Review of The Last Burden by Upamanyu Chatterjee
A Vivid, Vulgar, Funny Picture of a Modern-Day Indian Family
When his mother's piles appear to have erupted into rectal cancer, 28-year-old Jamun takes leave of his civil service job and flies across India to fulfill his filial obligations. Mostly, that means he’s obliged to hang around. In the ensuing months, as his mother undergoes heart surgery, recovers, relapses and finally dies, Jamun ruminates on his growing-up years, his parents' testy marriage and the webs knotting together this lower middle-class Indian family.
The storyline of Upamanyu Chatterjee's second novel, The Last Burden, is simple enough. (The first was the much acclaimed "slacker novel," English, August.) The flavor and form, especially for an Indian novel, are something else. Absent is any sense of historical or cultural sweep. The city where Jamun's parents live doesn’t even get a name. Chatterjee focuses in the opposite direction, examining a small family with an electron microscope.
Unflinching Eye
The viewpoint is Jamun's--witty, knowing, merciless, uninhibited. From quicksilver observations about death, aging or the unlovable features of loved ones, his mind veers seamlessly to the convenience of the pockets in his new jeans or bittersweet memories of licking walls as a toddler. Well, the mind does that.
Jamun is also endowed, or burdened, with an eye that never flinches. Here's how he first sees his mother, Urmila, in the hospital:
"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." In her final decline, "the reek from the sea, or the zoo, or a refuse heap, or the abrupt waft of carrion, in recalling his mother's form ... seems to effuse, instead, from her orifices."
Jamun's stream of consciousness flows consistently enough from the unrestrained bickering in his family. No criticism is too old or too trivial to be recycled. Complaints develop baroque proportions. While instructing his mother, not for the first time, on how to counter his father's bullying, Jamun sighs, "Oof, Ma, you're an A-one bore." Urmila believes he's called her a "whore," but has a typically subdued response. Jamun explodes: "But if your child called you a whore, you should be livid, berserk with fury! How can you react so lumpishly?" Jamun recognizes that among those with whom he is "most restful," he and they "can't endure the strain of being considerate," but it offers no saving grace.
Indian Lower Middle-Class
Perhaps bile stews hotter in a lower middle-class home. For Jamun and his older, married brother Burfi, the legacy of growing up "LMC" is a kind of grime that can never be scrubbed off, even though they have yanked themselves from the "ooze" with university educations. Caste isn't an issue at all. Of course, the earmarks of one nation's class structure aren't readily perceived by outsiders, as two centuries of the British novel attest.
One of Chatterjee's intentions is to convey a feeling for what "lower middle-class" means in India. It's a far cry from what the term connotes in Thailand, Europe or the United States. Both parents have spent their lives in undemanding office jobs in the civil service. They own a small house and a second-hand Ambassador. Eponymous ayas lurk in the background. Every family member, including Burfi's young sons, speaks fluent English. The parents are secularized Hindus. The sons' jokes bounce off Freud, Genesis, the Kama Sutra, Carl Sagan. Burfi and his Christian wife are at ease in New York, Amsterdam and the Dubai duty-free shops.
It gets sordid when Chatterjee unveils table manners (burping), postal practices (privacy is unknown) and toilet routines (a dubious achievement). In the childhood home, castoff bed linen became curtains and placemats were made from newspapers. The boys wore "striped string drawers instead of elastic undies." Their father still obsessively calculates the tiny returns on his hoard of fixed interest accounts. Through Urmila's illness, husband and sons grouse about how to divvy up the medical expenses three ways.
Neither generation, however, has the insatiable Thai and Chinese hunger for status symbols. Jamun and Burfi know instinctively that they are westernized in the ways they think, not by what they possess.
Fetor and Stridor
A jacket blurb unfortunately anoints Chatterjee as yet another "heir apparent" to R.K. Narayan and V.S. Naipaul. Whatever happened to Vikram Chandra and Vikram Seth? Besides, Chatterjee's immediate ancestry is obvious from his resplendent vocabulary: he's the lovechild of the late British novelist Anthony Burgess and the American critic John Simon. Chatterjee ably carries on his forebears' mission to rescue valuable words from obsolescence--words such as "globose," "pawky," "ravening," "sudorific," and "valetudinarian."
He has a poet's talent for transforming known words into new parts of speech ("vibed," "rubescent," "sinistrality"). And he only creates new words after due consideration ("leucodermic," "nulating," "pule"). For all the fetor and stridor of The Last Burden, the elaborate language is somehow supremely condign. It's disappointing that Chatterjee introduces few words from Hindi, Bengali or other Indian languages. One, however,"ratnagarbha," will fill a significant vacancy in English dictionaries.
Reference:Chatterjee, Upamanyuu: The Last Burden (Faber & Faber, 1993).
ISBN: 0140236252
The Last Burden
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Upamanyu Chatterjee
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