The Last Burden (34 page)

Jamun departs two forenoons after the sradh, his skull pallid and cool because of the shaving. Chhana has telephoned from Calcutta to confirm to Shyamanand that she isn’t in the least certain of the ins and outs of the various rites, but trusts that they are all being abided by; in their next letter to her, they enclose a photograph of Jamun, with glabrous cranium, slanting selfconsciously against the wall beside the cactus. Burfi doesn’t razor his head because Joyce has stated that she’ll shudder at seeing him without his hair, because then his ears’ll stick out even more, like bloody trainsignals; so Burfi tells Shyamanand that he truly believes that the woe of bereavement can never be even fragmentarily – and hence shouldn’t be at all – articulated by any symbolic externals.

‘It’ll look odd that of two brothers, one doesn’t perform a rite for his mother, and that too the elder. Chat to Jamun, check if he’s earnest about calling the barber tomorrow morning. Either both should or neither.’

Burfi is surprised by Shyamanand’s counsel, and even more by Jamun’s reaction; he’d rather go through with the shaving, because to him it seems a befitting symbol for starting anew.

‘But it’s okay even with Baba if you don’t – as long as we both do the same thing!’

But Jamun is steadfast and sits the next morning in the barber’s chair at the back of the house, beneath the mushrooming mango tree. The razor scrapes against the virgin flesh of his scalp, and behind it sneak in wafts to titillate the newly exposed skin. The windows of Urmila’s room are open. The sun is good. The sparrows in the mango tree carry on a bedevilled chirruping. A transistor in the neighbourhood yowls out the commentary on some cliffhanging moment in some one-day cricket match. A pliant and pleasing inertness under the barber’s hands. He feels clean and holy. Pista all but starts to bawl with envy when, on his return from school, he sees the new Jamun.
He screeches at Aya when she proposes lunch.

For Jamun, some of the goodbyes are undemanding. Telephone calls in the morning to Kasturi and Kuki, kisses, hugs and waves to Doom and Pista as they (Pista with sandwich in one hand and left shoe in the other) scoot for their school bus, and to Joyce and Burfi some two hours later as they scamper through the gate to Burfi’s office car, each livid with the other for having delayed him/her. Bidding adieu to Shyamanand, however, is somewhat messier.

For one, he looks pretty ghastly this morning – ashen and insecure, and his eyes continually dart away from Jamun’s features like a tongue. ‘Oh . . . So you’re pushing off? . . . Of course you are . . . Have you called for a taxi?’ Jamun touches his father’s feet. Fumblingly, almost tottering on his stick, Shyamanand kisses him on the forehead and the cheeks. His munificent beard tickles his son’s face. ‘You turned up in time for your mother, will you do the same for me? Or will you instead despatch a condolent telegram? . . . You should’ve married while your mother was alive. She’d’ve been jubiliant . . . Don’t forget your bottle of water for the journey.’ He tails Jamun and his travelling bag out to the verandah. ‘This is the first time that I see you off without your mother . . . She’d’ve softly nibbled your left pinkie and, while you cavilled against her mumbojumbo, mumbled a prayer for your passage . . . Can one use “passage” for a train journey? I think not . . . Yesterday, you remarked that I’m luckier than many because I still have my sons to care for me – and if I wish for a change of air, or when I squabble with Burfi, I’m to phone or wire you, and you’ll hot-foot up to whisk me away – and in any case, if Burfi and Joyce are transferred, I’ve to wean myself from this house and shift to your muggy, forgettable town . . . Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdest thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest; but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shalt gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not . . . Jamun, there truly does come a time to die. When the Brahmin sees the son of his son,
he is to perceive that the day has arrived for him to withdraw from the household and recede into the forest. Eternity does not exist; rather, it too has its season, and immortality is only continued existence in one’s issue, and in the seed of one’s issue . . . Will you ever get hold of this house again if you lease it out to a Marwari? They’ll battle you in court for fifteen years, bribe everyone in sight and romp home . . . You can’t even bolt and lock up the place and push off, because Naidu related to me a horror story last Sunday when he dropped in to swill our tea and exhaust my evening. It happened in the block between ours and that mosque. One family’s been away from their house for some months – a commonplace tale, one parent dead, the survivor packed off to where he won’t be a pest, none of the children greatly Concerned about the property, and in any case they’re dispersed all over the globe like a fraternity out of the Pentateuch. When one son returned to the city last month and rolled up to check on their house, he found complete strangers inhabiting it. People he’d never laid eyes on before – can you imagine? I’d’ve croaked on the spot, at my own front door. They haven’t settled matters yet, Naidu avers, because the bastards who broke in and didn’t glide away – and they’re a family! woman and children, a bloody sorority of thugs – have now produced signed and stamped rent receipts as proof that they’ve been legal tenants of the house for months! The owners apparently’ve had to trudge to court, and one of them’s suffered a heart attack. While Naidu waffled away, I kept imagining that much the same’d befall us when we forsake this house – my sweat of four years slopped just to finally lodge some housebreakers.’

Jamun’s missed a chunk of Shyamanand’s diffuseness because he’s been keeping an eye out for his taxi. When he concentrates on his father again, he all at once appears to see a cruelly older version of the person of five minutes ago. Shyamanand’s eyes have filmed with the tiredness of distress, and the skin – on his cheeks, throat, collarbones, forearms – has shrivelled and slumped, as though the meat beneath it has ebbed. His voice is reedier and more fretful. Jamun is ashamed that his foremost
response is a kind of triumph for his mother, who’d time and again distraughtly, screechingly augured to Shyamanand that she’d predecease him, that he’d recognize her worth, her virtue, only after her death, and that, Godwilling, she’d return from There to attend his tribulation.

‘Your father needs a wretch,’ she’s times out of number asserted, while combing her hair or picking up the comics that Doom has sprayed all over the drawing room, ‘whom he can pester and harass for twenty-four hours of the day – “Ah, wouldn’t this be Paradise if I could drink a glass of icecold Rooh Afza now? But who’s there to make me one?” – That’s him being crafty. After I’m taken, he’ll have nobody to badger, and the absence of a victim will finish him off. Unless you all can recruit a slave only to be a buffer for his nonsense – “Hey, you, put on my shoes for me . . . Hey, you, how dare you sit on a chair in my presence!” – but such a patsy’ll be difficult to find, and’ll demand a wage of a thousand – and deserve one of at least two thousand – rupees, which amount neither your father nor either of his prodigal sons will pay.’

Jamun tries to point out to Shyamanand the sunnier side of things. ‘You’ve Pista here to divert you, and Doom too – when-ever Joyce looks in. Your bank accounts are here, your Term Deposits, Postal Savings, and . . . everything. Your own house, You won’t be happier elsewhere.’

Shyamanand is a bit startled and hurt at Jamun’s synopsis of his, Shyamanand’s, interests, and’d like to know whether he’s being derisive, but the taxi draws up just then and begins honking at once, and he still has much to say, or so he’d fancied. ‘But you’re leaving me with Burfi. That bonehead’s marriage appears to be on the rocks – so he’ll have no time for me . . . Write as soon as you reach, or shall I telephone your neighbour tomorrow, the man with the queer name. . .’

Jamun’s train is on time and Hegiste – dumpy, swarthy, a sweating Gioconda – and his child, cola in hand, are on the platform. Embraces, pats on the head, you-shouldn’t’ve-bothereds, most-sorry-to-hears. A rickshaw through the dank,
high-density streets. A livid sky, swollen with rain. Past the cooperative bank, the unfinished municipal auditorium, Reddy’s Superstores, the hooch kiosk, dead at nine in the morning, the donkeygrey gynae hospital. From each spout on the roof of their block of flats, the rain for weeks has marked its course down the walls – cascades of moss and slime on a once-yellow backdrop The lawn of the block is still a tract of mud and bleached crabs. Kasibai is hanging up washing in the verandah. From the rickshaw Jamun can see only her mammoth belly between white blouse and white sari. She sights him when they alight and hoots his arrival into the flat. Vaman debouches on to the balcony, waves fatuously and bobs indoors again. He capers up to the rickshaw to take Jamun’s bag. He’s wearing Jamun’s shorts and T-shirt. The shirt is actually a seven-year-old discard of Burfi’s. It was originally lime-green, and its thorax reads: ‘Tough Guys Don’t Dance. They Hustle.’ Vaman is sniggering with foolish exhilaration. He now parts his frizzy hair, Jamun notices, on the left, and his upper lip – puffy, purplish – is bedecked by a tentative, ridiculous moustache.

In the verandah, Kasibai sets before Jamun a cup of her tea – thick, sweet, dark, like diluted molasses – and asks how his father is taking his mother’s death. Her Hindi is adequate for just the most primary communication.

‘Ah, you’ve raised an uppermost matter.’ Jamun unfolds, in his ghastly Marathi, that Shyamanand might come to live with them. While explaining why, he suddenly breaks off because he just can’t visualize Kasibai and his father together, in the same room – he sipping tea, she banking against the doorpost – or in the same world. Like matter and antimatter – he, without warning, confusedly, recalls his Higher Secondary Physics – the two simply cannot meet. Kasibai is gazing at him. A blunt nose, a virile, leathery face. ‘So how was Yavatmal? Did you win your land back?’

When Jamun received the telegram about Urmila’s heart failure, Kasibai and Vaman had been in their village hundreds of kilometres away in the district of Yavatmal. They’d had to scoot
there because Kasibai had all at once learnt that squatters had begun to encroach on the pocketsize cultivable land that she possessed. Thus she informed Jamun on his return from office on the Monday before the telegram.

‘Oh, that sounds dreadful. Did you get a letter or something, or did someone from the village show up?’ Jamun suspects her of fibbing, and on their afterdinner amble, Hegiste confirms to him that Kasibai is skirring home for altogether another reason. Like Kasibai, the Hegistes are Maharashtrian, and Mrs Hegiste routinely ferrets out from Kasibai the more covert stuff. Kasibai’s never been rightfully married, and the man she steadily refers to as her husband, i.e. Vaman’s begetter, is only the village stud whom she’s cohabited with, off and on, for several years. Every time, more or less, the he-goat’s inveigled a second nanny to move in with him for some months, Kasibai and her dunderhead lovechild’ve been turfed out – to bum around the countryside, to go to glory, or to an aunt, to sign on in the Congress Party, or whatever. From wherever she is, Kasibai’s kept tabs on the jock – who is giraffelike and marooneyed, with a dacoit’s whiskers sprawling across his jowls like a verdant pubic thatch, and is immutably cantankerous because of acidosis; she’s careened back to him at every vacancy. ‘She learnt this afternoon, from a visiting fluff from her bit of the world, that the cock’s last sexpot snuffed it some weeks ago – encephalitis, deduces my wife from Kasibai’s reportage.’

‘But surely she can tell me the truth, instead of this bull about poachers on her land – unless coyness pricked her into a euphemism there, even though she’s usually as bashful as the slut in a herd of rhino. D’you suspect she fears that I’ll be jealous or something? Priceless.’

Hegiste simpers, but voices nothing. The links are convoluted here. He knows full well that Jamun tumbles his elephantine domestic; indeed, he itches for her himself, and Jamun and he are fraternal enough to discuss her with comic bawdiness.

Within bounds, of course. Jamun, for example, will never
divulge to Hegiste what he actually feels about Kasibai, and how hard he was thwacked in his vitals when, the first time, she swallowed him, gulped him in like warm honey, grunting with relish. Never once in the hugger–mugger years, has Kasturi not spat him out, demurring sheepishly that she dislikes the taste, or contending laughingly that the hormones in semen’ll give her a beard. With Kasturi, he’s pumped himself out, all along, on the coldness of his own belly or the hollow of her throat, forsaken after love. But Kasibai has unclenched him, made him feel opulent, as though his juices – his lymph, his spittle – were inestimably precious.

He can never disclose to Hegiste that sexually, in his mind, his maidservant has thrown open the doors to towering caverns. One dark Saturday afternoon, he is underneath her, tonguing her, feeling her beginning to undulate, her thighs snuggling his ears, when the doorbell jangles, twice. She, muttering, gets up off his face to answer. Continuing to grumble, she slips on her blouse and sari in seconds and lumbers out of the room. The front door opens and Jamun overhears her snap. ‘No, isn’t in.’ She returns, peeling off her clothes, dreadfully irate, and, naked, surmounts his face once more, hissing in Marathi, ‘Your bloody Hegiste. I told him you weren’t at home. The next time he ogles me, I’ll clamp my thighs around his loaf and suffocate him.’ And then, leering at the face beneath her corralled by her thlobs of puckered blubber, a googlylike modulation to a frightful bashfulness, ‘Now where were we, my Jamun saheb!’

For months, the memory of that afternoon – both droll and carnal – sends gooseflesh cavorting all over him. It is her conduct, her deportment, that is so piquant; cunnilingus for her seems a bit like watching on video a Hindi blockbuster weepie – a familiar and wholeheartedly delightsome amusement, from which one resents being distracted by irritants like the doorbell and the telephone, and to which one returns at the earliest, within seconds if practicable, matter-of-factly, to carry on exactly from where one’s been interrupted.