Authors: Upamanyu Chatterjee
Jamun is astounded. ‘Beefeater?’ And then, for that doesn’t appear to sandbag Kuki enough, ‘You’re a fucking beefeater!’
In reply, Kuki, quite rightfully, whams him on his nose. Two hours before his parents turn up to chat with Jeremiah and co., he spends fifteen minutes in the washroom trying to plug the play of blood from his nostrils. From the smoky mirror goggles at him his wet, flummoxed face, with its handlebar moustache of watercolour vermilion. He’d expected Kuki to chortle instead of slugging him. Shock at Kuki’s reaction greatly abates his hurt. In a blurred way he’s also humbled. He can’t even begin to conceive responding similarly if another were to decry the tenets of his own religion.
An education in a Jesuit school and college, the fellowship of friends who conversed on and thought about consequential matters principally in English, and in general the snarled ins and outs of their fosterage, have piloted Burfi and Jamun to
discounting, even pooh-poohing, the worlds of their own languages. When Jamun’s ranking in class slumps a rung or two because of a suicidal performance in Hindi, Shyamanand expresses no disappointment and does not exhort his son to concentrate more on Premchand and Kabir. When the Jesuits, without warning, aiming perhaps to cart Mother Mary to the lumpen, seek to alter the medium of tutoring to Hindi, and to set aside a quarter of the seats of the school for the children of the badly-off, they acutely discompose Shyamanand and the fathers of some two thousand other pupils. ‘I do not pay your steep fees,’ he impetuously writes to the Principal, ‘just so that tomorrow my sons for a living have to teach Hindi in a tinpot primary school.’
His sons – Burfi in particular – have hobnobbed with, aped and envied cronies who usually were wealthier and more westernized than they; who, over the years, introduce them to hamburgers and porterhouse steaks, soufflés and blancmange, Levis, blues and heavy metal, hash and coke, and phrases like ‘laid back’, ‘shit creek’, ‘a piece of ass’; these friends also make the brothers, with diverse intensities, at different ticks of time, veiledly ashamed of their parents and their home.
Because their house, wherever they roost, Jamun knows, is gloomy, joyless. The features of his parents have desiccated with the meagreness of delight; they used to glisten with a precarious rapture, once upon a time, whenever the children scampered home, from school or playground, with prime tidings and the avidity to share the news with their parents – ‘Baba, I’ve been chosen Class Monitor again!’ ‘Baba, I thwacked sixty-seven not out, two sixes off Kuki in one over!’ – but time winds up all that; the children, now adolescents, now adults, straggle up their dissimilar trails, scraping together on the way their differing powers of cognition and insight. Thus Jamun at eighteen can expostulate to Urmila, ‘Don’t wait, wait, wait for me all the fucking time. To return from college, to finish a chat on the phone, to double back from Kasturi’s house, to tail off an evening amble with her, to dart back from a movie – for what?
To hear you bleat and whine against Baba, and him against you. Is that why you nurtured us, for our bloody ears? You just have to absolve and inure each other – this is priceless, a full twenty-five years after your marriage, to reap such counsel from your children.’
Urmila will definitely be sobbing by then. For some moments, while his gall surges, Jamun half-relishes her lined, forsaken face. ‘I’m sorry – ‘ but he isn’t, not truly. ‘Our house isn’t worth returning to. It’s unhappy, dead. Kuki’s, or Kasturi’s, house is such a contrast. Banter, warmth, a sunniness. Her parents’ friends’ll be in the living room. Yours don’t even exist. Kasturi’s mother’s face lights up whenever she sights me, a guest. I’m always urged to stay longer, have tea, participate in whatever the family’s doing. The father’s just bought tickets for a play for the whole family, her mother chaffs Kasturi’s grandfather, everyone cackles – they could be on another planet. You and Baba don’t even sleep or stay in the same room, unless the TV’s on. God.’ He switches off after he’s heaved his pique out, but the sentiment – that its very inmates have ousted from their house the warmth and light of consanguinity – abides with him, like a lump, for all the cold sweat years that he and his parents live by themselves.
They occupy three different corners of the house, like three isolated angles of an uneven polygon. Once Burfi shoves off for the wider world, he doubles back only for fair-weather holidays, which, after his marriage, he has to further halve between his parents and his wife’s. When he and Joyce finally pull in on their transfer, a decade, more or less, has glided by; in recompense for the years, they own a car, a good many thousands of rupees, and two sons. They breeze into the first floor, and without delay begin to grouse about being crammed.
Yet for Jamun and his parents, they are dearly welcome. They from the first appear to detonate the muteness of the cold sweat years. What the house seemed to hanker after most was the babble of a frolicsome child. And Joyce brought three, her spouse and her sons. Doom squeals at Aya not to distract him
with spoonsful of tonic and other such piffle from the iron-willed tracking down of evil to a contour underneath his grandmother’s bed. Burfi yowls out his version of the lyrics in exultant singalong with some rock’n’roll original on his stereo. Pista yawps and crows with rapture as he totters, trying to master the steps, as expounded by Burfi, of a shuffle called the Hustle. From the upstairs verandah Burfi, to Jamun in the downstairs dining room, brays his end of a conversation on the affinities, in general, between his stool and his brother. To Jamun, the rooms that Joyce and co. tenant seem to exhale light; the remainder of the house appears dank, leaden, without hope, like Urmila’s features when he used to return eight hours later than expected from college, and that because the house and its residents were too cheerless to lug him back early.
‘Who are these friends with whom you exhaust day after day?’ Urmila will demand, tears tipping her eyes. Are they like Burfi’s corrupters of six years ago, moneyed, unshaven, unres-trained? Are they worse? Why do you desert me for sixteen hours of the day? I can’t tend to your father by myself. I shall snap.
Burfi’s cronies were from the same Jesuit school, which was a first-rate institution, meaning that it was costly and that many of its alumni, under their own steam, performed superlatively in exams. They usually had mothers – some years younger than Urmila – who puffed long foreign cigarettes and tinted their tresses; or stepmothers whose blouses flourished their breasts, and fathers who tippled and chortled at the Club, wherever that might be. Their world, which Burfi was always hungry to sidle into, and in which, Jamun surmised, Kuki wasn’t out of place, was expectedly removed from any spiritual impulse. One could contend that only Christianity decorated this world from time to time, and that only in the idiom of wonderment – Holy Moses and Jesus H. Christ!
‘Fucking cow-sucker,’ Jamun breathes to his befuddled reflection, testingly. It doesn’t grate at all, and instead sounds
quite comic. He snickers and, half-startled at himself, returns to cupping water against his nose.
Eight years after, in the ado of Burfi’s civil wedding, amidst the exuberant bouquets, the perturbation, the household faces above the punctilious clothes, the fatigue unavowed beneath the steadfast smirks, Kuki dawdles up to Jamun and sniggers. ‘Your turn now, you booby, to mate a second fucking beefeater. Wouldn’t your parents simply freak out! You positive that your pigmy, Kasturi, didn’t knuckle under her nuns and turn into a Presbyterian, or a Seventh Day Adventist, or something? She could then yak with Joyce about who fucks around the most in the Bible, though your new sister-in-law looks too erotic to be any good at chitchat.’
‘God. Do you still remember that fucking beefeater affair? You bled my nose for it ages ago.’
‘I could repeat that for you, if you wish.’ They both titter embarrassedly. Beneath the varnish of his undemonstrativeness, Jamun is actually inconsistent, highly strung, inflammable. He leapfrogs over all ratiocination to the most freakish deductions. That Kuki can rake up a lightweight episode, eight years old, of Jamun jeering at his faith, that Jamun himself, now and then, can hiss at his own religion without being in the least disquieted, steers him to deduce, not that Kuki and he differ in their notches of forbearance, but that Christianity itself is better synthesized, more mettlesome; that its sway over its believers is a bit motherlike, kindling, at any gibe, even the dubious ones to its safeguard, leaving him to ruminate across the years whether, in the absence of a similar, external, cogent discipline, he in his fosterage has lost irredeemably.
‘Will you be back by six?’ Jamun sounds Burfi. ‘Ma’s to meet Haldia either this evening or tomorrow, and the Ambassador’s misbehaving, so if you could loan us your car . . .’ More than the Maruti, Jamun wants to delay Burfi’s departure for Pista’s school, to spin out these rare breaths of intimacy between parents and son, so that their sequent conversation, because so uncommon, itself will give Urmila and Shyamanand a subject
for discussion (and eventual discord) in Burfi’s absence: ‘How time darts by. Burfi going to Pista’s school looks so young and fetching. Altogether childlike, and characteristic, of him to bell-yache that he can fritter a day away in a thousand more pleasing ways than tuning in to the natter of Pista’s schoolmarms. Ah well. I was nearly fifty when I used to meet Burfi’s teachers –’
‘But you grumbled just as much then as Burfi now. I had to lug you with me by bus, and you preferred the get-togethers with Jamun’s class because then we could snatch a lift with Kuki’s mother. But she’d always keep us waiting in her car while she drew up all over the city for God knows what work of hers – in Caulay Town and at the YMCA. Exasperated, you’d hiss, “This waiting for her is that sow’s shoddy game. You’re in my car, so you budge only when I wish to.”’
To detain Burfi awhile, however, by asking for his Maruti is a cheap trick indeed. Burfi’d much rather hand over Shyamanand’s blazer or Joyce’s ballpoint. ‘Six? I can’t say. Why don’t you instead drive the Ambassador down to the garage?’ Out of habit, he glances for an instant at Joyce. Time and time again, when Burfi can’t sidestep a request for the use of his car, he drives off, on what he asserts is a crucial task, an hour or two before the Maruti is actually required, fibbing and vowing to return in time. About a year ago, Burfi, twice in one week, manoeuvred in this manner with his father. By that Saturday Shyamanand, immeasurably wounded, bought a ludicrous Ambassador off Mr Naidu, which Jamun drove whenever he was around. For ten months of the year, the Ambassador moulders in the driveway, ahead of the Maruti. From time to time, Joyce’s office chauffeur whisks its dust off, steals its petrol for his motorbike and takes Shyamanand and Urmila out for a spin.
‘Both of you look super, like winter-ensemble-models on a honeymoon. However will you mingle with the frumpish parents of Pista’s classmates?’
Burfi and Joyce simper. Burfi’s face shifts from sulkiness to rapture like a before-and-after film ad for the alleviator of a stuffed nose, or for A1 undies. ‘Yes, that’s true,’ he smirks,
eyeing himself in the rear-view mirror, purring at what he sees.
They wave and drive off. Jamun glances at his parents. Both are watching the road, as though the Maruti is still visible. Urmila’s armchair is between Shyamanand’s and Jamun’s. Her profile is incised on a background of ashen wall, the etiolated leafage of a money plant (that Joyce positioned there, beside the living-room door, when she came to stay and supposed that she’d belong. Objects in that house are scarcely ever dislodged from the nooks that they originally, haphazardly, occupy. Dressers, tubs for plants, settees, desks, root themselves wherever they are planted and, with the years, gather, like trees, reverence and dust), a once-white door, the pepper-and-salt tendrils of Shyamanand’s beard. The skin of Urmila’s face is fragile, slack, rutted, softened by brooding, the fatigue of age, and the recent, rare badinage with Burfi. Jamun remembers that Kasturi’d observed once, in the snug afterglow of coition, her fingernail sauntering down his nose, his abused contented lips, the ridge of his collarbones, his nipples, that he looked like his mother, while his brother took after his father. He hadn’t been pleased with the remark and hadn’t known how to react.
‘Whatever are you mulling over, Jamun?’
‘Oh, nothing, Ma, just hollow thoughts.’ Nothing, at any rate, that he can share. It seems impossible that the old – the shrivelled, the senescent, the toothless – had once been nurslings and toddlers, that decades ago Shyamanand had been Doom’s age, had played marbles, worn shorts, dodged baths. Time is the boss. Sometimes, when Urmila’s expression is unmindful and still, Jamun notes underneath the desolation of the years on the film of her skin, another face – of the same mould, but paler, tighter, more expectant – of someone she’d once been, now bedimmed by her puckered, translucent skin, the cerement of time.
Burfi and Joyce return at five, and Burfi seems to have no crucial tasks that evening.
Seven-fifteen. Urmila, Jamun, Pista, Doom and Aya in the
Maruti on the way to Haldia’s house. Of late Urmila’s met her doctor most erratically. She enjoys the car drives but shrinks from their objective. Her reluctance is in part her anxiety that Haldia’ll insouciantly confirm her covert impression that she isn’t mending. She in fact meets him only when she’s even more unmanned by an abrupt frisson in the chest, or a leadenness at the root of her skull, or when she runs out of capsules, and Jamun proposes that the quack be consulted before his prescription’s renewed, and she initially bridles, arraigning him with a minginess befitting his father’s son (‘I’m not spilling
your
money on my pills!’), and then, lukewarmly, acquiesces.
A snow-white, capacious waiting room, trendy murals on each wall, three ghastly electroliers, a handful of other invalids stoically waiting to be skinned, behind a white table an imperturbable woman with spectacles like the eyes of a mammoth dragonfly. ‘Yes? Are you with an appointment?’
‘Ohhhh – all white! So white!’ trills Doom, chugging about the room. He pulls up beside the receptionist and explains, ‘Thakuma’s come.’