Authors: Upamanyu Chatterjee
Her entire corpse body judders with each inhalation. He wants to tell her that the inconceivable happened that afternoon, that while backing the car out of the house, he glanced at Shyamanand – whiling away his time in the vernadah, observing his family come and go – and spotted that his father’s eyes were wet. I’m sorry, Shyamanand’d apologized, but I’d been brooding, and a moment ago I saw your mother’s face vividly – how she’d fondle her earlobe while squinting at the TV – and I just couldn’t restrain myself. Congratulations, Jamun yearns to purr to a sentient Urmila, your husband has at last sobbed for someone other than Chhana and himself.
A nurse’s bloodless, beautiful hand, slim-fingered, finely veined, rests on Urmila’s arm, a hideous contrast. Iced-water wads have been tucked into her armpits and patted down on her forehead. A silvery fluffiness of hair about the ears; above the left ear squats, like a frog, an oversize squashy bubo, which Neuman pronounces to be curdled blood. Yet some, muses Jamun muddledly, must’ve hankered for this body once, and, in a breath of enchantment, even decreed it more radiant than the swollen moon.
‘If you overlook her sensations,’ asserts Neuman, spanking his right flank with his stethoscope, ‘she’s really somewhat comfortable. If you set aside her emotions, that is.’
‘I presume what the nerd means,’ mutters Burfi, as Alfred E. lumbers off to confound some other careworn minds, ‘is that Ma doesn’t feel much pain. Her groans for sure don’t support the bugger’s idea. I guess quacks rake in even more cash when they’re inarticulate.’
Like regret, guilt, grief and lamentation, death too is inexorable. One has to be all set to buzz off, okay, but after what age? Sixty-seven? Thirty-four? Thus, if one realizes at thirty-two, for
instance, that one’s number is up, one can justifiably feel defrauded of a few months of life? Rubbish, certainly. Perhaps one has to be ready to snuff it at
any
time – while polishing one’s shoes, and tricycling about in the winter sun, on the shore, at the age of four. Doom should therefore be prepared to go the way of all flesh? Maybe the inevitability of mortality only connotes that death drops in at a particular age – and possibly that time of life for an individual is when his loved ones are tired of him or when he has mellowed into a vegetable.
Two mornings before Urmila cops it, Joyce and Doom emplane for Bombay. Joyce’s soulmate Rani has lately shifted there, and Joyce pines to be with her; so the family discerns from Burfi’s awkward, dishevelled explanations. In the five days that Urmila has till then spent at Haldia’s, Joyce hasn’t visited the nursing home even once. ‘She doesn’t like me, she won’t miss me,’ explains Joyce in the husky voice that she puts on when she’s being sanctimonious, ‘and I’m not a fraud. To bob about her bed looking pathetic, while speculating every second when it’d be okay to glide away – that’s how you all behave there, anyway.’ Joyce dilates her enormous eyes at Burfi.
‘She’s depressed,’ Burfi struggles to extenuate his wife’s conduct to Jamun, ‘and maintains that there’s an atmosphere of death in this house, and illness. She doesn’t want this gloom permanently to dispirit her and the kids – particularly Doom. And none of us actually cares for Ma, she believes; if we cherished her, we’d’ve been, like Chachacha neighed the other evening, dossing down in the waiting rooms at Haldia’s instead of looking in twice a day.’
‘She’s nuts.’ Jamun can’t curb himself. ‘Worse than nuts. Not even a loon’d run out on the dying in this fashion – because the mood of the house isn’t sunny and sparkling – like an ad for Kolynos.’
Burfi smirks without humour, trying to smother the turmoil within him. ‘Maybe I should tag along with them – I could snuggle up too with Rani the butch, and pick up a few tricks.’
All at once his features crumple. ‘Sometimes I wish she’d hurry up and croak.’
Neuman, in a tangerine safari suit, thrusts his John Lennon glasses up the bridge of his nose with a forefinger the girth of a dildo and announces a possible gangrene threat to Urmila’s limbs. ‘Do you mark these livid patches, soft and squelchy?’
Pista and Doom have visited the nursing home just once. Pista in particular has been averse to looking in on his grandmother. He secretly believes that she’s fallen ill once again because he persisted in incensing her by parodying her walk. In her dim, chilled cubicle, Urmila frightens the children. All of a sudden, just when the brats are about to begin to explore the room, she starts to mewl loudly, like a derelict cat in a tree, in the garden, in the dark. Her skull too begins to thresh about, as though an invisible paw is repeatedly smacking her. The kids gawp, openmouthed. In that penumbral light, in alien surroundings, that bestial squealing from a swathed heap that a week before had been their homely, disregardable grandmother is truly fearsome.
Kasturi and Jamun drop Joyce and child off at the airport. Kasturi is a handful of days away from her lying-in. A long, snug quietness on the return drive into the city. ‘We are all – at the middle point of the cycle, with allegiances and responsibilities before and after.’ She sits in the car like an obese king with a breathing problem, for whom simply squatting is exertion enough. With eyes shut, she waffles away. ‘We’re now enduring the stress of grihasthi, when both our parents and our kids need fosterage. Isn’t the classical codification of an individual life wise? Now and then I reflect on it – grihasthi is the eye of the storm, I suppose – though that isn’t entirely correct, because the eye connotes stillness at the heart of tumult, doesn’t it, and grihasthi is anything but. No, grihasthi is domesticity, the family, and a mortal life’d be fragmentary without it; for sure, the three other rungs are also significant to integrate a life, but the years before grihasthi seem to conduct you to it, and the
age after grihasthi winds away from it – it’s the hub, the umbilicus, the skein of birth and death, and one’s so enmeshed in it, in the bonds and responsibilities of family, that one doesn’t ruminate on the central questions, not much, anyway – but there isn’t much spunk – oops, wrong word – left in the years after grihasthi, and vanaprastha and sannyas are euphemisms, aren’t they, for rejection and dotage? Ergo, Jamun, grihasthi is all, that’s why so many of us are sucked into it.’
Miss Hirsute starts to cluck as soon as they file into Intensive Care. ‘Where’ve you been? The patient’s been waiting since ten o’clock for her Trentol; last night, I told that other man who drops in here that we were running out of those injections, but he appears to’ve forgotten the second he breezed out of here. Now you’ve to trudge to Caulay Town for it, because the chemist downstairs exhausted his Trentol this morning. And hurry.’ She then returns to her knitting; from its appearance, she seems to be ravelling a mammoth, grass-green, undie.
Hand in hand with Kasturi through the noisome alleyways of Caulay Town, while Shyamanand waits in the car. Jamun feels content to saunter with Kasturi again; the late afternoon recalls the similar hours of their university years, when, with scanty funds and a youthful itch for enlightenment, they’d foraged in the fusty cranny-shops of these bylanes for books. A pleasurable hubbub; rickshaws, backpackers, cattle, pedlars of philtres, Surds in Marutis, beggars with a gooey touch, neighing hawkers of export-reject clothes, cops fucking some citizen’s happiness, junkies wasting away at the foot of lampposts, barrow boys clangingly delivering gas cylinders, the thundering din of disco-devotional chants from an askew shamiana. ‘Kastu, a sale at Bharwaney’s, look! Shall we pop in for a second?’
‘God, you took ages!’ whinges Shyamanand. ‘What, did the druggist have to siphon the serum out of some shop assistant’s veins? And some scruffy policeman started to pester me: “You can’t park here, I’ll tow you away,” he kept smirking and hectoring me, thwacking his palm with his cane. “My son’s just nipped down the lane for some crucial injections for his mother,
who’s in hospital,” but that reptile wouldn’t believe me. And if you were meaning to take so long, you could at least’ve left me in some shade.’
With Urmila’s exhalations, Jamun finally knows what the phrase ‘sickly sweet’ truly conveys. Aya beneath the stairs had wheezed similarly, and tainted the air about her with this thick, candied unhealthiness, as though in her entrails, a rat’d been stifled in syrup. Throughout that week of his mother’s hospitalization, he unthinkingly connects all fetid odours with her distended, insentient contour. When he drives by, the reek from the sea, or the zoo, or a refuse heap, or the abrupt waft of carrion, in recalling his mother’s form, abides with him for minutes after he’s crossed the actual source, and seems to effuse, instead, from her orifices. Each time that this occurs – and the instances are several – he admits to himself, yes, this is the knockout, and from Haldia’s she’s bequeathed me this fetor, which I shall ferry about with me as a legacy befitting the quality of her life.
Friday morning, six a.m. Tea in the verandah. No one else in the house is astir. An insinuation of a chill in the air, reminding Jamun that, with his mother absent, the household now contains nobody who can be pleasurably badgered for blankets. He muses on Kasturi’s patter in the car on Wednesday, that they – he, Burfi, Kuki, Joyce, Kasturi herself and the like – have fetched up at a stage in their lives when they are twined with, and hence committed to, both the recently born and the dying, to both Shyamanand and Pista, Urmila and Doom. He assents to the idea, chiefly because Kasturi has voiced it; had it been articulated, for example, by Burfi, Jamun’d’ve construed that Burfi was using his children as a pretext to duck his turn to look in at the hospital.
Guilt continues to chafe him. He does, in jerks and snatches, believe in the creed: ‘As far as possible without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.’ But he further accepts that one has to be on even better terms – that is, one has to acquit oneself
even more honourably – with one’s kith and kin, and in particular with one’s parents, because they’ve gifted one with life. Yet, in life, these precepts are forever being transgressed; indeed, their precise opposite always seems to occur, namely, that one is persistently more beastly, unfilial, baleful and heartless with those whom one most cherishes, is most restful with, like a mother; as though with them, one can be just oneself, naked and horrid; with them, one can’t endure the strain of being considerate.
Shyamanand clumps out to the verandah, looking sloppy after a fretful night. Pista straggles down, hopeful of some sips of tea from his grandfather before Burfi wakes up and remonstrates. The telephone. Jamun answers. A voice from Haldia’s declares that Mrs— in Cubicle C expired at zero four zero nine hours that morning. When he returns to the verandah, Pista is ducking rusks in Shyamanand’s cup. ‘My mother’s promised me that if I finish up to Lesson Twelve of my bloody Hindi by the time she comes back from Bombay, she’ll buy me the Rambo Special.’
Burfi and Jamun drive to the hospital at six-thirty. In Urmila’s room, the divers machines are off and beneath her dead face is a body swaddled in white, a bit like a monstrous sanitary napkin. The sons sob, a warm and meagre dribble of tears. Hirsute click-clacks over to them to remark that the patient’s pacemaker has been removed, and that since it’s still in topnotch condition, they should remember to carry it with them before they leave because it could always be used once more.
‘But we were told that its batteries were leaking. In fact, we’d presumed that had her pacemaker been working, she wouldn’t’ve suffered her last attack.’
Hirsute gurgles with astonishment and jounces her football boobs about at the idea. Jamun doesn’t possess the will to dispute.
Seven-thirty is dreadfully early for Haldia, but not so for Neuman, who clacks gossipily, as though death is hot news, like a burglary in the locality. ‘In the last hours, the patient
suffered a succession of explosions in her skull, a run of tiny strokes. Her body’s altogether mouldered, you know. Are you meaning to park the body at home for long? Because her innards have putrefied, and relatives are likely to turn distraught over a corpse, and hug and clutch it, and hamper its being toted off to the crematorium; these hysterics crack up if, after a few hours, the cadaver they’re half-worshipping exudes the wispiest pong – are any such inflammable near and dear ones waiting at home? . . . Good. I propose that you cart the body off to the ghat today itself, and not kowtow to any beseeching that the corpse be retained overnight in the house because some brother or cousin or nephew is whizzing in tomorrow from Buenos Aires or Lusaka, and he or she must, absolutely must, peep at least once at the dear, cold face of the patient –I should say, ex-patient – you mustn’t knuckle under that kind of feverishness. Do light some incense around her bed, its smell always helps.’
Hirsute beckons to Jamun to assist her to fill in a couple of forms. ‘Name . . . Age . . . Sex . . . Address . . . Your Name . . . Relationship with Deceased . . . Sons? You are her sons? Both of you? Really? I’d never’ve guessed by myself . . . Cause of Death . . . Place of Death . . .’
The stretcher. The van. Burfi and Jamun feel lightened when they step out of Intensive Care. For some idiotic reason Jamun is lulled that he is that morning wearing Joyce’s latest present to him, a pair of cavernously roomy Levi’s, into which he has with ease rammed prescriptions, the hospital receipts, residual medicines, his chequebook and ballpoint, a pouch that contains Urmila’s necklace, earrings, bangles and pacemaker, her comb, a handful of notes, her face compact. As he plods alongside the stretcher, he irrationally believes that everything will be okay as long as he can continue to stuff things into his Levi’s and thus keep his hands free to take on the world.
In the van Burfi possessively lodges Urmila’s head in his own lap. ‘However could anyone profess that in death one can look like sleep?’ He is weeping soundlessly, with ease, as though his eyes are watering because of an irritant in them. ‘When one is
asleep, one’s face is slack, even doughy, but this’ – his fingers trip across Urmila’s cheek – ‘all the commonplaces that describe death are so befitting, aren’t they? That a light, or a spark, or a glow within, that was most naked at the eyes, is now stubbed out. That what survives is a shell, an untenanted house, the desiccated flesh of the fruit from which the sap’s been siphoned off – all the clichés about death wham you when you gaze at her lonely eyes and her mouth, when it doesn’t fully hide the teeth.’ With his fingers Burfi tries to clamp Urmila’s lips together.