The Last Burden by Upamanyu Chatterjee

Author:Upamanyu Chatterjee
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9789351180081
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2000-10-13T18:30:00+00:00

4

A WALK TO THE BEACH

But Aya stumps into Urmila’s bedroom then, grinning ebulliently, two prodigal bouquets of wine-dark and white roses, like twin sucklings, in her arms. ‘Happy Birthday of your marriage, from Joyce-ma,’ she beams at Urmila and Shyamanand. On cue, Joyce sidles in after her, en route to her office car, breakfast sandwich in hand.

Urmila’s jaws slacken in astonishment and pleasure. ‘For me? Joyce, what exquisite flowers! Ohhh! Glorious, gorgeous . . .’ Cradling the bouquet, she titters like a child at her daughter-in-law.

‘For me? But I’ve never,’ demurs Shyamanand, with a confused half-simper, ‘received any flowers in my life. Why me? You needn’t have, Joyce.’

‘But isn’t today your wedding anniversary? The thirtyseventh? Or have I goofed on the date? The eleventh of November, I’d thought.’ She lists against the door and, to veil her sheepishness, tousles Doom’s hair, and pushes a third of her sandwich into his unwilling mouth.

Shyamanand detonates into whooping, rumbustious laughter. With each guffaw, he seesaws like a puppet bowing to the hurrahs of encore. His face maroons, his spectacles perch awry, he all but overbalances. Yet his thunderclap hooting – which shudders his paunch like the touch of the electrodes of shock treatment, which nonplusses and even disquiets the children so that their half-smiles do not spread beyond uncertainty, and which Jamun sizes up as histrionic, overdone and selfish to the full – expires only when he begins to heave and wheeze.

Jamun explodes too, despite himself. ‘For God’s sake, Ma, don’t blubber, he’s not cackling at you!’ Incensed with himself for boiling over, he then corrals her with his arm and tries to steer her to her bed. She is weeping mutely and unrestrainedly. She shuffles compliantly enough with him, the roses in her arms like a lifeless child. When he glances up, Joyce has glided away, the kids, pop-eyed, have edged closer, and Shyamanand’s face is crimson and still.

‘Why the hell does Joyce, without warning, give you flowers? She knows, no, that you’ve never celebrated even one of your wedding anniversaries or birthdays, even one, in all your lives, unless it be to bicker with more than everyday malevolence.’ Jamun pauses to bridle his voice. ‘Which other duo would acquit itself like this on receiving flowers on an anniversary – with faces like the tragic and comic masks of Greek theatre? What remains for you both now is to flail each other, maybe with these flowers for starters. We’ve never spotted you touch each other from fondness, you could instead begin with hate.’

He keeps his arm around Urmila, corseting her, silently willing her to stop sobbing, willing Shyamanand to quit the room. In the disagreeable silence beneath her snivels and the ephemeral sounds of the world, Shyamanand does hobble towards the door, but before he leaves the room, he haltingly swivels to assert, ‘Your dishonest memories’ve always pampered your mother. She did lunge at me once – with a ladle – under your nose, just because I asked her why she was feeding me dead cockroaches – jumbo-sized, too.

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