The Last Burden (5 page)

‘Back home at six. I long to finish everything, scurry through everything,
conclude
it – feeding, trudging, clothes, being – so that at the end I can anchor; but where is the lull? In place of stillness, I reap only Kuki’s mother designedly mistaking me for her sweeperess. Feed and distend once more your father – else the ulcer in his belly detonates through his jaws. Put up with Aya’s gripes against her chums. Pass over the lurching in my skull, speculate about dinner. Food, all the time, food – consider all day what to feed others, yet perpetually bear their censure, stinking of an open-mouthed belly. Aya might not have gone to the market at all – some tip-top alibi – her menopause that’s been obliging her now for some years, her kidneys, her breathing – meantime, she would’ve hobbled off for a matinée cinema show – nothing in the kitchen to cook. Tea yet again! And again the apprehensions of the lavatory. Your accusations against the day –
Kuki cheated at badminton, and jostled your elbow so that your orange bar fell. Burfi not at home for hours on end, another wellspring of misgivings – who are these friends that he doesn’t bring home, are they lost souls or what? In particular that Assamese. But now the day is breaking up, and my corns are spiking me. What to ram into these greedy-guts? Who will help me to sate them? By and by, one of Aya’s fan club will saunter to the market. From his bed your father will cavil – I never check the accounts, so how am I convinced that he’s not swindling us? Of course I’m not convinced! But why doesn’t your father oversee the house himself? Oh, he’s shameless, hopeless. Make the beds, tidy the rooms. By the time dinner comes around, you’ll’ve mewled fifty times to me that we should eat like Kuki. Very likely, you’ll glide away to Kuki’s and cringe before his mummy, bob around her, bear with and even thrill to her churlishness about me – can’t I even sustain my own litter that it should cadge for grub in the houses of neighbours! By dinner time your father’s belly will’ve thickened with snacks. So I eat by myself. Exhausted, skull on pillow, sleep evasive, waiting for Burfi, where is that son?’

Jamun glowers at his mother’s profile. He has from time to time been informed that his features are hers, and Burfi’s Shyamanand’s. Jamun is guilty and jittery that his mother has intuited right about Kuki’s mother. Urmila’s sapience vexes him. Indeed, in the preceding one year Kuki’s mother’s meaty upper arms, inch-long rose-pink fingernails, lifebelts of lard underneath the restraining blouses, grandiose yet skittish buttocks of lime-green georgette, have unmuzzled a warm sap in Jamun’s lower belly that eddies into his scrotum and about his coccyx.

He gazes at Mrs Raizada’s face against the ellipse of the aeroplane window. Beyond her coiffure is the silver of the plane wing and the arid turf of the airfield. So. Back home after seven months, in which time his mother has suffered one piles operation and one heart attack, and he himself has picked up Kasibai and her lovechild Vaman, who is thick-ribbed and slow, and is charmed by mirrors.

Kasturi beyond the thick glass of the airport, in a baggy coraland-sulphur kameez that effectively keeps in purdah her pregnancy, plumpish but restive – no more mopish pallor. Jamun touches her elbow and sights Chhana ten feet away. He introduces them. ‘Chhana, my cousin, my father’s niece. Kasturi, my friend.’ Chhana is still bespectacled and meagre. The sun is temperate and wholesome. The palms that fringe the airport road lurch in the gusts from the sea like spellbound women votaries with haunch-length hair, bedevilled by some shaman’s philtre, corkscrewing their heads and arms about to a bacchic drum. Death simply could not be in this fair weather.

‘Shall we drive straight to the nursing home? She’s on the mend. She floated up out of coma last evening. She recognized me. She couldn’t speak, though. Her eyelids shuddered. Your father’s at the hospital too, though I urged him not to exhaust himself. She in fact croaked! Her heart knuckled under. Your father’s catnap was disturbed by the tinkling of Pista entertaining himself with her bell. How long was she dead? A minute? Ten minutes? One hour? Maybe she’d been kaput an entire hour and nobody realized. Wonder how this’ll affect her. I picked up somewhere that the brain can be choked for keeps if we don’t provide it oxygen for a minute. She should never’ve undergone that piles surgery. That ghoul Haldia – doctors will
slay
for money – steadily tittering and fibbing, their forefingers and thumbs moist and expectant, itching for notes. The sight of her is grisly. All the time she has globules of some fluid on her temple. I imagined water from swabbing. But they were perspiration – swollen pellets of cold, cold sweat.’

‘If you’re driving straight to the nursing home, you could drop me off on the way,’ proposes Kasturi. ‘Only family
should be with her. Outsiders would be cramping.’

The red lettering on the glass swing doors asks Jamun and Chhana to shed their shoes and slippers outside the cardiac wing. While Jamun, squatting on an invisible bench, back sheer against the wall, right ankle positioned on left knee, tugs at his shoelaces, a hospital attendant, hirsute and ruffianly, swishes past him and through the glass doors (the whine of which decelerates to a hushed groan, recalling for Jamun a gramophone ditched by electricity), bearing a covered rust-and-enamel bedpan that perhaps retains some festering offal, with his leather slippers squeaking like rats making whoopee.

A moderate cubicle, about twelve into ten. On the white iron cot, amidst chalky bedlinen and dun blankets, upended glucose bottles and tubing (like an aerial vista of a lattice of motorways and bypasses), in harrowed repose, a face the colour of mouldering teeth. Tall windows of tinted glass. Beyond, one more donkey-grey building with air conditioners embedded in it like cheese canapés poked into a cabbage at the centre of a feast. Wires from her brow shimmying to the corner, to an apparatus with a black screen that charts some electronic cardiograph. Beneath it, sunshine-yellow digitals whiffling helter-skelter . . thirty-seven . . . twenty-nine . . . fifteen . . . one hundred and two . . . The graph itself will, all at once, paroxysmically, yoyo up and down like the work of a toddler (wielding a pencil clutched like a dagger) being inspired to draw. On the dun blankets, derelict, an overblown and squelchy forearm, bluish. Through and above it, more rubber, steel and glass. The back of her hand is livid, but the fingers are chilled ivory. A frightful convulsive breathing, like being riveted within the breast of a beast by its amplified death throes. Her eyelids flicker unremittingly, unsettled moths. Her mouth gapes, as though composedly waiting to be fed. The ellipse from the edge of her nostrils to her chin protrudes simianly, shoved forward, as it were, from the root of the skull by the heel of a strong palm. To Jamun, his mother seems a vacant incarnation of a being till recently familiar. We are all
like this, he mulls confusedly, sinking monkeys.

He lightly strokes a brow that is wheelmarked in gagged agony. Warm. Disorderly salt and pepper hair that she, in vexation once, had snicked off at the neck. In the air an inapposite redolence – oh, Chhana’s scent. ‘Burfi’s just driven your father back. She’s asleep. She’s now conscious – has mumbled from time to time, but incoherent. Gibberish,’ says Chhana, grimacing, gnawing her underlip.

A silver sheen on Urmila’s cheeks. Hair, white down Jamun is positive that it did not exist before. To him it augurs death.

‘Your Baba’s in wretched shape. Like being thwacked with a hockey stick. He senses it, if she breathes her last, no one else will suffer his antics, the house will just cave in.’ Chhana trails about the bed, fretful, fearful, eyes so distended with contrition and irresolution that Jamun can’t grapple with them. ‘I’m going out for a cigarette.’ Chhana withdraws swiftly.

‘Ma.’

Ma, I, Jamun. I deferred for four days. I’m sorry. Befuddled, he smoothes down the grey strands over her ear. Like Chhana, he feels eerily vulnerable and does not know whether he should weep in atonement. Her turgescent, dogtired face is a mask. Her torso alone spasmodically leapfrogs for air, an old machine. He tips over and kisses her cheek, reflecting that it is due from him and perhaps he should have kissed her much earlier. He dazedly hankers after prodigious slabs of Time, weeks and years, in which he can indolently natter to her, lounge with her in pink-stone benches beneath the palmyras by the sea, evoke for her the trajectory of his day and, with the swish and rustle of the white horses of the sea, listen to the yarns of her yesteryears.

‘One day, when I am at ease and not tuckered out, I shall recount to you my life, what actually occurred.’ Thus a good many times, across the years, Urmila has, singly and together, vowed to her incurious sons. ‘Perhaps not to you, Jamun, you are too passionless, unforgiving. Maybe I shall tell Burfi. For all his unsteadiness, he will salute my survival, he’s warm.’

‘Burfi!’ Jamun’s pique spirals with the slump of his selfrestraint. ‘Burfi a responsive audience!’ He struggles to explain. ‘A listener should be painstakingly picked. The good listener invests esteem on both the fiction and the raconteur. But Burfi! He’ll merely be prurient about the sex and the scraps, so that he can recount the ruttish details to Joyce, suffixing a “See! Even my parents are with it! The proof’s these peccadilloes from the bloom of their lives – my mother was no gentle sufferer, and they married for – well,
not
for caste, and took to separate beds soon after – isn’t that modern, Joyce, and aren’t you dazzled?”’

A meaty nurse chugs in, stalked by Chhana, asking questions to her back. Meaty looks down her nose at her watch, twitches a tube out of that bulbous and torpid forearm, punctures in an injection, shoves a paper at Jamun, yawps, ‘Medicines. Required at once. And Accounts Branch has conveyed that of the initial deposit of four thousand rupees for the patient, you’ve only paid two hundred. Treatment might end otherwise,’ and chugs out, churlish and invincible.

At home, in the driveway, with a tennis ball and a child’s cricket bat, Burfi (flared jolted eyes in a tight-knit, stable figure), Pista and Doom are playing cricket. Shyamanand sits, expressionless, in the verandah. Doom is bowling to Burfi. Pista, at ease under the umbrella of the neem tree that Shyamanand and Jamun had sown eleven years ago to shield the south-west wall from the malevolence of the afternoon sun, is cackling outrageously at Doom’s manner of bowling. In his hilarity, Pista cants forward till his nut closes in one his knees, somewhat like a perpendicular foetus, or shudders back and forth, pitches his arms about, embraces himself, as though the jollity is an incubus that needs to be exorcized. His mirth further exhilarates Doom, who scuttles back to his bowling run on his dumpy, precarious legs, each unerring, twinkling step a marvel, twirls, draws up for an instant to paw the ground and glower at the batsman (as he has divined from TV, after the fashion of Pista’s godlings, the doyen bowlers of Pakistan and the West Indies), then trundles forward like an irate crank to within ten feet of a
theatrically intimidated Burfi, and, face wine-dark, with excitation, intentness, and mirth, bungs the ball about ninety degrees wide of target. Impenitent, he and Pista then spurt after the ball, whinnying. After every such perpetration, Burfi, to encourage the ringing of the laughter of children, feigning an affronted prowl around an imaginary batting crease, hewing the pigmy bat about like a twig scooped up on an open-country, after-a-cloudburst tramp, bewails, ‘I’m not playing with you jokers,’ and, ‘You ninnies are the worst players in India, the baddest cricketers in the Milky Way.’

Burfi and Jamun embrace cordially. The children wait, irresolute for an instant at the snap abolition of their sport. ‘Hi,’ smirks Pista bashfully, and, slewing round, ‘Doom! Jamun’s here!’ Doom finds in the statement an additional stimulus to yelp and scurry back to the crest of his bowling run. Jamun touches his father’s feet. ‘We went directly to the hospital from the airport,’ declares Chhana. ‘No difference. But that safari-suited whale with the Americo-Chandigarhi accent – who flogs his own thigh with his stethoscope while discoursing – said, no deterioration either. We are on our guard, he announced, as though my aunt was the adversary.’ Chhana, grinning demurely, then joins the cricketers.

The lawn, notes Jamun, their twenty-by-fifteen segment of desert scrub – what Burfi has named ‘our bloody rock garden’ – appears to have been poorly irrigated in his absence. The saplings that he had untidily planted during his previous stay – a tulsi, a white bougainvillaea, a eucalyptus, a shockheaded palm, and alongside it a hibiscus – are dead: bleached-sticks and shrivelled tassels. Only the mammoth cactus in the further corner (two storeys tall, sentinel) and some undying, random scrub remain, an obdurate, arid green. In the years that he has lived in this house, with an ignorant and fitful zeal, Jamun has struggled to make fecund their patch, and time and time again failed. Shyamanand has tried too. So has Urmila, inundating the plot once in a way. The sight of the dead plants and the dusty soil dispirit Jamun, naturally. His parents and he, overly
worried only about themselves, seem never to have succeeded in giving life to anything.

Except, Jamun half-smirks to himself, for the cactus. Which wasn’t even truly theirs, since they hadn’t planted it – not initiated it, at any rate – had simply dislocated and transported, and eventually transplanted, it when they had moved, roughly a decade ago, from a government flatlet to their own crumb of earth. The cactus had been part of the flatlet, a two-footer in a jumbo tub on the terrace, abandoned by the earlier occupant. Jamun’s aya and her assorted chums, over the years, had desultorily nurtured the plant to more than mansize; it had been disregarded by the family till the week before departure, when the sentimental ache that is roused when one quits a nook that has fostered one for years made them view rosily whatever did not, or could not, accompany them – the leaky, blackened kerosene stove, the cracked pail beneath the dripping cistern in the toilet, the Public Works Department armchair in the verandah, the enormous cactus on the terrace.

For the first time in a decade, Jamun, fagged out by the tangle of packing, mooching about among the transporter’s coolies, notices the symmetry of the many arms of the cactus. ‘Baba, can’t we take this with us? It’d be a continuity. These guys could easily yank and haul it on to the truck.’ Shyamanand, forever loath to forsake even a shard of his past, assents.

Shifting the tub, however, proves to be a killer. The coolies, for starters, decline to touch it, contending that it is not furniture. Then everyone starts to dispute with everyone else, glad to escape the decisions of cramming in and putting away. ‘These slobs need to be informed,’ squawks Jamun’s aya at Urmila, ‘that they are here to fetch and carry, and not to argue. And that
of course
the cactus
is
furniture, since it has as much sparrow shit on it as our dinner table and the chest of drawers.’

Two removal men finally begin to shove and tug at the iron tub. A third is hindered from a handhold by the thorns of the plant. He disappears to smoke and cough. Progress is fraught. With every gasp and snort, the cactus teeters like a child
learning to rollerskate. At the doorway, they discover that its arms and some two feet from the head will have to be sliced off. One coolie saunters away to forage for a weapon. The second tries to light his bidi, but is instantly prohibited by Shyamanand’s baying that he can’t puff under the noses of his superiors.

‘Look, Baba, can we call this off? I didn’t realize that this damned thing was so bloody heavy, unwieldy . . . However will these buggers cart it down the stairs? Especially those bends? . . . And now he’s going to hack away at it, and lop off large chunks – what’s the point? And after these guys’ve chopped it up, whatever remains will be further thwacked about while they’re staggering down the stairs with it . . .’

Shyamanand’s face pronounces that he takes a dim view indeed of Jamun’s backing down after suggesting what might very likely turn out to be an A1 domestic adventure, and particularly one which is beginning to give him a chance to bully some lumpen. The first coolie returns with a rusty toy saw and, while Shyamanand yawps his astonished delight (‘But that saw! My god, it’s from the carpentry set that I presented Burfi on his tenth birthday! Amazing how one unearths the oddest things while moving house. Oye you! Wherever did you get hold of that saw?’), starts on an arm of the cactus. Jamun gazes at the milk, dribbling like blood from the wound of the plant, and plods on, ‘We
could
live without this giant in our new house, you know, and could plant something else instead, a palm or bougainvillaea or . . .’ His knowledge of flora is at this point exhausted.

He recalls that he had, well, sort of chickened out just then, and had shambled off to pester his mother to make some tea. He had felt that standing about to witness the amputation of the cactus would be intolerable; so would the passage of the tub down the stairs. When it jammed at one of those bends, and when one of the plant’s vestigial arms grazed its spikes against someone’s skin, Shyamanand’s bile would spurt forth, and Jamun wished to be absent when the coolies reciprocated his father’s churlishness. Perhaps, most oppressive of all, their
resolution and endurance would crock up midway, and his whimsical, sentimental suggestion would be abandoned.