Authors: Upamanyu Chatterjee
Office has ticked your leave, most regretfully. Chhupa Rustam sanctioned it only when your beloved colleagues dared him to differentiate between your presence and your absence.
Your Kasibai and that teenage street arab Vaman returned one afternoon last week. They apparently possess a key to your flat. I was about to slip back to work after lunch when Kasibai fetched up at our door, mammoth and snuffling, perturbed. ‘Where’s Saab?’ Presumably, the cobwebs and dust had told her that you weren’t in office, or out buying cigarettes. Anyway, I left her to my wife. In the evening, a foxed Mrs disclosed that Kasibai had wanted to telephone you and actually chase you a thousand kilometres away to your parents’ house! Well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well! – is what I observed to myself. However, my Mrs suggested, stalely, that you, muddled that you are, have probably not paid her for some
months. She’s informed Kasibai that pursuing you across the country wouldn’t be necessary since you were returning within a fortnight. Aren’t you?
In your flat they play the transistor day and night. Bhojpuri skits, or the weather in Kannada, or something, interrupts, once in a way, Bombay film pop From the roundabout, through the yawning doorway, the sluggards (i.e. seventy per cent of our citizenry) observe Vaman the yahoo playact, to that howling from the radio, in front of your cracked mirror, the Hindi blockbuster hero. He jives and shimmies, shadow-bludgeons a hundred rogues, scrutinizes his braced muscles for that pit-a-pat effect, tries outlandish coiffures, declaims filmdom’s ageless, purple passages, for hours without pause, in tight T-shirts and your – presumably junked – sea-green goggles. That bum’s sole worth is as farce.
Whom do I play Drama In Real Life with, now that you’re away? I’ve stacked some for your return. Take one.
A havenot – subsisting two kilometres beneath the latest Poverty Line – in a trashy town – like ours, for instance – soaks up buckets of venomous hooch on payday, and cops it. Two hundred dead in the country’s worst liquor tragedy, squawks the press – the worst liquor tragedy since last Tuesday, that is. A pillar of the community ordains an enquiry, and an ex-gratia settlement of three hundred rupees on the kinsmen of each cadaver.
‘Ex-gratia?’ hoots the local Member of the Legislative Assembly, who is from the Opposition. ‘Its idiom itself exposes this witless gerontocratic government to be still mentally besmeared by colonialism!’
That was local colour. Now, on with the tragedy. Our cadaver’s son, aged thirty, befuddled and happy, capers off to collect the money, which he means to drain on vats of a rice beer the virility of which his defunct father had been scornful of. Ah well, will there never be any unanimity between generations? The local Revenue office implores him for a bribe. The goofy son starts to explain that he has no money to bribe with. ‘What, not
even a naya paisa?’ demands the clerk, incredulous, his eyebrows like horseshoes. For them, quite often, it’s not the cash that counts, but the principle. So, shaking his nut, and emitting clucking, ‘poor you’ noises, the clerk discloses to Goof that to process his case, he is required to submit, for starters, seven certificates, three affidavits and one testimonial, all in triplicate.
Next. An erring sister– HIV bubbling out of her pussy – affecting to be the liquor tragedian’s loved one, turns up as a rival claimant for the compensation. She proffers herself most prodigally to the entire Revenue office. Afterwards, she peacocks past Goof, tucking the notes into her tits.
Now what should our protagonist the scion do? Should he dart after her, bleating that he too works in the Revenue office, but that he’d missed out because he’d zipped off for a shit while she’d been spreading herself out on the Head Clerk’s table, and that it wasn’t fair? Or is he tragic, and hence will he bend over in the courtyard of the office, tug down his striped drawers, and screech, ‘Behold! Can you see the real me?’ Your answer, as always, to be propped by forceful argument, please.
I hope to see you soon. Even my son appears to be missing your evening saunters with him. My best wishes again for your mother.
Satyavan
Now that Kasibai’s returned, Jamun itches to go back. But forsaking his parents to Burfi he likens to gifting an heirloom – a grandfather’s fountain pen, or the family gramophone – for a plaything to a three–year–old.
‘Ma, I was considering returning to work. You’ve rallied now, and in any extremity Burfi’s always here. I was wondering whether, for a change of scene, you or Baba’d spend a week in Calcutta. I sounded Baba, but he declined. Sarcastically.’
‘Have you squabbled with him? Perhaps Burfi has. Because he edged in about half an hour ago, faltered about, and without warning urged that I revise my will, and not bequeath the house
exclusively to you two – add me also as a beneficiary, he suggested, otherwise, if you predecease me, what’s to curb my sons from turfing me out from what will lawfully have become theirs? Then where will I stray? he demanded histrionically. On the sands? “Whom have you bickered with now?” I badgered him. Incidentally, Jamun, where
is
the will?’
‘Oof, Ma, I’ve no idea, and that’s not what I want to chat about. Are you longing to laze about at Chhana’s?
Without
Baba?’
‘You do recall the will? Mr Naidu and your Kasturi attested it, around six years ago, and we continually wondered whether, since neither witness was a psychiatrist, the will would be illegal. Nobody seemed to know what to do with it, and now it’s lost. But before anything else, will you find out whom your father’s wrangled with? Never any peace in this house.’
Shyamanand has quarrelled after all, and with
two
people, and both on the telephone; long-distance with Chhana, and with Burfi in his office. Jamun is moderately riled. ‘Scrap on the phone? Isn’t it easier to disconnect?’
Dredging details out of a reluctant Shyamanand is particularly onerous. Nevertheless, Jamun fathoms that Burfi’d wished to inform them that his mother-in-law wanted to visit Urmila, now that Urmila had mended.
‘So?’ Shyamanand had asked, quite justifiably.
‘Joyce spoke to me from Rani’s a short while ago, to check whether her mother’s dropping in on you all would be okay. Of course, I retorted, why shouldn’t it be, but she sort of assumes that you detest her so much that you’ll be stand-offish and inhospitable with her mother. This visit appears so totally dispensable – of course, that peeved Joyce considerably, because for her, Joyce Senior is a kind of matronly Jesus . . .’
An assessment of his mother-in-law that Burfi himself lukewarmly accepts. Jamun has for long been covertly appalled at the psychological governance of his brother by his wife. Burfi, in Jamun’s expression, is a ‘gone case’. His opinion on virtually everything – on every topic save money and sex – on education,
religion, therapeutics, vocations, his upbringing, the family – has been recast by his marriage.
At a routine rum session, Burfi will proclaim, after the Old Monk has laved his tongue, ‘Hard for us to size up our parents undistortedly. Ma and Baba, you realize, are really quite unexceptional – self-centred and unwelcoming. You notice how they’ve no friends? They haven’t learnt to
give.’
‘Who has?’ retorts Jamun vexedly, despite conceding the unsociableness of his parents. His booze carousals with his brother have steathily slackened after Burfi’s marriage; by the time Jamun grows unconcerned at this falling off, he’s started to brood, now and then, over how little he now shares with Burfi – only a handful of years of a past the import of which is ebbing apace, the seconds of which are cascading like sand through the sieve of memory. Doubtless that both have always lived their distinct quadruple lives, but once upon a time they’d also shared, or had appeared to share – or perhaps it now seems, and only to Jamun, that they’d once shared – a fateful chunk of living that had fostered their existent form, and that hence their present being was embedded in an affinity that it was wrongful of them to slight.
Jamun has noted that whenever Burfi bleeps the sentiments of his wife, he frequently glances out of the corner of his eye at her – as though for benediction. Perhaps, had he wheedled and supplicated Kasturi, and yanked her away for the nullity that she had wed, he too would’ve begun to view Urmila and Shyamanand in an unforgiving light, with Kasturi’s eyes, be lorded over by her loins and her mind. Or he could peter out like his parents, friendless, inexpectant of the future, intuitive that the other’s passing would wither the survivor, yet pottering about in a house all day to shun each other.
Closeness dies, between parent and seed, always. In his case, Shyamanand imputes this attrition in part to the uxoriousness of his elder son, and so abhors his daughter-in-law. Yet the unmarried Jamun also admits, but secretly, to the slump of his own fondness for his begetters. This acceptance melts and yet
assuages, seems to release him. His brother has already whittled himself down to an acquaintance, his nephews command memories of no consequence, his mother is dying, his aya is dead; what remains for Jamun seems to be to front his father with his overblown trollop and her ragamuffin son. Grotesque.
‘Next on the phone, Burfi proposes to me, his father, that I should
promise
to be cordial with his mother-in-law! Then he, like a trustworthy deputy, can report so to Joyce. Wouldn’t you’ve bridled if your son’d called you boorish, particularly when he and his wife have a thousand times been unmannerly, even brutal, with you? I’ve been so disgraced by my children. When my daughter-in-law shames me, my son doesn’t demur at all, yet he dreads that for some reason I shan’t conduct myself with his mother-in-law. Why? Joyce baked a cake for Burfi’s birthday and offered it to all save your mother and me. You sated yourself on it too, didn’t you? I heard you, baying, “Fabulous cake, Joyce, way-out!” I questioned Burfi, why haven’t you given your mother some of your birthday cake? He tched and oofed in annoyance, conveying, how can you beset somebody of my weightiness with such piffling matters? Your vexation means, I paraphrased for him, that you’re too faint-hearted to ask your wife. Burfi next tried, “The cake’s extremely rich – butter, sugar, cream, chocolate and all that. Disastrous for your and Ma’s cholesterol.” Two hours later, the leavings, the remnants of the cake – crumbs and butter paper – were on the dining table downstairs. I couldn’t endure it. I ordered Aya to cart it upstairs again. I later probed Pista, my mole, on what happened afterwards. He recounted to me, relishing every detail, that Aya brandished in Joyce’s face the litter of the cake that I’d returned. She whined to Joyce that I’d snarled at her and, typically, warped what I’d really mouthed. “I can’t endure this obnoxious house, I simply can’t,” apparently snorted Joyce, over and over, padding about the room, Doom padding behind her. And now I’m to be the saboteur once more, for the visit of her mother.
‘What
does
Burfi dread? His mother-in-law’ll blow in and gush
– and I’ll hold my tongue, kennel our chat to bare pleasantries, but that too’ll rile Burfi, for he’ll interpret my reticence to be churlishness. But why
should
I chinwag with Joyce’s mother, when I don’t wish to, when we’ve nothing at all to spout to each other, when both my taciturnity and my tattle will be misread as incivility, when my son itches to niggle at me because his wife’s brainwashed him?’
And in the maiden flush of Burfi’s marriage, to the startled Jamun, this effacement of his brother’s mind appears total, like a spick and span blackboard for a fresh school term. Or how else to construe an enthusiastic Burfi exhibiting to Jamun, then in his teens, a flattering snapshot of a usually unphotogenic Joyce, and clacking, ‘See, isn’t she a wow? She’s much more beautiful than I’m goodlooking,’ and he half-glowers at Jamun, all but challenging him to dissent.
However have they arrived at such a situation, Jamun reflects then, wherein a human being, otherwise clear-headed, can conceive
and
voice such a fatuity: from certain photographs, one can infer that my wife is (basically) sexier as a woman than I am as a man.
Shyamanand is partly at fault. He has opposed the marriage of his son on all the grounds that he can dream up in the months between the declaration of the intention and its consummation. Joyce is so plain, he has cavilled, and she’s a Christian! She’ll appear terribly frumpish beside Burfi; does he wish his issue to be like their mother, dark and mousy? He and Joyce are virtually strangers to each other; how can one wish to wed a person one has known for only one messy fortnight? Especially a woman who lives apart from her parents for no discernible deficiency in them? And Joyce is older than the booby she’s netted. And thus Shyamanand runs on, for years, hatching fresh protests against his daughter-in-law even
after
the marriage, enraged and befuddled at the rage and befuddlement of his son. Why wasn’t Burfi, for instance, he demands, demurring against the fosterage of his children as Christians?; he is gnawed by his son’s unconcern for the subject, and slips back to it again and again as
a reassuring finger to the fringes of an abrasion.
Certainly all are to be reproached for the subsiding – or the suppressing – of closeness, of love, in the family. Burfi is to blame for disclosing, once in away, to his wife, Shyamanand’s impressions of her. Perhaps Joyce has dunned to know; or maybe in the initial glow of his marriage of infatuation, the husband has – ingenuously, and for starters – determined to be on the square. ‘Joyce, perhaps you could call Baba “Uncle” or something, and not “Mr’”, which sounds sort of queer . . . Yes, “Uncle” is odd enough, but if you just can’t call him Baba, then Uncle’s better than Mr’, or maybe you shouldn’t address him at all . . .’ Such disclosures of Shyamanand’s views help Burfi to shunt to him, whenever required, those of his own unpleasing opinions that need to be transmitted to his wife. ‘Joyce, Baba was mulling over why, even after marriage, you whisk off time after time to Rani’s and other friends’ houses, trailing Doom with you. The kid’s too young for late nights and offbeat living . . .’ A share of this dishonourable transfer of opinion is unpremediated; most of it is utterly foolproof because Shyamanand’s own views in general are discordant, untenable, displeasing.