed and
sullied them, so that the house itself demoralizes and appears to coldshoulder him. Her apprehensions, fuzzy enough in themselves, dribble into him too – after all, he
is
his mother’s son, and has been engendered out of the marrow of his fosterers – but with even more fuzzy contours. Hence he also is secretly chilled, for instance, that both his parents, designedly, will die just when he alone is about, too sapped by panic to stall their deaths.

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 –’