The Last Burden

The Cover of The Last Burden

I finished reading The Last Burden by Upamanyu Chatterjee. With this, I have read all of Chatterjee's novels :-).

Upamanyu Chatterjee

Upamanyu Chatterjee was born in 1959 at Patna, Bihar. After studying English literature at Delhi University, he joined the Indian Administrative Services(IAS) in 1983. His first novel was English, August - a wickedly delightful account of the experiences of Agastya Sen, August to his friends - a city slicker, an IAS officer posted to the very rural Madna. The book was nothing short of a masterpiece. Ummm. He followed this up with 2 novels - The Last Burden (1993) and The Mammaries of the Welfare State (2000), a sequel to his first one and a very good one at that.

“...it might well be used for an hors d'oeuvre, a phrase which its customers will not fathom unless pronounced as 'whores dee overs', like Punjabi streetwalkers at cricket.”

The book is a brilliant depiction of life in an Indian middle-class family at the end of the 20^th century. The central character here is Jamun, a bachelor, the son of Urmila & Shyamanand. His elder brother is Burfi who is married to a Christian, Joyce. Burfi has two children Pista & Doom aged 10 & 4 respectively. Kasturi, Jamun's girlfriend who is now married to a certain Agastya (who is nowhere as colourful as the "English, August" one) and pregnant too, Satyavan Hegiste, a Marathi fellow and Kuki - Jamun's friends, Kasibai - Jamun's maid and her son Vaman, Shyamanand's niece Chhana, Urmila's cardiologist Haldia are a few of the other characters in the book. The story begins with Jamun being intimated of his mother's illness. He returns home and sees that both his parents are fading away. So he decides to stay on till one of them expires. What transpires during the rest of his stay and the manner in which he bears his 'last burden' is for you to find out.

“But we're all feeble, he assents to himself, and heedless, glutted with vanity, and languish only after trumpery; and in a flash there remains no time to articulate one's love to those whom one owes love.”

The usual hallmarks of Chatterjee's writing are all there - large doses of humour, heavy usage of obscure words especially those used in literary & formal situations, creative sentence construction, characters with various hues of grey, the kinky situations, even the minutiae associated with India and its people. Moreover a strong undercurrent of depression can be observed in the book's flow, though this is offset to a large extent by the wryness of Chatterjee's humour.

“...all the commonplaces that describe death are so befitting, aren't they? That a light, or a spark, or a glow within, that was most naked at the eyes, is now stubbed out. That what survives is a shell, an untenanted house, the desiccated flesh of the fruit from which the sap's been siphoned off...”

The first chapter is titled "August", but here the allusion is to the month, not to the protagonist of "English, August". Compared to "English, August", this book is quite sombre and commercially too, was not as successful, the reason for the same being attributed to the seriousness of the book. The numerous squabbles in the family, the abjectness of some of the characters, their decadence, Jamun's recollections and various other situations all serve to heighten the book's poignancy.

All in all, a recommended read, at least for Chatterjee's fans.