The Last Burden (36 page)

Further speculations are curtailed by the entry at this point of Kasturi’s sister the brook, who breaks in to check whether Jamun wants tea, and tarries to natter. How curious the world is, ruminates Jamun, observing the brook’s eyecatching pantyline. Here we are, Kasturi and I, and our infant, with an altogether capricious future to confront, doubting of Time’s munificence, uncertain when we will next meet, and unable even to discuss our hopes and misgivings, to voice our intuitions, simply because of this arsehole that won’t shut up. However, it’s arguable, he reminds himself with a soundless guffaw, that, as Aya’d’ve said, this arsehole has been sent by God; to wit, Kasturi and I, at this instant, can do fuckall – can’t even
talk
– about our lives. Just furtively clasp hands beneath this bedspread, I guess.

Breakfast on the morning of Jamun’s return is at Hegiste’s. One end of Hegiste’s dining table bears their TV. Jamun sits next to Mrs Hegiste’s grandfather and gluts himself on some Maharashtrian stuff. The grandfather rests his hand on Jamun’s shoulder and begins toothlessly and unintelligibly to blether in Marathi. Mrs Hegiste translates into dissonant Hindi. ‘The grief induced by death is a queer thing. One comes of age not when one has – uh – uh –’

Hegiste simpers at his wife’s awkwardness and zestfully takes
over. ‘One truly comes of age not when one’s experienced sex or masturbated or had one’s first period, but when one’s flesh and blood dies. Then one fuzzily senses how mysterious and confusing living is, that it’s most sensible not to introspect at all on its pith. Bizarre my own situation was some forty-five years ago, when, within six weeks, my father knuckled under to cholera, my mother to the venom of a scorpion that she nearly squashed in the latrine one night, my eldest sister, whom I doted on, to appendicitis – and one first cousin foundered to the bowels of the Ganga at Kashi. Four stubbed out in six weeks. I recollect that in a way I didn’t altogether grasp whom to sorrow for first, as though that was the cardinal issue to be decided. I felt embalmed and unthreatened: I’ll no longer have to wait for grief. Afterwards, when I’d revived enough for my memory of the dead to be ambushed, ever so often, by the unexpected sound or smell, I’d even feel contrite that my sadness was so much more for my sister and mother than my father. Lamenting for the dead is a peculiar business.’

Glasses of daab before Jamun and Hegiste set out for office. The grandfather, head bobbing, plods on. ‘And your father’ll come here to stay with you? Splendid, but will he adapt to the food and your Kasibai’s cooking, and to this dankness twelve months of the year? He’s about my age, and to be uprooted when one’s rheumyeyed can be fiendish.’

Fuck the food, Jamun tells himself as they dawdle out to the gate, however will Shyamanand communicate here? His bloody Hindi isn’t passable enough for him to follow Kasibai’s. The instant I return from office, he’ll beset me with his grouses against the day, the oafishness of Vaman and the slovenliness of his mother. As the minutes pass, the impossibility of Shyamanand’s assimilation into his son’s other life pounds Jamun with snowballing force. He’d have to beseech Burfi to cart Shyamanand with him when he’s transferred. From Hegiste’s or the office, he could phone home to say that he’d arrived safely, and somehow, though God knows how, skew the conversation so that he could, designlessly as it were, disclose to Shyamanand
that his flat here had only one loo, which obviously the domestics also used. Nothing, he’s aware, will head off Shyamanand as much as having to share his bog with the lumpen, or, for that matter, even his bowls and mugs. Vive la caste and la social inequality. And for sure, gravest of all, his father’s presence will poleaxe his tumbling; one can’t conceivably bid goodnight to one’s father in one room and prance off to doss down with one’s maidservant (and her asinine son!) in the next. Further, Vaman in particular can’t be depended on to be circumspect. For Shyamanand’s own dignity, Jamun doesn’t want him ever to learn of his son’s proclivities; he can suspect and arraign to his heart’s content, but he must never incontrovertibly know.

‘But what touched off her heart attack?’ Hegiste, ceaselessly curious, unthinkingly aggregating thimblesful, of fact. I’ve always supposed that with a pacemaker inside one, one’s heart can’t conk out.’

‘We did her in together, I think. My sister-in-law gifted her some roses on her anniversary, the unexpectedness of which fairly flustered my mother. My father chortled and guffawed at the present, thus upsetting her even more; she in fact suffered a minor fit that morning. Nevertheless, I lugged her out for a walk to the beach – her first in years – God knows how that affected her.’ When we returned from the beach, she blurted out to me some weird dope about her life – she must’ve been anyway rattled to divulge to me all that, and the revealing must’ve further discomposed her. ‘My nephew, Pista, riled all of us by spoofing my mother’s gait. Then the pacemaker itself. The quack superintending her had confided in me the evening before the attack that the damned pacemaker was faulty – its cells were leaking, like pus or something. Later, each and every motherfucker – the supplier and all the buggers at the clinic – poohpoohed the idea. By now, they must’ve taken the pacemaker away – why don’t you donate it to the needy, they simpered, the anuses – and why don’t we try and re-use it for you, could save you fifteen thousand? So now, I presume, we can’t have it inspected. And the supplier – an old classmate of
mine – provided us a free and comfortable ride from Delhi to Haridwar, for the ashes, a bit like a bribe, we all felt, because after the ease of the drive none of us had the heart to raise the matter with him – no, that isn’t accurate – more that the tossing of the ashes into the Ganga was the end of it – the matter clocks out there, in the frigidity of the river.’ And we all conduced to her winding up there. Even after her attack, when she was numb, we – her sons – delayed her because, fagged out and fearful, we craved a joint.

‘Hello, Baba? Jamun here, from the office. How are you? . . . Yes, the journey was – no, actually, it wasn’t fine in the least, the bloody AC was off for half the night, this mammoth Surd in the upper berth uncorked these viperous mooli farts every four minutes, and I had an eerie dream . . . Did you go for your walk yesterday? . . . No, but you mustn’t give up the habit, Baba . . . Why, you could’ve asked Pista to accompany you . . . Oof, don’t be silly, you don’t beg for charity when you invite your grandson for a stroll . . . Did Aya or Joyce remember your afterdinner milk?. . .’

His last glimpse of Shyamanand has been through the scummy rear window of the taxi. Shyamanand is in the turquoise half-sweater that his wife knit two winters ago. He inclines against the thorax-high compound wall, has hooked his stick on the gate, and slowly waves his right hand in farewell. In the frame around him are the grey and white of his house, the arms of the giant cactus, a chunk of ashen sky, a shred of road, a snuffcoloured tempo, parked. The half-sweater and the cactus are conspicuously in focus, acute against the grey. He is condemned, isn’t he, reflects Jamun, to the vexations of loneliness, to the recreations of hobbling about in the driveway on agreeable evenings, and of chinwagging across the boundary wall with any neighbour who pauses. Doesn’t he feel dreadfully free, unbridled? With just walking stick and his benumbed limbs as his last liabilities?

In the dream that pesters Jamun in the train – a nightmare, save that everybody in it looks jaunty – Urmila stands in
Shyamanand’s place alongside the compound wall, giggling and waving. Joyce is beside her, her hair tenderly disarranged across her features, tittering. Burfi and Jamun, on the roof of the house, wearing singlets and briefs, are cooking, sweating, stirring with long staffs a goulash in a huge cauldron. It isn’t specified, but Shyamanand is dead. In the next frame, Urmila and her grandsons are on the seashore, facing the water, in blinding, metallic noonlight; they appear almost as three silhouettes against a screen of white heat. Hand in hand, they saunter into the sea, but it’s no longer the sea; without warning, the three are instead on the broad steps at Haridwar, with the glacial water of the river deadening their shins. They are all beaming, and Doom starts to cackle, to oscillate in his delight, to turn his face up to the heavens and squeeze his eyes shut against the incandescence. His lips, at the edges, brown with the heat. Suddenly, with his free left hand, he thwacks his grandmother with frightful force in her underbelly. She totters, but Jamun never learns further, because the scene slides once more; a closeup of two huge, scarred, singed, exhausted feet, plodding with mesmeric regularity on scalding grey sand. They’ve been trudging for years, Jamun is aware, with an enormous burden; the shoulders of the pilgrim cushion a beam, at the ends of which sway two large, decrepit baskets; their shadows caper on the sand as the pilgrim clumps on.

Shyamanand arrives to stay with Jamun in the February of the succeeding year. A fortnight after his son’s departure, he mails Jamun his first letter, a totally blank inland, clean but for the address on the outside. Jamun is unmanned by it, and telephones from office. ‘What nonsense is this, why have you . . . ?’

Explaining to Shyamanand uses up some time; when he finally has it, he chortles and guffaws at his error. Jamun is further disquieted because his father’s merriment sounds phoney, as though Shyamanand is persuading himself that the legpul was designed, and is successful, A second, three-page letter ten days after, to amend matters:

My darling Jamun,

Wasn’t that incident with my inland droll! I related it to Burfi (in doublequick time, as he loped upstairs after office to shun me) and he retorted, from the head of the stairs, that if he ever received a letter with nothing in it from me, he’d fear that I was going off my rocker. ‘Like son, like father,’ I bayed up the stairwell.

Doom and Joyce dropped in yesterday. Heaven knows where they’re nesting now, and with whom; why should I ask? The brat is bubblier at each meeting and disregards more and more whatever his mother voices. At lunch, he ignored his plate as much as he ignored her; she at last whinnied at him to get on with his food. Doom, agape, instinctively responded by parroting, as children will, the sounds, the pitch and cadence, the accents, of Joyce’s speech – without actually articulating any intelligible word. Hearing him, I was abruptly reminded of your mother under stress; she too mimicked the tone and intonation of the other in an altercation – it was her first defence, for she was never a topnotch quarreller, she slanted much more to sentiment than to the cut and thrust of reason. Unexpected paltry events, like Doom parodying Joyce, evoke your mother dreadfully, and one relishes the acridness of remembrance, so one encourages oneself to remember.

On the second night after your departure, in the wee hours actually, I heard Urmila sneeze in her room. I swear. You wouldn’t have forgotten her sneezing fits, those twenty-plus uninhibited thunderclaps in a chain, each of which alarmed Naidu’s hound conspicuously; he’d tauten, cock up his ears and growl till socked on the skull by Naidu, to whom sometimes I itched to do the same. I heard only one sneeze though, that night, distinct and characteristic. Of course, you’ll scoff that I imagined it.

Jamun tosses his head over this bit of the letter, sneering at humankind. Incredible that Shyamanand could’ve forgotten his conduct. Urmila’s sneezing bouts had been truly marathon, and
had occurred, for some reason, always in the late afternoon or early evening. Jamun and his nephews had treasured them (‘Doom! Buck up, you bloody bloated snail, Thakuma’s begun to sneeze!’), and ever so often swarmed about her to tot up the sneezes and to egg her on.

But Urmila’s convulsions annoy Shyamanand, because he’s resolved that every single item about her will rile him. He behaves despicably, twirling his head away – pronouncedly, exaggeratedly – with each sneeze, as though to dodge the germs, goggling at her balefully, theatrically leaving off whatever he’s been saying, even limping out of the room – however can one be snubbed for sneezing?

The letter, continued.

I run into Burfi and his immediate family so seldom that I feel that I stay alone in this house. We’ve eaten together no more than four times since you pushed off. I suspect that Pista’s been commanded to spend the minimum possible time with me. While your mother was alive, the monkey frequently sweated over his homework with us; now I can buttonhole him for just a couple of minutes before one of those women cheeps him away for something or the other. But even when I’m with Burfi or Pista or Doom, I feel utterly on my own, in a sense – a distressing sense – without bonds.

I continually see myself stumbling and sprawling while pottering about at home – in the dining room, for instance, while opening the fridge – injuring myself in the fall, and the cold floor against my cold cheek for an eternity; the cook does edge into the room at noon, and Aya at four, they gasp and charge out, but for some reason, help never steps in. With one frozen eye, I watch through the window the sky creep across its tints to black. Why do you leave me all alone? I quaver at Burfi when he drops in in the dead of night. He doesn’t reply, but so stands in the doorway that I can make out only the left half of him; he is bisected lengthwise, and his right half, from hairline to floor, is entirely shadowed.

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?