The Last Burden (4 page)

Thus for Jamun, a miraculous virginal world careens into focus at three on one ordinary, false-monsoon afternoon. Each atom of the stuff of existence around him is transmuted, steeled and fissioned, is a deflector of a crystalline light. He feels wobbly, The ground appears to lunge towards him. Demeanours and vegetation, stray dogs and the waterfall-blotches of a million micturitions against compound walls, crows floating like black hang-gliders on a candyfloss sky – all contours have diamond lines, and the light is cusped like broken glass. Each leaf is an entity, and all creation looks scrubbed and lacquered with dew. Yet Jamun plucks off his glasses. For he feels etched upon, spotlit, as acutely edged as what he beholds; he is marred for life, he thinks, and for a flicker mulls over which parent is to be arraigned.

In a few days, he starts slipping his spectacles off whenever he is distressed, glum or enervated, is with persons whom he thinks are goodlooking, or aspires to dazzle, or whose traits he wishes to commandeer. In such contexts, his bedimmed sight rallies after a fashion his spirit; with the years his vision slumps in leaps and bounds.

‘Going home?’ The woman, sixty-five-ish, on Jamun’s left in the plane, percolates through his pesky half-snooze. She has earlier softened him into ceding to her his window seat (‘I’ve a soft spot for the sunrise’) and has powdered her mug all through takeoff. ‘So drearily lower-middle-class, Ma, to powder your face – oof, makes me unwell,’ so Burfi has chorused for years on end, actuating his mother not a bit. For Jamun, powdering the face and neck is a deed not of womanhood, but of motherhood, executed (in the seconds pinched from the treadmill) to camouflage the chinks in a doleful housewife face. The ritzy perfumes from Dubai and Singapore that Joyce gifts Urmila in succeeding years are all pickled in her black trunk, and enjoyed on incomparably momentous jubilations – Burfi’s civil marriage, for example, for which Urmila swaddles herself in Benares silk and where she grieves only because she feels that she has to provide her spouse companionship.

Yet Kasturi powders her face too. ‘Much cheaper and much less hanguppy,’ she retorts to a sardonically diverted, knottedly concupiscent Jamun contemplating her floundering with a sari in the darkish light, some seven months ago. In the lookingglass, she dabs and smothers with the puff. In that second, that she is older than him cannons into his skull anew.

‘But I’ve all along bracketed it with mothers, Boss. When women who haven’t hatched use face powder, can’t one deduce that they tacitly
yearn
to bear kids?’

In response, Kasturi inexpertly lights a Wills and exhales a haze of smoke at him.

‘Yes, I’m on my way home.’ The window-seat-hijacker is grey and patrician. She is Mrs Shireen Raizada, she gabbles. She is
petrified of aeroplanes, and to outpace her cold feet jabbers the hind leg off a donkey. ‘My youngest has flunked three times in the Ninth Standard and once again in the Tenth now. How much more will his father have to satisfy the school with to hold him in there? Truly, living is null – like mud – when one’s children are one’s misfortune. Everything feels ill-spent – dust. But one twitches on. Good blood is the real fortune. I don’t suppose he’s dense, but what tension in the house whenever the exams are louring! How I quail at his Progress Reports. And then I’ll cop it and some petticoat will roost on his head and milk out my sap. All he achieves day by day is exercise, three hours in the morning and two more hours by nightfall. He’s soured on those days when he can’t strain and gasp for that long. Nothing else upsets him.’

‘I’m positive that all children dismay their parents now and then,’ assuages Jamun vacantly, with a smart-ass smirk that connotes that he considers himself exempted. But for sure he isn’t, and his words are more accurate than his smirk. Because memory is a crank, he does not remember the cold sweat that he and his brother have touched off, a million times, on those who cling to them. They’ve never threshed about for their parents with any remotely comparable strain. Burfi has scarcely troubled his head about them, or so Jamun reckons, with the entangled malevolence of the younger sibling. Yet parents can lacerate with equal virulence, so Burfi avers. ‘You must recall – on the morning of my marriage, and Joyce within range, fixedly simpering and steaming in her Kanchipuram, weighted like bedding, Ma distrait and asking whether what I was about to sign held the provisos for divorce.’

Of course, Jamun too has triggered off enough disquietude in his parents. In his early pubescence, for instance, he has temporarily – but deeply – strained his mother with his clumsy itch for the grocer’s boy (a man, really – old, malodorous, balding, buxom). Subsequently, as a hugger-mugger bisexual adult, he now and then remembers, with a feeling of lost blessedness, his unpolluted and stark, axial rut of those weeks. While the house
had dozed, in the inflamed afternoons, he had waited, aguish with lust, for the buffeting on the back door.

Towards which he scampers, from whichever part of the flat he is in, to simper a welcome at Garam Gandu – Kuki’s name for him (Hindi: meaning Hot Arselender, according to Jamun, and Hot-Arse Lender, according to Kuki). Jamun observes the plump frame of the shopkeeper’s assistant, and randomly touches his bicep, and adventitiously rubs against his thigh, and bulges rasher and rasher every afternoon, and is tantalized on the days of the man’s truancy; he is finally impeded, one day – ‘Shall I tell your father that you don’t know what to do with your hands?’ – at which, in bafflement and funk, Jamun strafes him with a squirt of the newly learnt bawdry that is a feature of growing up. Bewildered, distressed, that evening, he is revealed to his mother. ‘You’d better watch your second son.’ Urmila is too shut in and fatigued for the stricture actually to register before Jamun is quaveringly confuting it. ‘But, Ma, he broke two of our eggs, right before my eyes, and crammed them raw into his mouth – I only called him, bastard – his hands were all gooey with the yolk, and he wanted to fondle my face with that glueyness – so I called him sonofabitch. And he said, if you asked about the eggs, I should say
I
boiled and ate them.’

Urmila cautions neither; presumably, she just wishes the unpleasantness away. Jamun and Garam Gandu backslide into familiarity, into the itch, the irksome incontinence, the secondrate frottage, the limp menace of disclosure, till divergent yearnings tug the mellowing boy away.

Afterwards, Jamun, once in a way, broods on how much his mother had distressed herself over the affair of Garam Gandu, whether and how often she remembers the matter, and how marvellous she is to tend her son’s secrets, for certainly she couldn’t’ve divulged his proclivity to any soul. Or could she? At these moments, he vows to requite her caring, and for a time strives to be heedful of her numberless, paltry, annoying wants. Of course, he falters in honouring his vow; with him, as with many others, the allures and undertakings of the fleeting world
bid fair to prevent duty (or contrition, if you prefer).

Mrs Raizada is still chinwagging when the plane begins its descent. Her eyes are glazed and infinite like the crushed dog’s on the day of the telegram. Those eyes had ricocheted on to the rich, almost chewable, pages of the Bodley Head Robert Payne, and beyond the book on to the gossamer hexagons of the mosquito net, and the albumen-white of the ceiling, unmarked yet by spider and lizard. Mucus eyes; they had far transcended this life. For a moment or two, Jamun had watched the dog’s head in the fading rain, slackly attached to some wads and dollops of flesh, and the blood slowly and without end poisoning the water.

Jamun considers (an idiosyncrasy of his, to sport with the features of his kin) whether he would’ve preferred his mother to look like Mrs Raizada. Like-his mother, she also appears equably vain about the inwrought comeliness, underneath the powder and crannies, of her face. Urmila is placidly certain that no matter what she wears, no one can doubt her ingrained gentility. Yet one afternoon, decades in the past, Kuki’s mother, out of the evanescent rancour that one neighbour feels for another, had flabbergasted her by mistaking her for their communal sweeperess.

The sweeperess has decamped the day before with one of Aya’s male friends, a scraggy, peevish wolf called Kishori. The fuss over their moonlight flit impedes Aya from even thinking of the stodginess of housework. She, on the rooftop with her remaining chums, is in a huddle over the misadventure. Urmila screeches and yelps for her for some time. She will never be forceful enough to compel a toughie like Aya. Then Shyamanand begins to carp about the racket. Temples turgid at their insouciance, Urmila totes the garbage bin out.

‘Oho, Laxmi,’ miaows Kuki’s mother to Urmila’s back, ‘the refuse of other houses is much more important than mine, is it – oh, it’s you, Mrs – from the back I thought – with the rubbish pail –’

From the verandah, Jamun spots in the ice-blue of the road
tubelights his mother stumping arduously away. He glides out after her, past Burfi at this desk practically swooning over the newborn incubus of logarithms. Stalking Ma is initially more diverting than Hindi homework – easier too; only after a time does it drag. She wends at a foot’s pace, does not look up or about and, Jamun recognizes at once, is not going to any specific place. Feebly trying to give her existence the slip, at least for a time. Dinner will wind her in, or the responsibilities of feeding a family, so she befools herself. For when she doubles back, her husband, ramping against his stomach ulcer, will have sated his jaws with whatever his fingers fumble on in the fridge before reverting to his divan. Burfi, study and dinner mopped up helter-skelter, will be in Kuki’s house, clipped round-eyed to their TV. Jamun the gourmandizer will have guzzled once with his father and once alone, hating Burfi for having (while moseying past the table, aware that only Urmila and Jamun have yet to eat, and that his mother will never bleat over the dole of a leftover dinner) crammed down the best of the mutton. If there
is
mutton, when Urmila eats alone, wretchedly, she gets much gravy and many potatoes.

Her footfalls are uneven in the dispersed blue-ivory light that makes Jamun feel that he has slipped on sunglasses at nightfall – a tread more rickety than expected of her age, incarnating her infirmities and her cheerlessness. She does not trudge very far. She squats on the culvert by the lane, within earshot of the cigarette-wala from whom Burfi has lately, cloak-and-daggerly, started buying Gold Flake Filter Kings, parroting the adult world. She shows no wonder at seeing Jamun. Sluiced with sobbing, her face is voided and sacramental, as a landscape after a cloudburst.

‘Come, sit.’ Jamun sits, wondering whether any of the ambulant louts are going to be offensive about his mother perched alongside the lane.

‘I rise at four-thirty every morning. Long before the sun. Every morning. Holidays, Sundays, nothing, no variation. Four-thirty, in the murk I ooze out of a bone-wearying sleep. Lurch in the kitchen, warm the milk, make tea for myself, skull
pulsing. Scared of going to the toilet because of my piles. How to explain, and who shall listen? Every morning, how to express, that I blench at the thought of the lavatory, the abasing ignominy, the pain. In there, twenty minutes, now and then forty, face gnarled with exertion, once in a way tears, my calves and hams bubbling with fatigue. Five-thirty or so, back to the kitchen. Yell myself hoarse for Aya, who shall never descend before seven – from time to time she shrills at me not to disturb her. Tea again for your father – nowadays for Burfi too, he avows that he’s come of age. Wake the two of you up, beseech and plead, please get up, you’re going to be late for school, please wake up, your tea is becoming cold. Then wait, for you both to be indulgent with me and forsake the snugness of your cots. Possibly yet another intolerable visit to the lavatory. Pour out for your father his tea, detail the two of you for your baths etcetera. Bawl for Aya afresh. Screech at each of you through the doors to wash properly and not to fool yourselves. Whip up your breakfasts – eggs, porridge. Pack your tiffin boxes, lay out your school uniforms. Try to parry your vexing questions on your clothes – Ma, where’s my left sock? Ma, why’s Burfi not loaning me his other shirt? Park the bucket out for the sweeperess, make over clothes to the laundry boy, fish up the exact small change for the milk boy. Exhort you two to mop up your breakfasts in the moments remaining to you, sweet-talk you into not leaving your tiffin boxes behind. Lend Aya a hand in scrambling some breakfast for your father and me – and herself, and her several playmates – clout the beds into shape. Stow lunch for your father and me, hand on money to Aya for the cooking gas or the shopping, check with her what to buy – pointless, of course, for she buys only what her chum-of-the-week craves to eat – endure Aya’s cactus patter on my stricken life while my temples flutter with the knowledge of the lifelong deficit of money, money, money.

‘Then office. Meanwhile, your father, lolling in bed, has sipped several teas and inspected the newspaper with disrelish, grieving once in a way, perhaps, that the tea has cooled. I bathe
and breakfast, virtually at the same time, scamper to the garage over the stabs of my corns. Forbear your father mouthing in assorted heinous ways that
I
delay him for office, the beast. Shut the doors of the garage after he sucks dry some
ten minutes
to back the car out – I stand and wait, my tummy tight with disquiet, wrath and worthlessness, why can’t he ever precede me to the garage, even one single morning, why do only
I
have to shut the doors after the car? He could save me ten whole minutes.

‘In office – borrow money and evade the loansharks. One or two peons will mince in, bank their hams against my desk, chomp paan and review my refunding power. In every chat, every exchange, I’m blemished – I’ve borrowed and have paid back or have to pay back, or I’ve wheedled to borrow, and he or she has begged off, perhaps with restraint, very likely without, but has noised abroad the titbit over the tiffin boxes: she’s
still
cadging. Or I will borrow in good time to repay an earlier loan – or I will doubtless borrow in the long run. All day this tingling – this guilt and fretting – muddling with the leaden routine of office. I hate money because of the domination that it – it
squats
over me. Lunch with your father, at which, over Aya’s vapid cooking, he recycles his strictures.