The Last Burden (9 page)

‘Before we do that, let’s just check – with Burfi – how much we can pool. Doubtless we can –’

‘Burfi! Huh! My child, isn’t he.’ After a while Shyamanand adds, ‘You ask him. I won’t. Also confirm with someone else this pacemaker business.’

‘I’ll sound him this evening. If you recall, you wanted to amble in the Municipal Park today. We could drop you there, and on the hospital circuit I’ll discuss the contributions with Burfi.’

Dusk by the time they leave Shyamanand, Chhana, Pista’s aya, Pista and Doom at the gates of the Municipal Park. Shyamanand is downhearted. ‘Too late to enjoy a stroll here. Please return in good time. Too often’ve you discarded me in different gardens for what has seemed aeons.’ The women and the children pad into the park. Shyamanand plods towards a towering pipal beyond the gates.

‘Ironic,’ decrees Burfi, as he forages in a picnic basket at his feet. ‘Baba’s first love, his money, will now be gobbled up by this hocus-pocus to extricate his first hate, his wife.’ With a ‘tch’ of incontinence he evicts from the basket and dumps on the car seat a coppery flask of mutton broth, a turquoise flask of milk, and a canteen of a milk-and-banana mash. With an ‘ah’ of accomplishment he educes whisky, water, glasses. He pours himself a peg. Jamun waits until he’s certain, then asks, ‘Won’t you pour for me? Or put back Ma’s dinner in the basket?’ and yanks the basket over, to himself.

‘Cheers. Here’s to things mending,’ proffers Burfi. After a while he runs on, ‘Baba’s already paid out a good many thousands in the piles fuckup. He’ll disgorge more yet – his is an old
chastisement. You and I remember Ma boiling over time and time again, gnashing her teeth – Pista does it too, identically – she’d then curse, “His money’ll damn him,” and, “As though he’s going to carry his money over with him when he croaks.” None of us has any accurate idea of how much cash Baba’s squirrelled away in his bank deposits. The sum’ll be lightweight, nothing to holler about – one lakh or so – the lifetime hoard of a commonplace creature, who never had the daring or the adroitness to speculate. Oof, such a dismal lower-middleclass exercise, a babyish sport – to mothball the interest on a Fixed Deposit – never to wade into it – with that interest after months to archly open a Recurring Deposit, and with the interest of the Recurring Deposit to start some Term Deposit, or National Savings – like playing Trader or Monopoly.’

‘Rubbish. Let Baba and his money be,’ retorts Jamun, shifting his eyes off the road for a swig from his glass. ‘Even if we were on the breadline, Burfi, you’d never lay out a pie to pluck any one of us back from death, except possibly Joyce, and that only after she overrides and shushes your protests.’ Burfi grins like a bashful cherub and bawdily ups his thumb at Jamun. Jamun continues, ‘Phew, you and money are like a junkie and his fix. Do you remember, on my last visit, one usual evening, you and I imbibing upstairs – as Chhana would say – steaming bloated weather, skin like a fine cactus, but you were beaming – what’s a sandboy? – in the Bermudas that you’d bought in Kuala Lumpur. You’d proposed that the three of us – minus the brats – should dine out and then your mug showed that you’d begun to worry that if we did eat out, who’d foot the bill? From another room we could overhear Joyce fulminating against Pista.’

Well, Burfi half-remembers, but is certain that, since the recollection is Jamun’s, it won’t be to his credit.

Pista’s aya has complained to Joyce that in the afternoons Pista never alights at the apposite stop from his school bus, but gets down instead with friends at
their
stops. Pista’s aya then wastes a wearying half-hour on the telephone trying to ferret him out. Pista has already had his dome chewed off for this
failing, but since it’s chiselled out of adamant, this time Joyce is underlining the terrors of being kidnapped. ‘Hellish men will twinkle at you, offer you lollipops and toffee, and carry you off from your bus. Nobody’ll protest because you’re
always
getting off the bus at the wrong stops.’

‘The lunch that those men’ll give me will any day be better than what Aya gives.’

‘Ha! For lunch they’ll fatten you with beatings, for tea and dinner also.’

Pista is silenced, then, more considered, balancing the unknown horrors of days of thrashing against the ascertained horrors of his aya’s lunches, ‘What kind of beatings?’

‘First one villain – looking much like your Hindi teacher, what’s his name? – will hack apart your mouth and bully you into draining a hundred large glasses of milk. Next, twenty-five injections, one upon another, half of them in your gums –’ From the squeaks and squawks that succeed, Burfi and Jamun gather that Pista has leapfrogged on to his mother and is pummelling her. Then Joyce runs on, primly, like a godfearing Catholic schoolmarm – she uses the identical tone with Burfi too, frequently – ‘Pista, you must promise me that you’ll never ever straggle anywhere else from school without having earlier informed one of us in the morning.’

At that moment, suddenly, Burfi bobs up and tramps in from the verandah to instruct his wife and child on the cardinal point that she has omitted. ‘But consider the money, Joyce! Listen, Pista, you piglet, if you’re abducted, do you know how much
cash
we’d have to fork out to retrieve a bugger like you? You’re not to greet any stranger or bum around anywhere with anyone, ever! My God – they could exact lakhs! In a burst all, all our savings gone – plus, we’ll be driven to borrow! We’ll be paupers, rag-pickers – and we’ll have
you
back – some solace! – gadding about with new strangers, who’ll be coolly hatching a second abduction just so that we can be flattened out for ever and ever.’

At which Pista, ‘Will Mama also be flattened out, or only you?’

Jamun sniggers callously at the memory. ‘Neither Baba nor Ma,
fortunately, believes in primogeniture; otherwise, if they will the house to you, the instant you possess it, you’ll bundle me out and sell it, eh, Burfi?’

‘My attitude to money isn’t the issue, you bugger – the question is, what’s Baba doing with his cash? Both of us, at different times, have hissed at him, with varying intensities of rage, that we won’t miss his money. Maybe we won’t, really – even though a windfall of money is one of this world’s appealing things – because somehow we’ve made it, even you, you fuckpot – even though you angled for a really weird deal with Baba, ha-ha. You remember? You can’t forget! He was so non-plussed when you proposed. “You make over your money to me, and I’ll remain with and foster you and Ma for the remainder of your lives, but I’ll need to be financially independent” – some compact for a joker in his twenties! Of course he refused – “Don’t be so slothful!” – and you gravely pronounced, while everyone else was holding his sides, “Even when I urgently need money, I shall not thumb yours. When you feverishly need me, I won’t be within reach,” a forecast that didn’t awe Baba much!

‘Look – we’ve felt the pinch – Ma and Baba have, and because of them, I as a college yob – but the terrible years are done, and the future now is no more the withered winter for which Baba had to salt away – just pull up somewhere for cigarettes, Jamun . . . thanks . . . Gold Flake, twenties, are now so bloody expensive . . .’

Jamun remains quiet as his brother rambles on. Like his mother, he is wary of money, for he too has witnessed its bestial clutch on others.

Nearly two decades before, Urmila had stayed alone in Bhubaneshwar for about a year. She was transferred there. Missing her children, she remitted them the fare for the train tickets so that they could spend part of their school and college vacations with her. Jamun recalls that in her absence their government flat became drearier, more dishevelled and soulless, like a slummy hostel. They must have pined for her too.
But Burfi didn’t go because he snapped up his ticket money in staying alive with his prodigal chums. Shyamanand wheedled a few days’ leave to convey Jamun to his mother.

From that holiday, the scene that abides with Jamun for years is Shyamanand’s leave-taking of Bhubaneshwar.

A Saturday forenoon. The adolescent and his parents stand in the sliver of lawn outside the tidy, diminutive house that Urmila has had to rent for a considerable sum. Shyamanand and Jamun are about to start out to scout for a rickshaw when the unshaven, cross-eyed postman flings in a letter at the gate. It is to Urmila from Burfi.

The familiar, ingenuous long hand on the envelope greatly disquiets Jamun. That his brother communicates with his mother independently of their ritual, joint, monthly letter (‘Dearest Ma, How are you? I am fine. Yesterday, at badminton, I thrashed Kuki 15–10, 15–7, even though he cheated . . .’) in itself is astounding; it seems inconceivable that between two habitants of his intimate world might exist a link of which he is unaware. The concomitants of Burfi’s handwriting – his sallow, breadstick fingers, Urmila’s scarlet Parker pen that he’s snaffled, his desk that he won’t humour his brother to touch – are lacking; instead, there is the wispy grass and the gulmohar tree.

But that is not all. Jamun intuits that Urmila is loath to let Shyamanand read Burfi’s letter. She doesn’t open it there and then; indeed, she doesn’t even appear especially pleased to have received it. Shyamanand has unthinkingly stretched his hand out for the letter, but Urmila affects not to notice. It is at this point that his parents, the most familiar shapes of Jamun’s world, begin to look unaccountably unfamiliar to the boy.

He isn’t accustomed to seeing his parents in any surroundings other than those of their shabby flat. Unmindful of the sun, he watches them in the shade of the gulmohar tree, down which pelt two squirrels, and behind which is visible their neighbour’s kitchen window, from which eructs the trendiest Oriya film pop. All at once, everything seems unprecedented – the lawn, the house, the mould around the tap in the boundary wall, the
faces of the neighbours, the lingo on the roads – everything. They even cause the heavens and the sparrows to appear newfangled. The diverse, extraordinary components of the entire setting are telescoped in his parents looking like strangers. He senses, fuzzily but forcefully, that he doesn’t know them
at all
– not their essentials – their past, whom they yearned for at fourteen, and what they dreamed of at thirty-one – the kernel of their humanness; creation itself then seems without context. Jamun feels as though he has been cosily swimming underwater, and on gushing up for air has faced an altogether new world, and an outlandish light.

‘So,’ says Shyamanand pawkily, returning the letter, ‘after dissipating the ticket money that you posted, Burfi now implores you to “be a sweetie, a sugar” and send him “at least two hundred”, since the issue is of “life and death, and bloody Baba’d never understand”. Certainly, Baba doesn’t understand, not when life is jiving till dawn in some discotheque, and death is deviant sex with godforsaken hippies. As the world’s champion mother, you’re bullied by your conscience, no doubt, to exhort Burfi to carry on; especially when, as an upshot, he detests his father even more for not being like his poppet mother. Do despatch him the cash. What’s two hundred rupees in these days of inflation? Borrow from peons and typists, thresh about under their oblique derision, but feel saintly, bolster yourself with: I distress myself so that my deserving son can hold his head high in a discotheque. Five years later, will Jamun be as profligate as your elder son?’

Urmila is weeping by then. Her children have seen her sob night and day, to them, her lamentation has become piffling – now and then bothersome, vexatious.

Since that forenoon in Bhubaneshwar, Jamun has time and time again speculated on Burfi’s improvidence and Urmila’s outlook on money, for the attitudes of both have irked him. When he wasn’t yet ten, he would listen with rapt horror to Burfi, then thirteen, composedly cobble together – to bare acquaintances, to anyone who couldn’t verify – the most
preposterous yarns about their wealth at home, or homes, for he endowed them with several: a kind of ranch outside New Delhi, with its separate swimming pool for the servants; a sort of chalet in Ooty, to which they retreated in the summer; a six-bedroom penthouse suite in Cuffe Parade; etcetera. His father, who smoked a pipe, planned to buy a building or two in Manhattan, but his mother wouldn’t allow him, because, she asserted, how would the nation press on if we showered our money upon foreigners? Of course, Burfi next had to compose sinuous excuses to stymie his disbelieving auditors from visiting him at home, or homes. Jamun would hear his brother fabricate with the misgivings that one senses when a loved one, unready, performs on stage.

When he was nineteen, Burfi’s buddies were the anglicised, modish children of rich men. The affluence of his friends made him sneakingly ashamed of his own family. On weekday afternoons, since his parents would be at office, he and his girlfriend, or a hippie-adventurer, would frequently fetch up at the flat for an hour or so of coupling. They would habitually encounter Jamun, aged fifteen, dawdling in the house in shredded vest and discoloured undies. The sight of him always discomposed, dampened and peeved Burfi. He would bellyache in the evenings, “Why can’t he dress less like a servant? He’s embarrassing.’

‘Why should I stew all afternoon in pants and shirt just to appease Burfi and his soulmates for the one second that they glimpse me?’ Jamun, disputatious, would demur. ‘They can shut their eyes and sniff their way to his room.’

At fifteen, and at twenty-eight, Jamun recognized the disparity in what money denotes to him, and to Burfi – rather, at fifteen, he was witheringly certain; at twenty-eight, he fancied that a difference in their attitudes might exist, but also that it might not matter. He himself-gauges money to be wily. If he has the money, he’ll buy chewing gum, or condoms, or a refrigerator. If he doesn’t, he will muzzle himself to do without; the self-discipline becomes in itself quite piquant. But for Burfi,
deprivation is failure, a cudgel to his self-esteem.

‘Why don’t we suggest to Baba that if he truly can’t manage the pacemaker business by himself, we’ll both pitch in?’

‘Obviously,’ snorts Burfi, as they drive into the hospital ‘but you pitch in first.’ When they park, he reminds Jamun, ‘Check with Kuki about the pacemaker.’