Free The Last Burden by Upamanyu Chatterjee Page A

himself. He feels silly. The deathliness that soaks down into them is chafing, a sandpaper presence. He intuits that he should sneak off from Shyamanand before their dispiritedness pricks them into words that they’ll afterwards unwish. ‘I’m going to doze,’ he mutters. ‘I’ll be up before dinner.’ On his pillow, he feels sinful that he is trying to snooze when he should be heeding his sinking mother.
    Twilight. Beyond the window grille six feet away, the heavens like the sea, leaden and minacious, like the back of a torpid beast. A figure against the sky, sloping against the railing of the verandah, gazing seaward. Without his spectacles Jamun can’t discern who it is. He can fuzzily distinguish a sari the shade of dusk. He is positive, without reason, that the form is smiling. For the one unearthly instant upon waking at an unfamiliar hour, before the understanding clicks into position, he imagines that the shape is his mother, in good heart and euphoric, grown larger because of ruddiness. A section of the form stirs up and down unhurriedly, in intervals. In another second he spots the tip of the cigarette, in his bedimmed vision like a fulgent tangerine snowflake under a microscope. He puts on his spectacles for an instant and verifies that the contour is Chhana, puffing bemusedly against a cavernous, half-dead heaven. Tousled thoughts hustle one another when he is once more in the twilight blur of his vision. Is this a harbinger of some ghoulish eventuality, his imagining a shape in the half-light to be arestored, healthy version of his dying mother? From whom none could be more different than Chhana, surely. His sickly sight, his snap awakening, the receding span of day, the sky like a gunmetal sea – all these have hampered him from recognizing her. Chhana. Who has mothered Urmila’s firstborn. Who is arid, unwed because she was born without a womb, a freak of sorts.
    ‘So you are up,’ gleams Chhana. ‘Your mother’s now conscious. Was asking after you.’
    On the wall beside the elevator that always appears to run only for the liftman’s guffawing cronies, sags aslant an oversize photograph of a ponytailed girl. Her eyes gape like ink spots on white saucers, or black poached eggs, her dextral forefinger presses against her roseate, schnozzle lips, tip of finger upending nose, her fist like a bubo on her chin – fervidly shushing the world. The legend beneath the photo enjoins: ‘Learn to exist with silence.’
    ‘How mournful!’ warbles Chhana, warping her features to nudge her spectacles up for a better squint. ‘But doesn’t that snap recall Belu – the same lips and expression?’
    Shyamanand doesn’t react, concentrates instead on negotiating the hospital corridor. Jamun scrutinizes the picture anew. Belu as a duteous pigtailed girl? Belu is just one of the numberless relatives whom Jamun (and Burfi) have never met, whose photographs they have never viewed, who have never visited and have rarely corresponded, yet whose nicknames have bobbed up from time to time in the retrospections of their parents, and who have been mentally modelled by the listeners after those particulars of the recollections that have hoodooed their imaginations. Over the years, Jamun has hatched Belu to be fleshless, sombre, introspective, with mines for eyes, a creature in a grievous romance.
    Urmila’s tale, unfolded now and then, whenever she is at ease in her immediate woe, to whomever chances to be within hearing.
    ‘In the age when I was idiotic – the feverish mugginess of a midsummer in Calcutta, sweat spiking yesterday’s sweat – your father and I were rendezvousing thick and fast, he befuddled, occasionally disinclined – before office, during and after too, ambling on Chowringhee, scrabbling for an unoccupied bench in some park, just tramping because there was no spot where we could be alone. Nearly everyone at my house disliked your father. But my sisters detested me too. Moni spited me further