The Last Burden (17 page)

Of course, the deleterious effects of his fault-finding are long-lived. Burfi, for one, for years remains flummoxed and stung that his father exhibits so straightforwardly his dislike of Joyce. Patently, Shyamanand’s censures of his wife’s attributes reflect unfavourably on Burfi’s own appraisement of feminine attractiveness: what pathetic taste you must have if you were actually spellbound by a female as commonplace as Joyce. Only extraordinary maturity or indifference, or a singularly crass skin, can effectively breast this blitzkrieg against one’s sensibility. Burfi, being a vain child, commands none of these qualities; instead, he ripostes as best he can: displaying to all, for example, like an elated kid, any snap that presents Joyce photogenically, and parroting her convictions at all times on all subjects – on the upbringing of Pista, the selection of a counterpane as a gift for Urmila, the care of the teeth, the knots in his parents’ marriage, the primacy of Christian instruction as a guide for the stainless
life. ‘Church on Sunday,’ Burfi’ll observe, brow corrugated, lips skewed downward, expression stately because he supposes that they’re discussing God, ‘has been terrific for Pista. Has drilled him in the virtues – truth, kindness, charity, and all that crap. When we were young we missed that grounding, but Pista’s well up on Ruth, Job and Solomon, and how Absalom vibed with Herod, or whatever. On Sunday afternoons, when he babbles to me, I recall that Baba never towed us to any temple, ever, or distinguished for us Shiva from Krishna, and Sita from bloody Savitri.

‘Now and then I’d overhear, chancily, Jamun’s aya evoking for him the yarns of myth – Sravan trudging to Benares, bearing his decrepit parents, and Trishanku excluded, out in the cold between heaven and mother earth. But by then I was old enough to be irked by the romances and parables of grannies and fostermothers. Pity.

‘Doesn’t Baba recollect that
he
enrolled us in a Jesuit school, where Catechism classes were obligatory, that he exhorted us to speak English even at home, with Ma too? When I’d come by a couple of friends who braided their manes, cosseted lice in their beards and sniffed snow, Baba never protested against them for the crazy pretexts that slapbang! became momentous only when he first saw Joyce, when, without warning, I was informed that I had to acknowledge my responsibilities as a practising Hindu.

““A what?” I recall hooting. “Who the fuck cares? I just want to
marry
her!”

‘More than a decade now, but Baba’s still miffed that I married a Christian. What if Joyce’d been Muslim? Phew. Jahanara, or Jaaneman, or something. He’s gnawed even more by the “waning Hinduness” of the family. Continually tries that hocus-pocus on us, that one doesn’t have to perform any act to be a Hindu, one simply
is
one, Hinduness being intrinsic, inwrought, etcetera. Oof. Now he, off and on, exhorts me to revert our kids to our roots and all that jazz – so proposes that Pista should pick Sanskrit rather than French for his third language at school. Nuts. Who has the time, I pleaded, for bloody
roots! To which Baba rebutted, But Joyce has the time for church! Precisely, I bawled, because with her it’s the drill, like changing undies. She’s been accustomed to church by her parents; why didn’t you and Ma habituate us to whatever you wished? We were putty in your hands, as Pista and Doom are in Joyce’s.

‘Before
she agreed to marry me, she’d asserted that our children should grow up as Christians. For sure I assented. Whatever had Baba and Ma enriched me with that I could demur?

‘Then, whenever Baba’s cheery and disposed to banter about his relations with us, he cites Genesis: Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. Which is damn annoying as well. I mean, if he’s so bloody Hindu Mahasabha, then why does he know the Bible.

‘The first time I heard that, I zipped to Joyce, braying, See, see, Baba’s quoting the Bible! I was a little loony those days, foolhardily rooting about for something, anything, to reconcile wife and father, even the Bible would serve. But Joyce retorted, with smug triumph, “The Bible is an eternal work, consummate, for all seasons.” Fuck, what an existence.’

Shyamanand is saddened, naturally, that his rapport with his eldest son crumbles with his marriage. Equally naturally, the birth of his grandsons – of Pista ten, of Doom four, years before – deflects his cognate concerns. Jamun secretly grieves whenever he notices his father trying to woo his grandchildren. Shyam– anand’s efforts are distressing because so abortive. All his conversation with Pista and Doom, sooner or later, directly or askance, ventilates his acrimony against the interceding generation. Parents during the fosterage of their issue fecundate their minds, naturally, and overpoweringly, compulsively. Children willy-nilly soak up from them their opinions, attitudes, biases, idioms, quirks. Shyamanand is galled by the certainty that his grandsons have begun to disregard – occasionally snub – him and Urmila because they’ve noted their parents behave so. Time after time he probes Pista, his nark, on what is being discussed
upstairs. Perhaps the imp recounts without embroidery or guile. But Joyce especially seems to relish brutally debunking her parents-in-law in the presence of the children.

‘She stayed glacial and closed, Pista described to me,’ narrates Shyamanand, chafed afresh at his own evocation, ‘till Burfi was obliged to ask what’d occurred. Your father is so beastly, ill-bred – Joyce seemingly jeered to him, then all at once started to sob – he spurned the cake that I’d baked for your birthday. Burfi, with a few pegs hyping him up, boiled over and foamed in his routine manner – to placate his terrific wife, reviling me with obscenities, audible enough to your mother and me downstairs. I’ll slice the fucker’s balls off, he screeched. You all heard him, no one chided him. And Pista and Doom listen to that about their grandfather from their father: What impressions’ll they conceive of me? They learn that Burfi telephones me from work only to entreat me to be affable to an individual whom I’ve run into barely thrice in my life, with whom we’ve invariably been cordial, and whom the children idolize. What kind of ogre will they assume me to be that I’ve to be implored not to be loutish with such a darling, and implored even on the phone from office! They notice that their parents are perpetually churlish with us, that nobody admonishes them; hence they roll up their sleeves and begin too.’

‘Never mind’ – from her easychair, Urmila strives to assuage him – ‘we’ll both die in good time.’

‘These matters are more important than death.’ Shyamanand disagrees with Urmila whenever he can; where discord is unfeasible, he usually, derisively, marvels at her acuity. ‘Since you’ve brought up the subject – you should alter your will, dispossess both our angels, bequeath the house outright to me. Yes, both, for Jamun is ours only until he marries. Perhaps we should’ve spawned daughters instead – I understand that they’re more faithful to their source. Once you assign the house to me, I’ll square these two fiends, who presume concurrently to live off
and
denigrate us. Just why’re you smirking? This is comic, is it?’

‘Even if Ma wills the house to you,’ smartly intrudes Jamun to divert Shyamanand from Urmila’s discomposing simper, ‘you’ll still be miserable and insecure, staying here with Chhana in vapid anxiety.’

Urmila attempts to shush Jamun. She then swivels her neck to Shyamanand and submits, ‘Had Jamun been more alive to Hindu epic, maybe the dictates of fealty to his parents would’ve forced him to make war against his brother.’

A playful, even joshing, comment, but it disquiets Jamun somewhat; in thirty years Urmila has never manifested any instinct for wit or drollery. Whenever her sons have charged her with being too stodgily dour, she’s parried that wifehood has pumped all the
esprit
out of her. ‘Before I met your father, I was a charmer – sparkling, piquant sallies, always the core of a get-together. He’s shrivelled me.’ Her heart failure seems to Jamun to’ve unmuzzled her wits – but thank God for that, he points out to himself, smiling.

Burfi and Joyce come round the corner of the house. To fraternize minimally with her parents-in-law, Joyce often uses the side door, like a lodger who’s behind with the rent. After a while Burfi, as is his habit, has followed suit. His parents at first are unduly pained by Joyce’s shunning of them, and perforce have to persuade themselves that they abhor her very face anyway. In good time, Joyce and Burfi have convinced them-selves of the same idea.

They are going to Pista’s school, to attend some Parent Teacher Association meeting. Burfi is obliged to pout and carp because he’s had to skip office for the day only to be updated on something as piffling as Pista’s progress. His dress, however, contrasts rather fetchingly with his mien.

A cream and pearl-grey half-sleeves shirt, flawlessly casual Jordache jeans. Burfi doesn’t look like the father of a ten-year-old; he seems instead practically a decade younger than he is. To Jamun, Joyce too appears captivating, in a lilac and honey salwaar kameez. Time has nurtured her comeliness, tutored her to accentuate her eyes and hair, to smile more often and without
pretext, to remain hardy and robust, only by the might of will if necessary, to ensure that her sons cherish her more than their father, unremittingly to remind her husband, in a thousand ways, that she’s in every manner more versatile and masterly than he.

Burfi glances doubtfully, once or twice, at his parents and brother in the verandah. ‘Will you return for lunch?’ asks Jamun, just to say something. In the preceding two months, he’s settled into inhabiting the same house with his brother and sister-in-law and not swapping even one nod or a grin with them for days. They’ve nothing at all to intimate to each other. He’s begun to feel as separated from his brother as his parents, and repines that neither Burfi, Joyce nor he have striven in the slightest to stall this waning of their amity. Psychologically, even physically, he seems to have hinged himself to his parents in a gang against the occupants of the first storey. Now and then – when, for example, Burfi is rabid and spitting abuse at those who don’t answer back – he even feels that he has to shepherd his parents from the others in the house. Then, penitent about such thoughts, in expiation, when next he comes upon Burfi or Joyce, or even Pista or Doom, he sprouts fraternal prattle on any subject that flits into his head.

‘Nothing definite yet. Put by some food for us anyway.’ By which Burfi connotes: our lunching out is not linked at all to our lunching in. We – uh, Joyce, at any rate – contribute to the household, so we must have our due of food for breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner, no matter if we waste it. Which they regularly do. Platesful of untouched food lie in the fridge for a day or two before Shyamanand, Jamun or Aya – all three of whom abhor wastefulness – nibble, grimace and grouchingly toss the food away.

Burfi flails dust off their beaming Maruti and puts on his sunglasses. He abruptly smirks at his parents and Jamun. ‘How at ease, domesticated, and cosily seedy you three look, like rheumy-eyed villagers around a hookah in the winter sun.’

‘But when
we
presented ourselves at the Parent Teacher
get-togethers of our sons,’ retorts Urmila jocosely, ‘we looked less crotchety than you now.’

‘What crap,’ chortles Burfi through the window of the Maruti. ‘For starters, in my eleven years, you didn’t show up more than twice for my Parent Teacher do’s, and that only because as a student I was a catastrophe, and the Principal sent you many notes of foreboding on the topic. But Jamun was virtually a whizkid in school – how many of his Parent Teacher functions did you grace?’

Astonishing that Burfi can recollect the minutiae of school life, but, Jamun reasons, everyone remembers if he wants to; even so, Burfi – childlike, forward-looking, well-favoured, once-uxorious Burfi – can never have been presumed to wish to recall the leavings of his uninspiring past. Yet Jamun is wrong.

And Burfi right. Jamun himself can remember his parents meeting his teachers just once. They had appeared grey, wrinkled before their time, overtired, careworn with them-selves, and prodigiously, unutterably proud of Jamun. Their rapture in him distracts them, for the time being, from the dispiritedness of their selves, gleams on their features like polish on creased buff shoes. He is doubtless chuffed at their delight, exhilarated by its openness – and, in passing, assured of their solicitude for him. For he too has been bedevilled, at that point of his life, by the commonplace pubescent anxieties of filial neglect, and has been certain that his parents, at the least, cherish his brother considerably more than him; his aya has time after time affirmed such sentiments to him.

But remembrance is so capricious. He can’t recollect with conviction whether at that Parent Teacher function itself, he was lurkingly rueful of the inconspicuousness of his parents, or whether that indistinct intuition of shame sprouted at a later date, with the fascination of Burfi’s glittering friends, to keep pace with whom, for years, Burfi donned a disingenuous face, idiom and manner.

Yet, among the other parents, Urmila and Shyamanand
do
look out of place. Urmila doesn’t elbow forward for Jeremiah’s
notice. She’s not wearing lavender georgette, stupefying perfume, or chokers. Instead, she has smarmed down her face with Lakme powder and carmine lipstick. And Shyamanand, with his ivory-white thatch above a youngish, chubby countenance, his shabby clothes and scruffy shoulder bag, does not mingle either.

Jamun stands with them, futilely, vision cleaving to Jeremiah’s waxen hardboiled thighs, mind turgid with concupiscence. That day in school has been seismic. Jeremiah proclaims in front of the entire class that in his new spectacles Jamun looks downright idiotic. She next is unforgivably endearing with Kuki, and thanks him for the chocolates that he’s gifted her at Sunday church.

Church? ‘You mean you waste your Sunday morning mooching about in church just waiting to suck up to Jeremiah?’ Jamun is sneeringly enthused. ‘It’s easier, Kuki, to instead mug up to shimmy through your exams.’

No, discloses Kuki with a hint of a shamefaced grin, his mother and he attend church now and then because they are Roman Catholics.