The Last Burden (28 page)

The waiting room down the corridor is steel-blue and lugubrious. Jamun blows smoke rings at the nearest No Smoking plate, and watches Burfi whizz through a magazine. All at once, Burfi stops at a page, frowns at it and starts to read. Must be an article on kinky sex, muses Jamun.

‘Listen to this, Chutiyam Sulphate . . . “Pierson is one of the three hundred or so children each year across the United States who murder one or both of their parents. Fathers are most often the victims . . . In court more and more children are arguing that they acted in self-defence, admitting readily to the crime but pointing to years of abuse that left them fearful for their lives . . . Sociz” – however that’s pronounced – “Junatanov, who worked in his father’s restaurant, hired a thug to kill his father. When the knife-wielding assailant failed, Junatanov’s girlfriend crept into the hospital disguised as a nurse and injected the wounded victim with battery acid. That attempt also failed. Junatanov lined up another contract killer to finish the job – but this time the hired assassin was an undercover Los Angeles police officer . . . Last year a jury in LA acquitted him of all charges after hearing lurid testimony of years of physical, emotional and sexual abuse by his father. ‘The jurors came up and hugged him,’ said the Defence Attorney . . . In another case, Ludwig initially denied that he had been abused . . . ‘Kids are so ashamed,’ explains a psychiatrist, ‘they even try to convince outsiders that they deserved the beatings. These kids are like
prisoners of war. They can’t think straight any more’ . . . well over ninety per cent of children who commit parricide have suffered physical, sexual and mental abuse . . . Most such children are found to be suicidal . . . Pierson, a quiet and somewhat immature teenager, says that her 240-pound father began sexually abusing her when she was about eleven, progressing until he was having sexual intercourse with her as often as three times a day. She claimed that he even molested her in the car on the way to the hospital to visit her mother, who died some years ago . . .” Sombre stuff, isn’t it? Baba should wade through this, and remember it whenever he bleats that in our time, the spaced-out Hindu tradition of undisputed reverence for one’s elders has been degraded by the influence of the sordid West, where a child hasn’t yet learnt to esteem its papa in between his four daily rapes of her. But then the West is youthful, and has much to imbibe on the subjects of tolerance and maya. Daddy’s squat prick, looking much like the Police Commissioner in Mandrake, grinding into her mouth after every meal or something – that ingenuous, Polish, second-generation American must realize that Papa’s phallus does not exist, that it’s actually in her head, and not between her teeth.’

Jamun wishes to demur that he doesn’t need to be diverted from their immediate extremity in this manner, but he isn’t certain that Burfi’s approach to the crisis isn’t the correct one; if one conducted oneself as though one were only waiting in an anteroom for an inconsequential interview, or to endorse one’s train tickets, then perhaps one could really push off after a while and not return morning, noon and night, day after day after day, just to stand about for a death.

They can see their mother only the following morning. ‘She’s better now, much better,’ affirms a charlatan whom they haven’t encountered before. He is colossal, in a turquoise safari suit and an Alfred E. Neuman face. He expresses himself in Hindi, Punjabi and English – by the sound of it – all at the same time. ‘I declared her out of danger at’– for some reason, he peeps at his watch, which is about the size of a planet – ‘four this
morning. She’s half-conscious, and her speech is somewhat intelligible. For sure, she’ll tend to confuse time and space for a while – for instance, she fancies that she’s at home now, and once or twice has asked after some Kishori and one Ratna Garbha – your maidservant or something, I presume. The instant that her system stabilizes, we’ll ferry her off for a Catscan’ – simpers – ‘to worm out how her blood’s been trifling with her brain.’

An interrogatory moan as they file into the cubicle; they can’t discern much in the half-light that transudes through the black panes. Urmila’s face is the ashen tint of the room.

‘Ma, it’s me, Burfi. Ma.’ Her eyelids quiver, but she doesn’t swivel her head towards the voice.

A twilight brain in a twilight room, a drugged sluggishness, a webbed silence. What rest, in an incorruptible, measureless freedom. In that pillowed owl-light, Urmila confounds her sons with her physicians, and twice demands of Neuman why Jamun doesn’t come down for his tea. ‘He fritters away all his time upstairs with Kasturi, shunning us,’ she grumbles, or they presume she does. She wants to know whether twenty rupees has been deducted from the sweeper’s pay and why Burfi has not remembered to turn off the pump after the cistern’s topped up. So she unveils a subconscious that is almost wholly –and embarrassingly – cramped and domesticated; yet these rodent-like scamperings within her skull seem unthinking, mechanical, and despite her slurred murmuring (what Alfred E. calls her ‘strenuous cerebral activity’), in her insentience she is untrammelled and altogether free.

The Catscan den is elementary sci-fi – ochreous domes, winking computer screens, courteous bleeps, lubriciously gliding, rubber-swathed slabs, crystalline, schematic light, soundless footfalls, bespectacled moustached whitecoated whizzkids. Orderlies slide Urmila from her stretcher on to a ledge. Jamun marks that the left side of her face has buckled, much as Shyamanand’s had more than a decade earlier. Had it not been for her extinct, half-open eyes, the askew features would, for a
moment, have looked pawky, sardonic, even attractive. She groans deeply, from her bowels, while Alfred E. struggles with and at last twists off her golden earrings. ‘Can’t have metal underneath the scanner,’ he chortles. Jamun wants to stretch out and, like talons, clench Neuman’s mammoth wrists, impede them from arousing an agony that skewers even Urmila’s numbness and extorts such groans from her vitals. ‘Old-fashioned earrings, these,’ deplores Newman, pushing his upper lip all but into his nostrils, and spilling the rings into Jamun’s palm. ‘Like diffident virgins, they don’t nestle in your paw without a little force.’

Elfin, golden marigolds. Jamun’s eyes fringe with tears as he thumbs his mother’s earrings. They are exceedingly dainty, patterned with mastery and restraint. As a thumbsucking toddler, he’d incessantly yawped and whinnied to be carried so that he could be within mauling reach of these rings and the flesh that had encased them. But that flesh had now departed, and in his hand the marigolds were heartrending, the terminal remains, like dice abandoned in the dupe’s palm after a punishing and brutish game. He tries to hide his tears from Neuman’s embarrassed glance.

In his initial days in the insurance office, Urmila’d telephone him now and then, chiefly to chuckle, and to ‘see how it feels to hear you in a job, to conceive you actually jotting things down in a file, you, my own child. I should call your boss and disclose to him that you’re horribly cantankerous and, not so long ago, regularly flew off the handle because I wouldn’t permit you to tweak and grind my earlobes while you sucked away at your left thumb . . . Ah, but what’s twenty years, Jamun . . .’

In the week that Urmila wastes away in hospital, his wits, in their disorder, ever so often conjoin the queerest, most disparate images. Her leaden countenance one forenoon, for example, with its unseeing eyes, which are flecked with the grey of a sort of bitter fear, suddenly, without reason, recalls for him the face of the lawn at home when it’s not been hosed for days, when, beneath the chalklike topsoil, he’s visualised the crust to be
skeined, by fissures, like an omnipotent’s chastisement of their neglect. Other unrelated impressions also prod him to the brink of tears. When he stands futilely beside her bed, her exhalations waft to him the weakened fetor of carrion, as though her entrails are merrily rotting away. Throughout that day (and in his understanding, the two happenings – her breathing and the impression that his features have skewed – are cause-and-effect) he is overwhelmingly convinced that the left side of his own face has petrified and yet, somehow, at the same time, sagged dreadfully. Its skin feels glacial and inanimate. Time and time again, he buoys up his left cheek with his fingers, and (adopting the manner of a narcissist unthinkingly caressing his own face to encourage his dilatory introspection) unobtrusively massages it.

Hindi film ditties on television one evening. The sons, the daughter-in-law, the grandsons, easefully viewing and sneering at the beggary of the music. A weepy sixties idol cheeps and warbles to this screen goddess that she’s far-out, a damn sight more gorgeous than the swollen moon, and much sexier than some Urdu word that Jamun surmises means a come-hither simper on the face, of a sexbomb, and that Aya contends denotes simply the sun. Shyamanand wolfs down his dinner by himself in the dining room. After he’s burped and wheezed the food down, he hobbles past the television on his way to Urmila’s room. Perhaps the very sight of Joyce, her dome slanted in vacuous vanity, eyeing the screen with a daydreaming half-smirk, looking quite through her father-in-law, vexes him, because he abruptly draws up to ask the loungers, ‘Shame on you all. Is this the hour that you consider suitable for Hindi movie muck? While your mother’s dying in hospital?’ He limps on across the room. He’s begun to doss down in Urmila’s bed from the evening of her departure for Haldia’s, an act the irony of which bitterly entertains his children. ‘What’s he aiming to prove?’ Burfi has scoffed. ‘That he can glide into Ma’s bed only when she’s away in a nursing home? So he loves her only when she’s absent and dying?’

‘There’s nothing unseemly or sinful,’ counters Jamun, tense
with guiltiness at Shyamanand’s comment, ‘in lolling in front of a TV while Ma recuperates in Intensive Care. She isn’t Indira Gandhi, you know, that we’ve to hurtle out into the streets and thwack our tits to voice our grief.’

‘Grief! How can you even conceive,’ sneers Shyamanand from the door, ‘of sorrow in your bogus, looking-glass age? To you, a wimp in a Hindi movie, tweeting the tropes of intimacy, is more moving than your sinking mother.’

Was it that same evening, or the following, that Naidu and his hound look in to ask after Urmila? ‘So? Is she on the mend?’ bays Mr Naidu, wobbling on the balls of his feet in the centre of the drawing room, fuzzily hopeful that if he contracts his tummy and thrusts out his boobs, his five-foot-four’ll somehow spiral to six feet, at which Joyce’d swoon with lust for him, instead of simpering witlessly at the television. ‘Who’s with her now?’

‘God, I imagine,’ murmurs Burfi, struggling to comb Doom’s hair.

‘No, I mean, who of the family’s in the nursing home at this moment? Because I notice that all of you are here.’

‘We assumed you knew. Ma’s in Intensive Care and they head off relatives in there; we aren’t needed in that situation either, just mooching about outside the glass doors, burning for a fag –’

‘But someone should be there.’ Surprise in Mr Naidu’s inflection, and a gentle but distinct reproach. ‘A blood relation should be with her all the time, a husband or a son. What are all of you slouching about here at home for? What if she – Heaven forbid – expires right now? A nurse’ll telephone you to suggest that you zip across at once, because the case in Cubicle C has passed away. Would you like that? And if she regains lucidity and asks for one of you, she’ll be told that her sons are at hand only at eleven in the morning and at sundown, so she’d better surface once more round about those times.’

For both Shyamanand and Mr Naidu, mourning has to be visible, for all to see; one simply can’t laze about in front of a TV and tweet along with a Hindi hit parade if one is grieved; encumbered by despair, any devoted spouse or son should be
shrivelled up in front of the glass of Intensive Care, night upon night, should start up only at each swoosh of the swing doors, and should disregard all the orderlies who sidle up to remind him that loitering in the corridors is prohibited.

At night, when he can’t drop off, Jamun ruminates on these things. Intuitively, he disagrees with his father and Mr Naidu. But he doesn’t hold, unlike them, that woe is no emotion for display, that passionlessly, in a Hindu way, one must learn that existence, which is immeasurably vaster than birth and mortality, paddles on independent of these events; and yet that, being itself, like Time and all other matters, must also fade out. No. Instead, over the years, while Jamun has grown up observing his parents squabble, while his gnarled emotional evolution has cramped him from voicing himself fully to Kasturi, while he’s witnessed their marriage paralyse his father and slowly butcher his mother, he’s begun to believe that living is elementally a petty, indecent, punishing business; its value lies in struggling against its meanness. In such a universe, remorse is weak selfishness, and mourning is remorse. When one grieves, one in fact only repines that one has not conducted oneself better. For Jamun, this sentiment is reinforced in the week that his mother takes to die. Regret is futile; there seems no point in behaving rightfully with Urmila in the terminal days of her life. Yet contrition is inexorable. He feels that he has to confront it face to face; through it he can learn to acknowledge his own shoddiness, his oafishness. Then, at other moments in that week, he’s convinced that since they’ve all acquitted themselves abominably with Urmila, they fully deserve now to writhe with mortification.

Shyamanand disintegrates too, that week. One morning, he chokes on his tea and starts to wish that he himself were dead. ‘No,’ protests Burfi incisively, with Pista in his lap, and his hands on his child’s shoulders, ‘living is better than dying,’ and suffixes, after a moment, ‘Yes. We should pray for the best and brace ourselves for the worst.’

Jamun fondles Urmila’s hair and watches an enormous vein in
her left temple throb fast and quick. Her fingers and arms are decoloured and chilled. To sob is greatly assuaging, and quite easy; whenever he snivels at his mother’s bedside, he feels that he’s fulfilling a duty, and redeeming himself a bit for his numberless churlishnesses.