The Last Burden (22 page)

‘Besides, you’ll be there, Jamun, alongside me when I totter and plod. Can’t I trust you to keep me apart from the shit? After all, what are sons for?’

‘Well, Baba isn’t tagging along with us, if that’s what you mean. Though he should – it’d profit him too.’

Urmila, Shyamanand’s walking stick, Jamun, two gambolling, factious nephews and one cherry-red tricycle. Shyamanand shambles out to the ground-floor, and Aya to the upstairs, verandahs to spectate, root for, and chuckle. Urmila – shrivelled, roundshouldered, befuddled – falters twenty steps to the gate, halts and begins to plead exhaustion, giddiness, twinges in her joints, murmurs in her heart, proximal death. She and Jamun bicker till she starts to snivel; then, peeved with each other, yet muffledly pleased with their wrangling, continue their amble, down the lane, through the wicket in the boundary wall of the housing estate – and thence into the hurly-burly, the snarl, of the hutches of the fishermen.

Scattily mumbling and squeaking her strictures, Urmila, spectacleless yet Argus-eyed, inches past the hovels (of brick, mud, asbestos, pilfered boards, cardboard, canvas, jute sacking, motley flapping polythene, yesteryear’s newspapers) crested by TV antennae, the yawning sewers of rank, pestilential ooze the tint of pus, the scrum of round-eyed urchins, with turgescent tummies and moustaches of snot, frolicking, playing hopscotch, marbles, a sort of cricket, the standby and laidup dinghies, scummy, mouldering, at close quarters disagreeably large and seemingly unwieldy; the fishing nets, their measureless rhomboids of cord somehow resembling a sea of sloughed off snakeskins desiccating in the sun; the paan stalls, all mirror and white tile, like a loo for the villain of a Bombay movie (but with a paan wala in it! – perhaps crosslegged on the commode, with his paan leaves in the sink), whinnying out the trendiest Hindi
boogie-woogie; about the stalls, dawdling, the lotuseater generation, in Ulhasnager Calvin Kleins, painstakingly scruffy, mincing and posturing as though modelling for cigarettes, aftershaves, condoms, shunning till lunch their warrens, their mothers and the chores that’ve been deferred for weeks,’’ clutching, cuddling, squeezing one another’s hands, waists, thighs, arses, genitals, in that lubricity wherein anything will momentarily sate, even a straggling pig, as long as it tussles; the sickly, knackered palms; the yards of washing on the shingle behind the shanties; the squash of housewives in the quagmire around the handpump, scouring puling toddlers who forget to blubber when they spot Doom’s tricycle; the fearsome pong of a billion fish parching on perplexing cement slabs the size of double beds; the stridor of shrewish bickering, of matrons snarling at plastered husbands, of a hundred bicycle bells, the unthinking yawping of dulled hawkers, cubs squealing bawdry and arraigning one another with cheating, the undying Hindi film muzak, which, by the time Urmila fetches up at the hem of the row, has melted into a syrupy ghazal with a timbre whose opulence seems to ooze from the wrinkles between the crooner’s anus and scrotum; then, sensing before feeling on their skins the muggy breeze, they tack with the compound wall to squint at the calloused sands and a steelish sliver of sea.

‘Oof. Some stroll,’ bleats Urmila. ‘I’ll sink into this for just three minutes, try and revive before returning. Oof. Never again.’ She and Jamun subside on to a pink-stone bench on which, over the donor’s mawkish proclamation, has been etched by a zealot: ‘
JESUS IS COMING SOON
’ beneath which has been postscripted by a wag: ‘
TO HELP US CUNTS WHAM PAKISTAN IN CRICKET, AND HOCKEY, AND WAR
’. Pista and Doom, tricycle forsaken, scamper away to gawp at the monkeys jig and whirl; rather, Pista lopes off and Doom wobbles after him, mighty dome and jumbo rump touch and go on his isthmian shanks.

Jamun watches him totter away. Doom’s podgy gawkishness
irrepressibly reminds him of the distresses of his own puppyhood, when he too was derided for ungainliness, for nosediving without reason every five paces, for losing every single scrap that he was baited into, for bawling at all nicks to his body and his heart, for being hopeless at marbles, kiteflying, treeclambering, for being selected for a game always at the butt end, just to eke out a side. Jamun had assumed that Doom would intuitively cling to him, simply because Doom raked up Jamun’s own puppyhood, and therefore in disposition they must be one. He’s rancorously tickled to elicit from the years that tenderness between kin is never instinctive, never just a spinoff of cognation, that Pista and Doom do not adore him out of some fathomless consanguineous sympathy, that fondness – among uncle and nephew, and parent and issue – has to be assiduously fostered, like a dimpled babe on its back, on a fresh sky-blue sheet, ogling its mum and gurgling.

While Urmila natters on, unheeding whether Jamun listens, gratified (though shell never concede it) to lounge in the sun and breeze of a tepid November, he, with a smirk of empathy, observes a maddened Doom frisk about the hem of the knot of slackers around the monkey-man, doing his damnedest to ferret a route through adult hams and adolescent haunches to the epicentre for an eyeful of the cavorters.

Filial love. To bewail its attrition is the singularity in Shyamanand that his sons, times out of number, have smirked at, cocksure that they themselves will never ache likewise, that cognate fondness is passé, outworn, hardly the burden of those who dab their armpits with Halston and encourage an illjudged Americanness to bespatter their enunciation when they converse with all foreigners: ‘. . . Jeez . . . shucks . . . bucks . . . geewhiz . . .’

Show over. The scroungers diffuse across the beach before the monkeys can paw them for a tip. From the dumbshow in the near distance, and from a commonality of experience (by which what befalls Pista and Doom at any sole instant only seems to rerun, in essence, what issued with Burfi and him some
twenty-five years ago), Jamun recognizes that the monkey-man is trying to sweet-talk the brats to scamper across to the bench for a baksheesh for him. Doom, at ease, eyes Pista for guidance in the matter; Pista, recalling his father’s derision of those who kowtow to pestering entreaties for tips, and yet joyously bewitched by the monkey-man’s personality – the witchery of which is his livelihood – simpers witlessly at the universe. Tenderness goosefleshes Jamun as he watches his nephews scoot, and flounder, back to Urmila and him. Will his memory – as wilful as a circumspect cat – salt away this instant of his fondness, this frame of two laughing children haring across nondescript sands, against a shoddy sea, to meet him? Won’t he rather smack his lips over the thousand inevitable instances of their heedlessness, when they’ve been too up-and-doing with living to remember to give tongue to love, have deemed that a grandmother or an uncle will eternally be there to ease the flapping of the heart, have assumed the philanthrope’s bench across a few feet of sand?

Pista of course fetches up first, cherry-red, huffing, touches the victory post of Jamun’s knee, and twirls to boo Doom’s tottering progress – ‘Roly-poly-snaily! Roly-poly-snaily!’ Jamun is quckened to countermine, ‘No, no, don’t listen to him Doomo! C’mon Doomo, you’re really zipping Doomo! Abibe Bekila, Doomo!’ Chortling irrepressibly, breathless, with ecstatic eyes in a carmine face, Doom scuds up to tumble into his uncle’s lap. Jamun cuddles him hard, and nuzzles the warm, plump, talcumed neck. Pista, needled perhaps by this show of love to a kind of neck-and-neck jealousy, disregarding Urmila’s bogus protests against his weight, plonks down and starts to rock on his grandmother’s knee. How piteous Shyamanand and his sons are, reflects Jamun turbidly – with his chin roosting on Doom’s head, palm spreadeagled on the soft child-chest, feeling through the cotton the heart thudding like the diesel engine of a rice mill across miles of field – for nurturing their remembrances of one another on instances not of unprompted affection, but of putative affront – doubtless not wholly putative, which was
even more piteous, that in one’s fosterage, with one’s blood, with whom one is entirely naked, one shows more balefulness than charity, just because with them one is snug, and can be oneself.

The notion didn’t dishearten Burfi in the least. ‘You take any fucker. Any fucker anywhere in the world, he’s secretly vindictive, viperous with his what are called near and dear ones. It’s natural – like shitting once a day if your tummy’s okay. With those we’re completely restful with, in front of whom we can loll and fondle our balls through our lungis – with them we’re time and time again feral, churlish, baleful, till our vitriol pricks us to contrition and pity – which is what tenderness is when untouched by carnality. Libido brews well with loathing, don’t you think, a sort of malevolent rage at the golden body that one hungers for. That’s what I believe, at any rate – we find malignity comfy, we’re rancorous just so we can goad ourselves into love. Thank God for the family. Without it, how could we grapple with the world?’

Flattered that Pista is comfortable on her knee, Urmila, with her shrivelled hands on his back, sighs and continues her natter. ‘Have you read Chhana’s last letter? No? You brothers’ve done with communicating with her or what? It arrived some four days ago. I know that Burfi hasn’t riffled through it, your father refused last night to hand over the letter. “It’s not meant for you, Burfi,” he sneered, “it’s only from a lower-middle-class niece to her lower-middle-class uncle.” Of course Burfi mooched upstairs, quite riled. All this while we were wasting our time and money at Haldia’s. Really, who’s more infantile, your brother or your father? You do remember that rumpus between Burfi and your Baba?’

‘Which of them, Ma? In the past twenty-five years, the rest of us together ve achieved, on an average, one earthshaking and three frivolous wrangles with Baba per week. You and Burfi head the charts, neck and neck. The one about our letter-writing manners was ages ago, wasn’t it, just after Burfi married, when the savour of Joyce’s world seemed to grate him with what he
concluded was the coarseness of his own past.’ Yes, Ma, I remember. We
are
our parents’ sons. If the recollection is ugly, we never forget: we tack it on to the anthills in our minds.

The family’s always written common letters to one another. If from Amsterdam, for instance, Joyce addresses a picture postcard to Jamun, the other inhabitants of the house can rightly suppose that her ‘Wish You Were Here’ is equally meant for them. Burfi writes to Urmila, and Shyamanand replies: ‘Received your letter of 16.4; your longhand’s even more illegible than before . . .’ They unthinkingly slit open one another’s letters when they recognize the handwriting to be parent’s, brother’s, son’s’. Envelopes from acquaintances who are aware of and beguiled by this communion in correspondence are sometimes marked: ‘For Your Eyes Only’. Nobody in the family thinks the quirk queer, leave alone shameful, till Burfi marries, and Joyce, stupefied, gawps at Jamun rip open Chhana’s letter to her husband.

Afterwards, Burfi, plainly goaded by his wife’s derision, strives to expound to his brother how wedlock has refined him. ‘You see, Jamun, people of class simply don’t tear open others’ letters, just as they don’t burp and gurk in public like fetid volcanoes. I’m certain –’

‘People of class? Phew. I’m appalled’ – Jamun is now eighteen, when ‘appalled’ sounds really good – ‘that I’m actually related to someone who can, without flagellating himself like a Muharram freakout, actually use the phrase, “people of class”. Whom do you–’

‘– that none of your soulmates apologizes after belching into your mug, and up your nostrils, perhaps because your face deserves it. But do they even
know
that to burp in front of others is as vulgar as to fart? Bet they don’ Not even that new bomb of yours, Kasturi, that squat one who wants bad. Her eyes become like damp pussies whenever she peeps at me. Have you fucked her yet? Bet she and you suspect that fuck means to burp into each other’s noses without warning. Joyce was zapped – and how fucking embarrassing, that she had to hiss at me, “in the
presence of my friends at least, please don’t belch like a Guinness Book hopeful. Jesus, I feel so goofy proposing to a husband that he burp less, that he finish each eructation with an Excuse me, or Sorry, or something.’’ Would you enjoy hearing that from a wife?

‘Then Joyce has spotted Baba writing postcards to Chhana. Baba’s not exactly her honeybaby, you know. Why doesn’t your father, she asked, use envelopes and inlands? They aren’t – she couldn’t resist suffixing – that prohibitive. She was correct in her raillery – she’s brainier than me anyway. Postcards, burps, to dip into others’ letters, to slip into lungi and sandow vest the instant you return from office, to wear striped string drawers instead of elastic undies, and use homemade STs of discarded sari swatches and newspapers, and two languages for interlocution at home – your own lingo with your parents and their age, English with your own quartet – all, all that we were was so squalidly LMC: the castoff bedlinen for curtains, newspapers for tablemats – I’ve defined for Joyce what we were, how in Bhubaneshwar, repaying the housing society scrunched up Ma’s salary, and month upon month she hocked, pawned, borrowed, to buy her provender. Joyce understood in a wink, she’s really quick-witted’ – asserts Burfi in the besottedness, the early lambency, of his marriage – ‘how we, you and I, hauled ourselves – the family, I mean – out of the ooze, just by making good, so that Baba and Ma, correctly, can show us off, like the first colour TV in the locality.’

Jamun at that age thrills in the origination of discord; so he forthwith recites to Shyamanand that the new Burfi has just declared that his wife’s graces have disclosed to him the shoddy, outrageous lower-middle-classness of his previous avatar. Afterwards, Shyamanand and Burfi squabble halfheartedly, and Shyamanand, for corrupting his firstborn so, notches up yet one more grouse against Joyce, of which there already exist a dozen; when he’s downhearted, lonely, feels untended, overlooked, he reanimates, any one grudge, and consequently declines a rare airing with his grandchildren in Burfi’s Maruti because he
senses that Joyce won’t welcome his presence; or he’s peeved that Burfi hasn’t asked after a recent letter from Chhana, infers that even the shrivelling of his care for his kin is due to his wife’s straddling of his wits, next acquaints Burfi with the arrival of the letter, but does
not
hand it over, maintaining that it’s too lower-middle-class for his wife and him; which doesn’t disquiet Burfi immoderately, for Time’s sedate sledgehammer
does
lame the bonds between kith and kin, but as creatures of the beaten track, he and Shyamanand just can’t permit a chance to bicker to glide by.