Authors: Upamanyu Chatterjee
With Urmila’s death, they’ve grown, for the time being, gentle with one another. Jamun recognizes that this recent considerateness of theirs will not endure, and that its abatement will signal the close of their mourning for her. But in Shyamanand, alongside this caring, her departure appears to have planted a more persistent acrimony, so that when one death leads him to reminisce of others in his long, undistinguished life, of the deaths of his stepmother, his father, an older brother who yielded to diphtheria at the age of seven, he unwittingly dwells on – rather than what he might’ve reaped from each experience – more the comfortless, bitter sensations kindled by each event. ‘When my father died of cholera, I was twenty-three,’ he recounts to Jamun over their dinner of chapatis and hot milk, ‘and two thousand kilometres away, in Simla, I received an unintelligible telegram, two days old, and fathomed that my father was sinking. Three more days for the journey by mail train and bus. Five whole days from the despatch of the telegram. In my suffocating third-class compartment, amidst the droppings of toddlers and the trunks of jawans, I prayed and craved that I’d see my father breathing. But he’d been cremated on the third day. Just his ashes and my brother’s strained, unshaven face waited for me. I could’ve died with regret. I wasn’t in any way certain what I was sorry for – all that I felt was that if I could’ve only met my father before he died, touched his feet, kissed his forehead, held water to his mouth, I’d’ve been reprieved for my transgressions against him. What transgressions?
Simply our thousand trifling harshnesses against one another, daily, for a lifetime. That’s why I feel that the two of you won’t fret like I did, from guilt, because I wasn’t at hand. What d’you think?’
Well, Jamun thinks a fair deal, in a scrambled, keyed-up manner, about his mother’s passing, but exchanging his notions appears inconceivable. Would Baba or Burfi sympathize, for instance, with his sentiment that a mother’s demise somehow behoved him to acquit himself better, more humanely, with all living beings, that he now felt, and keenly hoped that he’d continue to feel, towards all, a passionless and ascetic dutifulness? For passion was vexation and sorrow, and he’d now to set about to accomplish a stolidness even towards that sorrow. Truly, a death made one brood, didn’t it. And if one scrutinized the matter, looked it in the eyes, and full in the face, then doubtless the value, the drift, the purport of existence was a burden likely to make one lose one’s marbles. Of course, for that reason, if one were wise, one wouldn’t reflect on the subject of the pith of death for more than a couple of seconds at a stretch. One could use Ma’s case as an illustration. What had her life been for? Why had she come to life, and why had she survived for over sixty years? Surely, at bottom, for nothing? The aspiration of her existence had for sure not been happiness, which appears to him, uncertainly, to be one feasible vindication for living, the single glow amongst the anguish, malevolence, rancour and rage. But Ma’d never conceded to an instant of any species of delight in her drab childhood, her toilsome youth, or her catastrophic marriage. On this feature of hers, Baba’d once in a while observed, from his bed, from behind his journal, that individuals such as she wouldn’t recognize joy even when it perched on their nose and nibbled at their cheeks. Yet whenever she’d been pumped, circuitously, on what she felt about these things, she’d steadily advanced that her life had been fruitful because after all, hadn’t she fostered two good sons?
Haridwar. Bald recumbent hills, knolls. A scrubbed, piercing sky, and cloudlets like elfin white birds in a watercolour. Joyce’s
head pillowed on Burfi’s shoulder. ‘Where d’you wish to go?’ demands the driver, swivelling his dome round at Jamun without decelerating an inch.
Jamun realizes with surprise that Tranquil hasn’t been instructed on the object of the journey. ‘We have to douse my mother’s ashes in the Ganga.’ The driver nods and the car careens away to the right at breathstopping speed.
Imperceptibly, the highway has whittled down to a lane. The bullying lorries and white Ambassadors have melted away. The town, however, is nowhere discernible. They scud past infirm saplings on what might be an embankment, and through buffalo, openmouthed children, oxcarts of gur, dungsmoke from invisible sources, dust. A bend or two, and they untidily pull up at what appears to be a fairsized canal. A handful of concrete steps between them and the avocado-green water. Hawkers, operating beneath awnings framed out of rent dhotis, spiritlessly bleat out the attractions of their wares – the commonplace pilgrimage stuff, rudraksha beads, shell pendants, statuettes, figurines, sandalwood sundries, vials and phials of the water of the Ganga. Burfi helps Shyamanand out of the car. Tranquil torpidly attempts to shoo away the fine-eyed urchins who foregather to gawp at the patriarch. The town – in the main on the opposite strand of the river, swarming up the hillocks like boy-scouts on a crosscountry, predominantly in yellow and rosepinks blanched by the sun – looks pretty. They all feel tired and dull. ‘Are we at the right place?’ Shyamanand asks the world. ‘The bustle seems to be all on the other bank. I don’t even spot any touts here.’
‘Maybe they’re feeding somewhere. A two o-clock lunch of bananas and ganja at some temple.’
As though he’s been tipped off, one does steal up to them just then – spindly, hairy, in a singlet and skull cap – and quizzingly shimmies his eyebrows at Jamun.
‘No, we don’t want a priest, no, for anybloodything . . . Is there any particular, sort of reserved, spot on the river for chucking ashes? . . . You sure? . . . But are you certain? . . . Baba,
the bugger says that we can immerse this’ – Jamun raises the earthen bowl in his hands an inch or two – ‘anywhere. And should I ask him to find us a priest? But I’ve an inkling that he doubles up for one himself.’
This surmise is immediately ratified by the hairy man; to further validate which, his accessory, a skeletal adolescent, naked but for sodden carroty undies, with hydrocelic balls and elbows the girth of knees, hoarsely pronounces to Shyamanand, ‘For the Ganga is the most sacred of mothers; for it, procreation and death are but one.’
Burfi doesn’t like the situation. ‘But we should line up a recitation or something, shouldn’t we, an incantation, some Sanskrit verses?’ But Shyamanand looks dreadfully old and uncertain, so they all shuffle again towards the steps. Joyce pulls out her camera, a gift from Philip Jonas, from her handbag, and begins clicking away. ‘I guess we could dunk the remains even without the om mani padme hum or whatever,’ suggests Jamun. He slips on his sunglasses in a sort of goofy protest against Joyce’s and Burfi’s ardour to freeze on snapshot even what he considers the most inappropriate events. The tout is deflected just then by the arrival, with a mewl from its brakes, of a crimson Contessa with black windows, the sort of car one’d reckon would be owned by somebody resembling any one of those four Hindujas.
Naked, pubescent urchins in the water, who leave off their romping for a time to watch Joyce, in her lilywhite sari, crouch and stretch for the dead-on angles. On their right, at the foot of the arch bridge, sits a compact, pinkwashed temple; its wall portrays a mammoth ad for hairoil – a visage that fuzzily recalls Shirdi’s Sai Baba, and spurting away from his dome (and from his ears), like black, undisciplined waters, a squall of turbulent snakes of hair. Shyamanand is markedly indignant. ‘How can they advertise hairoil here, of all places? Couldn’t anyone deter them?’
‘Jamun, can you duck back a step, please? I could then snap you and the ashes against that lunatic composition.’
When they’d brought Urmila back from Haldia’s, and’d tugged and shoved to lay her down on her own bed, remembers Jamun, and he’d trailed off to rummage for the incense that Urmila always used to possess, he’d tousledly reflected that he appeared to command more selfrestraint than Burfi, didn’t he, because on the drive from Haldia’s, with Urmila’s head in his lap, Burfi’d smoothed the strands about her ears and permitted himself to sob undismayed. Yet one could never, never be sure of people, for when he returned to his mother’s room to declare that the incense didn’t seem to be anywhere and that he, or someone else, or perhaps Burfi, would have to trudge down to that huckster on the beach for it, he was jolted to see Burfi behind his camera, focusing on Urmila’s stonedead face, murmuring, ‘Too still. We should’ve borrowed Kuki’s Handycam.’
‘But you don’t shoot the dead!’ Jamun had unguardedly exclaimed and, responding to Burfi’s taken-aback, caught-inthe-act face, continued more measuredly, ‘I mean, I don’t think it’s done – it looks pretty odd, as though we want to remember her most this way.’ He’d stolen a glance at Urmila. Her complexion had blackened, and her lips seemed to have receded even more. ‘I mean, I don’t know, with a photograph of her like this in the family album, every time you stumble on it, you’d flip the page. You can’t –’
But by then, Burfi had clicked. ‘I don’t see what’s wrong.’ With a sideglance at Shyamanand. ‘After all, it’s happened, hasn’t it, the most fateful event of our lives.’
Entirely without warning, at that instant, Jamun had been reminded of a cartoon in some forgotten issue of
Mad
magazine, a takeoff of
Jaws.
One character lolling about on the deck of a yacht or pleasureboat, a second frisking around in the water, the simper on his mug elysian because he hadn’t spotted the shark (with an extraordinary smirk on its face) zeroing on him. In the sequent panels of the cartoon, Jaws chomped away and the bather bleated at the yacht for deliverance. The pal on deck scooted in and, eyes alustrous, scooted out, not with a harpoon or carbine or something, but with a camera, to start clicking
away. Of course, Jamun’d been in no humour to divulge to Burfi what his conduct had evoked for him.
Glacial, freezing, the Ganga is, avocado-green, and swiftly gliding. Wading a step or two in, with the residue of one’s mother’s body, is not easy. Shyamanand too wants to tread water with his sons, but its iciness and its rush stalls him on the last step. In the water, Burfi yammers theatrically and wonders just how those striplings can bob about in that cold. ‘You and Jamun should hold the bowl together,’ Shyamanand directs him, ‘and slither in as far as you can. Pitch the ashes high and deep. Yes, now, throw.’ They lob the clay pot. It sinks instantly, leaving behind in the world, but for the demented clicking of a camera, no whisper, no whiff, of evidence.
The unremarkable death of an old (no, middleaged) woman, sixty plus – a weepy wife, but a proud mother – but even that combination is not uncommon – indeed, the first all but always entails the second, doesn’t it, in that when a husband and wife fall out, but don’t separate, they are actuated, partly, by the itch to woo their brood away from each other while straining to demonstrate to it, in a thousand oblique ways, the general beastliness of the spouse. This tendency is indeed quite widespread, and is certainly conspicuous even in the subsequent relations between Burfi and Joyce, that is after their marriage really sours and Burfi begins his second extramarital affair, about which he breathes to Joyce not a syllable – but naturally! did you exclaim? No, in Burfi’s case, not naturally, because, soon after his maiden adulterous fling had started to jade a bit, he
had
felt sheepish and had actually owned up to Joyce, and afterwards also unburdened himself, in turn, to Jamun, Urmila and Chhana, muttering, with sloshed, crimson-eyed gravity, ‘My marriage’s cracked up – and someone in the family must be told why.’ Yet that too is widespread, isn’t it, the affair, the fondling of the seven-year-itch – and one senses that one is growing up when the widespread, the commonplace, befalls oneself. One has ever so often heard and read, for instance, that for a marriage, the particularly dreadful, uphill years are one’s late thirties and early forties, that one’s most likely to be unfaithful, grumpy and disoriented then, and next, one observes and hears of somebody one knows – a neighbour, a brother-in-law – that even his marriage has cracked up; then one starts to believe that one’s life will always startle one with those traits of the human temperament that’ve been disclosed a million times before, that the world is indeed composed of these cyclical,
wellworn tracks that every generation shambles about on, age upon age, that nothing that falls to one’s lot is new, that maturing and growing old really signifies encountering, in the particular, what has already occurred numberless times in the universal.
So. Neither Burfi’s adultery nor the escalating wrangle with Joyce; instead, just a death in an ordinary family. This one too, like other families, has its skeletons that thrill rather than scandalize – illicit love, bisexuality, that sort of thing – but somehow, when one takes the family and not the individual, as the unit, nothing shocks anyway, as though the fellowship of one’s blood itself is a kind of cushion, a buffer, or a diluting agent, for all singularities.
But a family, of course, has more than blood in common. Shyamanand, for instance, certainly bequeathed to Burfi both his yearning for money and his incapacity to hoard much of it; and Jamun did share with his mother an itch to snap his fingers at its frightful power. ‘But to ignore the weight of cash,’ he concedes, ‘is damn hard, you know. We ourselves have suffered from not having enough of it. I mean, when we were young, weren’t Ma and Baba hard up
because
they had to raise the two of us – and bloody Chhana? They became comfortably off only after we’d made it.’
‘Yes,’ comments Burfi, as though in concurrence, ‘you and I’d be an asset to any parents.’
‘True, even if only from the outside.’
‘Don’t be brainy, fucker. Gratitude between generations is a two-way thing. For not letting him down, for not slashing one’s own wrists and for not ending up as a bus conductor or something, for not
embarrassing
him, any parent’d be proud of us.’
‘True, even if only for our outsides.’
A sample of Jamun’s salty wit – and of his spasmodic self-loathing for being absent for weeks on end from home and parent – and thus for acquitting himself shoddily with his blood.
‘Where did I come across – but it’s obvious, anyway – that only homo sapiens has this parental hangup? Meaning that in
the other species, when the young are old enough, they’re rebuffed and junked so that they can fend for themselves – tiger-cubs and stray puppies – but we clutch and claw the emotions of our spawn for ever.’
The family splinters with Urmila’s passing. In the car, on the return drive from Haridwar, they – Shyamanand, Burfi, Joyce and Jamun – feel becalmed and restful, as after some convulsion. ‘We’ve timed this business nicely so far. If the car doesn’t conk out or go up in smoke, we should reach Delhi with an hour to spare for our airbus home. I hope, Baba, that you aren’t too pooped?’
Shyamanand instead asks, without slewing his head around, ‘Do any of you know where your mother kept her will?’
No’s from Burfi and Jamun. From Joyce, an only-your-father-could’ve-raised-such-a-subject-at-this-moment glance. ‘Perhaps,’ suffixes Jamun, ‘it’s in her trunk. That’s the only spot in the house that she could call her own. Everything that everyone else in the family didn’t want to keep and couldn’t toss away was dumped in her room, wasn’t it. But her trunk was inviolate – maybe because she always kept it locked – like her desk in the office. Probably crammed with litter – our postcards to her when we were nine, Camays from Burfi’s Europe jaunt, untouched.’
‘I’d proposed to her that she change her will to include me as a beneficiary of the house – along with you two – but she couldn’t, at that time, unearth the will, or so she said. We should find out from some legal type the correct position on this. If the will’s never traced, then who gains the house?’
‘Shouldn’t all legal documents be registered with somebody to be valid? You know, a . . . well. . . registrar, or notary – someone who’s halitotic and corrupt, and whose office is girdled by rolypoly touts in black jackets, also halitotic. In English whodunits, everyone seems to have a family solicitor.’
‘Hindu law’ll apply,’ contributes Burfi, with a sideglance of censure at Jamun, ‘in our case, I guess, so we’ll all share equally. If we ever stumble on Ma’s will, then of course we’ll have to execute it. It’s some kind of scandalous crime, isn’t it, to be aware of a will and not to effect it?’
‘But we could surely change the title deed to accommodate. Baba. Neither you nor I’d protest.’
‘Don’t jump the gun, choot. We’ve first to take on the sharks at the Land Office. They’ll compel us to kowtow in front of them a hundred times before they even fucking
begin
to skim through our application. Then they’ll require from us the most incom-prehensible documents, one by one, one every three months – depositions, affidavits, endorsements, attestations, warranties, testimonials – and expect with each visit a modest bribe. Don’t you remember – or were you too young then – the trials of the Land Office that Ma and Baba endured while building the house? A good five years of struggle before its ownership’s transferred to us.’
‘Your mother,’ interrupts Shyamanand, powerless, out of habit, to check himself, ‘did very little – apart from signing the papers – to erect our house. I alone suffered those clerks and that Assistant Land Officer, the villainous contractors, the shifty suppliers of bricks, the dealers in cement, the carpenters and masons. Had even one of you backed me up that terrible year, I’d perhaps’ve eluded this.’ With his right hand, he heaves up, by the wrist, his benumbed left arm.
The unlocking of Urmila’s trunk is deferred for some days because all, quite naturally, wish to let the dead, and their possessions, be; furthermore, nobody knows where her keyring is. About a week after Haridwar, however, on the day that Doom returns from Bombay (conveyed by Rani, in tight jeans and dragonfly sunglasses), on the morning that Kasturi is confined, Jamun learns from their cook that Urmila had, six months ago, borrowed five hundred rupees from her, and (with a hideous, mincing pretence at embarrassment, playing with the end of her sari, simpering, dodging his eyes) could she be recouped please.
‘Five hundred? I see,’ reflecting all at once that the cook’s indeed plumped for a realistic sum, that to confute her without losing either her or one’s dignity’d be tough, that had she slithered up to Shyamanand instead with her claim, she’d
presumably have changed his newborn, eggshell love for his dead wife to scorn (and not’ve reaped her notes either), that her first buttonholing Jamun clinches his position as his mother’s successor, the steward of their household.
In all families, one member kicks off the day for the others, leaving his bed before the sun to unbolt some door, pick up the newspapers, put on the kettle. Urmila had been their starter for years, and had relished the quiet of the early morning. Even when ill, she’d tried to be up, to make and drink up her four cups of tea, before anyone else was about. After she was shifted to Haldia’s, Pista’s aya performed Urmila’s early-morning chores for a couple of days before starting her bellyaching. Jamun took over from her quite agreeably, feeling, while fussing about in the kitchen or pouring Shyamanand a cup, the easeful right to claim a special relationship with she who was dead.
‘Do you know what Ma wanted the money for? . . . I suppose she didn’t give you a chit or something for it?’
‘She’d’ve had to hand out chits, then, to one hell of a lot of us,’ smirks the cook.
Warm blood seems to explode behind Jamun’s temples. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself for speaking of her this way.’ He itches to claw the simper of timorousness off her face. ‘No, I don’t think we can pay you until you show me some proof – because she didn’t need to borrow at all – you can quit if you please . . . How many of you are there, anyway?’
The cook isn’t certain, but asserts that other than the dhobi and herself, there could be a dozen – fifty rupees here, two hundred there. ‘She was fond of borrowing.’
‘Let me see. I’ll have to discuss this with Baba and Burfi . . . One of these days, we’re going to open Ma’s trunk – perhaps we’ll dig up some proof in there – you’re positive you don’t know what she needed the cash for?’
‘But how can I know?’ Grimacing with defensiveness, pirouetting prettily, dwarfish, obese, wily; a rasping tongue that has never been schooled to speak gently. Jamun struggles with the fancy, spawned by his disquiet, to pink her against the
kitchen sink with his six-foot prick, with which he’d next thwack the smirk off her mug. ‘Obviously, she couldn’t’ve taken the amount from her family, because you all would’ve probed. She did implore me and the dhobi not to leak to anybody.’
A mixup in Jamun’s head. He wishes to focus on the cook’s disclosure of Urmila’s extraordinary conduct, but is muddled by the something in her that has, all on a sudden, evoked Kasibai – perhaps the sauciness with which her tight blouse squeezes out the flesh of her upper arms, or the sheen of avarice in her eyes at the idea of five hundred rupees – perhaps the stuff of her itself, the mosaic of vulgarity, unenlightenment, slumminess, tunnel vision, illbred voice, base material longings, that to bulge forth waits only for Jamun to cave in to her – which he doubtless would have, had they too tenanted a characterless flatlet in a disregarded town, cocooned by leaden rain for eight months of the year – he at the verandah door, lolling in a lounger, positioned so that he can eye both the drizzle and the mammoth haunches of Kasibai scouring the lavatory floor, speculating not, would he, but when.
The cook retires, jiggling her arse. He observes its jellylike jouncing and decides, for the time being, not to cough up even a rupee. The befuddlement over Urmila’s possible indebtedness subsides when he, with a grimace, recognizes it as a detail of her quadruple life. The phrase is Burfi’s, and denotes the notion, common enough, that each of us leads several existences of which one’s near and dear ones are unaware, or only fuzzily aware.
The telephone. Kasturi’s younger sister, garrulous and breathless (whom Kasturi’s husband was to have married had he not been repulsed by her volubility), on the line. ‘Hi, we haven’t met for ages . . . How’ve you been? Very sorry to hear about your mother . . . Kastu left this minute for the hospital, looking like the Beyond – isn’t this utterly too piquant? My sexbomb of a brother-in-law showed up just yesterday. “Hi, Cass,” he cheeped to her. “Phew, if you don’t mind my saying so, you seem to’ve swelled somewhat since your marriage.
Have you considered consulting a dietitican?” So cute, no? In the car, she reminded me to phone you – I’m terrifically relieved that she’s hatching here and not in Calcutta, where she’d’ve littered, in an eighteen-hour traffic jam, into one of those craters – hell, chasms – on Central Avenue, and we’d’ve to name the bundle of joy Metrodeb, or Metrodebi, as the case may be – when do we see you?’
An eventful morning, for Rani and Doom return unannounced from Bombay some minutes after this phone call. Shyamanand, Burfi and Jamun are taken aback, in particular by Rani’s jeans, T-shirt and sunglasses, not quite seemly wear for a visit to a house in which a mother has been dead for less than a fortnight. Rani is squat and swarthy, and doesn’t take off her goggles while nattering to a cheerless, monosyllabic Shyamanand. But they are all distracted by Doom’s phenomenal and wholly unexpected delight in getting back; he jettisons on the verandah his hand baggage, namely his toy recorder and his Hanuman mask, and, goaded by his ebullient joyfulness, starts to scamper in and out of the rooms, and up and down the stairs, chortling and cackling to himself and at every face that he passes, irregularly pulling up to twitch his nut up at the ceiling, squeeze his eyes shut and whoop. The walls themselves appear jolted by the child’s hubbub, as though they too had taken to the hush of death. Shyamanand and his sons wish, involuntarily, that Doom be still, but reasonableness prevails and they say nothing to him, and half-shamefacedly enjoy the happy squeak of his sneakers on the steps, and his versions of the songs of
The Wizard of Oz
that flutter down to them, with uneven strengths, from different rooms.
Rani, however, has not showed up just as a chaperone for Doom. When Jamun goes up to remind Joyce, he finds her on the bed, Hamletically eyeing the dunes of clothes about her. The room looks stark and bright, for the curtains – picked by her, with her money – turquoise and orange on white – are drifts on the floor. He almost topples into an open suitcase at the threshold. It is glutted with more clothes, and looks like multicoloured
dough rising. ‘Oh. We imagined that Doom’d stay for a bit.’