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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Books |
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Review |
The Outsider
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| Rediscovering one of the original heroes of Indian English fiction |
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| I |
N UPAMANYU CHATTERJEE'S 1993 novel, The Last Burden, the 20-something Jamun recalls a Faustian moment: he had once offered to take care of his parents until their death if they made over all their money to him. His father, Shyamanand, dismisses the idea, so Jamun says gravely, “Even when I urgently need money, I shall not thumb yours. When you |
feverishly need me, I won’t be within reach.”
The memory of this attempted pact, which the family laughed off, is triggered by the realisation that Jamun and his elder brother Burfi don’t really need their father’s money; they’ve done reasonably well for themselves. What the family cannot abide is Shyamanand’s compulsive squirreling away of his measly savings. Burfi says, “Oof, such a dismal lower-middle-class exercise, a babyish sport—to mothball the interest on a Fixed Deposit—never wade into it—with that interest after months to archly open a Recurring Deposit, and with the interest of the Recurring Deposit to start some Term Deposit, or National Savings…”
Jamun reminds his brother that he is as fixated on money. "He recalls Burfi’s wife Joyce once reprimanding Pista," their young son, about his habit of getting off the school bus at the wrong stop and detailing to him the horrors of being kidnapped. Burfi had intervened to point out to mother and son that the real horror would be the cash they’d have to fork out if the little bugger was abducted.
This exchange of memories within memories and half-affectionate accusations between the brothers takes place in the family car as they’re on the way to the hospital where their mother is recovering from a heart attack. Burfi makes himself a drink from some whisky hidden at the bottom of a picnic basket which contains food for the invalid Urmila. He ruminates, not without relish, on the hopelessness of the situation. “Baba’s first love, his money, will now be gobbled up by this hocus-pocus to extricate his first hate, his wife.” Jamun points out that he has dumped their mother’s food on the seat and not packed it back in the basket. Neither has he offered Jamun a drink.
Burfi rambles on, and his brother stays quiet, for this thing, money, that they have expended so much of their middle-class lives on, has always made him uneasy. He remembers other moments in their lives distorted by its demands: Burfi as a child, cadging money off his mother without his father’s knowledge; Burfi spinning fabulous yarns about the family’s riches for his friends. And all the while, Jamun’s growing detachedness. He had once been certain about the difference between his and Burfi’s attitudes towards money; now he is not even sure if the difference matters.
The immediate purpose of this extended scene is that Jamun will, as he has promised his father, talk to his tightfisted brother about sharing the costs of Urmila’s pacemaker. This purpose is achieved in an instant. “Obviously,” says Burfi, when Jamun brings up the subject. “But you pitch in first.”
| I |
N SPIRIT AS WELL AS STYLE this is The Last Burden in a nutshell, except that the very idea of nutshells would be anathema to Chatterjee’s project. Of all our contemporary English novelists, he is perhaps the most leisurely in his explorations, perhaps the one whose books are least amenable to satisfying summarisations despite not much in them by way of |
conventional plots. The Last Burden could be summed up in one simple sentence—Jamun’s mother is ill and he comes to visit for a while and then goes back to his job—and this would be an accurate description of the story and yet capture nothing of its richness. Chatterjee’s writing is not just leisurely, it holds up the ideal of leisureliness in fiction as an end in itself.
In The Last Burden Chatterjee has no authorial axe to grind despite the recognisable characters—the long-suffering wife, the cold patriarch, the stand-offish daughter-in-law, the servants who exploit the guilt of their employers, and the employers who can never reconcile themselves to their servants. He is not interested in pegging family stereotypes onto some caustic tale about middle-class sterility. The idea of the novel as a sociological instrument does not interest Upamanyu Chatterjee. Neither does the novel as a medium of history. Jamun’s description, to a colleague, of his parents’ past takes six words: “…Partition, refugees, trauma and all that…” and is never alluded to again.
What does interest Chatterjee is the tragicomic drama of the middle-class moment. He captures this with a density that is rare in Indian English fiction. We get to know Jamun, Burfi, Shyamanand, Urmila and the others less through second-hand reportage, more through first-hand observation. In the scene described above, the small details are not embellishment, they are the novel. Burfi dumps his sick mother’s food on the car seat; Jamun remembers Burfi’s hilarious stinginess when faced with the prospect of his son being kidnapped. These are not utilitarian details meant to lead to judgment or resolution. Jamun is not living out his Faustian fantasy—the fact of his once having considered it, and now his memory of it, are what’s significant.
For if the rules of family life mean you can say wild things to each other, those very rules also ensure that those wild things are often said as performance. Shyamanand and Urmila rail at each other with a bottomless bitterness. They are a tearful, Bengali version of the Lockhorns—their epic antagonism does not drive them to anything except fashioning new insults out of the old ones. Similarly, Jamun can marvel at his brother’s selfishness and his Shyamanandlike love of pelf and yet this does not make him feel superior to Burfi. The fact of their being brothers seems to override the differences in their natures.
Why should this be so? Why are family ties so uniquely messy and subjective? One answer that The Last Burden implicitly offers is: shared memory. The scene above is stitched together with memory. The fact that the family has a shared past becomes, in some mysterious way, a basis for sympathy even though what the sons badly want is to wrest free of the last burden—their parents. The common stock of memory prevents them from breaking out. They must stay together and stay content with being horrible to each other. Their familial love, when occasionally revealed, is usually indistinguishable from expressions of pity and guilt. None can be absolved so none should pretend to be, but sentimentality is best avoided—no situation is too terrible to crack a joke about or smoke a joint over.
Memory is a binding agent but it can also sometimes play the opposite trick. When Jamun is thinking back to how his brother would, without anyone knowing, write to their mother for money, a completely unrelated image comes to him. It is when he and his father are visiting Urmila in Bhubaneswar that they find out about Burfi’s cajoling letters. Jamun is watching his parents as his father is on the verge of making this discovery:
He isn’t accustomed to seeing his parents in any surroundings other than those of their shabby flat. Unmindful of the sun, he watches them in the shade of the gulmohar tree, down which pelt two squirrels and behind which is visible their neighbour’s kitchen window, from which eructs the trendiest Oriya film pop. All at once, everything seemed unprecedented—the lawn, the house, the mould around the tap in the boundary wall, the faces of the neighbours, the lingo on the roads— everything. They even cause the heavens and the sparrows to appear newfangled. The diverse, extraordinary components of the entire setting are telescoped in his parents looking like strangers. He senses, fuzzily but forcefully, that he doesn’t know them at all…
This is an example of the double-edged nature of memory (it creates intimacy as well as strangeness) but also, again, of Chatterjee’s unhurried style. He makes generous space for the perceptual—for how things feel and look, and how appearances betoken not just documentary but also emotional value in fiction.
To look one needs to pause, to leave off what one has been saying in order to notice, and for all of this one needs time. And there is ample time in the novel’s pre-globalised world where it takes four days to book an air-ticket and where a cranky Ambassador sits in the driveway. There is also ample time in the heads of those not going anywhere, which is why Jamun’s apathy in the novel cannot be incidental. Since we experience much of the novel’s world through his eyes, it’s important that he himself, to fulfil the novel’s functions of remembering and mulling over, generally lack any ambition other than to remember and mull over.
| T |
HE LOVE OF THE PERCEPTUAL is balanced by the generalisations of philosophical insight, especially those regarding parents and children—fosterage, to use one of Chatterjee’s favourite words. To Jamun that precept of Genesis according to which a man shall leave his parents and cleave unto his wife and spawn a litter, which in turn will do the |
same thing, illustrates only life’s “hellish and dreadful designlessness.” And yet the Bible is often referred to, especially by Jamun’s lover Kasturi whom he has not married, possibly because he is loath to give in to this designlessness. There is Corinthians to further caution him: “He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife.”
One is reminded of this natural turning to the Bible when Burfi is recounting to Jamun how resistant their father is to the influence of his Christian wife, Joyce. The two boys went to a Jesuit school and were exhorted to speak English at home, but when Burfi married a Christian he was summarily reminded by their father that he ought to “revert our kids to our roots and all that jazz.” “Who has the time…for bloody roots,” says Burfi. Recalling how on other occasions their father tends to quote from Genesis, he adds, “…if he’s so bloody Hindu Mahasabha, then why does he know the Bible?”
This familiar bind experienced by the English-speaking, missionary-school-educated Indian translates, in Chatterjee’s fiction, into high irreverence. The subliminal effect of the education—in the broadest sense—that the brothers have received is that they cannot take anything seriously. “Existence,” says Jamun to himself, “can be rated as a gift only when the impotence lurking beneath all action is accepted.” In the case of the alienated character, this impotence may be the only existential conclusion possible but in the case of the writer, the achievement is to describe the impotence as graphically as possible.
Of course to some the language of The Last Burden may seem a little too extravagant. “Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting,” says Jonathan Franzen, another masterly chronicler of family life. Chatterjee lets loose a flurry of interesting verbs. People constantly bellyache rather than complain and pule rather than whine. Exams are louring when they’re menacing and Jamun sees a woman pendulating rather than merely swaying. There are interesting adverbs too—pawkily, joshingly, edaciously—and fascinating adjectives—someone is ‘aguish’ with lust, a performance is ‘contumelious.’
But more than individual words, it is the idiom of the novel that is a very deliberate experiment in style. The effect of the formal, fuzzily Shakespearean language is to first throw off and then, through sheer consistency, gradually draw in the reader. At the beginning of the novel, Maharashtrian housewife Mrs Hegiste says, in supposedly bumbling Hindi: “Home is the hanky-panky of memory—honeyed, quilted— a fabulous once-upon-a-time lull.” Though one may not go as far as trying to work this back into bumbling Hindi to establish its untranslatability, this incredible sentence makes one resist not just Mrs Hegiste but a good number of the novel’s succeeding pages.
Eventually, though, the artifice becomes art. Jamun declaims to his girlfriend: “…how addictive desire is…Oh, but you snicker at mine and piety mauls it.” Elsewhere Chatterjee says of him: “Of course, he falters in honouring his vow; with him, as with many others, the allures and undertakings of the fleeting world bid fair to prevent duty…” Urmila, effusive on her way back from the hospital, asks, “In our time, in how many homes do three generations stay together without baring towards one another a beastly malignity…” Despite our knowing that this is not the way people speak, Chatterjee succeeds in showing us that to be convincing in fiction you do not need to be ‘authentic’. He gets us, as Shakespeare does, to hear the voices of his characters. And that, in the long run, is the only thing the person on the page needs. | | | |
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