The Last Burden Read Free Page A

plastic like large headphones, and eyes stale, absent, with a strain of amber). Jamun and the two boatmen beach, and with the oars start to bludgeon the heads of the others in the boat. The oars are ponderous, and as he pivots and lunges, Jamun slumps in the wallow. His crazed gasps clash harshly with the stodgy thud of wood on forehead bone. None demur, but all look thunderstruck. Jamun knows them all, but for the life of him cannot recapture a sole face in his waking hours. He jets sweat, but the oarsmen are passionless. Next, with the punts they are ramming heads into the ooze, like shepherds mustering a flock, and striving to extricate themselves from the talons of frenzied arms. The heads struggle up again and again, about six or seven of them, less than ten at any rate. Their features are veiled, but the victims are indeterminately rural, in dhotis and short saris. The boatmen have butchered before – their looks, as deadpan as their biceps, are witness – but whether Jamun too has been so hellish, and whether he has commissioned them, is not plain. Do the heads all scuttle? But he is swarming up a sandbank hand over fist, a precious few feet, white with panic, as though one of the heads has hinged itself to his leg like an auxiliary knee. Steps, inexpertly incised in the mud. He senses gore on his person,manifest to all but himself, on his shirt front and chin, like milk from an upended cup at the lip. On the knoll (is the sand hump by the river artificial, a boneyard?) is a cottage, and a splendent sulphur light from a box-like verandah, tiny and featureless, of perhaps a Lower-Income-Group flatlet. A door creaks into a newish and characterless bathroom – but Jamun is positive that underfoot and beneath the tiles and pipes slink the snake and the scorpion. He must scour himself, but which portion most feverishly his terror cramps him from tracking down. And then a female frame at another door, somewhere, in a transparent dress, with a rank and succulent thatch full up to the navel, and she grimaces, and he tries to hide. Then the truck horns hit upon him at the end of a warm, flesh-pink tunnel and yank him out to the slate and steel before sunrise.
    He opens his eyes and tastes an illimitable and opulent easing which stills him for most of that third day. Yet quick as thought, he time after time experiences his hands weighted with oars whamming heads into pap, and is rattled by the sleep that can spawn such bogeys. Complicity and fright squawk in his brain – these ogres of randomness and he must connect somewhere, in some hoop, for otherwise how did they slink past his forehead?
    But to Mrs Hegiste in the afternoon, when he goes down to phone, he merely chinwags. He dials a clear line quite soon. ‘Burfi? Jamun. How’s she?’
    No tangible alteration. She has groaned once or twice, and threshed her head about in some iceberg world, but her pulse has not steadied. Burfi sounds distrait and ineffably rushed, as though the exchange with Jamun is stretching beyond forbearance a raving urge to piss. ‘You should know – she in fact died. I mean her heart stopped beating and she was just dead. Then we thwacked her chest like in a roughhouse, and her heart kicked off again – like an Ambassador taxi. We’d determined to give you the details when you came, but you’re so long coming. Baba boohooed like an infant when her heart started up again – his breakdown was a crumb of comfort.’
    At the time the attack comes about, Urmila is alone upstairs,in that jittery slumber particular to mortals on the wane. An inflamed late-August afternoon. Burfi’s elder son Pista returns from school, saunters about the house to circumvent his lunch and the aya, sheds his uniform in a hideyhole which he doesn’t reveal to her until her fury seems authentic enough to menace him just a bit, and pushes on to rouse his grandmother to irk her into dabbling at chess with him. He calls, next hoots into her ear, jerks her. Shyamanand