The Last Burden (19 page)

Forty minutes later. ‘So hallo, how are we – my, we’re looking tip-top, aren’t we, my dear . . .’ The pockets of Dr Haldia’s ivory safari suit are patterned like fish scales.

He checks Urmila’s pulse and blood pressure, and drivels away. ‘My, our heart is like a GDR gymnast’s, solid enough to bounce over the Berlin Wall . . . Appetite, digestion no bother? . . . Your piles shouldn’t . . . sleeping well? . . . Can you please hold back that cub from raking through my medicines? . . . Thank you . . .’

Jamun answers several of the doctor’s questions, because Urmila often prevaricates to evade admonition. ‘No, Doctor, she hasn’t dropped table salt yet. She only declares that she has. The phial of special potassium salt that we bought over a month ago hasn’t been opened yet. I try now and then; she reasons, why should I deprive my taste buds in my last days . . . No, she isn’t sleeping on any hard bed, her mattress instead is like a roly-poly woman, brimful of some sap . . . What, without
pillows? She uses three . . . Exercise? Ma? Exercise! She hasn’t shuffled out of the house since she returned from Intensive Care, six weeks now . . .’

Urmila remonstrates, but perfunctorily, because inwardly she gladdens at Jamun’s motherly, finical grousing. To her it connotes that he cherishes her. ‘What bunk. I lie in bed because I need to rest. And my eldest son calls me Kumbhakarna.’

Dr Haldia giggles obligingly and slides his stethoscope about her back like a vacillating reptile. Jamun wishes to underline the point. ‘Ma’s shown no zeal, Doctor, to recover. You can’t contradict that, Ma. Your entire day’s laid out in this creepy drowsiness in your twilight room. Whenever anyone unbolts a door, or tugs the flush in the loo, or dials a telephone number, you in your cot shudder and twitch, as though suffering a vision, and murmur, or sigh, “Who? Who’s that?” without straining for a reply.’

At such moments, he feels that his mother has floated up from the dead, only to mutter gibberingly. Yet this impression, like several others of his, is more whimsical than accurate. For Urmila, time and time again, also discloses a mindfulness that jolts him. From her bed she’ll, for instance, ask, ‘Jamun, please check the kitchen chart and tell me when our gas cylinder arrived. Because in the last week I haven’t, even once, heard on the road the plunk and clang of the gas delivery cart. I’m certain their supply’s packed up for the millionth time. That cook’ll sulk and grumble when we wheedle her to use the kerosene stove instead. We’d better book our cylinder in good time.’

Jamun is startled by these minor, yet revealing, instances that establish that Urmila’s senses are finely attuned to the world beyond her mind, her person, her room; in those balmy, early-November afternoons, she’s the only one who misses the everyday sounds that don’t reach her, and correctly reads its import. But Jamun is also certain that in the weeks of rest after her heart failure, she’s been bewitched by inactivity. Her relish for the agreeable activities of her past shrivels, then vanishes. She does potter about in the kitchen to make tea, slowly forage through
her trunk for the bric-à-brac that yanks up some slivers of her past, compose incomprehensible letters of grievance to the Municipal Corporation against the scavengers of the locality – but not with her previous, or any, vim. Ludicrous, but true, for instance, that her tea, once an occult, heady blend, brewed with almost Japanese attentiveness, now has lost its savour. Her inertia is eerie, and darkishly suggests to Jamun that stir, the flurry of the lives of Burfi and Joyce, is vital only to bury the vanity of the hours, that existence can be rated a gift only when the impotence lurking beneath all action is accepted.

‘We must begin a short stroll every morning, starting tomorrow. That’s crucial. We must also meet more frequently. We are not cronies who gather once a month for bridge.’ When they’re at the door, Dr Haldia suffixes, not looking up from his desk, in a pitch outrageously casual, ‘Ah . . . Mr . . . Will you wait a second, please? . . . No, only you . . .’

Haldia’s consulting room has no cobwebs or smudges on its citrine walls. No matter where, Jamun always, unpremeditatedly, matches the room he chances to be in with those of their own house – for cleanness, for taste, warmth. Haldia presumably paid hundreds to some cocksure lackeys to empty the wastebaskets in good time, to clear teacups with treacly dregs off his table, to spot that the curtains ought to’ve been laundered weeks ago, to swab the flyshit off the fans. Would he’ve preferred such a room to be his own? With its burr of airconditioning and room-freshener-air? Jamun’s questioned himself thus in a thousand rooms, and has always responded with a no; he’s richly maudlin about the house that his parents’ve raised. He’s lived with them in it for long, and their pride in their possession – for whatever it is – in their affixture on their mote of earth – has sidled into him as irresistibly as his past has soaked into the cupboards and the blotches in the whitewash, like winter benumbing one’s bones; the house has not affected his brother so. Whenever he quizzes himself whether he covertly prefers other houses and rooms to his own, he feels sweetly sinful, as though in a fuzzy way, he’s being false-hearted,
unfilial; each such occasion overhauls his affection for all that’s his own.

In fact, he can’t even
see
himself tenanting a room as aseptic as Dr Haldia’s. He’s been fostered in, and so has become habituated to, has even, in a way, grown to cherish, this household world of bedraggled counterpanes, speaker tops so dusty that his finger doodles on them the serpentine courses of caravans across a desert, askew picture frames, lamps with fused bulbs, switch-boards with missing screws, clocks with dissynchronous faces, all out of time, walls that are canvases for the exploratory pastelry of burgeoning nephews, last year’s newspapers yellowing in knolls underneath the stairs. Unlike Burfi, he’s never hankered to inhabit the gloss of the rooms in an ad for distemper.

‘Your mother’s pacemaker batteries are leaking. I thought you should know. Of course, the patient mustn’t be told.’

After a pause, Jamun, ‘What does that mean? Isn’t the pacemaker working?’ His very first reaction is that Kuki, by dumping on them for twenty thousand rupees a dud pacemaker, has avenged himself too prodigally for Jamun’s having once dubbed him a fucking beefeater.

‘Now, we mustn’t harass ourselves. When next you come, we’ll examine her again, meticulously. Shall we put off our assessment till then?’

‘Why did the fucker blab to me, Kasturi, if he isn’t certain? What am I to
do
with the news? Tell Baba and observe his befuddlement? If I check with Kuki, he’s sure to fib to shield himself. He’ll assert that Haldia’s mistaken; he’ll then coax that testicle to concede that he is. After all, they’ve been accomplices in business for ages. Hence next week Haldia’ll profess that the pacemaker’s running tip-top, that this evening’s diagnosis was half-ripe.’

‘If the pacemaker’s packed up, your mother’s too feeble now, I guess, for a second operation – for a replacement.’

‘A third. Before this pacemaker shambles, Haldia’d slashed her piles off. Perhaps we should call in another quack. But even for that, I’ll have to confide in Baba.’

‘You look as though you’re going to eat here. Tell me, because then I’ll scramble together an extra something. There’s practically nothing in the fridge.’

‘And all but no one in the house. If we can stash away your grandfather in the fridge, I could show you what I really want to eat. Isn’t that a response worthy of the smuttiest adolescent?’

‘And since when haven’t you been that, sweetie? “Sweetie” is what my sister’s new boyfriend calls her. He’s bloodcurdling. D’you remember BF and GF? In our nonage? I was ardent about widening your mind, whammed down on you all kinds of books – potboilers, antinovels, opuses – but you doted only on Ring Lardner. Remember?’

‘But your husband was for starters to’ve hitched up with your younger sister, no? At least, so your grandfather’d worked out. Queer how things ripen. He couldn’t endure your sister’s jabber, leered at you instead, and you peeled off your panties – you’d mooched about long enough with Heidegger and Max Weber.’

Kasturi’s lips curl with minimal mirth. ‘What stakes, please, that you’ll start your pawing in ten minutes?’

Jamun stares at her from the verandah door, but she shuns his eyes. ‘Why didn’t you hold on, last year, when I proposed that we marry just after my parents die?’

For minutes the lull of recollected discomposure. He dawdles about the room, recapturing a white-hot afternoon, eleven summers ago, in this same room, when he’d gawkishly, naked, lain down in Kasturi’s warm arms and had shammed that he’d tumbled and entwined with other women before. With his face weltering in the fleeciness beneath her ear, in the balm of the expectant, susceptible skin of her throat, the heat from her riven lips, ravished by the ecstasy with which her thighs’d scissored his hips in an intuitive, immemorial rhythm, bewildered by the notion that the miracle was actually, truly befalling him – him with his spectacles and womanish haunches – he’d, all at once, been stupefied by a thankfulness to her that’d felt like a double dose of molten blood in his forehead, and all over him, just
underneath his skin. In his gratitude, the delirium of which’d waned with the shrivelling of his rut, he could’ve attempted anything, flagrant, infernal, to laud the bewitchment of the coffee-with-milk dunes of her body; could’ve bedecked her pudenda, tongued her leavings.

Later, languorous, he’d taken in the new world. The same four-poster had then faced the windows; the curtains’d been prettier, bleached-blue with flecks of white. The fan had gone off. Emboldened, he’d rolled over and tasted the sweat on her throat.

‘I remember how you ducked my questioning. By citing Isaac and Rebecca. Slickly flipped the subject into the absurd. Is she gaga? Why the fuck does she connect with the Bible all the time?’ At the remembrance he snickers like a ham, blood-andthunder blackguard. ‘And Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent, and took Rebecca, and she became his wife: and he loved her: and Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death. When you quoted that through your fake sniggers, you actually jolted me. Maybe she does believe that only after my mother snuffs it will I itch for another woman. Perhaps that’s how I register with other people – as though always groping about for an udder to nurture me.’ He halts in front of her, seated, with ramrod spine, on the bed, abdomen overblown, hard, like a mammoth globe. ‘Why don’t you lie down, Kasturi? Please?’ He’s taut with misgivings and hunger.

She simpers uneasily, rises from the bed like a beast of burden, murmurs, ‘Don’t be foolish,’ and, with her heaviness, shambles towards the verandah. ‘And the Lord God said, Jamun, it is not good that the man should be alone: I will make him an help meet for him. I’ll have to station verses from Genesis between us to head you off from knowing me. Tch, you don’t look a bit tickled. Why don’t you marry, Jamun? Since you’ve been so solicitous for your parents and their sentiments, beseech
them
to pick a Mrs for you, so that you don’t have to wait for them to croak before you can, as my husband says, get vour sex on tap.’

They shuffle out to the verandah. The night gusts from the sea trace them among the highrisers.

‘Shall we run up to the roof? Ogle at the stars and listen to your unseemliness?’

Among the forgotten junk and TV aerials of a hundred apartments, they share the stump of a lychee pudding. He watches her spoon pudding into her yawning mouth. ‘Since when’ve you begun using your right hand for anything?’ She’s the most lefthanded creature he’s ever met. He’s never been able adequately to reason to himself why he’s so extraordinarily charmed by her sinistrality. A warmth ruptures in his belly when he watches her do the most commonplace things – scrawl a telephone number down, brush her teeth, draw the curtains – only because she uses her left hand.

In an irregular line, in the bottom inches of a curtain of patchy blue-black, nod the motes of light from the tankers and liners too mammoth for anchorage in the harbour. A mettlesome breeze, and haphazard halfhearted stars. Traffic easing along hundreds of feet below like ants with torches, other overnight highrisers prodding the sky like the monumental, upraised arms of the contentious and dispossessed bawling for a chunk of the sun. Jamun banks himself against the parapet and inspects the vertiginous drop. ‘Say something viperous, Kasturi, now that my mood’s mending.’

She giggles and, from the back, enfolds him, lolling her head against his shoulderblade. ‘Can’t we be friends and enjoy a radiant relationship?’ She sniggers again. ‘Jamun.’

‘Does Genesis have any of those? Male and female soulmates who don’t hump? Unlikely.’ He revolves to confront her. His rut has whimsically attenuated to a dryness against himself. Inwardly snickering, in a manner abashed, he deduces that he isn’t going to mount anyone other than his matronly Kasibai, that he should hence return to her swiftly, that he should bear himself more charitably with her, in particular because he possesses no one else. ‘Your Genesis is pretty ravening and queer, isn’t it? You thwacked it on my head, hissing, read, pore over,
evolve your psyche, its passions are most Asian. So I waded through it, and was overpowered, out and out, by the hard porn and the way-out dollops of fornication, harlotry, defloration, gang bang, buggery, pederasty, incest and bestiality. Wow, who doesn’t, in the Bible?

‘But its soul is not a bit Asian, I remember cavilling to myself; we – the humans I know – aren’t like that in the least. Malevolent familial discord, the totally capricious, arbitrary conduct of kinsmen towards one another, one parent whimsically favouring one child, brother versus brother without any cause other than a communal blood – Esau and Jacob, Abel and Cain, Lot and his daughters – quite flummoxing. If we’d inhabited that world, Kasturi, and I’d there mooted to you that we marry just after my parents die, you, in the span of two verses, would’ve diced them up and whirled me off to bed, where you’d’ve commenced knowing me. Or if you’d married another, the dreadfully knotted life of this marvel in your tummy’ – he palms her – ‘of course hatched in possessed heat while your husband was away, would be vaticinated by the direst omens – black falcons tittering and crunching off the heads of infants, that sort of stuff. Aren’t we much gentler than those patriarchs of the Pentateuch, more tolerant, and less sexy?’