The Last Burden (2 page)

‘She should strip. Peel herself of her clothing, blindfold herself in white, brace the remaining son on her shoulders – the last burden – I presume that she’s strong and sexy – and stride out for an interminable walk. She’s almost free.’

Then in the air the remote, namby-pamby siren of the Municipality, tipping off its taxpayers that the river is ascending. The embryonic moon, the springtide, the exuberant rain, and the town lying in a hollow – so the waters ascending. ‘Crocodile time,’ says Hegiste. A yarn of the town, that in another decade the spate had jettisoned a baby crocodile of the salt flats into the gynae hospital, and that its daddy had shadowed it, in quest. But the flood alert doesn’t faze the traffic one bit. The auto-rickshaws continue to squirm through, like
flitting lifers ducking flak. Their hooters are ear-detonating whistles, catscratches on the eardrum.

In the verge beside the liquor den, a girl and maybe her younger brother play frisbee. The girl is in salwaar kameez and runs about crabbedly but blithely. The boy likes missing the frisbee and darting after it with weak squawks.

The oldies, cordially tipsy, loll in the courtyard amidst the enormous moss-green leaves. Mrs Hegiste’s grandfather – gums, baggy chest skin, yellow-and-white-striped drawers with a front pocket – says hello and checks out Jamun’s mother.

‘She’s in Intensive Care with a heart attack. Numb.

Jamun and Mrs Hegiste’s grandfather are chums, although Jamun fathoms his speech but poorly. His nose is even, but the rest of his face has slumped. Desiccated skin and cannonball knees. He wiggles his finger at a neighbouring antique and warbles (so Jamun hears), ‘Bong suitcase leapfrog in Africa.’ Jamun beams at him. They now and then rust together in Hegiste’s verandah and observe the crabs. The grandfather has onetime told him (or so Jamun got hold of). ‘You are good. You must visit
me
and not always only Satyavan. If you don’t come and visit me, then I’ll visit you!’

‘Your mother will not be taken.’ Fossil eyes with capillaries like red-hot webbing. ‘For where in the womb of time will she meet with another son like you?’ The other wrinkled lushes amen.

Daybreak, the tint of ashes. The impatient honking of lorries at the liquor joint – truckdrivers topping up and laying in for their stretched day’s journey into the shadows of the next dive – disturbs Jamun’s frightful nightmare, the rubble of which nevertheless rattles him all day. Nothing in his perception connects with it, yet its matter seems intimate, and so more frightening.

He is in a kind of rowing boat, closing in on the waterline of a river, or a lake. Everything is in focus, the keen night, the deathliness, the swish and suck of the oars and the water, the hush. Then the clotted ooze of the bank, like phlegm and mud. The lights on the salt knolls loom ice-blue in the moonlight, the
livid white of the tubelights hemming the road pale into the wetlands. Other contours in the boat, intimate yet shadowy. Jamun is wearing his customary clothes, jeans etcetera, and somehow knows that in everyday light the sand will be oystergrey and not brown. (How was he privy to those settings, runs in his head hourly – why had he sensed that on those flats he was no stranger? Perhaps he tacks on some minutiae later, in the discursive light, but the gooseflesh defies the day – he had trodden those sands before; on that ashen alluvium he had not lurched.) Perhaps the hours just before dawning. The two boatmen (Jamun is an extra for that one particular crossing) are of a piece – diminutive, swarthy and rock-hard (like those labourers who transit past his kitchen window at daybreak tea on their route to some sweat-and-blood slog. Jamun observes them over his teacup. Tits of black plastic like large headphones, and eyes stale, absent, with a strain of amber). Jamun and the two boatmen beach, and with the oars start to bludgeon the heads of the others in the boat. The oars are ponderous, and as he pivots and lunges, Jamun slumps in the wallow. His crazed gasps clash harshly with the stodgy thud of wood on forehead bone. None demur, but all look thunderstruck. Jamun knows them all, but for the life of him cannot recapture a sole face in his waking hours. He jets sweat, but the oarsmen are passionless. Next, with the punts they are ramming heads into the ooze, like shepherds mustering a flock, and striving to extricate themselves from the talons of frenzied arms. The heads struggle up again and again, about six or seven of them, less than ten at any rate. Their features are veiled, but the victims are indeterminately rural, in dhotis and short saris. The boatmen have butchered before – their looks, as deadpan as their biceps, are witness – but whether Jamun too has been so hellish, and whether he has commissioned them, is not plain. Do the heads all scuttle? But he is swarming up a sandbank hand over fist, a precious few feet, white with panic, as though one of the heads has hinged itself to his leg like an auxiliary knee. Steps, inexpertly incised in the mud. He senses gore on his person,
manifest to all but himself, on his shirt front and chin, like milk from an upended cup at the lip. On the knoll (is the sand hump by the river artificial, a boneyard?) is a cottage, and a splendent sulphur light from a box-like verandah, tiny and featureless, of perhaps a Lower-Income-Group flatlet. A door creaks into a newish and characterless bathroom – but Jamun is positive that underfoot and beneath the tiles and pipes slink the snake and the scorpion. He must scour himself, but which portion most feverishly his terror cramps him from tracking down. And then a female frame at another door, somewhere, in a transparent dress, with a rank and succulent thatch full up to the navel, and she grimaces, and he tries to hide. Then the truck horns hit upon him at the end of a warm, flesh-pink tunnel and yank him out to the slate and steel before sunrise.

He opens his eyes and tastes an illimitable and opulent easing which stills him for most of that third day. Yet quick as thought, he time after time experiences his hands weighted with oars whamming heads into pap, and is rattled by the sleep that can spawn such bogeys. Complicity and fright squawk in his brain – these ogres of randomness and he must connect somewhere, in some hoop, for otherwise how did they slink past his forehead?

But to Mrs Hegiste in the afternoon, when he goes down to phone, he merely chinwags. He dials a clear line quite soon. ‘Burfi? Jamun. How’s she?’

No tangible alteration. She has groaned once or twice, and threshed her head about in some iceberg world, but her pulse has not steadied. Burfi sounds distrait and ineffably rushed, as though the exchange with Jamun is stretching beyond forbearance a raving urge to piss. ‘You should know – she in fact died. I mean her heart stopped beating and she was just dead. Then we thwacked her chest like in a roughhouse, and her heart kicked off again – like an Ambassador taxi. We’d determined to give you the details when you came, but you’re so long coming. Baba boohooed like an infant when her heart started up again – his breakdown was a crumb of comfort.’

At the time the attack comes about, Urmila is alone upstairs,
in that jittery slumber particular to mortals on the wane. An inflamed late-August afternoon. Burfi’s elder son Pista returns from school, saunters about the house to circumvent his lunch and the aya, sheds his uniform in a hideyhole which he doesn’t reveal to her until her fury seems authentic enough to menace him just a bit, and pushes on to rouse his grandmother to irk her into dabbling at chess with him. He calls, next hoots into her ear, jerks her. Shyamanand downstairs is hauled out of his fretted torpor by the shrill pinging of a bell. Pista stands hard by him with the bell that is customarily at Urmila’s beside, staidly pronouncing, ‘Thakuma has snuffed it.’ Shyamanand takes unconscionably long to get there. He stares at her and with the first spasm feels as though, somehow, an ice-cream sky with tendrils of chilled cloud has ambled into the room. With his right fist he bludgeons and pounds her heart, the bile of panic vaulting with each thump. He then slumps on to the floor and breaks down. Pista could never have conceived his grandfather in that situation. He goggles at his grandmother inhale and wheeze like snorting wheelwork. He is instructed to telephone his parents’ offices. Neither is in. Shyamanand’s tears frighten the boy; he scampers to Aya. Both, after boundless rummaging, exhume Dr Haldia’s telephone number, whose answering service enchants Pista. Shyamanand, run-down on the floor, waits for some being to relent and be benign. Aya brings water and wad for Urmila’s brow. Pista wishes to listen to the answering service again. Aya tramps out for counsel from her neighbourhood comrades. A timorous Pista dogs her. Shyamanand watches the water drip from the wad into the ashen hair that camouflages the ear, the rictus mouth, the slate skin at the temples, the gashes on either side of the mouth scored by exhausted time, the crescents of ivory where the unseeing eyes lurk beneath the lids, the penduline skin at the throat, the disordered sari, the naked gasping, the wasted, scissioned hands, the pewter-and-burgundy bangles. He trembles with helplessness and almost craves to be in her position where doubtless this exhaustion would not harrow him. He has not the
self-mastery to rise from the floor. Two sons and a bloody daughter-in-law – but where are they now?

‘Burfi. Are you high? You sound strange.’ Jamun is mindful that they have already expended ample long-distance time on Mrs Hegiste’s telephone.

A tee-hee, discomposing. ‘Baba and I have squabbled, so what’s new. This afternoon Joyce had almost agreed to look in at the hospital, but he carped, it isn’t proper to send her, I should go in her stead, Ma at this hour should not be girdled by outsiders, by Christians who do not care for her, even in these circumstances don’t her sons rank her worth their time – his usual drivel, but so untimely in this wretchedness that I – well – let fly.’

Jamun is fearful. Burfi has always been hot-tempered, and in his tizzies has ever so often flattened out only other people’s belongings. But his essence, his marrow, is buoyancy, and he ordinarily inclines to break with the past. He is in this manner distinct from his father.

At their last booze bout, on his birthday, Burfi, sozzled legless, has stretched out a hand towards a disinclined Joyce, and blazoned, ‘I don’t hanker after a single breath of my past, not a sole second.’

Nobody heeds his words, or so it seems, until some prattle later, Shyamanand without warning says, ‘Why should you be hungry for your past, you who like a darling pet has been tutored to forget?’

Urmila, strained and miserable, has lain down betimes, to writhe and twitch on the bedlinen till morning, as is her custom. Shyamanand thinks ill of drinking, yet is intent on brightening a birthday with his sons. Tippling at least congregates them. Otherwise for days he doesn’t come upon them at all, scarcely sights them as they bundle off to and fro office, or some errand, or scurry downstairs in the mornings for the newspaper.

The geniality dissolves at Shyamanand’s remark. Joyce shifts to wooden and quits the room. Jamun bides equably for Burfi to cut up rough before following her. Burfi’s face stales. He
crinkles his lips and glowers, circumventing other eyes. ‘You’ve again squashed our spirit, our good humour by your rottenness.’

‘By saying what’s correct? Why should you languish for your past – your puppyhood and your pubescence? Your wife was no chunk of that.’ Shyamanand’s head wobbles in extravagant disillusion. ‘Underling, bodyservant. Chattel, instructed not to remember.’ He flails out in this style, head to wind, whenever he is tight.

Burfi breathes a squirt of abuse, muted but unmistakable, then trudges upstairs. Jamun smirks to himself, with unwitting guile. The sons are regularly chuffed by the dispraise of their parents, and once in a while stoke it. Jamun says, ‘Now you can let your bile boil over on me.’

So parent and sons chat, shabby to one another without motive or zest. When Jamun plods up to get his spectacles, he overhears Burfi summing up to Joyce, ‘ . . . is past bearing! Inly he’s so misshapen and scrunched up that as a father . . . ’ Burfi decrees thus about once every fortnight.

Joyce declares, ‘Not mad, but mean.’ She half-relishes and half-rouses her husband’s choler against the family, in particular when their boys are listening in.

When Jamun goes down, Shyamanand is loudly reminiscing to the supine Urmila in the adjacent room. He is addicted to sporting with memory. ‘. . . put a sliced egg in each of their tiffins. I wrapped salt and pepper separately, in Britannia Bread paper – Jamun never tried the pepper; in the evenings in his tiffin the tiny wad was all along unopened, but when I discontinued the pepper he was bitterly resentful: Burfi’s tiffin has pepper, why have you denied me mine? Occasionally I salted and peppered the bread-and-butter. I furnished Jamun his lunchbox for roughly a decade. Burfi scorned tiffin when he was about twelve – too old, he said, which actually meant that his contemporaries were ragging him for being so dull as to cart food from home. In place of tiffin, he claimed cash.’

To jolt the chatter on and so to gladden his father, Jamun
asks, It was you? But I somehow recall Ma handing over our tiffins – we bypassing baths and ever so often toothbrushing too, and squelching our hair down by dabbling water on our heads, and she in that first light half-gloomily bellyaching of scant time and little help while cramming eggs and the night before’s dinner into our two Kookwel aluminium boxes. Yes, Burfi mutinied in good time against tiffin, and also stopped recognizing me in school; confessing to a tiffin-chomping, bespectacled sibling was even more embarrassing than being a boy without a father, like Kuki.’ Jamun is on the divan, frolicking with a derangedly overjoyed Doom.

His hush (but Jamun doesn’t mark it) is a statement of Shyamanand’s befuddlement. ‘Your mother?’ he in the end falters. ‘Very well. Excellent.’ He gazes at the convulsed Doom. Jamun is chivvying the child’s yielding, perfumed belly with his nose. ‘Is your memory
that
supple? Your mother made over your tiffin! How can you expunge me in this way? She laid out your breakfasts and uniforms while
I
crammed your lunchboxes.’ As usual, he is dreadfully stung.

‘How does it matter?’ Jamun chortles, boozily. ‘Practise to forget. In our prankish memories, you can’t win over Ma, in spite of your extended ratfight to woo us away from her. You should’ve spawned daughters in our place.’