The Last Burden
Authors: Upamanyu Chatterjee
The Last Burden
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE LAST BURDEN
Upamanyu Chatterjee was born in 1959. He joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1983. His published works include short stories and the novels
English, August: An Indian Story
(1988),
The Mammaries of the Welfare State
(2000), which won the Sahitya Akademi Award for writing in English, and
Weight Loss
(2006).
Upamanyu Chatterjee is married and has two daughters.
for Anne – while the going is good
AUGUST
For four slow and secret days, Jamun reads Robert Payne’s life of Mahatma Gandhi, while outside August slips into a closed and equally febrile September. The on-off rains are warm, troubled, and touch off a dreary ache in the small of the back and a flame beneath the skin. When he gets the telegram calling him home because of his mother’s heart attack, it has been raining immoderately and the electricity has gone off. ‘The sky’s an old old kidney,’ Hegiste has said, leaning as far back from his ledger as equilibrium permits, arms snarled yogalike over his head, neck angled, eyes half-closed, dreamily sniffing his own armpit.
Jamun books a call, waits for two hours, hears Hegiste abuse the operator, and then walks to the Vayudoot office. In the rain he feels hot and somehow full of blood. From a crushed dog on the road, blood plays like an effluent. Its eyes are blue-white and pupilless, transcendent, frightening. He waits fifty minutes before the besieged bastard can place him on the flight four mornings away. ‘. . . Such a demand . . . Festival . . . Rush . . .’
In the four days Jamun emerges at twilight for cigarettes and potatoes, milk etcetera. Otherwise in the white rooms of his flat he reads the Gandhi life and hears the rain. In the afternoons the waters slip away under the cauterizing sun. Then the white rooms glut with the exhalations of mud – of fish and sea, the beach and the wet. In the early mornings, from his verandah he observes the cream crabs in the ooze on which the block of flats has been erected. Later in the month, the river will balloon and Hegiste on the ground floor will share his flat with it. At night he hears the polite tap-tap beyond the windows, in the swelter, in the rain. Not frogs; too well-mannered – perhaps the crabs clucking to one another before coition and proliferation, or
perhaps a tiny dinosaur with a second-rate larynx wooing admittance through the window so that it might read a book. In the primal slobland and prodigious heat, all is potential.
Burfi’s letter has preceded the telegram.
Ma might have rectal cancer. It sounds dreadful and is very likely much worse. Haldia said this evening that a lump in the rectum at her age is 75 per cent cancer. He wants to operate. His eyes shone at the money he’d pick up. Baba predictably has already suggested that we should divide the bill by five. He telephoned Chhana, who of course is rushing here with opinions.
When Jamun had last seen his valetudinarian mother, he had said, ‘I returned because I was afraid that I would not see you again,’ but his father had not been touched. Yet his father himself has often murmured, with a kind of distaste, while his mother naps on the sofa in front of the TV, ‘She will not live long.’ She herself has contended the same for the last twenty-two years. She has also said, fitfully, ‘I want to go and stay with you, Jamun.’ But he has circumvented. Rectal cancer. If she endures, she will trail around with a polythene bag affixed – something like that. Because Haldia will take away her sphincter and perhaps hawk it to a snooty restaurant, where it might well be used for an hors d’oeuvre, a phrase which its customers will not fathom unless pronounced as whores dee overs, like Punjabi streetwalkers at cricket. Plus, Jamun’s mother also has had to combat her hypertension, her piles, corns, arthritis, heart, marriage, her mind.
Jamun hasn’t written home for a while out of listlessness. They haven’t written either. His father’s last letter, now quite old, has run on an on about his
own
listlessness.
Here in this boomtown waste Jamun has bought the same brands of refrigerator and geyser as at home, and has also struggled to debar the blues from his white rooms. At home, depression wafts out from the whitewash downstairs, but Burfi’s rooms on the first floor, in contrast, like Hegiste’s flat, have always seemed to exhale light.
The third evening, on the roof of the building, draughty, forehead cooling. Pretty sick of Robert Payne, watching the river, orange and thick, recalling his mother in the kitchen, pottering. ‘Jamun, the anger of parents is never anger.’ All at once a white bird the colour of cold milk, gliding across the wet verdure of trees between river and gynae hospital. The wings wave in silent, tireless eurhythmy like ballerinas bidding farewell.
Just then, down the ramp of the hospital comes a young woman – hand gripping railing, pendulating clumsily on splayed legs, enfeebled, in pain, groping – perhaps walking was prescribed. She wears a pink salwaar kameez and a black chunni – an ineffable Muslim mien – and Hegiste has time and time again said that untaxed Gulf money has raised the hospital. Without warning, Jamun pines to procreate too, to feel an illimitable and unfading, secret agony, then nothing, then to crawl gracelessly out and see a new world. He sees the bird and the woman and knows that in biding his time for four days, he has sinned profoundly.
Dinner with Hegiste the first evening. ‘Spoke to Burfi at last, it’s only the heart attack, thank God – I mean, not rectal cancer. She’s still in Intensive Care. My father said I need not come if I find it difficult to get away.’
Hegiste and Jamun step out for cigarettes at six. Hegiste’s son, three and a half, endomorphic and captious, wants to go too. He puts Jamun in mind of one of his own nephews, Doom, aged four, though between the two there is no specific likeness. On his last visit, on the last day, on his way out, he had gaped at Doom kicking up a big big fuss. ‘I want to go with Jamun, I want.’ No Uncle, nothing, just Jamun. And with each ‘want’ Doom’s head bobs. Everyone is amazed, for Jamun is not irresistible to children. Jamun is unduly touched and mantles with delight. This
hankering
for his company – who has evinced it? Kasturi? His mother?
Or even his father? Consummately smashed, head undulating, AWOL three nights running in one of those cold sweat
years – late teenage, hadn’t it been? When he came in, and his mother had shifted from anxiety to anger, and no one was listening to her, his father said, sombrely, ‘In your whole life, no one will wait for you as we have waited, as tensely, with as much anguish. No one else will be as happy to see you. To no one else will you matter. Never again will anyone want you like we, or start at the sound of your voice, or your step, in all your years.’
Hegiste has moved up from Gold Flake Kingsize to Classic. ‘If you’d made an effort at the booking, whipped up your anger, or wept and wailed a little, you could’ve caught this evening’s flight.’
‘Two women ahead of me in the queue conceived dead fathers. One was to zip straight to the ghat from the airport. In comparison, my mother was merely dying.’
A cola for the kid, who bubbles into the straw. ‘But it’s good that the whole family is together. Except you, of course. Like the joint family of an earlier generation. Especially in a crisis.’ Hegiste is comradely and outgoing, and avid about others. ‘And your parents are clocking their years out with
all
their immediate family, in a house that they themselves built. Not many can end as fortunately.’ Decent of Hegiste to catalogue the pluses. ‘For them these things cast a long shadow. Partition, refugees, trauma and all that, redeemed in time with a crumb of earth.’
‘Slightly more than a crumb. The house is not large, but it’s restful.’ One’s own fallout shelter, a funkhole from wayfaring. Jamun has wanted to have done with the journey even before setting out. At which his mother has times out of number expostulated, ‘But after we go, your father and I, how will you exist alone! In some sort of love with a married woman. Who will shoulder you? Your brother? Will his wife allow it? He himself?’
Still, on these occasions, she has reprehended falsely, only because it is incumbent upon her, or so she surmises. To tell the truth, no one pays any heed to her mind. To her, Jamun is boring but he is secure. The others are ever so often boorish and
uncaring – but he yet evinces concern, possibly because he hasn’t married thus far. She is very afraid that he will slip away and leave her alone with her husband.
In the afternoons the sun’s white flames at the frosted glass of the windows, and with the windows closed the white rooms have a genial, opalescent glow. Jamun, with beside him a cast-off Robert Payne, mulls over satyagraha in South Africa, and
the
Gandhi battling like mad, as though hooked on mutiny, for emigrant strangers, and all the while perhaps undutiful to his family, because later his eldest son turns Muslim to gnaw him. Evidently, he, Gandhi, has found the wider world more vital, more deserving of his care, than the vicinal.
The evening before, Hegiste of the Gioconda face, hairless and artful, has cooed to his child to put out of its head a second cola.
But the child is mulish, and most articulately, in Hindi, ‘No I want another just just now no you said.’ Arms bobbing about, body out of true, face constricted and the maroon of beetroot, stomping on the pavement. Jamun marvels at the bewitchment of articulation – precisely when did the child master the words ‘another’, ‘just’, ‘now’, and learn to thread them coherently? Thus Burfi’s son Doom too is daily being moulded. With a child’s rotten memory, he might now find me a perfect alien; but (Jamun reminds himself) a four-year-old nephew’s forgetfulness ought not to upset an adult, and in any case, Time will cicatrize all the lesions that it has made.
He recalls the time when Doom first sprang underripe Hindi on his aya. The child has marked that her pitted and usually nonplussed face becomes even more befuddled whenever she hears English; he has therefore registered that the one language that simply will not do for his mother – Hindi – is the sole one for his aya, who is practically his fosterparent. When Burfi witnesses his son bossing his aya around in Hindi, and otherwise wobblingly utter sense (lallate, for instance, buddyfukka – no guesses – at his uncle), he tastes both a parent’s loss and the consummation. The ripening child is both a mission
accomplished and a dream dispossessed. An allegiance towards
all
flesh must always abide within one (so Jamun ponders), but in extremity one’s duty must hurl one first towards one’s blood. To hold true to one’s blood is more noble than to combat General Smuts in a remote country. Hearken unto thy father that begat thee and despise not thy mother when she is old. So Kasturi had cited. That night she had also given a fleck of her self away. ‘In my pregnancy I am safe, I feel defended, only here, at home with my mother.’
After dinner Mrs Hegiste sighs. She takes stock of the untidiness around her, the child under her nose with rice ringing his plate and curd in his left ear and her husband freeing his belt to grant his tummy parole. ‘I so wish I could go home,’ she tells Jamun in her bumbling Hindi, and grins – ‘home means parents, of course. When your parents pass away, you have no home at all – only your children do.’ She then struggles to hinder the child from careening his toy car through his rice. ‘Home is the hanky-panky of memory – honeyed, quilted – a fabulous once-upon-a-time lull.’
In his excitation Jamun reckons that it is his mother’s self-pity that cries out for him. Yet time and time again, he himself, with a child’s raw sentience, has itched to be there. He can’t situate her in hospital but when he at last contemplates her in Intensive Care – gunmetal skull on green pillow, stertorous, terrorized exhalations, brow rutted with veiled agony – he recognizes anew her method of living: a bullheaded and dreary conflict because she discerns no choice, in the main with head down and neck steeled, but botching and ebbing decade after decade, the point of the struggle progressively disputable, never taking stock because her mind could unplug, and after it does, what endures is this gentler submerged strife amongst the shards of her self. But you unhoused me, he tells the fluttering eyelids. Yet I shouldn’t’ve slipped away. They say death crops up for all. They say all things must pass. Yet here you breathe, out in the cold, excluded as ever.
But life will always ambush with its burlesque, won’t it. For
Hegiste’s child indicates and fishes for immediate enlightenment on four donkeys (mules?) fucking in the dead centre of the road. Two overloaded sand trucks have stopped, perhaps to clock them. A liver-coloured Fiat honks petulantly. Jamun is positive that he has never spotted two pairs before, in parallel cadence, and particularly in the evening. This is known as an orgy,’ expounds Hegiste to his son in Marathi. ‘Orgy’ is the one word for which he doesn’t dig up any Marathi equivalent; the brat reruns the word once or twice but looks dissatisfied in between looking bewitched. The donkeys’ wangs are enormous, and faintly incurvated and tapered, like a lance, or a preposterous nose. They take Jamun back to the cover of the Classics Illustrated Comic of
Cyrano de Bergerac.
The donkeys’ cocks are contoured like Cyrano’s nose, only farcically longer, all but a foot. Jamun’s father’d times out of number bought the comics for his two sons, but they’d favoured
Batman
over
Taras Bulba
and
The Apprenticeship of Miles Standish,
and he’d been crestfallen. But the comics abided, because nothing was ever cast away in their house – rickety chairs, sweaters, decrepit spectacle cases, and stapled to each item an evocation – icons from another time, gaining smudges over the decades as they witnessed a family bicker and grow. At diverse flecks in time the sons happen on the comics in unlooked for pockets – Jamun aged nineteen raking everything over for his charmed dice, Burfi at seventeen quarrying in a cupboard for mislaid condoms – and for a point of time (grasping the tatters of
Robur the Conqueror
or
Kit Carson
), they are scratched by a wistfulness; and later still, Burfi seeks to introduce his own young to Hiawatha, but somehow the knaves plump for Spiderman.
The donkeys then frolic, hoist their hind legs at one another, whinny, shut their eyes, pirouette their heads up to the gathering sky, disclose their gums and overgrown yellow teeth, and look humanly hideous. The males angle for to swarm up again. ‘Now baby donkey will pop out, but won’t play with you because he doesn’t like children who mewl for two colas in one evening,’ plumes Hegiste.
Hegiste to Jamun, again in Marathi. Hindi and English are not for the exchange of weighty ideas. They are used in the unthinking life – for office, to snarl at queuebreakers at the movies, against a spouse when the argument is lost, that sort of thing. Okay, are you ready for Drama In Real Life? Good. A widow, two children, not angelic but mortal kids, with snot and conjunctivitis. She has just enough money for respectability, but the imps have to lick their plates clean even when it’s spinach. The youngest needs surgery, say at Tata’s, an extortionate operation, not a footling sprain or something. A hotshot doctor, maybe a tiny Parsee with degrees like the alphabet, a dynamo with no time to shit. He warrants to the widow that the operation will not under any circumstances more damage the son. Either her child will turn as right as rain, or status quo. Cost a lakh or two. Widow irresolute, her liquidity versus the child’s
mañana.
Grave shilly-shallying. In the end she borrows promiscuously, right and left, derangedly. The operation concludes in good time, and the child snuffs it. The Parsee debouches from the OT – or the scene of the crime? – eyes his watch, says, “Oho, I am delayed for Strasbourg,” and takes wing with Carl Sagan for a metagalactic symposium on Bioplast in the Afterlife. The widow beholds the meagre Parsee hindquarters twinkle into a Volvo. Well? What now for her?’