The Last Burden (14 page)

Urmila cleaves to her bed all day. She snoozes wobblingly, like the damned, in the subtler hours, chats patchily with Revati (herself noticeably garrulous), gazes emptily beyond the window at the tints of green in their unweeded garden, hears the sea and, in the night, the lewd squabbles of the fisherfolk. As the days trickle by, the family appears to accustom itself to her seeming fairly content with the society of Revati; they, excepting Shyamanand and Jamun, begin to look in only now and then: they have their separate existences, they assure themselves that they are not essential, and convalescence, that lull after an extremity, is covertly dreary, a subtle comedown. Shyamanand, however, remains beside her for all the time that they do not wrangle. And to Jamun, Urmila shrivels to a supine, querulous contour in a crepuscular room.

Dr Haldia has prescribed a daily walk in the verandah and subsequently, sanguinely, in the neighbourhood park. Urmila dignifiedly sidesteps the advice. Shyamanand calls her lazy. Urmila’s blood pressure zooms to the moon. She bawls. He remarks that she implicitly pines to regress into the morbid repose of Intensive Care. She screeches that he’s expended his money to pin down her life because he needs a target for his barbs.

Chhana returns to Calcutta four days after Urmila’s homecoming. ‘I’ll be here if anything happens. Don’t fret,’ she enjoins Shyamanand. ‘You remember, I reached home before Jamun could.’ No one save Shyamanand misses her, and he not for long.

Chhana is some sort of assistant in the Raja Rammohun Roy Library. She’s also been studying Rabindrasangeet for decades. She’s the only one of their relatives whom Burfi and Jamun meet – once in a way, about once every three years – and whom they can easily recognize. Because of the circumstances of their lives and their dispositions, Shyamanand and Urmila have swerved from their kin; hence, Burfi and Jamun are barely acquainted with their cousins. Among the kith that they’ve infrequently come upon over the years, they can’t tally more than three names and faces, or deduce who has spawned whom. The next generation of Pista and Doom are not even aware of the existence of their father’s kin, though they’re notably chummy with their maternal cousins. This skewness pesters Shyamanand alone; to him it incarnates his most sombre forebodings – the total suzerainty over his grandsons of their execrable mother, the vassalage of Hindu husband to Christian wife, the dishonourable anglicization of his own sons, the erasure of the patrilineal family organization that he recognizes, the complete apathy of the others to these concerns.

Chhana and her manservant – fiftyish, bald, obese, Bihari, badtempered, flatulent – inhabit the first floor of a drab house in Baliganj. She manages quite nicely with the rent from UCO Bank for the ground floor. She began to smoke after her mother died. When the flunkey fetches the milk in the morning, he also picks up for her a packet of Four Square Twenties. Because she smoked Burfi concluded, when he was sixteen, that Chhana was panting for it. ‘Bets that she’d dote on SM, a pounding with a leather belt,’ he offers Jamun, who’s startled and titillated by the idea. ‘But she nursed you, Burfi!’ he demurs involuntarily.

Burfi pauses, as though granting this image of the other Chhana enough time to flick open – in Jamun’s brain – a shutter, to unveil to him the tortuous wine dark tunnels of adulthood. ‘She brushes against me all the damn time. And why’s she always hanging around while I’m exercising?’ He shrugs his shoulders, a Not-even-God-can-help-my-sexiness shrug, and simpers. ‘Someone must be regularly mounting her – maybe
that fuckface slave of hers – these Bong spinsters can be desperately horny, and entwining with her menial’ll spice it with extra kink – you know, caste ’n all. And she’s wombless, remember, totally hasslefree.’

At Urmila’s heart attack, Shyamanand entreats Chhana to come because he funks; all at once, he’s not certain of his sons. They seem brand-new and alien, in jeans and T-shirts of dubious shades, and articulate a puzzling species of English; whereas Urmila and he had ripened in an earlier, illusorily genial world (in which Shyamanand and his siblings had nested together in parsimony, balefulness and rancour), wherein, mawkish that he is, he reckons that the bonds of family had been sturdier, and parents more revered. To him in his vulnerability, Chhana has at first seemed an unflinching ‘figure from that world, but she disillusions her uncle.

Chhana’ll handle everything, Shyamanand asserts – our meals, the kitchen, the household. Burfi, Joyce and Jamun await the marvel of her proficiency, but it stays undercover for the days of her sojourn. She appears to relish only ambling about the house in a crimson housecoat and her hawaii slippers – smacking them on the floor like wet kisses on a toddler’s jowls – unconcernedly observing others at their chores, puffing away at her Four Squares (though not under Shyamanand’s nose), gawkishly aping Joyce’s manner of speech, imperceptibly annoying everybody. Daily, she bathes for an aeon, and for another brews and soaks up tea. Whenever Shyamanand troubles her for trifles, or what he rates trifles, to make him black coffee, or assist him with his walking shoes, Chhana starts amenably enough, but progresses so torpidly, botchedly – ‘I can’t find anywhere the tea cozy that we use every day, the one with lemon-and-pink spots, but I rummaged about and hit upon another one, green and shabby, so I thought I’d begin the coffee only after verifying with you whether I could use this green . . . ’‘The laces of your left shoe are kind of queer, aren’t they? I don’t quite understand how they can squeeze through these eyelets and also skirt the back . . . ’ – that Shyamanand, exasperated, halts
her midway and grouses at her to call Jamun instead. A few days of Chhana saps him; he’d never have accepted that the years would remould her into a vapid, bumbling stranger. While he observes her push her spectacles above the bridge of her nose to peer better at the muck on TV, the idea twitches within him that the being who riles him the least is Urmila, and she’d all but died. He feels scared.

Three hours after Chhana entrains, Joyce, clenching Doom’s gummy forearm, simpering vacuously as she transits the supine Urmila in the drawing room, departs for Rani’s nest for the weekend.

‘And Jamun? When d’you go back?’

‘Whenever you and Ma wish me to. I’ve already written for an extra month’s leave.’

Neighbours, curious, civil, look in on Urmila. Among them, Mr Naidu the tramper. While his cur sniffs the petrified Revati’s thighs, he gabbles. ‘Pyne’s litter hawked his house last week. The eighth house in my block to be sold this year. Twenty-five lakhs, is the whisper. A profit therefore of nine hundred per cent in one decade. What else could we do – doubtless they must’ve exclaimed. They last showed up in India for Pyne’s final rites – you remember? the newspaper-wala located him outside the WC after ringing and ringing for the clearance of his bill.’

‘Pyne’s eldest daughter met Burfi or Jamun somewhere, and declared that they needed the money much more than their father’s house.’

‘So Pyne’s clod of earth has now been ceded to the developers. They plan to raze the entire house and erect on that plot a four-storey block of eight dolly apartments, each of which will cost ten lakhs. However does the Corporation tick such plans? Pyne was a refugee too, one of us. He could stay just four months in the house that he built. Eighth house in my block this year – like the crust beneath you’d loosened itself, become an island, and the tides were gliding you and your home out to the sea lanes – that’s how I feel. When we raised our houses here, we’d only the sea, the fishermen and these sapless sands. The
house itself became a chunk of the family, the newest child.’

Mr Naidu interrupts himself to perfunctorily dissuade his hound from thrusting his muzzle up Revati’s sari. Revati continues to appear to be transfixed. Mr Naidu runs on, ‘When I stayed with my daughter in Munich, I’d once in a while telephone my deserted house here, just to listen to the distant burr of the instrument – next to the stairs on our scrapped dining table – and I’d hear the burr-burr with the receiver crushing my ear, with the enraptured, encouraging intentness of a parent listening to his infant turn articulate. Sometimes I’d even croon into the phone – how screwballish of me! – “I’m returning to you soon, kiddo!” Those days we had two phones at home – one was from my son’s office, and those slothful buggers’d forgotten to retrieve it. I never rang my son’s office phone, though because the sound of our own, older phone was wondrously sweeter – hushed, well-bred.’ Mr Naidu has thoroughly eructed himself for the time being, and so sighs with toilworn contentment. He then remembers the rest of the cosmos, squints at an abstracted, procumbent Urmila and brays, ‘So? How’s our Pacemaker Madam?’

She responds bemusedly, palpating her collarbone, staring at the ceiling. ‘My pacemaker’s detached itself.’ She pauses to assiduously probe the tract around her collarbone. ‘I can feel it, like a toad underneath the skin, eluding my fingers.’

From which Mr Naidu deduces that he should withdraw
forthwith,
and bounces up from his armchair, alarming his mongrel most of all. ‘Up-shup – c’mon, kiddo! – time to halt your drooling all over this house! Bye then – I’m positive this pacemaker headache’s no great shakes – just a little delicate adjustment required – like catching a radio station.’ He waves to Urmila from the door like a prime minister bidding adieu to his fawners before ducking into an aircraft. At the gate he fashions for Jamun four or five facial expressions of neighbourly solicitude and distaste, perhaps wishing him to choose one; in the final contortion, Mr Naidu rams his sausage-lips against his livid nose and lavatory-brush-moustache, and faintly resembles the
vitals of a lavish humburger. ‘Tell me if you need any help for this pacemaker pickle. A sticky wicket, but you’ve the ’ – Jamun twitches at his startling guffaw – ‘balls to bat! So cheerio, kiddo, grand to see you floating about here and absconding from your post.’

‘Ma, whatever did you spout to Chachacha about your pacemaker? A pickle and a sticky wicket?’ But Urmila doesn’t answer.

She’s dead, intuits Jamun for a millisecond, at which a kind of balm sprinkles his entrails before contrition routs him. But Urmila is breathing, fitfully. Jamun watches her drowse, benumbed by the notion that at her death he’d probably, for starters, taste deliverance. Nothing is godly. They’d continue to shove damaging – at best ineffectual – chemicals into this capacious pouch of senescent skin, only so that it can flounder in this fashion, like an enormous heart. Under their eyes, in their fosterage, she’d crumble into a thing querulous and unrecognizable. What was uncertain was just the tempo of her deterioration. Their love, or tender scorn, would struggle against the fatigued distaste that the alien that she’d slump to would beget. She’d wail for succour, and her heirs would ‘tch’ with exasperation and pretend they hadn’t heard. Their hellishness was even now demonstrated, when the youngest of them fancied his mother dead and, for an instant, felt eased.

‘What’s the matter, Jamun?’

‘Oh, you’re awake. Your pacemaker seems to be distressing Chachacha as much as you. What’s this new nightmare?’

Urmila asks Jamun to palm her upper chest. ‘See, it’s loose, floating about.’ He is extremely unwilling to touch her. Something’ll snap, he is certain, and life will rush out of her as out of a balloon, she’ll shrivel to a scrap of puckered rubber in his hands, because of him. ‘No, Ma, my thumbing it won’t help. I should inform Haldia at once.’ At the evocation of Haldia and his hospital, and that entire exacting routine, dispiritedness shades their features.

Urmila continues ruthlessly to knead her collarbone flesh,
pulling up dollops of it like plasticine, eyes remote in concentration. ‘Stop that, Ma, please!’

‘I’m not returning to Haldia. Revati, water.’

‘What of this pacemaker detaching itself?’

‘Forget it.’

‘Are you sure?’ knowing that her answer will be yes. Of course, he’s unable to forget; at unanticipated moments in that week, remembrance bobs up jubilant, a jack-in-the-box of an adversary, and pesters him with the conviction that he’s ignoring her warning for his own comfort.

She can’t reply with the glass at her lip. At their following consultation with Haldia, she doesn’t initiate the subject. Her cagey responses to the doctor’s perfunctory questions suggest the interrogation of an inept spy in a comedy, but Jamun discerns that she’s truly petrified of being prescribed a reversion to Intensive Care. He suffers with her for a while and then, eluding her eyes, declares, ‘Doctor, my mother’s been murmuring that the pacemaker’s somehow been dislocated. She’s continually massaging and pawing that area – won’t she disarrange . . . ?’ He unfolds her and his anxieties, muddledly. Dr Haldia pooh-poohs and chortles, a crescent of a cackle being doodled on the face of cheese. Urmila is snubbed into an irate quietness. She begins to consult him less often. ‘What’s the point? He isn’t interested in my case any longer. How are we, dear? Aren’t we hunky-dory, dear? Just two hundred rupees, dear.’

‘D’you want to consult some other vet?’

But Urmila seems will-less, not unconcerned, but both afraid and unequipped to decide. So appears the rest of the family. They’re all wary of her affliction, and deport themselves as though they hope that if they ignore her infirmity it won’t harass them anew. Stroking, pawing, massaging the flesh on her pacemaker becomes a solace for Urmila, even a fixation, like the thumbsucking of a nursling. Her left arm is forever up, communing with her collarbone, save when Jamun’s in the room. His presence deters her. Undetected, he once in a way observes her – recumbent, unseeingly eyeing the fan, her left
forefinger gently, ramblingly pirouetting about her collarbone, like a lone figure idling on a skating rink. An eerie peepshow – the waning room, and in it a blurry Revati gliding from cupboard to desk, stashing away clothes, tidying the drawers, pilfering cash. Jamun struggles to conceive how he himself would feel with a cigarette lighter embedded in his vitals, but can’t. He imagines it as a clod in his windpipe that can’t be prodded down. Whatever scampers through his mother’s mind as she reclines and scans the ceiling, hour upon muggy hour? Then Revati notices the voyeur, and reveals him to Urmila by clearing her throat or asking him the time. Urmila’s left hand whips back to her side, like some bloodsucking reptile rattled at its feeding. Jamun waits, irresolute, and at last slouches into the room, embarrassed, smirking vacantly, befuddled time after time that his mother has to be cautioned of his approach, and by a downright stranger, as though he were the menace. Yet who could one upbraid, since time helter-skeltered everything?