Authors: Upamanyu Chatterjee
‘She’s lived with us for over twenty year. She’s part of the family. She doesn’t wish to leave the house now. She wants to die at home, she proclaims, literally! She throws away or hides her medicines. Doctor, we can’t suffer this to continue!’
The custodian chortles. ‘In the Registration Card, in the column, Whom To Notify In the Event Of Death, shall we, Mr’ – to Shyamanand’s nostrils, from the doctor’s mouth, flutters the sweetness of paan masala – ‘write, Not Applicable? That’ll officially docket the patient as Waif, and’ll acquit you of all obligation. Then we’d just have to dream up how we stumbled on her. But if your names are entered as Family, then we’ll have to, for starters, explain to Welfare how a patient with family’s been registered in a hospital meant basically for the shelterless. Every four months, till my transfer, suspension, retirement, or death, whichever’s the last, they’ll despatch letters troubling me to explain.’ The doctor’s lips flag from a boundless grin to a fatuous simper.
‘Can’t we be written down as Ex-Employer, and Well-Wisher?’
Aya scents, the same night, the ruse for her removal the next morning. No one alludes to it, but she’s always kept an ear to the ground. She slap-bang snatches her plate of food from Urmila and chucks it back at her chest. She’d aimed for her brow. Urmila snorts in shock and pain and totters against the wall.
Aya in her hysteria is a deal noisier, but less frightful, than Urmila in hers. As soon as Aya begins to ululate, Jamun frisks about the house shutting all the doors and windows. She yowls, whines, grunts, groans, brutally writhes in her cot for an hour or so, till exhaustion hushes her. Amidst the high, bestial squeals and base rumbles, she intermittently murmurs
half-penetrable phrases about landslide and her pulped sons, herself as Urmila’s companion, Jamun as a child, one of her chums Kishori. Spume at the mouth, pupilless ivory lunettes for eyes, above the snarl of a skull. ‘Have sinned . . . sinned . . . seized my sons . . ’; such expressions are abruptly punctuated by weak squawks of fright as she delves her head away from some bodiless ghoul that pitches into her.
Watching her, Jamun battens down his jaws to repress his tears. To divert himself from his impulse to cry, he thinks that he should mouth something, anything; maybe he can ask, conversationally, d’you fancy she’s shamming? No sooner has he opened his mouth and inhaled than the tears begin to dribble out, gropingly, like a reptile oozing out if its lair.
‘Thank God the houses here aren’t ravelled into one another,’ mutters Urmila bemusedly, through her abated tears.
The ambulance pulls in two hours late the next morning. ‘New colony, yours. I lost my way,’ fibs the ruffianly driver. He’s been instructed to sedate the patient, so that she doesn’t kick up a shindy, and, when she surfaces out of insentience, initially doesn’t realize where she is. ‘But is that wise?’ demurs Jamun, again only to squash an urge to cry. No one troubles to answer.
The subterfuge is needless. The driver, quite solicitously, lifts Aya and easefully lays her down in the ambulance. ‘Don’t fret, Mother, you’ll be okay.’ She, like a snapped doll, reacts to nothing.
Jamun is averse to accompanying his parents. He isn’t doughty enough, he senses. Now that their distress is clocking out, his desire for its cessation has swelled insupportably. At the same time, he feels cold inside, as though each artery, each vein, in his torso has been sliced, and the gore has dribbled out and, torpidly, curdled about his entrails, smothering them in glacial jelly. Through the window of the ambulance, he struggles to smile at Aya, but she is looking away. ‘Aya,’ he whispers in someone else’s voice. Her desert eyes swivel. She smiles gnarledly at him. When the ambulance chugs away, he’s
happy to be sobbing. He opens wide the side door, but the sun won’t lick her cot.
Cutty Sark at sundown, for Shyamanand, Burfi and Jamun, while Urmila tries to suppress that she likes the shandy that Burfi’s blended for her. ‘This is what you’ve mastered at work, is it, to make your mother tipsy?’ Expectedly, she’s both extremely gloomy at Aya’s removal and joyful at the homecoming of her elder son.
Burfi
doesn’t
manifest much curiosity about Aya, and he
is
eager to gabble about his new existence with Joyce; for him, marriage’ll gulp down a decade before it irks. He’s also agog with the particulars of Joyce’s recent sojourns in Vancouver and Dubai, and of Vancouver a sight more than Dubai. For him, Aya is the jetsam of an anterior passage. ‘When she improves, she’ll return, I imagine,’ he voices in passing.
On her third shandy, Urmila, almost theatrically ruminative, scanning the condensation on her tumbler, murmurs, ‘When I’m dying and you tackle me as we behaved with Aya, as though she were a mess on the floor, I must remember not to lament. I must wham into my head that we all, generation upon generation, peter out in that manner, with those we’ve reared absent, or impatient, or looking away.’
Shyamanand demurs. ‘Why’re you so upset? If we’d found a hospital earlier, we’d’ve removed Aya there before. We’ll visit her from time to time, and every month we can send her a little spending money with an office peon – some trustworthy type who can’t pocket the cash. Isn’t Aya behind us now? Her recovery rests with God. Don’t be morose. Consider the congenial things – your new house, the rare concurrent presence of your sons – and that’ll become more uncommon as the years glide – their splendent futures, which’ll crown our fosterage. Your mind has never stretched out for the agreeable things.’ But, perhaps because he’s beginning to be tiddly, Shyamanand’s tone is singularly benign, and Urmila doesn’t appear to resent. She doesn’t seem to be listening either. ‘Now’s the moment to quiz Burfi when they intend their first child, and
whether they dream of a boy. And when will Jamun marry? Has he met any appealing woman yet, anywhere? Will we have to scout for him, or will he too, headstrongly, ditto his elder brother, and blunder into a marriage of passion? Who knows – in the hours that he wastes away from the house and supposedly at college, he might already be leching around; in my time he’d’ve been “encountering life”. Which is vital.’ Shyamanand chortles like a man of the world and asks Jamun for a refill.
Any prattle about sex –
any
prattle – has always interested Burfi. He lauds, ‘Excellent, Baba, that you commend sex before marriage. That’s essential.’ Then, with a smirk and a twitch of his eyes at Urmila, ‘And Baba, you? You’ve never disclosed whether you were a virgin when you married.’ A custom common to the brothers, to while away their time by discomfiting their parents with probing their sexual lives and tittering at their equivocal replies.
Shyamanand quaffs down half his glass before he responds, sententiously, ‘No one, no male, is a virgin by the time he marries.’ Though Shyamanand tipples like a novice, in huge inexpert draughts, he conducts himself well.
The sons glance at one another urbanely, simper, but voice nothing of their spice at their father’s gaffe. For that he means exactly what he’s uttered is inconceivable; to the sons it is incredible that their sedate, respectable father is in fact betraying that before his marriage he’d actually tumbled a woman; much more likely, silently smirk the boys, that Shyamanand, craving to be candid, barefaced, to be accordant with his sons by adopting what he fancies is their idiom, has assumed that a male virgin denotes, not one who has never copulated, but one who’s never ejaculated, that is, simply a prepubescent stripling. Thus Shyamanand is only indicating, surmise his sons smugly, that before he married he’d known what his spunk looked like.
Burfi and Jamun go to bring Urmila home. Muggy late-September; should’ve been morning, for Dr Haldia was prepared to bundle her out then, but they can set off for the hospital only at noon because Burfi slopes off at ten to the dry-cleaner’s for his Armani ensemble, which ruffles Shyamanand frightfully. He therefore wishes to accompany them, ‘to remind you on the way of your mother and the object of your drive, and to restrain you from halting midway to windowshop for T-shirts and cassettes’. The remark and his tone, of course, peeve Burfi considerably, whose huffiness quite entertains Jamun; his jocundity in turn riles Shyamanand and Burfi. So Burfi informs Shyamanand that he shouldn’t go with them, ‘because Ma’ll presumably have to lie in the rear and three of us’d be corseted in front. Then if that cadaver of a car of yours flops on the road, we’ll have to fret about you as well as Ma.’ Shyamanand’s face exposes his wound at that comment; Burfi is vexed with himself, but can’t display his contrition – in brief, their routine emotional vacillations.
The pacemaker’s been slid in and Dr Haldia is still simpering, so everything was super. The matter of a second medical opinion has been pigeonholed; no one resurrects it, partly because no one’s sure of precisely what to resurrect. (‘Dr Haldia, we aren’t certain that you don’t mean to slice open my wife/our mother
only
for the forty thousand that you’re picking up on the deal – but it’s ludicrous, isn’t it, to discharge her from here and admit her into the clinic of a second shark, just for his counsel, which could very well ditto yours, for who’d wish to forgo a tidy sum? . . . . Would you mind if we invited another specialist to look in on my wife/our mother here? – Could you, by the way, recommend somebody else? – Someone trusted, of course,
whose views you’d value? . . . ’) They don’t speak of the subject, half-believing that its urgency will dwindle if they don’t refer to it. To be fair, the unusual and tiring rhythm of their lives in these weeks has hampered levelheaded thinking; machinelike, they can plod on till something happens to Urmila, but they can’t will themselves to any resolve. The interviews with Haldia – some five minutes every three days – have afforded no guidance. ‘Hallo, hallo, how are we? . . . No, not stable yet, poor thing, a restless night, fidgety . . . We’ll wait, before we make that teeny-weeny nick at the collar – so, now that I’ve confined your mummy here, who’s simmering the dal-rice at home, ha-ha! You look run down, pining for Mummy’s curry, are you, ha-ha! Don’t worry, be happy! And thank you for dropping in, my dear.’
Urmila is not overly keen to return home – an excellent augury, that her cognitive befuddlement and bodily distress have adequately decreased for her to discern the comforts of twentyfour-hour airconditioning, nursing, repose, silence, greyness. She’s warmed to one nurse in particular – demure, efficient, flatchested – and has jocosely proposed her to Jamun as a potential wife. ‘She’s pretty and kind. While you introspect about the meaning of existence and eternity, she can look after your father and me.’ ‘We should pick for her a less boring husband,’ suggests Burfi.
Philip Jonas sends luxuriant bouquets thrice. Urmila recalls him effortlessly and is charmed even in her debility because she loves gifts. Jonas also presents her, incongruously in Intensive Care, with a tin of Earl Grey tea, which delights Urmila even more.
Three days after the operation, she’s been shunted to a peripheral, presumably less intensive, cubicle. Dr Haldia visits her much less frequently there. The flatchested heroine is recruited as a night nurse at a hundred and fifty rupees per ten hours, and twenty rupees for every extra hour; ‘Like a bloody taxi kept waiting,’ bellyaches Burfi.
Urmila remembers practically nothing of her immediate past.
She can’t recall when she was carted to Dr Haldia’s, and only fuzzily grasps why. Time has misted for her, and space too. ‘Isn’t my piles operation done? . . . If you help me to sit up, then perhaps I can stump upstairs and loll in the sun for a time, away from your father.’ Her mouth stays open after she’s tailed off, and her eyes constrict, her forehead corrugates, in puzzlement, in her tussle against opacity, to educe her past. But the dauntless Haldia bleeps that her memory, presumably a wine, will enrich with time.
No one knows how much to disclose to Urmila about herself. ‘I really was senseless for days with the heart attack?’
‘Uh . . . This curiosity of yours is a bracing sign,’ sidesteps Burfi, who is for postponing all enlightenment until Urmila surfaces to normalcy.
‘Why don’t I remember? I recall returning home from the piles surgery and lying in bed, terribly weak – and next, nothing. How many days between the piles and this heart failure?’
‘Three. You arrived home on the twenty-seventh, and were carted here on the thirtieth of August.’ Chhana can never dissemble adroitly.
‘August,’ dittoes Urmila, unfamiliarly, trying to assign it, puckering her eyes at the Air-India calendar on the wall. ‘And today is . . . My God, I’ve lasted with Haldia around a month!’
‘She can calculate!’ squeaks Burfi ebulliently.
‘Certainly I can, goose . . . August.’
Pista is markedly crestfallen. ‘Can’t we at least tell Thakuma that for ten minutes she’d copped it, that Thakuda thwacked her chest and dragged her back to life? Please. She could even be interviewed on TV.’
In the further room Urmila has become a wizened, slack bag, professionally declared out of danger, because of which the visits of the final five days are noticeably more genial. For Pista and Doom, their grandmother all at once grows measurelessly more interesting; formerly the unassertive, unwilling fulcrum of the household, of whom none is seriously heedful, she is now the tousled drift of bedclothes in a chilled, sombre room, near
whom they are shushed nonstop, and hindered from pawing unfamiliar objects, but who is still as delighted to see them, even though she appears ashen and unfocused. The incongruity between the two generations is hideous. Pista’ll be maroon and sweaty from the football game from which he’s been plucked
en route
to the hospital; Doom will be like a meaty peach, in the way of everyone’s knees, trailing strangers into other rooms.
Doom, nose caulked with muck, breathing restfully and audibly through his mouth, the bridge of his interdigitated hands shouldering his chins, resting plump and caked elbows on the stool, beside the bed, sallow rotund calves – with the scarlet streaks and stipples of nicks, stings, spills, scuffles – intersected at the ankles, drivellingly, to Urmila: ‘Thakuma, Pista says you died, Thakuda whammed your chest and you came back to life. Now like other aunties you’re going to TV.’
‘Yes, Baby, I snuffed it, and while Thakuda was boxing me, I zipped off and met Heman and Skeletor. Skeletor sends you many smooches.’
Doom sighs and starts to dispute the story. His birth, four years ago, was fortuitous. Joyce wished to abort. ‘We didn’t intend this. Joyce doesn’t want the load of a nursling right now.’ Burfi defensively advanced to the rest of the family. He routinely has to vindicate his parents and his wife, one to the other, his parents and his wife seldom communicate straight-forwardly. This aids the son, when vital, while bickering with wife or parent, to fudge his own disagreeable views as those of the absent individual.
‘Abort? Why? You’re married, aren’t you,’ carps Shyamanand, and to Urmila, apart, hyperbolically, ‘We’ve hatched a killer.’ She compliantly remonstrates with Burfi, ‘You’ll regret this abortion.’ Next, both parents, mordantly, ‘Can’t you dictate your own hankering even once to your wife? Isn’t the foetus yours too?’
Jamun probes Burfi. ‘What d’you really feel? D’you itch for a second child?’ He’s truly interested.
‘If I want my way, I should suggest to Joyce the precise
opposite of what I actually wish her to do,’ jokes Burfi. ‘I’m ambivalent about babies, Jamun. They’re wholly unknown, almost extraterrestrial! Pista helter-skeltered our existence, rampaged through the ruts of our lives to the heart. He cradled the marriage – snared us
both
! Which is Joyce’s signature tune – that she’s been enmeshed, first by marriage, then by a kid. Modernity dribbling out of her boobs. But ever so often, I’d imagine – would be thrilling to sense a scrap of your flesh outside yourself, to nurture it, see it pule, laugh, argue, prosper, into a separate creature that was yet yourself. We all, from time to time, endure life’s blues – it’s null, etcetera – a brat provides not a reason, but a pretext – and for a time distracts you from those silly questions, and bluffs you that procreation in itself is an end.’
‘“The wise men of old,”’ cites Jamun joshingly, ‘“did not want children’’. ‘What should we do with children,’ they said, ‘when we have Brahman and the world besides?’” Just the sentiment to echo to Baba when next he bleats that you’re being deviant in not hankering for a second kid, in bereaving
him
of another grandchild. But I like him because he fattens on choler. He’s corrosively dubbed you and Joyce “Grammy Sugars” – a delicious expression, isn’t it? – for those who habitually gape at the Grammy Awards on TV
,
and who, Baba assumes, submergedly crave to resemble those freakish beings we glimpse at those awards – hair like aquamarine ropes, and windowpane skirts, no matter what gender! For Baba, both his sons are Grammy Sugars – they dote on the screech and squawk of bebop and covertly yearn to be – the horror, the horror! – Christians! Doubtless, Pista’ll be even more of a Grammy Sugar. Would be ironic, then, to zap Baba by confessing that Joyce and you don’t want to spawn, on the counsel of a bloody Upanishad.’
Now and then, in those terminal days in that further room, the family muses whether they are carting a stranger home. All, save Chhana, struggle to smother such introspection; the sons yield their mother altogether to time. For minutes she stares vacantly at the wall, or the lavatory door, the blue night lamp, or
the aggregation of bottles and injections on the metal table beside her pillow, the desiccated skin of her forearms, or her drained hands and her temple ruts, her eyes dim with the remembrance of an anterior ache, but she won’t, or cannot, share the evocation.
‘Enormously expensive, wasn’t it, my heart attack?’ Urmila asks Shyamanand, her face buckled into a grin. ‘Jamun tells me that you and he’ve divided the costs.’ Shyamanand whooshes into his beard and says nothing. ‘I’ll repay you, whatever I own.’ Shyamanand doesn’t demur.
Burfi wheels her out. In the corridors and across the lawns, she gapes at the faces, the whirl and the sky, like a toddler confronting a new world, wondrous-eyed, mouth feebly slack. She’s dreadfully frail. Her collarbones show like an ivory coat-hanger. Her features illume when she sights the car. Burfi cradles her in his arms and lays her down in the rear. She’s weeping unashamedly.
Jamun drives. Urmila begins to waffle, fitfully, in a jerky, peaked, almost-cataleptic – but not distressed – manner. ‘How much inconvenience I must’ve caused you . . . no matter how hotly we grouse, your father and I’re fortunate in our sons . . . Next time this heart nonsense occurs, lodge me in a home for the aged, or whatever they’re called . . . some must exist somewhere . . . a few might even be congenial . . . Your father’s anxiety – and mine too for a season – was that we’d be discarded in a large house in the city of our lives, desolate, with an Alsatian for crony, like that stodgy Mr Naidu, whose children stay in Australia and Germany, and who takes six unending walks a day to flaunt that he isn’t piqued . . . In our time, in how many homes do three generations stay together without baring towards one another a beastly malignity, like the mother-in-law histrionics of Lalita Pawar. . . . For sure, Burfi and Joyce dream of their own establishment, and are rueful about living collectively . . . but instead, you should be proud and happy, because it’s markedly rare . . . Why are the old abandoned? . . . In the paper last Sunday . . . no, not last Sunday, silly . . . I read that derelict
parents nowadays are prosecuting their issue for maintenance . . . You must foster me, for I fostered you . . . For hundreds of years, generation upon generation, why’ve the old been abandoned . . . Pista and Doom’ll shed you in a big house that you’ll shout you erected for them . . . and next their young will. . .’
‘Her wits are tip-top. Shush, Ma, enough, you’ll flake out. Too torrid to chat.’
After they pull in at home, Urmila offers additional evidence that her thrombosis hasn’t harshly altered her. The family seethes around her like water vanishing down the drain of a sink, while she: ‘But the drawing room’s noticeably untidy . . . the dust on the TV . . . Hasn’t that woman been swabbing and whisking? . . . Nobody to thwart her from shirking, I suppose . . . ghastly, these servants . . . What d’you mean, I can’t go upstairs, what doctor’s advice . . . ‘ She is markedly jolted to learn that Dr Haldia has prohibited her from climbing stairs. She subsides in a mass on the divan. Pista and Doom subside alongside her, and instantly begin to bob up and down on the springs of the mattress. ‘I’ll lie down for a time. I feel dreadful.’ She stares dismayedly at the faces cordoning her. ‘If I can’t mount the stairs, how’ll I dodge your father when he resumes his sarcasm and rancour?’
That annoys all her listeners. ‘Phew. Don’t you have anything else to brood about right now?’
But Urmila has lain down on the divan, crabbedly, her neck askew as though it’d been snipped. Her eyelids shudder, and she is murmuring, ‘God, I must die before he does . . . I must . . . Then he’ll learn . . .’
Flatchested quotes two hundred rupees per ten hours for nursing at home. ‘We ordinarily don’t nurse our patients at their houses,’ she simpers to Urmila, ‘but with you . . . ’ To tend an invalid away from the hospital is, ostensibly, obscurely degrading; at the patient’s house, the nurse is presumably less a professional than a domestic. For Urmila, however, Flatchested consents, ‘Nonsense,’ dissents Shyamanand. ‘Coax her to procure us someone much cheaper.’ Flatchested complies glacially.
She presents Revati, an aya of a kind, elderly, civil, proficient, also flatchested.
Revati remains with Urmila for a month. She feeds, bathes, clothes, natters with and humours her. In the nights she naps – as snatchily as Urmila – in the same room. By degrees Urmila becomes totally dependent on her and, between eleven and eight in the day, feels tetchy and vulnerable in Revati’s absence. Urmila’s demeanour sneakingly vexes Jamun, even though he is plainly reluctant to, say, supplant Revati with himself.