The Last Burden by Upamanyu Chatterjee

that evening-man,
and at the foot of the fragment, as a tailpiece:
Remember the picture –
is it picture, or portrait? –
of Dorian Gray.
The words “Dorian Gray” were in English, I think. I wasn’t even sure if those were exactly his messages – Belu’s script had become so unreadable. In his normalcy he’d once in a while echoed from that book –
How horribly real ugliness made things
– something like that. He’d all along recoiled from and discredited goodlooking persons. After two or three months of my marriage, I wrote to him sketching it – a ululation from a dungeon to the one least likely to snigger on hearing it. He didn’t reply for months. Then suddenly another note:
You used to bleat, to flit from my family, I’d even wed a demon. In your husband you have a better dispensation
.’
    Jamun has time out of number been the audience for the parable of Belu. To him Urmila has sometimes appended, in a coda, ‘But you oughtn’t to judge all marriages by the corrosion of ours. I
know
– that you don’t wish to marry because you dread that you’ll tail off like us.’
    ‘And if I don’t marry,’ banters Jamun, ‘I’ll end like your Belu? Really, Ma – you flatter yourself. You and Baba haven’t contaminated me that much! And you reap what you merit – why did you marry in the first place?’
    ‘Don’t counsel like a grandmother. Now and then I imagine that you’re faintly scornful of us because we married even when we were so inconsonant. But not to have married would’ve been unthinkable – we were everywhere together – I would’ve gained disrepute, a thirty-plus woman, perhaps thumbed and dumped – you remember the buzz about Kuki’s mother, and she was only a divorcee. I too was incubated in that middle-classness – no oddball outsider, me!
    ‘Jamun, inly you’re so puffed-up! Being unmarried, you suppose, makes you objective, the deadpan eyewitness, but bachelordom’ll bleach you.’
    With his mother Jamun is softened, but does not expose hischastening. To Burfi, however, on a different occasion, he comments, ‘Ma is no rebel. She herself sweats the same prejudices that she grieves squelched her in her youth. No one learns. You’ll never forget her outcry at your marriage, as though you were hitching up with Whitney Houston or something.’
    ‘And she wasn’t,’ rejoins Burfi, ‘turning any younger. She was thirtyish then, which for her generation connoted forty. She must’ve funked. But her perspective’s so queer – I pattered to her once that remaining single was simpler nowadays, and she replied, of course, but that’s also because we now stay in houses that are set apart, and not snarled into one another.’
    At the glass doors of the Intensive Care Unit, Chhana sternly impedes Shyamanand from shedding his sandals. ‘You look old and adequately eminent, so the underlings won’t block you. If they do, try to look even more eminent.’ Within, behind inky glass and nondescript tapestry, in a creaky, seared voice, subterraneanly familiar, like an intimate ditty on the brink of one’s hearing, Urmila is catechizing the meaty nurse with certain exacting questions. ‘Why haven’t I seen you before? Who’s changed these curtains? When did this hurt in my left arm start? Why don’t you respond instead of just skimming about like a mosquito? What’s the date today?’ Blessedness and grief eddy through Jamun at the slurred, unnatural tones of her remembered voice.
    Urmila’s eyes are now leaden, with unfocussed dots of amber. The striated desert face, toasted gashed lips that won’t cap her teeth, and the extremity of a whitish tongue that whisks over the ruts of her lips like a gecko’s. Shyamanand evens the silvered hair away from her forehead. ‘How long you all took to come and see me,’ she mumbles. Jamun nears the top of her bed. She pirouettes her head at the movement. ‘Jamun?’ Her eyes centre above his left shoulder, but for an instant her