Authors: Upamanyu Chatterjee
In her last days with them, Revati’s attitude to her chores, of course, alters, and Urmila becomes more distraught at her approaching departure. Dr Haldia had proposed that if she mended evenpacedly, Urmila should tend to herself after about four weeks, but Revati asserts that
she
is quitting because she can’t endure any longer Shyamanand’s nitpicking and faddishness. She has in fact procured a more paying job, but must’ve decided to bleat about Shyamanand in transit, out of devilishness. Urmila certainly is for Revati and against Shyamanand, and wails day and night to Jamun, ‘See
again –
your father can’t stomach my being comfortable! He may seem solicitous, but inly he festers whenever he spots me at rest. The instant I pick up an efficient servant to somewhat ease my donkeywork at home, he begins to niggle and crab – only because I may catnap one afternoon or in front of the TV one evening. He’s been like this for forty years – a purulence in my skull. You must remember that chain of servants – Kishori, Bhido, Ramteke, Chandan – that we had to help Aya. They all scrammed because they couldn’t endure your father’s prickliness – “Chandan! Five past
one already! Lunch is five minutes overdue, you’ll have to be more punctual, duffer!” “Bhido, you oaf, you should’ve tallied the entries in the passbook before you left the bank.” Your father plainly doesn’t know how to behave with domestics – it’s his deep-seated boorishness. He bullies those whom he fancies are beneath him, and discovers in good time that they are not. And he, in this way, upholds caste, and rues that we don’t come by a Brahmin cook. He’s naturally a skinflint, and wishes to pay a servant by the rates of 1917, and then expects him to be grateful to us And–’ To Jamun, Urmila’s ceaseless carping against Shyamanand has always irked; she observes the tedium on his features and starts to patter faster and more tinnily, straining to conclude before he quits the room. ‘. . . With Revati he’s even more infuriated because her attendance benefits
me
specifically, and not the household in general. “You aren’t punctual, Revati. We aren’t paying you to uneasily wait for you every morning.” “How dare you enter by the drawing-room door! A guest, are you, you bloody sow? The side entrance is beneath you, is it?” Your father should decide for good whether he wants me alive!’ Urmila slithers to the edge of the bed to aim her last remark at Jamun’s exiting left heel and calf.
So Revati departs, and Urmila reverts to fending for herself. Jamun helps, in the initial week or two, to escort his mother to the lavatory, to carry her lunch and dinner to her bed, to be with, and listen to her; but he’s gradually enervated by the tasks of passive attendance, and begins slinking off from the room – to any nook beyond earshot of her – moments before he senses that he’ll be needed. By the time he returns, Urmila has managed somehow, or has done without. Her vexation has surged. He counterfeits reasons and afterwards attempts to persuade himself, listlessly, that by wriggling out of his responsibilities time after time, he’s helping his mother to be self-reliant.
November. A whisper of wintriness in the air. A long letter from Satyavan Hegiste. Jamun browses through it and recognizes that he has now to slide back to the antipodal life one
thousand kilometres away, of Kasibai and the apartments on the wetlands.
He has to budge from home for a further reason too, he discerns sardonically. If he doesn’t decamp fast, Burfi and Joyce’ll very likely exploit his presence to once more try and shove off themselves. ‘You seem to’ve anchored yourself here for keeps. So now at least we can scram from this cowshed, pick up some space for ourselves. If and when you decide to revert to your other responsibilities, and Ma and Baba remain alone in this house, don’t harrow yourself,
we’ll
care for them – telephone them every evening or something. Or we could entice that damn Chhana to wangle a transfer here – she and her fuckface could roost in the entire first floor – she’d freak out, luxuriating in these rooms, wholly unattached to the crises downstairs.’
Jamun and the others in the family have endured these opinions from Burfi numberless times in the foregoing eighteen months, ever since he, Joyce, the kids and their aya arrived on their transfer. They initially occupy two of the three bedrooms on the first floor; after Jamun leaves, Burfi reshapes the third into a den for deafening heavy metal.
After a crushing eleven hours in office – chitchatting, swilling barrels of tea, sauntering from one colleague’s chambers to another’s – Burfi comes home and glumly switches substandard gin for tea. He can’t spatter his middle-thirties, sundown blues on Joyce, Pista or Doom, because the one overrides him and the other two are at their homework in front of the TV. Hence he sulks at his surroundings, buffets a few downstairs doors, hollers for his mother to help him unearth the pyjamas that he has (for dread that Shyamanand’ll usurp them) interred somewhere, reclaims just
his
laundered clothes from the pile underneath the stairs, manages to dishevel the remainder, forages through the fridge for a snack to attend the gin, fulminates at the refrigerator for not stocking more alluring delights, totes upstairs the mutton (thereby effecting four fewer helpings at dinner), and with his second gin starts to whine to an audience
of lamp, stereo system and one unmindful relative.
‘What a septic tank. I’ve picked the shit end of the stick, hooked by parents into staying with them. They grouse day in and day out about Joyce and me. “You don’t spend any time with us . . . Your wife” – never Joyce, fuck them! – “takes no notice of us. You whiz to work at eight every morning, and when you hobble back it’s unduly late in the evening, your temper’s beastly, and in any case, you plod straight upstairs, without a second for us. If we snuff it downstairs, you all, upstairs in that dinning rock music, wouldn’t even know.” I’ve suffered that one about a thousand times. Fuck, does anyone wish to hear such shit at thirty-four? So I’ve retorted once or twice, “Unlikely that both of you’ll croak together. When one cops it, the other can ring us on the second phone upstairs, and then leave the corpse be, join us and let his – or her – hair down to some vintage acid rock.” This sort of exchange can fuck you up for a week.
‘By staying here, Joyce and I lose three thousand rupees every month as Residence Allowance! Baba should repay me that. Staying with them is screwing my marriage up.’
Whenever Shyamanand overhears Burfi in this tone, he soon after grumbles to Urmila or Jamun, ‘What’s preventing them from clearing out? Please beg them to leave. Why does Burfi pretend that we’ve manacled him to us? They could leave the brats behind. I’ll nurture them.’
The listener placates Shyamanand. ‘Never mind. Burfi’s just a child.’
And now and then Jamun striates his brow and submits undecidedly, ‘Burfi doesn’t really intend to budge. Three large rooms for nothing – he won’t have it so good anywhere else. When I arrive on holiday, it’s a squash only for me. I survive out of a suitcase in the drawing room, and feel like I’ve registered in a camp for evacuees or something.’ The bitter deadness on Shyamanand’s face dries Jamun up. Shyamanand prizes the house that he’s raised and any remark on its insufficiency stings him.
Indeed, for Burfi, staying with his parents is fairly gainful. For one, it is substantially cheaper. Until cornered, he never contributes any money towards staying alive; when he senses that he’s going to be accosted (by Urmila, or by Shyamanand through Pista – ‘Baba, this afternoon Thakuda handed me this water bill to give to you. Could you send someone from the office with your cheque?’) he slopes off even earlier to work, remains upstairs, jerking his dome to the earphones of his Walkman, or, whenever he can’t dodge his parents or his sons, gabbles, with a heavy, forbidding countenance, of the dreadful lumber of office affairs that’s hampering him from looking to domestic matters. Burfi’s chief bestowal on the superintendence of the household is his desultory censure; this taxes neither his mind nor his purse. Thus he never actually, determinedly, prospects for another house, though on weekends, now and then, eluding Joyce’s eyes, he proclaims that he’s off to househunt, and melts away for the day.
Other blessings too. He can evade the exhaustion and the costs of entertaining; when chaffed on the issue by his pals, he can, and does, reprehend his circumstances. ‘No space, man, like living in those colossal PWD sewer pipes underneath some flyover. We live with my parents. They need me.’ His grimace, his shrug, the lugubrious delivery, could’ve depicted the slaughter of an intimate.
And certain benefits of staying where they are Burfi and Joyce do not concede even to themselves. When they return from office, they are usually dejected with fatigue, and the twingeing in the skull that now a different life will have to be administered – Aya’s crabbing against Doom or Shyamanand, and Pista himself – having outgrown his Aya, and being six whole years older than his brother – was the boy lonesome, and did he pine for his parents in the day? What did he actually do, and mull over, and makebelieve; was he burgeoning well, would he consummate creditably? Why didn’t they command more time for him, and yet what span of time would be ample?
On some evenings, at their return, Pista is enjoying himself at
chess with his grandmother. She sits shapelessly on the couch, while he bobs about the room, trotting up to hurl invisible, wicked balls at timorous champions among batsmen imagined against the walls, contorting his spine and skying his arms in yawps of ecstasy as their wickets explode – from all of which Urmila drearily lugs him back, again and again, for his next coup on the board. At the entry of his parents, Pista looks joyful enough, and skips up to greet them and be cuddled, but returns in a wink to the game.
‘Chess is more lovable than your mama, is it?’ grins Joyce, but Pista is more agog to exhibit to her how utterly he’s drubbing Urmila in that tussle. Of course, neither player is at all certain of the elementary operations in chess, and Pista dabbles only with his grandmother, because she’s the one adversary whom he’s fairly convinced of trouncing – or badgering into yielding. Urmila detests the game because it summons up her brother Belu, but she never declines Pista, for only chess seems to bring the boy to her. Further, with the brat capering about, there is another being in the room to tug away Shyamanand’s regard, which, when trained at her, customarily expresses scorn.
On other days, if they are early, their parents spot Pista and Doom in the straggling garden, planting saplings for their grandfather. Aya will be in the first-floor verandah, much like a muezzin on a minaret, yowling to the heavens for the children to be benign and come upstairs for the dual horror of warm milk and homework. Not to be winched up by her stridulation, to exile it from his universe, Pista clenches his jaws and savages the earth with his trowel as though she, Aya were spread in front of him. Shyamanand, guiding his grandsons, smirking, winking, proposes, ‘If you disobey Aya, I’ll reward you with chocolate or bubble gum, whichever you wish. If you remain downstairs till dinner, I’ll gift each of you both.’
And Doom, Pista feels, though ridiculously young, does have his pluses. He potters about the house after Pista, hauled by the overriding enchantment of the four-year-old for the activities of the greenest of his elders, bawling when Pista apprises him that
his tommy gun is immeasurably superior to Doom’s idiotic Smith and Wesson, and that Doom won’t be permitted to so much as touch it, squealing when Pista asserts that he’s decided to be both Thor and Hiawatha, but Doom can’t be anything because he’s too young, short, fat and too dense, so there. On many a sultry afternoon, from divers corners of the house, this shrill wrangling of Pista and Doom, and Aya’s screechy, disregarded shushing, filter through Shyamanand’s half-snooze, and make him fuzzily marvel at the vitality in the young.
Urmila, Shyamanand and Doom: for a year and a half, Pista buds in warm company. His parents, however, never concede this notion, do not acknowledge it even to themselves as a ground for not shifting, that Burfi’s parents are beneficial to their boys and so to them. For both, living with one’s parents is a sort of embarrassment, a dreadfully lower-middle-class practice, like conspicuously relishing epic television soaps.
‘Ma and Baba can’t be discarded, Burfi, like rundown chappals. We could slice them, and one could be despatched to Chhana’s. Baba, I suppose, since everyone else aches for a respite from him, Ma most of all. I mean, in a race for The Nation’s Most Disagreeable Bong, he’d be streets ahead of the rest of us. You’d be second, though.’
‘What about giving
us
a break, fucker, and packing both of them off for a time? In that peace, we could even overhaul the house, painting, with-it fittings, throw a party, let our hair down. But they’ll never leave this house, even for a holiday.’
‘Astute of them, if a vacation involves yielding the whole house to a sharper like you. When they return, you won’t allow them in, or you’ll exact rent or something. But jokes aside – a firstrate idea, to sunder them for a few days – they can rediscover how much they detest each other. I’ll probe them.’
‘A priceless suggestion, worthy even of Burfi at his most witless. You imagine that I’ll abandon to him and his wife your mother in this state? You’re very stupid, Jamun. When we hankered for you to bear us away with you, you seesawed, submitted rubbishy pretexts – that the climate there’s noxious,
malarial, the cook’s boneheaded, there’s nowhere to visit, we’d bore ourselves forthwith, we’d yearn for the snugness of this house, etcetera. Your lukewarmness crumpled up your mother – doesn’t Jamun want us with him? He too? She was wholly correct. And now you propose that I should unwind for a bit at Chhana’s. Whatever for? We don’t need any breathers, thank you.’
The answer lies in part in Satyavan Hegiste’s letter. Hegiste writes a cultivated Marathi, as one who aspires to polish his reader’s knowledge of the language.
My dear Jamun,
More than two months’ve slipped by since you left. I received your letter, and by the time you get mine, I’m confident your mother will’ve recuperated greatly. My grandfather-in-law too is assured of this. In the evenings, lolling in his pet venue – the courtyard of the liquor den – he continues to proclaim to his comrades, ‘Jamun’s mother will definitely revive. For where in the maw of time will she happen on another son like him?’ Awed by this proclamation, the chums then – as always – drain an extra peg to you.