The Last Burden (8 page)

‘At some juncture Belu hobbled and tottered away to drink poison, to requite himself. After these years I don’t accurately remember how he got the poison, or what it was. Luckily, he panicked almost instantly after. He lurched towards the courtyard, spluttering my name. Amidst the weals and drying gore on his face trailed pellets of cold sweat. We couldn’t puzzle out his slur. His lips spumed, and his exhalations ferried a dreadful stench. He had to be hospitalized. My father laid out sizeable amounts of cash to bribe our neighbourhood police, the Station House Officer especially, not to register a case of attempted suicide.

‘Belu was half-paralysed. Nonstop aching since then, and creeping involuntary movement, for more than fifty years now. He settled in his bed, his room, hushed. Would infrequently come out at dusk, or after, like a wraith, perhaps to stare at the rain. He conveys the essentials through practically unreadable notes. His survival intensely discomposed us all. When we weren’t writhing with guilt, we were half-yearning for his death. He’s the Chhana of our family, the grand embarrassment. I scarcely ever ventured into his room. Throughout my girlhood, behind the grass-green doors of his room sneaked the ghouls of my twilight, the bogeys that bullied me in sleep. When I suffered my first period, the maiden blood, even in my bewilderment, my terror, I was convinced that the gore had dribbled out from behind Belu’s doors and into my guts.

‘On the single occasion that your father visited my family, Belu was in the courtyard. Owl-light, late evening. I couldn’t
introduce
him
! He lingered in the gloom, like an incubus biding its time. That night he sent me through the cook a note:
Do not marry that evening-man,
and at the foot of the fragment, as a tailpiece:
Remember the picture –
is it picture, or portrait? –
of Dorian Gray.
The words “Dorian Gray” were in English, I think. I wasn’t even sure if those were exactly his messages – Belu’s script had become so unreadable. In his normalcy he’d once in a while echoed from that book –
How horribly real ugliness made things
– something like that. He’d all along recoiled from and discredited goodlooking persons. After two or three months of my marriage, I wrote to him sketching it – a ululation from a dungeon to the one least likely to snigger on hearing it. He didn’t reply for months. Then suddenly another note:
You used to bleat, to flit from my family, I’d even wed a demon. In your husband you have a better dispensation
.’

Jamun has time out of number been the audience for the parable of Belu. To him Urmila has sometimes appended, in a coda, ‘But you oughtn’t to judge all marriages by the corrosion of ours. I
know
– that you don’t wish to marry because you dread that you’ll tail off like us.’

‘And if I don’t marry,’ banters Jamun, ‘I’ll end like your Belu? Really, Ma – you flatter yourself. You and Baba haven’t contaminated me that much! And you reap what you merit – why did you marry in the first place?’

‘Don’t counsel like a grandmother. Now and then I imagine that you’re faintly scornful of us because we married even when we were so inconsonant. But not to have married would’ve been unthinkable – we were everywhere together – I would’ve gained disrepute, a thirty-plus woman, perhaps thumbed and dumped – you remember the buzz about Kuki’s mother, and she was only a divorcee. I too was incubated in that middle-classness – no oddball outsider, me!

‘Jamun, inly you’re so puffed-up! Being unmarried, you suppose, makes you objective, the deadpan eyewitness, but bachelordom’ll bleach you.’

With his mother Jamun is softened, but does not expose his
chastening. To Burfi, however, on a different occasion, he comments, ‘Ma is no rebel. She herself sweats the same prejudices that she grieves squelched her in her youth. No one learns. You’ll never forget her outcry at your marriage, as though you were hitching up with Whitney Houston or something.’

‘And she wasn’t,’ rejoins Burfi, ‘turning any younger. She was thirtyish then, which for her generation connoted forty. She must’ve funked. But her perspective’s so queer – I pattered to her once that remaining single was simpler nowadays, and she replied, of course, but that’s also because we now stay in houses that are set apart, and not snarled into one another.’

At the glass doors of the Intensive Care Unit, Chhana sternly impedes Shyamanand from shedding his sandals. ‘You look old and adequately eminent, so the underlings won’t block you. If they do, try to look even more eminent.’ Within, behind inky glass and nondescript tapestry, in a creaky, seared voice, subterraneanly familiar, like an intimate ditty on the brink of one’s hearing, Urmila is catechizing the meaty nurse with certain exacting questions. ‘Why haven’t I seen you before? Who’s changed these curtains? When did this hurt in my left arm start? Why don’t you respond instead of just skimming about like a mosquito? What’s the date today?’ Blessedness and grief eddy through Jamun at the slurred, unnatural tones of her remembered voice.

Urmila’s eyes are now leaden, with unfocussed dots of amber. The striated desert face, toasted gashed lips that won’t cap her teeth, and the extremity of a whitish tongue that whisks over the ruts of her lips like a gecko’s. Shyamanand evens the silvered hair away from her forehead. ‘How long you all took to come and see me,’ she mumbles. Jamun nears the top of her bed. She pirouettes her head at the movement. ‘Jamun?’ Her eyes centre above his left shoulder, but for an instant her features splinter into a childlike smile. ‘Jamun.’ An ashen hand on the coverlet throbs heavenward. Jamun touches it. Her fingers hug his like chilled talons. Chhana detonates into sobs. A sliver of Jamun’s mind ruminates whether it’s right that a
husband’s niece rather than a son should, at such a moment, bawl so.

‘You’re going to bounce back. You’re going to snap out of this.’ Shyamanand is gabbling, clenching Urmila’s shoulder like a predator. He raises up her frozen hand and inspects her decoloured fingers. ‘Then when we reach home, we’ll blink at the TV, and if Jamun can spare us so many hours, we’ll play Cutthroat Bridge before dinner. You’ll sham an unwillingness to join, and all through’ll never concede that you enjoy it. You’ll bellyache for the thousandth time that you vehemently resent chess and bridge because Belu and your father both were such zealots about them that they skimped the remainder of living. And if a tipsy Jamun entreats us to swill a peg or two of Burfi’s fancy New York stuff, we won’t decline, even though you’ll continue to tch-tch in reproof. When I gain a rubber, you’ll grouse of giddiness and twinges in your chest, and I’ll gibe, “Oho, the green-eyed monster, so this is your gimmick to jam the game!” You’ll be miffed, and we’ll bicker. But hereafter, when you grumble about your ill health, we shall all consider you soberly, and Burfi won’t twit, “Oh, leave off hamming like a hypochondriac,” or, “like an untended grandmother in some factious joint family!” And we’ll all bear ourselves so caringly that you won’t need to slide back into hospital merely to point out to your family that it’s neglected your danger signals.’

Endearing prattle, and exceedingly rare, as Shyamanand scuffs around the bed, impeding the nurse, badgering her about the readings on the electronic cardiograph, scrutinizing his wife’s limbs, spiking diverse localities of flesh with his index finger to verify for hollows, carping about the airconditioning, the water carafe, the pillows. Urmila’s smile is a snarl wedging apart her jaws; at the same time, the halves of her face appear to be skewed, as though it had cracked down the middle. She doesn’t register three-quarters of what Shyamanand babbles. She surrenders Jamun’s hand. Her tongue darts over her lips without stopping. Jamun introspects, as he has done before, gazing at his parents, one with her bubble life, the other
mentally worn, futile, too late her protector, which of them will be the first to slip away, and which of them he will ache less to see off first.

Across the years, he has time after time imagined himself alone in a modest, maroon cinema hall. Time has made the sequence more distinct by accretion. He is seated in the geometric centre of the auditorium, clearly visible in the reflected, ice-blue lambency of the screen. Usher-like shadows seem to huddle at the doors. The screen displays a gargantuan close-up of a man’s face – small, mellow eyes, a ten-foot-high nose, lips like violet pythons. Jamun recognizes him to be a celebrated cinema villain of a previous age. He speaks to Jamun in donnish Hindi, in the gentle, prudish tones of a specious believer in persuasion through methods other than thuggery. ‘Jamun, sweetie, you understand that your dear mother and father are being indecently tortured even now in this chamber. In a moment the camera will rove to bare to you what is being done to them. Such feral acts sicken me. We have slashed off the sound so that their shrieking and puling do not divert you from me. That would vex me with them. We could halt if you divulge to me which of your parents you hate more. We would then fix just that one. All mortals hate one parent less than the other. Raise your right hand for your mother, left for your father. If you cannot decide because you are squeamish, then we shall have to kill both. If you crave more time, I could grant you some, though you should be able to resolve this promptly.’ The fiend’s mien modulates from august malignancy to finger-wagging, chiding naughtiness. ‘I realize what you are imagining, you darling corrupt boy, that what if you put up
any
one hand only to settle your macabre bewilderment, and we fathom your gesture, and realize that you have despatched a parent to his – or her – or is it his? – death without even fretting yourself with brainwork, and, to chastise you, choke the remaining parent too? Would that be better? Or shall we leave the survivor be? How will you confront her – or him – and yourself? Quick, which hand now?’ The face falls back
gradually. Jamun spots a whitish jacket lapel and cravat, and about the ears an indeterminate sky-blue backdrop. ‘To help you to select, we will now show you your parents.’ The face swerves to off-screen. The voice edges to command. ‘On sound.’

The hallucination routinely peters out at this point, presumably because Jamun wishes to know no further. He can never recapture precisely when he visualized it in its bud, and how. Very likely in pubescence, that dishevelled season of awakening, perhaps in one of those numberless, exquisitely perturbing dreams. He is not unduly discomposed by this one, for he has visioned a good many hideous things. He isn’t even certain whether the minutiae that he has afterwards crammed in are the upshot of cognitive and slothful musing, or are the disclosures of assorted nightmares. In his earliest recollections, for example, the seats in the cinema hall were toneless and sombre; some time later, he notices that they have shifted into maroon. However, what the hallucinations, or the nightmares, do tousledly urge on his soul is that the duty of waiting for the extinction of one’s source is unconditional, and that such passing sires a desolation that would never fade, were it not overlaid, mercifully soon enough, by Time’s desert sands and the accretive lumber of living.

The fat nurse is cranking up to shoo them out, ‘Enough now. Patient must rest.’ But Dr Haldia twiddles in then, in an opulent-yellow safari suit, suave, lubricious, like a freshly opened can of cheese. ‘Hello, hello, and how’re we this morning?’ The fat nurse tries to look demure and dextrous at the same time and nearly drops a bedpan. ‘We’re chatting unsparingly today, aren’t we?’ Dr Haldia tilts against the head of the bed, crosses his legs and simpers dotingly at Urmila, like the besotted and knavish lord of a fortress and Urmila his tearful hostage, recaptured after a shot at deliverance. Dr Haldia has been to Europe and the United States umpteen times. After virtually each visit he has had to reprint his visiting card, and jack up his consultation fees. He returns radiant from his jaunts,
clutching four or five letters of the alphabet, seemingly selected out of a hat, and the abridged name, in brackets, of (presumably) a European or American centre of learning. The letters and the abbreviations are tacked on to the others on his card, like extra bogeys for a slow train. Thus FIVN (Zur.), DBTP (Lond.), MAKG (Berne), OCSE (Bos.), etcetera. His six telephone numbers have had to be hustled to the reverse of the card. ‘We’re fairly set upon recovering and buzzing off from Dr Haldia’s today itself, aren’t we?’ (His idiom, expectedly, exasperates Burfi. ‘Where the fuck did that shaved arsehole pick up his English? Unless one of those degrees is for a course in Bedside Manners – Take Their Money, Not Their Shit. Isn’t he an FRCTTMNTS (Edin.)?’)

‘An admirable recovery, Mr –’ to Shyamanand. ‘She’ avuncular chucking under Urmila’s chin – ‘grappled with her disorder like a redblooded boy.’ They meander out like a politician and his groupies. Outside Intensive Care, Dr Haldia discourses to a dozen strangers – relatives and sympathizers of those held in his half-nelson, their faces naïve with anxiety – while Shyamanand, Chhana and Jamun wait. At last Chhana asks when they can shift Urmila home. The good doctor chortles, pronounces nothing, motions to them with his stethoscope to go and sit in his office, and joins them there, refulgent, after thirty-eight minutes.

Dr Haldia has no time to be genial with those who have waited long for him. ‘Hahn, your Mrs’s case . . . infarction . . . angina . . . coronary thrombosis . . . intense hypertension . . . clot . . . embolism . . . dyspnoea . . . cardiovascular murmur . . . phlebitic arteriosclerosis . . . arteritis . . . high blood pressure, dogtired heart, pacemaker . . . surrogate, standby, booster . . .’

‘Is my mother strong enough for the operation? You remember, you cleared her for the piles operation, and she caved in because of the strain. How much’ll this one cost?’

‘I see no alternative,’ declares Dr Haldia glacially. The glabrous cheese surface gullies. ‘There was no choice to the piles operation either.’

Shyamanand is somewhat twitchy on the way home. ‘Twenty-five thousand for the pacemaker. Does she need it? Can she bear it? We should consult a second specialist.’ Through the car dawdle the drugged, moist breezes of September. ‘I don’t have twenty-five thousand in ready money. I’ll be forced to break a bank deposit, borrow – and pay interest to the bank for using – my
own
savings.’ He shrugs dispiritedly.