Free The Last Burden by Upamanyu Chatterjee Page B

that April to August because your father was good looking. But Belu was almost afraid of him. Belu was the sole person in my family who cherished me, and not the salary I carted home – all, all family narratives are despicable, hideous – if they’re faithful to the essential life – aimless rancour for one another, the most guileless event milks from us our watchful malice – living together merely to thrill in unkindness, marrying, mounting and spawning because we’re all afraid of being corporeally alone. My sisters derided Belu, were ashamed of a brother, supposed him crazed, because he hadn’t voiced a word for some twenty years, vowed to silence after that rat-poison episode – you recall that? – he burned for some beastly slut, lowly caste, pined to marry her – “Baba, I can’t live without her!” – huh! – my father lashed him with a fine bamboo switch, for hours, I was seven then. We all watched. Belu’s twiggy forearms twitched – like exhausted butterflies – to shield his face and skull. His saffron kurta ripped inch by inch. Flitting about in thirty square feet of space, bawling, sobbing, pulling, “Ma! Ma! Release me! Ma!”
    ‘“Yes– I shall pound you enough for your shrieks to retrieve the dead!” So my father snarled with each whack, but he also was weeping, and, “I’ll purge the harlot out of you. She’s in your blood, you swear, but your blood’s mine, isn’t it –” And the scourge whistled down, over and over, like stealthy, camouflaged queries from beyond your window from a chum whom you’re prohibited to meet. My father tired, pulled up to wheeze. His heaving mingled with Belu’s blubbering, the gasps and snivels whamming against my eardrums, no other vibrations inthe universe. Moni time after time was needling my father, murmuring, atremble, “The sides. Lam the ribs. From the top you’re just smacking his forearms.”
    ‘Hours, perhaps one. Belu slumped into a clod on the floor, a knot of bloodied shreds, hair. My sisters cuffed me about lightly, forbade me to help Belu. I didn’t. I was utterly terrorized by the trouncing, the screams, the disarrayed pile on the floor, like clothes for washing, its stillness. I gaped. I was summoned away.
    ‘At some juncture Belu hobbled and tottered away to drink poison, to requite himself. After these years I don’t accurately remember how he got the poison, or what it was. Luckily, he panicked almost instantly after. He lurched towards the courtyard, spluttering my name. Amidst the weals and drying gore on his face trailed pellets of cold sweat. We couldn’t puzzle out his slur. His lips spumed, and his exhalations ferried a dreadful stench. He had to be hospitalized. My father laid out sizeable amounts of cash to bribe our neighbourhood police, the Station House Officer especially, not to register a case of attempted suicide.
    ‘Belu was half-paralysed. Nonstop aching since then, and creeping involuntary movement, for more than fifty years now. He settled in his bed, his room, hushed. Would infrequently come out at dusk, or after, like a wraith, perhaps to stare at the rain. He conveys the essentials through practically unreadable notes. His survival intensely discomposed us all. When we weren’t writhing with guilt, we were half-yearning for his death. He’s the Chhana of our family, the grand embarrassment. I scarcely ever ventured into his room. Throughout my girlhood, behind the grass-green doors of his room sneaked the ghouls of my twilight, the bogeys that bullied me in sleep. When I suffered my first period, the maiden blood, even in my bewilderment, my terror, I was convinced that the gore had dribbled out from behind Belu’s doors and into my guts.
    ‘On the single occasion that your father visited my family, Belu was in the courtyard. Owl-light, late evening. I couldn’tintroduce
him
! He lingered in the gloom, like an incubus biding its time. That night he sent me through the cook a note:
Do not marry