Authors: Upamanyu Chatterjee
‘Liar. You don’t even have the spirit to own up to your real self.’ Shyamanand turns to Jamun, gnarled features crimson with triumph and detestation. ‘Now you bear her out, you mother’s son. Assert to my face that she didn’t screech just now that my death’d be welcome – come on, let me hear you fib.’
His mother’s face decides him, as always. ‘Well, Ma didn’t
intend
to spout anything like that. Your asking her to buzz off was so heartless that she . . .’ Jamun peters out when he discerns from his father’s mien that he’s been hurt enough. He has, with the curious acuity of late teenage, from time to time apprised Shyamanand that the tussle of fathers with mothers for the love of their sons is, for the fathers, hopeless from the start, because son is yoked to mother more sinewily than even daughter to father.
‘Heartless! When compared to you cherubs, for sure I’m unmerciful, sadistic . . .’ And so on, till the weeks accumulate into a decade. Shyamanand recuperates, by and by, sufficiently to be able to hobble about without help; walking sticks as an occasional gift for him become quite popular with Joyce, presents that he gratefully uses, but not without discomfort, since he likes to presume that he’s too straightforward to relish giving to and receiving from those he abominates.
The years trudge by, Jamun plods through university. Fearful of the dispiritedness that his parents beget in him, he confusedly spends more and more time apart from them. When at home, he glides away upstairs and affects to study while listening to the stereo – for hours, or until Urmila’s next spell of sobs tugs him down. In those years, he and Urmila continue secretly to chafe with guilt whenever they are lauded for their devotion to father and husband. With only one active hand, Shyamanand finds shaving irksome, hence he cultivates a lush beard that straggles down his chest and of which he becomes tolerably vain. The stroke alters his body in inconsequential
ways too. The nails of his left foot and hand, for instance, begin to grow much more slowly than those of the right; they are pared half as often. In due time, the fact of the impairment does ooze through into his subconscious, for at ten one winter morning, he discloses that in his frightful dream of the previous night, in which he’d lain in the sludge at the bottom of a punt that was crewed by two noiseless, swarthy, wiry oarsmen – in that nightmare, he’d been transfixed even though he hadn’t been bound, and within the dream itself he’d recognized, without surprise, that he could not stir because he was wholly paralysed.
‘Last evening, at his house, whatever’ – asks Urmila, as she rearranges Joyce’s roses in Doom’s porridge mug – ‘did Haldia keep you back for? Did he want more money? You know, I don’t think he’s understood my pacemaker one bit. I can make that out by the amount he smirks.’
But, ‘Look! Look!’ avidly yelps Pista just then from the door, thus delivering Jamun from a response. The kid can’t even wait till his grandmother and uncle’ve swivelled, but immediately thrusts his right foot forward, sways insecurely before transferring his weight on to it, and seesaws yet again for balance before daring to shove his left foot ahead, and so on, crabbedly across the room, remembering to huff and snuffle before and after each tread. His right arm, braced, bent at the elbow, relies heavily on an invisible walking stick. His forehead puckers with befitting intentness and strain, though at each step the imp also titters in triumph, and looks askance at his grandmother to note how she’s taking his parrotry of her manner of walking that morning. Doom stalks his brother, sniggering distraughtly, trying to ape the mimic, but failing because of the ferment of impatience. Shyamanand stands at the door, cackling his encouragement. Both Urmila and Jamun laugh, because Pista is imitating his grandmother so well as to be almost cruel, and simultaneously Jamun does wish, unwittingly, that the brat’d forthwith knock off the mimicry.
Pista fetches up at the bookcase, pirouettes, lurches and totters forward a few more paces, declares, ‘Watching Thakuma struggling to walk this morning was so funny – like a kiddie trying his first steps – even Doom walks better! Thakuda says that when Thakuma moves, she’s as steady as a drunken cripple! Like this!’ He begins to parody his grandmother’s walk
again, pausing now and then to chortle teasingly at Urmila.
When his mimicry stops being droll and instead starts to drag a bit, Jamun and his mother, after commending the bugger’s perception and flair for travesty, revert to the roses. The two monkeys mooch off to forage for an audience that’d be appreciative for longer.
Jamun next comes upon them about an hour later, when he descends for lunch. Urmila lies in her room. Pista ambles about her bed, repeatedly beseeching her to play chess with him, tch-ing with vexation whenever she responds that she wants to rest till lunch and then, out of boredom and balefulness, spoofing her steps again. ‘See! See – this is how you plod – like a drunken cripple!’
‘Oh, leave off, Pista. You’re pushing up my BP like . . .’ An adequate simile eludes Urmila, and she turns over, hoping perhaps that a view of her compressible, cushiony back will rebuff her grandchild. Plainly, she’s been trying to deter him for quite a while, but he very likely has interpreted all her bids at dissuasion as stages in a game, for he prances up to the bed and starts to poke her in the back, as though inspecting its pliancy. ‘Thakuma, d’you know how you looked when you went to the hospital? See – you looked like this,’ and his eyes gyre up underneath their lids, his jaws unbrace, even his face seems to blench a bit in a first-rate imitation of an insentient countenance.
‘That’s enough, Pista. Stop riling Ma, and let’s move for lunch.’
Perhaps Jamun’s tone is too disdainful, withering, too abrupt, perhaps the boy is rankled by this dampening of his expectations, but Pista, before gliding away from the bed, without warning thwacks his grandmother in the spine.
‘PISTA!’ Shyamanand screeches from behind Jamun, from the door, so deafeningly, with such fury, that they all involuntarily twitch. He hobbles into the room, face lurid with rage. ‘You beast. So this is what your damned parents knock into your head upstairs, is it – to wallop your grandmother – we don’t matter at all, of course –’ His arm jerks – the first motion of
upraising his walking stick – but Jamun touches his father’s shoulder long before his intent can be plain to Pista. Shyamanand’s body shudders with passion. After a moment, poor Pista’s legs fail him. Wholly stunned, he lurches forward two paces, slumps against the wall, slides to the floor, all elbows and knees, and begins to bawl soundlessly. ‘You behave with us in this manner only because your parents treat us so dismissively, because you note every day that what we believe, speak and do doesn’t penetrate them one inch. And you know that if I complain this evening to your father that you boxed your grandmother, the statement won’t even enter his skull. And your mother’ll probably gift you a chocolate for it . . .’ Shyamanand peters out. For some seconds the room fills with his exhausted breathing. Jamun, who hasn’t yet totally recuperated from his mother’s straggling disclosures of the forenoon, glances at her, but she, seemingly insensible, gazes on them all without expression. Pista, still snivelling, revives enough to slink away and upstairs. Jamun clears his throat and suggests lunch. ‘Later,’ slurs Urmila drowsily, and labouredly curls up away from them.
Lunch, like every other activity in the house, is a delicate, fatiguing enterprise. For years, on weekdays, when Urmila’s been in office and Jamun in the university, the menial of the month has, at one p.m. sharp, helped Shyamanand to stuff himself and, at two-thirty or so, has, amongst the flies in the kitchen, tucked into and pilfered prodigious quantities of leftovers. On the many days when the flunkey’s played hookey, Shyamanand has had to look to himself with only his one good arm and leg (two and a half limbs actually, if one counts his left leg). Notwithstanding his tearjerking protestations, one
can
manage to care for oneself, tolerably well, with just one half of one’s body alive. However, feeling tragic, he stands in front of the fridge and, with his right hand, gouges out and gulps down the gelid leavings of dinner – rice, dal, curd, fish (to the morsels of which are attached, like minuscule, tawny ice floes, frozen chunks of cooking oil), some vegetable mash, and whatever else the refrigerator might that afternoon contain – cheese, tomatoes,
a sweet or two (more likely two). Later, ignoring the slight nausea of the hog, he telephones Urmila to inform her of the drudge’s truancy, and then equably listens to her commiseration.
For years, on holidays, and when teenage despair prevents Jamun from attending at the university, lunch is a listless, potentially inflammable venture. He always tries to eat alone, but his parents, sick of each other, hoot and yell for him from the stairwell to come down and eat with them. He bellows back, ‘I’m not hungry!’
‘Well, come and sit with us while we eat.’ And be the biased referee, is what they mean.
Then, after years, at their table for six, when the entire family is together, occasionally eat Shyamanand, Urmila, Burfi, Joyce, Pista, Doom and Jamun. From these meals, only the wiliest, the most vigilant, milk nutrition. They seemingly believe that the dining table is a sort of Hobbesian world in miniature, wherein only the fittest survive, and that, too, more on mutton and fish than rice and lowly spinach. The fittest are, in order, Burfi, Shyamanand and Jamun. Of these three, whoever first clutches the ladle masses up his own plate like an ideal growing boy in an advertisement for some wonderfood. Whoever grasps the ladle second, unspokenly detesting the first as the loser the champion, and fuzzily searching for revenge, while nattering with the less fortunate at the table, heaps up for himself an amount even more mountainous. Thus those who help themselves last usually feast on just rice and dal. Very swiftly, Joyce tires of the food habits of the house, and on her visits Chhana (sedate and dreadfully vain, who believes that to be slow is to detain the attention of others for longer) becomes more and more irregular at meals. Joyce sets up a separate kitchen upstairs, into which the ingress of those other than her brats and her aya is not encouraged, from which debouch, on holiday afternoons, the magical fumes of Occidental cooking, and from which goulashes and fondues gravitate to the dining table downstairs only when they’ve gone off a little.
On Urmila’s thirty-seventh wedding anniversary, Shyamanand and Jamun are burping away their lunch and Jamun’s puffing away at a cigarette when Doom, looking uncertain, sidles up to them, scratches his right knee out of a kind of misgiving, and quavers, ‘Thakuma’s on the floor, and is not getting up. I shouted in her ear, but she’s not getting up.’
Breathless with the exertion, Jamun and Aya heave Urmila. back on to the bed. She has urinated in her petticoat. ‘You kids buzz off so that we can change Ma.’ The kids don’t budge. ‘Pista, can you bring me Haldia’s phone number? Thanks.’ Shyamanand collapses on the bed and strokes Urmila’s ashen strands back from a brow puckered with some gagged agony. ‘Now what?’ he falters to himself, twice. ‘Now what?’ Her mouth is open, like a cave on the face of a mountain. ‘Maybe she’s snoozing,’ moots Pista unsurely. Her each inhalation seems the outcome of a slow and turbulent contest. Pista chats twice with Haldia’s answering service. Burfi says that he’s zipping home that very minute. After some fifteen minutes, just before the doctor calls back, Urmila starts to twitch and groan, gently. Her groans sound like shrieks from a remote dream.
Her sons stand about her bed. Jamun, worrying his lower lip, loosens the strings of her petticoat. ‘What’s she saying?’ mutters Burfi, sallow with anxiety. ‘She wants something, doesn’t she? Something’s pestering her.’ Then, bending over her gunmetal face, long fingers rambling across her cheek, ‘Ma, it’s me, Burfi. Ma, what is it?’ He straightens, grimaces at the wall, and shakes his head theatrically.
The moans swell in urgency, become quicker. The ruts in her temple deepen with the struggle, her eyes half-open, but sightlessly, her lips slip off her teeth, her skull starts to thresh about like a fish scooped out of a rivulet and tossed on to some shingle to die. Burfi clutches her shoulders, as much to bridle himself as her. ‘Ma, what is it? What’d you like, tell me. Do you want water? Ma, are you thirsty?’ A hint of a shift in pitch in her moaning, a sort of adjustment in its phasing, connotes that no is the answer. ‘She understood me, God, what a relief . . . Ma, is
the room too muggy? Shall I open another window? . . . What, d’ you feel cold? Would you like me to switch off the fan? . . . I can’t follow you, Ma, what’re you trying to say . . . D’you want a third pillow? . . . Are you comfortable? Or shall we roll you over? . . . Is the light upsetting you? Shall I draw the curtains? . . . Maybe she’d enjoy a cold-water compress . . . Is some part of your body chafing you? . . . Oh shit, what an idiotic question. . .’
They continue to watch her purgatorical face – the skin the pallor of the sky at dawn, the dishevelled hair, the gullied forehead, the rictus of anguish on her lips, the string of gold about the neck – and the bloodless, forsaken hands, the cracked feet. Beside her, Shyamanand’s spine has looped over in defeat. ‘She won’t return from Haldia’s this time. I know it. In my bones, I know it.’
All at once, Aya squawks, rattling them all, ‘Of course, I know what Ma wants!’ She lunges forward, clacking distraughtly, ‘She wants her hair combed! That’s what she’s missing! Don’t you remember? After lunch she always sinks into that easy chair by the window and combs her hair for some fifteen minutes! Then in the evening, after her bath and before subsiding in front of the TV, she plaits and buns her hair – I know it! If you make her sit up, then I could brush down her hair.’
A flutter of Urmila’s eyelids, like moths on the wing, and, amidst the twitchings of her head, a distinct affirmative nod. Burfi and Jamun tug her up from her shoulders, but Urmila can’t sit straight in bed, and instead keeps listing over like a tipsy lush in some slapstick. Doom starts to titter. Finally, Jamun squats behind her and grasps her arms. Aya, murmuring in triumph at her own discernment, begins to unsnarl the luxuriant salt-andpepper tresses. Urmila’s moans mellow into weak purrs of cosiness. Her forehead eases, the jaws slacken, and over her features glides a sheen of light like a shadow across water.
Before they start out for the hospital, Burfi and Jamun climb up to the roof of the house to puff a hurried joint. Burfi’s proposal – ‘We’ll need to be high, you realise, to grapple with
those quacks and that carbolic acid. After all, it’s Ma, and not just an aya or something’ – readily assented to by his brother Shyamanand quaveringly wails from the foot of the stairs, ‘How much longer will you be? Every second is vital at this stage.’ Jamun brays back, ‘Coming, Baba! Burfi’s pretending to rummage for some cash, hoping that we’ll lose patience and beseech him to forget his contribution.’
The sons cart Urmila out to the rear seat of the car. She seems to be an abominably heavy, shoddily clothed, broken doll. Burfi sits in the back, her head in his lap.
At Haldia’s, on the single visible stretcher at Reception, sprawls an orderly – uniformed, bestubbled, with feet as malodorous as his yawning mouth, into which Jamun rams a hundred-rupee note.
‘Ten rupees’d’ve been enough for the fucker,’ grouses Burfi as they trail the attendant, virtually waltzing behind the stretcher.
Doom’d been idling about when Jamun’d packed an essential bag for Urmila. To leaven the air, he’d bunged a foil of sedatives at the child. ‘Here, have some of these, Doomdoomo, they’ll develop you as an individual. Leonardo has four of them with every meal.’ But Doom hadn’t even picked up the strip from the floor. ‘No, why should, I? I’m not dying,’ he’d retorted pipingly, and clumped out of the room.
At Intensive Care, Urmila and Malodorous are swished in. The bewhiskered matron shoves her knockers out at the brothers and orders them to wait beyond the glass doors. Burfi proposes that they find a spot where they can at least smoke a cigarette. ‘Here we go-o-o again,’ he warbles, and then appends, drily, ‘being milked by Dr Rotunda for thousands and thousands and thousands of rupees. Shit. What a life.’
Jamun is chastened by his extreme exhaustion. Nothing else appears to wriggle into his skull. This is the real life, he ruminates messily, this fatigue, these aching calves, this bedpan world. We’ll never know for certain whether Ma wished for anything other than the braiding of her hair. A primal remorse oozes through his veins. We can never express the true
sentiments – love, devotion, kindness – we can never act humanely, while those whom we cherish are healthy and alive. At that moment, to Jamun, this thought seems as indubitable as the precept of Genesis that a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh, and shall spawn a litter which in due time will leave its father and its mother to cleave to and be one flesh with a spouse. Thus existence has trundled along for thousands of years, and will chug on till Time itself peters out, and its hellish and dreadful designlessness is at last immaculately clear when one witnesses, at close quarters, the sickness of death.