The Last Burden (31 page)

No one hears the boy’s questions. He registers with Jamun now and then, tottering as he tries to mince only on the limewashed stones that edge the footpath, tossing his interrogations into the air, ricocheting them off the sparrows and the gulmohars, with each tread the lank strands bobbing on his sizeable dome. Jamun realizes – but leadenly, dully – that Pista is in fact fairly pleased at his grandmother’s death. Jamun isn’t goaded enough to dissect why, but out of a kind of illwill, he slants towards Burfi and murmurs, ‘Pista seems pretty thrilled, doesn’t he, with this business. Gruesome little bugger.’

Burfi nods, without having seized a single word, At that selfsame instant, Jamun, all at once, is dreadfully ashamed at having divulged to Burfi his impression of Pista. It betokens to him both his balefulness and his lack of control. Malice, he jumbledly recalls, was the one sentiment that his mother’d never expressed, and certainly the only way to commemorate her was to emulate her, was to release oneself from the instincts in one that’d never been fostered by her. One had to atone for her passing by bettering oneself. Jamun reaches forward and tousles Pista’s hair, but the dolt doesn’t even wheel about.

On the drive back home, Shyamanand expressionlessly examines the earthen bowl and, gazing blindly out of the
window, remarks that most of the ashes that Burfi has so reverentially carried to the car are actually bits of gutted coal.

Kuki shows up at eight the same evening, sleek, well brushed, in a shirt the shade and texture of his skin. ‘I was away yesterday,’ he stutters to Jamun, almost in self-defence. ‘I didn’t know till this afternoon, when Haldia phoned me. Sorry.’

‘Can you curb yourself today from swigging your routine six pegs? We’ll amble down to the beach instead, and I’ll stick you to a daab or two.’

Casting about for a vacant bench, they saunter past the wastrels, the dope fiends, the turtledoves, the hawkers, the promenaders. ‘Kuki, Haldia might not’ve told you, but at Ma’s last checkup, which was the day before she was carted off to Intensive Care, he messed me up by declaring that her pacemaker was defunct because its batteries were oozing or were dud or something. But before I could figure out what I was to do with what he’d told me, she’d had her heart attack. I’ve been wondering this past week, you beefeater, whether you dumped on us a dildo for the price of a pacemaker.’

‘Hey, don’t fuck me up like this.’ On the right fringe of Kuki’s upper lip sprouts a rash like smeared lipstick. I’ll definitely quiz Haldia on what he confided in you, but those pacemakers aren’t toys, you know, cobbled together in Ulhasnagar or Kalyan by dropouts who chomp their fingernails and daydream of breakdancing in a Hindi movie. They’re A-one stuff, and in my eight – no, nine – years in this racket, this is the first time that I hear of leaking cells in a pacemaker. Tell you what, give it to me, and I’ll have Haldia test it; if it’s sound, I could flog it again. Save you a cool fifteen thousand. But how’re you all travelling to Haridwar? Have you worked that out?’

Changing the subject, Jamun senses, is Kuki’s way of stating that to propose, after a death, to the supplier that his defective machine triggered off that death, is both futile and tasteless, because wholly speculative. Jamun can’t decide how to react. ‘We’ll fly to Delhi, and rent a taxi or something there. A flunkey from Joyce’s office is getting us the plane tickets. Us means
Burfi, Joyce and me. My father wants to accompany us, but we aren’t so certain that he’ll be able to endure the three hours with Indian Airlines and the five in a cab. Let’s see.’

‘Have you arranged for the drive from Delhi to Haridwar, or should I fix a car for you?’

‘Could you?’ A rotund girl hoots and points Jamun and his outfit out to a younger, even more rotund boy whose face, from cheeks to chin, is hidden behind rubescent candyfloss. ‘Kasturi’s husband is mooning about in Delhi nowadays. She’s asked him to organize a taxi for us, but he seems a fairly hopeless guy.’

For the next two days, he and Burfi potter about the house in their pendulous and impure white, confronting the faces of commiseration. The rooms feel dreadfully silent. Jamun seems to hear only the drag of Shyamanand’s left foot as he aimlessly shuffles about from room to hushed room. Father and sons sit for hours about Urmila’s bed, and feel sad and companionable. In the sunlight that sidles in through the windows, swathed in the yards of homespun, Jamun begins to realize how befitting his clothing is. His dress, that he is to wear continuously for thirteen days, makes him feel penitent and unclean; only its wrinkles and limp crumpledness seem real, and in a manner venerable. After sundown, in the days of mourning, when he ambles down to the beach to take stock of what he knows of his mother’s life, his vestments of sorrow make him stoop and cringe his shoulders. He feels that his feet, as they sieve through the sands, are particularly cracked and unclean; his robes appear to mantle him in a kind of sacredness, and he senses that in a way he’ll miss them after he’s peeled them off.

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 closeness 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.