The Last Burden Read Free

metagalactic symposium on Bioplast in the Afterlife. The widow beholds the meagre Parsee hindquarters twinkle into a Volvo. Well? What now for her?’
    ‘She should strip. Peel herself of her clothing, blindfold herself in white, brace the remaining son on her shoulders – the last burden – I presume that she’s strong and sexy – and stride out for an interminable walk. She’s almost free.’
    Then in the air the remote, namby-pamby siren of the Municipality, tipping off its taxpayers that the river is ascending. The embryonic moon, the springtide, the exuberant rain, and the town lying in a hollow – so the waters ascending. ‘Crocodile time,’ says Hegiste. A yarn of the town, that in another decade the spate had jettisoned a baby crocodile of the salt flats into the gynae hospital, and that its daddy had shadowed it, in quest. But the flood alert doesn’t faze the traffic one bit. The auto-rickshaws continue to squirm through, likeflitting lifers ducking flak. Their hooters are ear-detonating whistles, catscratches on the eardrum.
    In the verge beside the liquor den, a girl and maybe her younger brother play frisbee. The girl is in salwaar kameez and runs about crabbedly but blithely. The boy likes missing the frisbee and darting after it with weak squawks.
    The oldies, cordially tipsy, loll in the courtyard amidst the enormous moss-green leaves. Mrs Hegiste’s grandfather – gums, baggy chest skin, yellow-and-white-striped drawers with a front pocket – says hello and checks out Jamun’s mother.
    ‘She’s in Intensive Care with a heart attack. Numb.
    Jamun and Mrs Hegiste’s grandfather are chums, although Jamun fathoms his speech but poorly. His nose is even, but the rest of his face has slumped. Desiccated skin and cannonball knees. He wiggles his finger at a neighbouring antique and warbles (so Jamun hears), ‘Bong suitcase leapfrog in Africa.’ Jamun beams at him. They now and then rust together in Hegiste’s verandah and observe the crabs. The grandfather has onetime told him (or so Jamun got hold of). ‘You are good. You must visit
me
and not always only Satyavan. If you don’t come and visit me, then I’ll visit you!’
    ‘Your mother will not be taken.’ Fossil eyes with capillaries like red-hot webbing. ‘For where in the womb of time will she meet with another son like you?’ The other wrinkled lushes amen.
    Daybreak, the tint of ashes. The impatient honking of lorries at the liquor joint – truckdrivers topping up and laying in for their stretched day’s journey into the shadows of the next dive – disturbs Jamun’s frightful nightmare, the rubble of which nevertheless rattles him all day. Nothing in his perception connects with it, yet its matter seems intimate, and so more frightening.
    He is in a kind of rowing boat, closing in on the waterline of a river, or a lake. Everything is in focus, the keen night, the deathliness, the swish and suck of the oars and the water, the hush. Then the clotted ooze of the bank, like phlegm and mud. The lights on the salt knolls loom ice-blue in the moonlight, thelivid white of the tubelights hemming the road pale into the wetlands. Other contours in the boat, intimate yet shadowy. Jamun is wearing his customary clothes, jeans etcetera, and somehow knows that in everyday light the sand will be oystergrey and not brown. (How was he privy to those settings, runs in his head hourly – why had he sensed that on those flats he was no stranger? Perhaps he tacks on some minutiae later, in the discursive light, but the gooseflesh defies the day – he had trodden those sands before; on that ashen alluvium he had not lurched.) Perhaps the hours just before dawning. The two boatmen (Jamun is an extra for that one particular crossing) are of a piece – diminutive, swarthy and rock-hard (like those labourers who transit past his kitchen window at daybreak tea on their route to some sweat-and-blood slog. Jamun observes them over his teacup. Tits of black