The Last Burden (24 page)

Shyamanand awakes some two hours after, a little before dinner. Yes, he swallowed two Calmposes at four in the afternoon. Because Kishori, Aya’s chum, and the libertine of the sewers, showed up, out of the blue, purposing to cadge a loan and a meal off her. That she’d been shunted to a hospice a few weeks before frustrated him acutely. He exposed his desperation by even trying to sponge some cash off Shyamanand; Shyamanand instead reviled him with terrific vigour, calling him, in passing, a rapist and a low-caste gigolo. Kishori, nettled, in turn snarled and threatened him. Kishori
was
a frightening figure, cadaverous, maroon-mouthed, in a buttonless shirt that flaunted the fuzz on his chest and forearms, yellow-eyed. Shyamanand bolted the door and spied from behind the window curtains.

‘And how’s that ratnagarbha? Is her womb still spawning pus and faeces?’ Thus, Kishori also yawped his rage at the absent Urmila for a minute, narrates Shyamanand, and then scrawled his choler on the wall before shoving off.

‘Ratnagarbha? Why should that fucker call Ma ratnagarbha? Doesn’t it mean, one whose womb has – well – spawned jewels? Sounds far too elegant a word for that sonofabitch.’

An ineffable adjustment in the countenances of Shyamanand and Urmila, like the passage of a shadow; a shift of the eyes from one innocuous object to another, from the rice ladle to the bangles on Urmila’s wrist. ‘It’s a name for me,’ she divulges lukewarmly, ‘that Belu coined in a letter, after you two’d been born. Aya must’ve told her Kishori about it.’

‘Odd that I’ve never heard ratnagarbha before, of you, from anyone.’

‘You shouldn’t’ve gulped down two Calmposes.’ Urmila swivels to Shyamanand to shift to what to her, presumably, is a graver subject. ‘That Kishori can’t be priced that high. Particularly since you’ve given up that bald quack’s medicines. You shouldn’t have, you know, not without consulting – or at least telling – him. While you were asleep, both Jamun and I noticed how sort of black you’ve become, as though your blood is clotting. Why don’t you meet Haldia or someone else with these new symptoms?’

‘Tchhah. Symptoms? Of what?’ Even Shyamanand sounds glad to sidestep the discussion on Kishori. ‘I’m perfectly fine. That pill that Haldia’s prescribed – Pulsantin? Punsaltin? or whatever – costs two rupees per capsule. Six rupees a day! Just for a fortnight, he chirps at me at every visit, but I’ve been bolting three of those every day for months now. And to what end? As for my darkening, you two’ve never heard of a tan or what? I slog for two hours every morning in the garden, in the sun, not that you two’d’ve noticed. You want me to call in Haldia for an anti-suntan lotion or something? No, enough of his bloody cupidity. I can cure myself, thank you, when next my BP bounces up to the moon.’

After dinner, Shyamanand submits afresh to the effect of the Calmposes and returns to bed. Urmila and Jamun loll in the easychairs in the verandah. Jamun sips a post-dinner whisky. Not that he particularly wants a nightcap, but he’s seventeen. On his sojourns, Burfi has initiated the custom, which Shyamanand and Urmila’ve been too elated with his presence to cavil against, of smoking and tippling under the eyes of his parents, a practice to which he’s also invited his younger brother, for in numbers lies strength when a taboo is being circumvented – and on Burfi’s departure, Jamun has continued the custom, the only way, really, of consolidating a concession.

He is still a little perplexed by the events of the day. The visit of a measly wraith of one’s yesteryears does not warrant two Calmposes, certainly not with the obdurate, cold and sardonic Shyamanand. Very likely, muses Jamun, the actual significance
of the day’s happenings, of which Shyamanand and Urmila are more than aware, is snarled in that hunk of their past that he does not know. Just then, Urmila astounds him by asking him for a cigarette.

‘Boy. Boy! Are you sure? . . .’ He gawps at her hold and light the cigarette, and exhale smoke alternately through mouth and nostrils, most seasonedly. ‘I’m stunned. Is this your method of getting even with me for boozing in your presence? I’m also hugely impressed, especially by the manner in which you crinkle up your eyes against the smoke . . . Exquisitely wrapt-in-far-off-philosophic-thought . . . You could revolutionize the Marlboro ad . . .’ But beneath his chaff, he
is
startled. His mother puffing away is as jolting an image as that of his parents entwined in passion. Yet he can’t accept that her smoking is the upshot of the anxiety of Kishori’s visit.

‘I’m worried,’ begins Urmila all at once, ‘about your Baba, about his health. Now that I’m padding off to spend two weeks with Burfi, I’m even more disturbed. Your Baba started consulting this Haldia just about three months ago, didn’t he? You should remember,
you
brought the news that a posh clinic’d opened up overnight beside the flyover to Dost Garden. Kuki’s mother recommended Haldia too. Well, in the last few weeks, that fat vet seems to’ve crammed your father with the
world’s
medicines – three capsules in the morning, two at lunch, four tablets at bedtime. Haven’t you marked a change in him, a strangeness more than a change? These marathon walks twice a day, that brutal digging and pruning in the lawn for hours in the sun, the gawkish efforts at housewifery, to clean up his cupboard, his room – just where’s your Baba tapping his vigour from? He’s never, in the twenty-five years that I’ve endured him,
never
revealed a chip of his present energy. His most characteristic, his
instinctive,
pose has been supine, browsing through junk in scant light, with his mind on other things. So whatever has Haldia been packing into him?

‘Two or three days ago, your father suddenly left off gobbling these pills, stopped
all
of them, without even telling that crook!
He asserts that he’s nauseated by this dependence on medication, and by Haldia’s manner, that he wants to heal himself with self-reliance – the sort of trash that overfills the wits of those with time on their hands, like the retired. But the true reason, I think, is that he adores his petty cash too intensely to spend it even for his own wellbeing.’

‘Has Baba changed after he stopped his pills? Become less energetic or something?’ Questions just to keep Urmila going, to assure her of the attentiveness of her audience.

She doesn’t respond for so long that Jamun peers at her in the dark, fancying that she hasn’t heard. He begins to repeat the questions when she speaks, passionlessly. ‘I must confide in someone, because I’m scared. Had Aya been here, I would’ve conferred with her. I wish she was with me now. I miss her – the woman’s talk. Will you understand, or will you gibe me – in your smugness and your insobriety? In the last three weeks, your Baba, with his unprecedented pep, has tried to sleep with me five times.’

A sensation, like a groundswell, traverses Jamun’s skin, seemingly from left wrist to the brink of the right shoulderblade. ‘He hasn’t touched me for eighteen years. We haven’t gone to bed in the same room since you were conceived.’ She exhales dejectedly. ‘Had Burfi heard this, he’d’ve broken in with, “Quite naturally. The birth of a baby with Jamun’s looks should daunt any couple from all further tupping. ”’

Quietness, for a time. The sounds of night, of restful laughter from behind a wall, the malcontent honking of thwarted traffic, the nasal hum of mosquitoes on the prowl. ‘I was – I am – very frightened. When he sidled into my room at eleven at night, and I drowsy, yet fretful at the speed of the ceiling fan – minutes, whole
minutes
before I understood what he wanted. When he perched on the frame of the bed, and I finally realized, I felt as though I’d budged to the rockingchair by the window, and was rocking and gaping – from there – at Baba and me, bitter, incredulous.’

The most fanciful notions careen about in Jamun’s skull,
ricocheting off one another with the delirium of a squash ball in play. For an instant he suspects that Urmila, pricked by her hatred and spite, has trumped up the tale; next, that her fantasy, spawned by her repression and her hankering, has scrambled with the real life till she’s mistaken one for the other. But what she’s recounted, to him it seems, just can’t have occurred. His mind cannot conjoin Shyamanand’s stately, silver-domed mien and the notion of a tense, stubborn penis; neither can he conceive his mother’s nakedness. Other lumber, too, hustles his wits: what positions’d they copulate in? In her menopausal state, they wouldn’t need condoms, or would they? However would his cheeks and chin nestle in the crook of her shoulder? Would the ruts of a lifetime on her face dissolve in the tenderness of coition? Jamun tries to make out his mother’s expression in the gloom. But she’s speaking again. ‘The last time was three nights ago, the one you spent God knows where. So now what? I’m not even sure whether capsules
can
galvanize you like this. It’s distasteful, somehow – this artificial boost. And it’s possible that your Baba’s done with those pills out of repugnance, because they roused him to touch me.’

Jamun discerns in her outpouring a kind of exhilaration at the idea that, despite his conduct for over two decades, Shyamanand actually needed her, even physically. A tincture of devilry as well, in her disclosure of such intimacies.

The verity of which, he knows, he can never confirm from Shyamanand, not because he’d be too embarrassed, or his questions singularly ludicrous (‘Is it true that you sweated to get it up last night?’), but because when Shyamanand denies Urmila’s assertion, and one parent is thereby shown to be a liar, Jamun’s pity would seesaw between Urmila’s crumpled face and Shyamanand’s gagged silence till it brewed with the rage of impotence; and he’d once more be embroiled in the exhausting business of taking sides.

Even in his late teenage, he is, now and then, disconcerted that he feels for his parents a love that is only the tenderness of remorse, just a sorrow, a shame at their unhappiness. His
affection for them is in fact pity, yet he also believes that it’s truer than Burfi’s thoughtless, fitful attachment. Concomitantly, Jamun presumes, unspokenly, that
he
is his parents’ darling, their heart’s-blood.

He’s certainly awakened in them much less disquiet than Burfi, has demanded less of them. Just a few rupees a month from Shyamanand – for his train pass and his cigarettes. Urmila he hardly ever pesters for money – perhaps because the collegiate Burfi’d cadged off her nonstop – and in any case, her salary’s gobbled up by the house – by the cook’s wages and the gas cylinders. Whenever Jamun needs a little extra, he touches Shyamanand, who always coughs up – always lukewarmly – but always; in part because Jamun’s requirements tend to be reasonable, in part because Shyamanand’s post-retirement gratuity has been considerably more than anticipated. The windfall’s even goaded Jamun to suggest that Shyamanand could fork out a chunk of it towards paying off Urmila’s decades-long debts.

‘Don’t show off your birdbrain when you don’t know the facts. Once this house was built and I had the cash, how many times’ve I probed your mother for the details of her indebtedness? “Just tell me how much you owe to whom.” But she’s wilfully refused, for years. If my money, ten thousand rupees of it, is to be used to settle your mother’s borrowings, haven’t I a right to know to whom she’s hocked herself over the years, in front of whom she’s derogated herself? But no! She resists infuriatedly! I must lavish on her the ten thousand with no questions tacked on. I didn’t give her the cash, she screeches, when she needed it the most – for milk, Calmpose and the electricity bill! – so how dare I quiz her on her loan sharks? Idiotic, mulish woman. She doesn’t want me to discover that she has, in her time, wheedled in front of Aya for pittances, and perhaps in front of Aya’s lovebird Kishori too. The illiterate peons in her office have doled out to her, and some of her subordinates also – all at preposterous rates of interest. They snickered at her – nonstop
–
for being such a shoddy housewife,
such a crummy manager of her money, and at me too they must’ve sniggered, for God knows how she vilifiea me to them.

‘But your mother is masochistic. She craves to feel persecuted, harrowed – it’s her way of tugging at attention – look, everybody! My husband’s so unpleasant, so miserly, that I’ve to beg and borrow from the lumpen just to keep body and soul together. The one defence that I can pick out for your mother’s conduct is that with so much heartache in this world, it
is
better to be masochistic.’

Jamun watches Shyamanand’s features glow to enunciate the words of scorn. Disparagement is always much easier to voice. The pity that his father touches off in Jamun is rarer and stronger than that provoked by Urmila. Now and then, he’s affected by it altogether independently of any utterance, demeanour, gesture or act of his father, when what moves him is a nebulous, ineffable sensation of the beggarliness of existence, the web of a shabby life – as when he drops in on Shyamanand at his office and sees him behind his desk, a silver-haired, distinguished head behind a tiny desk, unnoticed in the hall of ten inconsequential civil servants; at other times too, when Shyamanand disappoints him – when Jamun, for instance, pumps him for enlightenment on the most piffling matter, and Shyamanand concedes his inability to supply it – even on those occasions, Jamun’s disappointment is more compunction, a hazy gentleness, than disenchantment.

As when, at the disgruntled age of twelve, he encounters Radhakrishnan in his textbook of English essays. ‘Oof. Bastard. Why’s he so bloody shitty? Baba, what does ‘‘putative” mean? And “pheno” . . . “phenomeno” . . . “phenomenal”?’

‘I don’t know, Jamun. Why don’t you look up the dictionary?’ In his own way, Shyamanand too has mapped out the fosterage of his children. They must, in due time, learn to be fittingly independent in all matters, even to stumbling on the delight of themselves unearthing the meaning of words.

‘You sure you don’t know? Would be much easier than opening a bloody dictionary.’

Shyamanand fibs only on exceedingly rare and what he considers crucial occasions. ‘No, both the words seem new to me. What were they . . . puta – what? . . . You’ll’ve to rouse yourself to reach that Chambers. Always better to, you know, can be certain then.’