The Last Burden (12 page)

‘Well, just this pyre of your belongings is new – she hasn’t tried this one before. Ordinarily, your chats with Joyce on any subject conclude with her scudding off to her parents, Doom pursed into her armpit, being tossed out of there within three days, zipping next to her soulmate Rani. To all her cronies, she must be portraying her husband’s family as these ogres who make life intolerable for such a young, photogenic mother – and one with earnings of her own, so it’s clearly her niceness that enables her to endure her inlaws.’ Jamun’s temple pulses like a
heart. He has had enough of calamitous marriages. ‘Burfi, whether it be you or Ma, in a marriage, one crops exactly what one merits. A pity about your dollars, though. Didn’t Baba double the hubbub by bawling from downstairs, “Who’s fighting whom up there!” and, “How can Pista finish his homework in this din!”’

On the way downstairs to his bed, Jamun is checked by the vigorous reek of newly ground coffee. He subsides against the stair rail. Pista’s aya is steaming herself a late-late-night cup. He craves for a large mug too, potent, sugarless, black, blistering, that’ll detonate the crapulous ache in his skull, cauterize on his brain the truths that he ought never to forget: that his mother is eroding away in hospital and surely merits all his surplus time, that Kasturi is quite contentedly wedded to someone else, that Shyamanand is loveless and solitary, and needs solicitude, that, but naturally, marriage – which is as prodigal a corrupter as time has altered both Burfi and Kasturi. Jamun ponders whether he can cadge some coffee off Pista’s aya. She is generally damnably insolent, he is virtually a stranger to her, and he doesn’t pay her salary. To brew himself a cup seems wearisome; to surprise her by asking for half of hers quite reasonable.

But marvellous, he ruminates sottishly, how each generation has its aya, how sequent ayas have always been a unit of the family, as household as the walls, the watcher of all, the curator of secrets. Burfi and he were fostered by one; she was also Urmila’s confidante. Pista was reared by a second, who, of course, also helped with Doom. Doom finds it insupportable that Shyamanand, Urmila and Jamun call her Pista’s aya (to distinguish her from the first aya, who was called simply ‘Aya’), and not Doom’s aya.

The nurture of his nephews has hoodooed Jamun, unveiled to him how alike generations can be. As a kid, he too was more intimate with his aya than with his mother. He had continually striven to wield Aya’s fondness for him to prick Urmila’s jealousy. Then, by degrees, with age, with the dilation of his frontiers, with school, playtime, companionship, with awakening
self-reliance, he was participating in activities – school elocution, French cricket – in which his aya couldn’t share. Next, without warning, she was no longer an aya and the surrogate mother of his nonage, but just a cook, who could be screeched at for slackness when a tardy lunch was delaying one from table tennis or rudimentary porn at Kuki’s.

Now and then, bewitched, Jamun witnesses Pista and Doom enact random scenes from his own infancy, reincarnating the same themes, as though they are players in an extravaganza about Jamun’s life. Doom, resentful of the quantity of chocolate fudge that Pista can shovel in, is a parody of Jamun’s envy, of two decades ago, of Burfi glutting himself with halwa that would otherwise have swelled Jamun’s portion. Pista, flaunting to an unlettered aya his freshly-won attainments in classroom English, appears to parrot Jamun trying to edify his own aya.

Who used, from time to time, out of monotony and mischievousness, to fib preposterously to the child Jamun. While he is tackling his homework beside her, in the sudorific kitchen of the government flat, Aya divulges – in her dialect that till school Jamun’d fancied was the ‘correct’ way of speaking Hindi – ‘You know, Jamunya, you’re
my
son, but your parents snaffled you because they yearned for another child. But I insisted that they employ me here as an aya, so that I could remain with my pet.’

Jamun, flurried, scoots to Urmila for illumination; she muddles rather than assures: ‘Aya pretends to forget that we’re
all
her children. Isn’t she Sakti, the Celestial Mother of the cosmos?’

Aya died of diabetes, tuberculosis and neglect in a rundown charitable hospital. Jamun was eighteen then, and she ageless. She had never known the date of her birth, and had computed her years by the earthquakes and famines that she’d witnessed. For some months she disregarded the symptoms of her afflictions; when finally she couldn’t ignore them, she hyped up her ailments. ‘I’m dying, don’t you know that!’ she would scream at Urmila. ‘Yet you bulldoze me to slog, slog, slog! Insufferable!’ And she would hobble up to the roof, to puff a bidi and plan
with her male freeloader cronies an outing to the cinema.

Shyamanand objects to Aya’s continuance in the house and her unconcern for the doctor’s injunctions. ‘She could transmit her tuberculosis to us, to Jamun. She cooks our food. She coughs incessantly, a parched, corrosive hawking, as though sand and bonedust gnawed at her windpipe. She’s losing flesh. Her skull’s peeping out from beneath the pleats of skin. She hasn’t dropped any of the taboos – bidis, rice, potatoes, sugar – doesn’t take her medicines systematically. Yet pules nonstop that we don’t look after her properly, that
we
are killing her. Can she or can’t she conduct herself like an adult, a sixty-five-year-old? She is disintegrating. She must be admitted to a hospital, where she can’t be fussy.’

Instead, Shyamanand, Urmila, Jamun and Aya move that monsoon from the government flat that they’ve nested in for a decade to their own house. They are among the pioneering householders in that mushroom housing colony, set up by the sea on gaunt, hardbitten soil, girdled by tipsy fishermen, harried by fetid sea breezes. Shyamanand and Urmila have scrimped and drudged to watch their house rear up, on their own clod of earth. They had wished that the whole family would stay there together, but their longing is not to be slaked for another decade; by the monsoon of their transfer, Burfi is in a job that has plucked him out of his hometown; he has also married. The nearest bus stop is a kilometre away; the closest paan wala doesn’t stow Jamun’s brand of cigarette. For the initial months, they live like refugees in a depot.

Shyamanand, Urmila and Jamun ferry a most averse Aya to the nearest government clinic, ten kilometres away. Shyamanand and Urmila have to skip office for the day; they are vinegary at the waste of a day’s leave. Grimy benches of wood, an aeon of enervating waiting, Jamun flinching in the huddle of the infected, Aya’s eyes tinted with emptiness, without expectation, her talon hand trammelling his wrist.

He dislikes sitting alongside her. She looks so servantlike; he is disquieted that he might be mistaken for her relative.

Recapturing the scene more than a decade after, maudlin, deflated against the stairs, without the energy to entreat a second aya for coffee, Jamun snickers woozily – and what of his Kasibai? A veteran scrubber from the intestines of some slum, whose most bountiful regulars were crimson-eyed truckdrivers – he now beseeches her for her bloated body; she constitutes one of his quadruple lives. To any fair-minded appraiser, surely Aya would’ve been signally less loathsome a human being than Kasibai? Yet he cringed away from Aya when she was dying; in her terminal months at home, a derelict in her charpai beneath the stairs, once virtually his foster-mother, he was revolted by her; a decade after, he is cringing anew, but this time sottishly, lasciviously, in a ruttish charade, in front of Kasibai’s randy, bestial face. Perhaps the abettor of this degeneracy is that corrupter, the decade itself, and its expression that jocose snicker that once in a while nuzzles his ears. Oh, he should die, rackingly, with a dagger slash on his loins, devises Jamun out of contrition, and titters once more.

Aya is deserted at the government clinic. The doctor, a young dunce, is initially most unwilling. In the end, after Shyamanand effectively shams acquaintance with the entire Ministry of Health, the birdbrain concedes Aya a bed in the single befouled ward for the days that Shyamanand requires to admit her to a TB hospital. She is caddied through the ward in a tumbledown wheelchair. Her new neighbours gaze listlessly from their beds. ‘You’ll improve here, in no time. Then you’ll return home . . .’ They patter the last-minute pledges, the half-lies of a cursory grief prodded by alleviation. Aya remains quiet and does not glance at them.

She comes home the next afternoon, her triumph camouflaging her apprehension. She has dawdled out of the ward and hared into an auto-rickshaw. ‘I’m hot going back to that compost pit. This is my home. If you toss me out of here, I’ll die at your gate.’ She starts to bawl. Urmila, feeling blameful and now eased – indeed, delighted – begins too.

Shyamanand’s features buckle in distaste. He stresses that
Urmila, Jamun and he should get themselves examined for tuberculosis. Urmila cavils vehemently. She is scared. They go, by and by, and are exculpated. To felicitate, they buy a kilo of sweets – sandesh and gulabjamuns.

In the anxiety before the results of their examination were disclosed to them, Jamun was fearful for his parents, particularly Urmila, who is infirm, brimful of symptoms, and Aya’s soulmate. He is annoyed to learn that his parents were uptight for
him. ‘
You
look
tuberculous, so skinny, and you smoke so much.’

Shyamanand and Jamun select the sweets, after ardent, loving debate. Jamun realizes then that this is probably the one occasion in the lives of his parents that they are rejoicing together. They never commemorate their birthdays or wedding anniversary. How peculiar a pretext for jubilation, smirks Urmila, that Aya has been unequal to transmitting to them her tuberculosis.

In the following weeks, Aya stays beneath the stairs and disintegrates evenly. From their offices, Shyamanand and Urmila haphazardly try to unearth a hospital, administered by government or some philanthropes, that’ll remove Aya from them without levering out any of their money. They don’t have thousands of rupees to spill for her nursing. The costs of her therapy oblige them to recognize that she is not a limb of the family. Her precise status has hardly ever preoccupied them before, although she has lasted with them for more than twenty years. Her husband had ditched her long before she had been recruited by Urmila. Her two sons – jewels both, she’s sustainedly asserted – were mashed, aged thirteen and eight, in the landslide of an earthquake. In those decades with them, she never once holidayed by herself in some other town, or visited people out of her past whom Shyamanand or Urmila did not recognize, or – even at her most malcontent-repiningly conjured up a halcyon past that antedated her fosterage. Perhaps the past before her existent employment had just not been – or had been too hellish, or too nondescript. Nevertheless, she was not family.

From the beginning Aya is resolved not to leave her cot. She swears that she can’t, but the family is cynical. Jamun buys a
bedpan for her. Urmila wheedles with their sweeper to scour it periodically. He refuses, pithily briefing her that he considers the handling of the faeces of women degrading. So Urmila cleans the bedpan twice a day, before and after office. Aya continues to shun her medication. She also suborns the sweeper and the peevish maid to get for her paan, bidis and her pet jalebis.

Aya viperously berates Urmila whenever she sights her with the bedpan. ‘Tch-tch, the madam of the house carting my dung! Because she’s loyal to the faithful, isn’t she! Then why did you slough me, my sweetie, at that cold government clinic? And on that single night that I spent there, you were easeful at home, weren’t you, while I slipped on someone else’s droppings on the tiles of that repelling lavatory, and lay in the feculence, voiceless, till the next piddler pulled in. You hanker after my death, no? But you wait, I’ll endure on this cot for decades, and promptly after
you
cop it, I’ll revive.’

Urmila will weep and call Aya an ingrate. Urmila’s conduct peeves Jamun acutely. ‘D’you know how ridiculous you look, snivelling, with a bedpan in your hand? You’re bitter with her, so you blubber, but you’re cleaning her shit at the same time.’

Jamun more or less ceases to acknowledge Aya. When he bounds upstairs, or slopes off through the side door, or ushers an electrician to the fusebox, he dissembles to himself that she’s only an inanimate accumulation beneath the stairs, a truss of cast-off clothing, a few blackened sticks. Only her eyes, misted by infirmity and bitterness, jar him. In time, overlooking her existence becomes almost effortless.

Jamun has hazily (and fatuously, inspired by junk entertainment) fancied tuberculosis to be the ailment of the soulful, a contagion that yanks towards itself harrowed, beauteous nurses who weakly weep while the consumptive wheezes and hawks over his violin or his typewriter, his generative will befooled by his frayed lungs. Aya deftly blitzes this silly idea. Her coughs and groans, squeals and sputters, infiltrate the entire house. She – out of torment or boredom – rasps, chokes, screeches, for
minutes on end, like a monstrous, lacerated bird. Covertly, Jamun gawps at her, spellbound by the stridors of agony. Certain spasms pluck her torso a foot off the bed, like a fakir’s, bedevilled. Beside her charpai lie, side by side, her bedpan and her forgotten plate of food.

Aya’s stridency brings Urmila scuttling to her. ‘Aya, what’s wrong? . . . Aya, sip some water? . . . Aya, shall I call a doctor?’ Her questions are always answered by further, almost theatrical, racking coughs and howls. Urmila waits by the cot till her futility worsens to humiliation; then, snivelling, she veers round. Occasionally, before she’s beyond earshot, Aya reviles her. ‘Pig. Trollop.’

A formidable night, monsoon, abating to a sort of autumn. Urmila has that afternoon, at last, ferreted out a charitable tuberculosis hospital whose superintending doctor has assented to enrol Aya at seven hundred rupees per month. Rather, through a labyrinthine circuit, she has managed to entreat Someone in the Ministry of Health to bid an intermediary propose to a connection to nudge the doctor not to be irksome. Shyamanand and Urmila forthwith visit the hospital, thirty kilometres away. Clean enough, Urmila declares. Cleaner than our house, contends Shyamanand. They engineer with the doctor, a ceaselessly smirking Punjabi, a ruse to transport Aya there the next morning. Fortuitously, the following day, Burfi is arriving after months, on work. The first family reunion in their own, new house. Shyamanand, Urmila and Jamun would’ve honestly liked the real Aya to have participated in that reunion, but she appears to have been supplanted by an eerie, lookalike wraith, by her own skeleton shrouded in her own – but darkened – skin, commanding all her bane and none of her winsomeness. Unspokenly, they want this false Aya exorcised from the house before Burfi shows up. For at the news of Aya’s hospitalization, or of her leaving, he’d be aghast – but only in passing, because he’d be more eager to natter of his new world. But to actually exhibit her to him – almost transfigured, a set of bones beneath the stairs – would be, somehow, grim on him too. He’d –
naturally – overlook Aya’s kinks, her pigheadedness, ‘d never spot the grit in Urmila’s drudgery, and would almost certainly insinuate remissness. However could they celebrate Burfi’s homecoming against the noises off of her groans and her corrosive cough?