The Last Burden (3 page)

Yet on that late-August afternoon, forsaken on cement flooring, with his wife outmatched and insentient – the whispers from an ice-cream sky and outside, in a lucid light, the cawing of a million birds – he, Shyamanand, sweats to rescue her for the twinges of mortality. She cannot escape. He pulls away her pillow, aligns her head, strives to knead her feet, chill and lumpish, wets with the wad her desert face and tries the phones again. Dialling is all but hopeless. A clear fear has clenched him. The notion baits him that his sons and Joyce have juggled matchlessly to incarnate before him their mother’s conviction that in extremity, when he craves them most, they will vanish; when thus forlorn, his vanity in his wealth of sons will atomize to stubble. He explains birdwittedly the emergency to a
voice in Burfi’s office. With his faculties pirouetting, he converses with an intelligent daughter in Haldia’s house and receives phone numbers that he cannot retain. He hobbles and subsides leadenly beside his wife’s head. Her exhalations are sweet, like purulent molasses. Next, Time mislays its meaning till Aya and Pista flood in with a knot of locals. Still, easing swells through him like maiden rain on desert sands. Now he cannot be upbraided for her dead heart.

Jamun’s eyes ache. Very likely because of the rot on TV, he says to Mrs Hegiste’s grandfather, and wanders out to the verandah. He slips off his spectacles and enjoys the matt-finish rain. His eyeballs itch to twist themselves free. He hopes that his vision isn’t worsening. In twenty years, near enough as many opticians have pronounced that sight wilts leisurely, but that with him, the decline should’ve ended with adolescence.

How memory twines and enlaces value into the slivers of one’s past. Whenever Jamun wonders about his eyes, he involuntarily rakes up a green blackboard and copperish pubescence on buttermilk skin.

He is eleven, and he has almost conceded to himself that his vision is falling apart. For several prefatory months, he hasn’t been able to read the blackboard from the terminal rows in class. In these circumstances, he’s censured the teacher’s handwriting to his classmates. After the vacations of summer, the new blackboards are bottle-green in colour. On the first Monday, the sun singes but the skies rain too. Jamun is yet taking to the new board when the initial drops sprout on the windowpanes with a rat-tat that he takes a breath or two to match with them.

‘Ohhh, rain!’ whoops Kuki in the bench ahead of his and next the window. Very unforeseeably, Kuki bobs up and sets to shedding his uniform! The class gapes. Copper-brown shorts and cream shirt are abandoned on his Radiant Reader Part Two. Jamun notes that Kuki does not believe in undies. Then the play of light on a toasted fleeciness, on the flour skin at the crotch, as, naked, Kuki corkscrews to the window. He means to scurry off to cavort in the rain, but the thunderstruck teacher butts in at
that instant. She is Mrs Jeremiah, meaty and baleful. Jamun abhors her with the ecstasy that one tastes with those whom one derides by day and is hot for in the camouflage of night. She is perhaps (alas, who can tell?) turned on by Kuki’s nakedness, for she lumbers up to him, whinnying with arousal, and thwacks him a sledgehammer on his right ear. Kuki begins to pule some seconds before the clout; after it, he, yowling, lurches away from Arsehole (thus Mrs Jeremiah is felicitously named), across the room and out the door. Mrs Jeremiah brays that he be intercepted, and twenty-seven scholars leave their seats for the exit, of which twenty-four are dissuaded by her succeeding snarls.

It is in this atmosphere that Jamun is directed to rise and fill in the blanks on the board. He is unable to read a single letter. He stirs from his bench to make towards the board but his steps markedly exasperate Mrs Jeremiah. ‘You’ll stop right where you are! Read from your place!’ she bawls, and struts up to him, udders and hams jouncing like ill-congealed pudding.

‘We are now starting an eye test,’ she proclaims to a breathless class, and positions an exercise book over Jamun’s right eye. ‘Read!’ But his eyes are stitched to the spectacle of her hunk armpit, inches from his thorax, a meaty spread of talcum and sable stubble.

Mrs Jeremiah deduces that Jamun is being saucy, therefore she clobbers him till her meatloaf arms enervate and he mellows into a puling ruin, his lubricity having pelted Kuki’s way with her very first whack. In his school diary, she carps, ‘Has taken to impertinence lately. Also has some difficulty with his vision. Requires an eye check without delay.’ To Jamun she suffixes, twitching a cautionary forefinger like a prick in rut, ‘You’ll get· the bashing of your life if you don’t show up with spectacles tomorrow.’

Neither parent endorses Mrs Jeremiah. In the evening, Urmila is sluicing the washbasin, office sari kilted at the waist. ‘Ma, Jeremiah said today I must have glasses.’ She stares at him, dismayed in an involuntary sort of manner. Shyamanand is
gasping and glutting himself with the chill leavings of a watery lunch. ‘Nonsense. But what roused her to say so?’

‘No idea.’ After a pause, without enthusiasm, condensedly, recapturing Jeremiah’s uppercuts and maledictions, ‘But I can’t make out the board too clearly from where I sit.’

‘Can the others?’ Afterwards, Shyamanand bears up a newspaper a few feet from Jamun and invites him to read an ad. Jamun crooks his head left and right, elbows his chin out, then into his throat, withstands the itch to slither two paces forward, and is mute. Shyamanand is bitterly surprised, somewhat malcontented, and wavers awhile that Jamun is befooling him. Finally, ‘We’ll undergo an eye test at the KGH this week.’

Dinner is zestless and incidental, drudgery Aya irks in the kitchen, half-fudges a tantrum, and flits. Urmila’s face tousles. Burfi is enmeshed in Kuki’s house, playing high. Shyamanand samples the dal. Its tastelessness goads him into murmuring, ‘Everybody’s eyesight in my family is first-rate. But Jamun at age eleven needs spectacles.’

Urmila checks her nibbling and stares at him. Her gullied brow is margined by oversize livid veins. Her mouth warps and she mewls, ‘No one in my family puts on glasses either!’ In reply, Shyamanand budges slightly to squint more finically at the afternoon newspapers. Urmila feeds herself through her tears. Jamun exits to frig on the roof underneath a hyaline night sky; Kuki has enlightened him, and he has accepted, that his onanism and his flaccid vision are twined together, but at that moment he doesn’t upset himself with the notion. He routinely vanishes for his handpractice when he intuits a wrangle between his parents. Urmila evacuates the table. Her abandon has fattened and pulped the skin beneath her eyes.

The next Saturday, dawning. Shyamanand, Burfi and Jamun in their charpais on the roof, comatosely witnessing the sky slide through her tints. Jolted by the bellow of dogs from the Sikhs’ house, whose border wall (snips of glass sitting on its ridge like a crew cut) has elbowed forward to gulp the roadshoulder into the house lawn. In the spectral light of every
daybreak and dusk, the dogs yawp evenpacedly. Shyamanand has distended and jolted the imaginations of his sons with, ‘It is possible, isn’t it, that those Sikhs have no hounds at all? For the dogs that
can
hustle them up the ladder would be too costly. Far cheaper to arrange for tape recordings of the baying of mongrels, some hellish streetfighters. Our Surds play back the tapes to deflect the unwanted – neighbours poorer than they, schoolchildren hawking lottery tickets. Plus, for ultra effect, they rerun the cassette at those moments of the day when the world seems at anchor. Now, shut your eyes and focus on that barking. Well? And none of us has ever spotted one of those Surds with a dog, have we? Yes?’

Thereafter, at a thousand and one unannounced moments in his life, the neck-and-neck baying of dogs dredges up for Burfi the halcyon-day-image of roguish male Sikhs, with hair stumbling loose like an avalanche to the shoulders – perhaps a crystal holiday morning, and the males have earlier fumigated their scalps abreast of blue buckets in the garden – now crouching over an upmarket stereo system (whose speakers skulk in the prodigal moneyplant that fawns on the wise pipal by the gate), index fingers taut above the buttons Rewind and Play, about to unmuzzle the whelp snarls at Burfi vacillating at the gate, wiggling in his hand the raffle tickets pressganged on him by the Jeremiah who bullied him four years before she baited Jamun.

‘Poor vision can be inherited, like diabetes and the assorted lunacies, from our parentage. The eyes of somebody or the other in your mother’s family or mine might have been sickly. This is not good. In manhood, some spheres will not be for you – Air Force, certain engineering careers. Let’s see how you handle today’s eye test. Yet I can’t think of a sole example of excessive myopia in either family.’

So the King George’s Hospital at eleven. A Raj structure; with time, the verandahs have been blinkered with humpbacked plywood for more space. Public Works has slapped on the exterior a rust-red that scuffs off on the domes and
shoulderblades of the drones against the walls. Like the average mortal, Jamun resents hospitals – the squeeze, the infestation, the torpor on hardwood benches, the trepidation at the malodour of purulence.

They have determined to reach by nine. For both Urmila and Jamun, the greatly loathesome excursion is a little uplifted by the fellowship of the other. They cadge with and scramble into an auto-rickshaw because both quail at buses. Urmila is also somewhat uncertain about her adroitness to prance on to a bus. ‘The conductor waits till my one foot remains on the road, then the bus reels away: The steps are very skiddy and high. My legs are columns of mucus,’ she inventories proudly as she gathers her sari about her and shortsightedly examines the floor of the rickshaw for crud. Jamun corkscrews and, through the oval hole in the rexine behind his head, waves to his father. Time after time, Shyamanand scans from the verandah when one of the family sets out of the house.

At the hospital, Urmila trudges crabbedly, drearily, clutching tongslike Jamun’s wristbones for reinforcement. Underneath her sari, her legs will be wan and spongy, with veins varicose like a bluish subcutaneous skein. One foot forward; next, the rear foot inches abreast as though she is always fording chancy stepping-stones, and wishes not to wet her feet at all. When she walks, she scrutinizes the ground with the vigilance of a child sleuth with a magnifying glass dogging Professor Moriarty. ‘Corns and arthritis, but when I was a schoolgirl, I was the wind!’ After every few steps, she halts, reconnoitres her surroundings, wheezes and clacks, ‘Your father was surveying us, wasn’t he? To check that I don’t mess things up? That we cross the road safely, that I pick an honest auto wala? How shabby he is. Why doesn’t he escort you himself? When you grow up, you’ll realize – he’s unforgivably idle and self-absorbed. No, much cushier not to help in any way, instead to inconvenience and belittle till your wife wants to die, yet not permit her enough time to die.’

Urmila manifests not acrimony, but a kind of blithe untrammelling, a garrulous sunniness to an on-off listener. At the OPD,
she unlatches her bag for her spectacles. Jamun gazes at small change, derelict oneand two-rupee notes, two or three rectangles of folded paper – recondite, with smudgy creases – the Lakme face powder compact with its fractured rose-plastic top on which Jamun has gummed a sticker of Batman, one flesh-pink, two-inch disc of the edible clay to which she is addicted (the sons have fitfully nibbled at some – paradisal!), two ponderous swarms of keys, the travel soap that couches in the lining solely to transude its balm, her scarlet Parker fountain pen with which Jamun secretly tests his calligraphies, a scalloped kerchief sulphur-yellow with desuetude, the carmine lipstick that like all other shades of red looms discrepantly against her etiolated skin (the same shade that Jamun, in his fantasies, tarts up on his bum-pulsing schoolmarms in their sunglasses and nylon stretchpants, sleeveless caftans, highnoon boobs, pruned armpits and hairdos the size of a bucket), (Urmila illumes with her lipstick only on signal events – when her kin overrides and tows her to the cinema for
The Sound of Music,
or on a Sunday afternoon with the grandsons on the beach – perhaps once every three years, maybe twice), a talisman of rudraksha beads, and
The Good Earth
by Pearl Buck – the job-lot of her portable world.

Eye tests at the KGH are scrupulous. They are also gratis if one vouches that one’s family earnings are preposterously humble. Everyone fibs with felicity on the blanched old-ivory forms. Timeless laps in convoluted queues – Jamun quails whenever Urmila diffidently tries to pioneer new Ladies Only queues – toadying to unshaven bespectacled clerks, exploring the hospital for a loo that will not enrich Urmila with some ghoulish chancroid fester. The woman ophthalmologist is laidback, rotund, with a bobbed beehive hairdo, bull lips that will not bestride her teeth, and a tumid face that for the burgeoning Jamun resembles the nob of a sprouted phallus. He can’t read the final three rows of the illuminated box chart. He sidles up to it while Urmila natters to the doctor and tries to mug up the lines. The penultimate line is peculiarly naughty –
COQCGO. To his vision, the letters look like a file of minute black quoits.

The doctor dashes off a prescription. Urmila condoles with Jamun, and airs a brief mortification. ‘Spectacles don’t count. Brainy persons put on spectacles. Perhaps you read again and again in minimal light, and earned your poor vision. Henceforth you’ll always be propping up eyeglasses, deadweight on the bridge of your nose.’

The basement shop within the hospital compound offers spectacles at some concession, or so their billboard announces. Urmila and Jamun are jittery and morose, as seconds before one’s set piece at an elocution contest. He ventures on a gold frame and inspects the bespectacled twin unknowns in the open-book looking-glass. The gold frames are overly costly. ‘You look so elderly,’ grimaces Urmila dispiritedly, and commends without fervour a biscuity Clark Kent pair. Neither bestirs him/herself immoderately over the choosing, and Jamun in addition feels both abasement and an undefined complicity. He returns for his spectacles six days hence. They aren’t done. He, with deliverance vibrant on his skin, does not go back for the tryout until a fortnight after, when the assiduous Jeremiah hustles his recall with a rally of stunning haymakers.