Authors: Upamanyu Chatterjee
Shyamanand rejoins, sedately by design, ‘How brazen of her, to let her distress yank her son away from his merrymaking, and from his sister-in-law.’
Jamun is stunned. His ears flame with blood and a pinhead of ache bulges deep underneath his left nipple. His wellbeing fissions; choler inundates him. ‘That’s gibberish – ’ and then, for he hasn’t voided himself enough, ‘Only you, lout that you are, could’ve mouthed that –’ and again, because Shyamanand doesn’t rebut and his own bile doesn’t abate, ‘I’m – we all are – so disgraced by you. When will you understand that?’
Shyamanand lays his magazine and his reading glasses aside, and hauls himself upright in bed, as groundwork for interminable hostilities. ‘What I utter, certainly, is a disgrace, and what you do, of course, is praiseworthy. You should, for sure, feel ashamed for me while I should, doubtless, swoon with rapture for you, thus is your generational canon. Your own mother merely appealed to you to flip a switch to help her to pass a comfortable night, but that makes her “exquisitely infuriating” because it muddles for a minute your tippling some champagne, and impedes you – for a moment! – from those fulsome anecdotes of your paradises and the society of your Christian sister-in-law, whom you nibble on the cheek when you greet and nibble when you part – that should not be you! She already reigns over your brother’s face underneath her – but you!’ Shyamanand’s face glows with blood. The veins in his temple now sprawl like maggots of sputum. Evocation has hacked away all mockery from his features and his voice. He quavers, in a tongue tinny with fury and indelible abasement, scrabbling for articulation, ‘They’ve nonstop been so horrid to us, your mother
and me – they bake and sauté a good many savouries upstairs – all those smells drift down to us, but they’ve never offered us any, never! They’ve coached their boys to keep away from us. Whenever Pista or Doom is with us, he’s becked upstairs by the screeches of the aya or the mother – you know that, you’ve witnessed that yourself countless times –’
‘But you’re insane! Joyce does detest you and Ma, but only in jerks and snatches, and not without basis, and she’s congenial with me. And her churlishness with you has no link with Ma’s fan!’ Even in his resentment, Jamun perceives that they both are bearing themselves idiotically. One element in him hopes that the other inhabitants won’t overhear their deranged tussle; yet another that they will, will flurry in from diverse parts of the house, wary at the voices spiralling to hysteria, will stand about superfluously, and unwillingly salute his chill articulation under stress. Urmila has resumed her sapless and fidgety mewling, ‘Jamun! What’s wrong! Jamun!’
The stub of his reason importunes him to quit the room, but the blood in his skull, the breathlessness, quickens him to be glacial and barbed, to waste his opposer with the balefulness of cogent argument, to reinforce his self-discipline with the debris of the restraint of others. Urmila’s disquiet goads him the more. ‘She was cheerful a minute ago, and now you’ve launched her off afresh.’ He stretches his voice for the further room. ‘No, Ma, nothing, merely Baba’s routine depraved thinking.’
Pista’s Corporation Bank footrule – cast off every day in the least foreseeable crannies of the house as slag from his home-work, a withering token of his pick of place of work for that afternoon, the selection itself intimating his derision at the very idea of homework, the dereliction in addition offering him a stratagem to defer his homework on the succeeding afternoon, when he will bum around the house ruffling everyone by dolefully enquiring whether they have sighted his footrule anywhere – is now in Shyamanand’s fist, bobbing like a chastiser’s irate forefinger. ‘Depraved, oh yes, I am so and you’re not. You warm to those who spurn your parents, your fount. When they
kindle our death, over our pyres you can clink glasses of the champagne that you couldn’t share with us tonight. Depraved – you pig, I ask you who is depraved! You procure your loveboys from the wastepipes of slums, survivors with scabby skins and ancient eyes, who squirm their waists in front of your face for your money – you sleep in their diseases, you cheep and baa over them and feed them like a woman – and I’m depraved?’ The sallow, agape befuddlement on Jamun’s face infuriates Shyamanand the more. ‘You itch for that artful Joyce -I know it! You hurtle home every three months for her. Your goofy mother presumes that you scuttle home for us, for her, but the quarry is Joyce – hapless Burfi, noosed between unrivalled wife and brother. You’ll die fumblingly, of some contagion that your traits’ll sow in you –’ The penduline flesh beneath Shyamanand’s beard starts to shudder unrestrainedly.
Noisy oversize inhalations, tears jolted out of him, sweat irking his armpits and collar, and a lumpish fury within Jamun that now intends to hack apart his sinful flaccid body, and spirt out. He is queasy, as though a vigorous talon has gashed through his muzzle down to his belly and is foraging in his guts. His calves bubble but the warm tears feel easeful, like cleansing. His father looks shrivelled and appalling, but something baneful and primal in him craves to flail back, monster versus monster. He snarls snatchily, spite stifling rage, ‘You bastard – we should thank God that we are sons. If you’d hatched a daughter, you’d’ve bedded her – you fucking ingrate – this as recompense for what I’ve done for you –’
‘Jamun! Have you no shame!’ Urmila, buoying herself against the wall – appalled eyes, but her voice conveys more dread than indignation; she censures somewhat dedicatedly, as though she will be chided for not excoriating with sufficient zest, panicky in the meanwhile that without warning, without motive as usual, both husband and son will enervate each other and instead beleaguer her.
‘Oh, hold your tongue – ’ for through his sniffles and gulps, Jamun tastes solace when he carps at his mother; because in his
animus, carping is easier than winnowing those words for his father that are sure to stab; yet he detests himself when he recognizes on her face the blind slackness of deep hurt, and he knows that he will loathe himself even more when Shyamanand at last is also gutted by the prongs of his son’s words.
‘Savour your handiwork, our sons. Fostered for decades to hate me. Like a perfect mother, you’ve kneaded them against me. You’re the saint and I the demon, but notice, they damn you too.’
Burfi hears some of the particulars of the squabble and snickers, ‘My bout next, I imagine, with Baba.’ The next morning, Jamun, in the verandah beside the kitchen, liking the sea gusts on his inflamed forehead but not conceding so even to himself. A leaden, toss-and-turn night for Shyamanand and Urmila, in their shunned rooms, but Jamun has enjoyed the numbness of the sozzled and overtired. Urmila in the kitchen, pottering, warming milk for her husband and herself: ‘Jamun, he’s a worthless husband, but a good father. Jamun, the anger of parents is never anger.’
‘You suppose she’ll die? Or return?’ To use the word ‘die’ for his mother is hard, but for Jamun the euphemisms – ‘pass away’, ‘breathe one’s last’ – are impossible. From the gate Shyamanand and he gaze at the car that carries off the others – Chhana, Burfi, Pista’s aya – and Pista and Doom too, who beseech, are rebuffed, wail, are screeched at, blubber, pule and are finally permitted – to the nursing home. Shyamanand doesn’t respond. ‘She looked so . . . meaningless this morning, like . . . Burfi said you’d told him that you were convinced she’d mend. I hope you’re correct. She looked so ill.’
Shyamanand hobbles away from the gate. Jamun stalks him. Shyamanand was too exhausted to go to the hospital. As is his nature, Jamun felt uneasy at forsaking him, and remained behind too, deeming that his father would be covertly glad for his fellowship. In like conditions, Urmila would have been patently so. Plus, Jamun wished to converse and himself be allayed.
They subside in the uncomfortable garden chairs. Shyamanand has no idioms of solace for anyone. Too old. Jadedness has coated his soul. ‘Just five days. Getting through to you was hopeless. So we despatched the telegram. Chhana was much easier to contact. Within a minute. On the first night, Burfi stayed till sunrise in the car in the hospital parking lot because she was on the edge.’ Shyamanand slackens off. Enunciation is bone-wearying. He craves to be in a warm snugness, in darkening and silence. ‘I should die before she does, that is my leading, hoggish thought.’ Jamun wonders how he had looked for alleviation from his father who so bitterly needed alleviation himself. He feels silly. The deathliness that soaks down into them is chafing, a sandpaper presence. He intuits that he should sneak off from Shyamanand before their dispiritedness pricks them into words that they’ll afterwards unwish. ‘I’m going to doze,’ he mutters. ‘I’ll be up before dinner.’ On his pillow, he feels sinful that he is trying to snooze when he should be heeding his sinking mother.
Twilight. Beyond the window grille six feet away, the heavens like the sea, leaden and minacious, like the back of a torpid beast. A figure against the sky, sloping against the railing of the verandah, gazing seaward. Without his spectacles Jamun can’t discern who it is. He can fuzzily distinguish a sari the shade of dusk. He is positive, without reason, that the form is smiling. For the one unearthly instant upon waking at an unfamiliar hour, before the understanding clicks into position, he imagines that the shape is his mother, in good heart and euphoric, grown larger because of ruddiness. A section of the form stirs up and down unhurriedly, in intervals. In another second he spots the tip of the cigarette, in his bedimmed vision like a fulgent tangerine snowflake under a microscope. He puts on his spectacles for an instant and verifies that the contour is Chhana, puffing bemusedly against a cavernous, half-dead heaven. Tousled thoughts hustle one another when he is once more in the twilight blur of his vision. Is this a harbinger of some ghoulish eventuality, his imagining a shape in the half-light to be a
restored, healthy version of his dying mother? From whom none could be more different than Chhana, surely. His sickly sight, his snap awakening, the receding span of day, the sky like a gunmetal sea – all these have hampered him from recognizing her. Chhana. Who has mothered Urmila’s firstborn. Who is arid, unwed because she was born without a womb, a freak of sorts.
‘So you are up,’ gleams Chhana. ‘Your mother’s now conscious. Was asking after you.’
On the wall beside the elevator that always appears to run only for the liftman’s guffawing cronies, sags aslant an oversize photograph of a ponytailed girl. Her eyes gape like ink spots on white saucers, or black poached eggs, her dextral forefinger presses against her roseate, schnozzle lips, tip of finger upending nose, her fist like a bubo on her chin – fervidly shushing the world. The legend beneath the photo enjoins: ‘Learn to exist with silence.’
‘How mournful!’ warbles Chhana, warping her features to nudge her spectacles up for a better squint. ‘But doesn’t that snap recall Belu – the same lips and expression?’
Shyamanand doesn’t react, concentrates instead on negotiating the hospital corridor. Jamun scrutinizes the picture anew. Belu as a duteous pigtailed girl? Belu is just one of the numberless relatives whom Jamun (and Burfi) have never met, whose photographs they have never viewed, who have never visited and have rarely corresponded, yet whose nicknames have bobbed up from time to time in the retrospections of their parents, and who have been mentally modelled by the listeners after those particulars of the recollections that have hoodooed their imaginations. Over the years, Jamun has hatched Belu to be fleshless, sombre, introspective, with mines for eyes, a creature in a grievous romance.
Urmila’s tale, unfolded now and then, whenever she is at ease in her immediate woe, to whomever chances to be within hearing.
‘In the age when I was idiotic – the feverish mugginess of a midsummer in Calcutta, sweat spiking yesterday’s sweat – your father and I were rendezvousing thick and fast, he befuddled, occasionally disinclined – before office, during and after too, ambling on Chowringhee, scrabbling for an unoccupied bench in some park, just tramping because there was no spot where we could be alone. Nearly everyone at my house disliked your father. But my sisters detested me too. Moni spited me further that April to August because your father was good looking. But Belu was almost afraid of him. Belu was the sole person in my family who cherished me, and not the salary I carted home – all, all family narratives are despicable, hideous – if they’re faithful to the essential life – aimless rancour for one another, the most guileless event milks from us our watchful malice – living together merely to thrill in unkindness, marrying, mounting and spawning because we’re all afraid of being corporeally alone. My sisters derided Belu, were ashamed of a brother, supposed him crazed, because he hadn’t voiced a word for some twenty years, vowed to silence after that rat-poison episode – you recall that? – he burned for some beastly slut, lowly caste, pined to marry her – “Baba, I can’t live without her!” – huh! – my father lashed him with a fine bamboo switch, for hours, I was seven then. We all watched. Belu’s twiggy forearms twitched – like exhausted butterflies – to shield his face and skull. His saffron kurta ripped inch by inch. Flitting about in thirty square feet of space, bawling, sobbing, pulling, “Ma! Ma! Release me! Ma!”
‘“Yes– I shall pound you enough for your shrieks to retrieve the dead!” So my father snarled with each whack, but he also was weeping, and, “I’ll purge the harlot out of you. She’s in your blood, you swear, but your blood’s mine, isn’t it –” And the scourge whistled down, over and over, like stealthy, camouflaged queries from beyond your window from a chum whom you’re prohibited to meet. My father tired, pulled up to wheeze. His heaving mingled with Belu’s blubbering, the gasps and snivels whamming against my eardrums, no other vibrations in
the universe. Moni time after time was needling my father, murmuring, atremble, “The sides. Lam the ribs. From the top you’re just smacking his forearms.”
‘Hours, perhaps one. Belu slumped into a clod on the floor, a knot of bloodied shreds, hair. My sisters cuffed me about lightly, forbade me to help Belu. I didn’t. I was utterly terrorized by the trouncing, the screams, the disarrayed pile on the floor, like clothes for washing, its stillness. I gaped. I was summoned away.