The Last Burden
“This tendency is indeed quite widespread, and is certainly conspicuous even in the subsequent relations between Burfi and Joyce, that is after their marriage really sours and Burfi begins his second extramarital affair, about which he breathes to Joyce not a syllable – but naturally! did you exclaim? No, in Burfi’s case, not naturally, because, soon after his maiden adulterous fling had started to jade a bit, he had felt sheepish and had actually owned up to Joyce, and afterwards also unburdene...d himself, in turn, to Jamun, Urmila and Chhana, muttering, with sloshed, crimson-eyed gravity, ‘My marriage’s cracked up – and someone in the family must be told why.’ Yet that too is widespread, isn’t it, the affair, the fondling of the seven-year-itch – and one senses that one is growing up when the widespread, the commonplace, befalls oneself. One has ever so often heard and read, for instance, that for a marriage, the particularly dreadful, uphill years are one’s late thirties and early forties, that one’s most likely to be unfaithful, grumpy and disoriented then, and next, one observes and hears of somebody one knows – a neighbour, a brother-in-law – that even his marriage has cracked up; then one starts to believe that one’s life will always startle one with those traits of the human temperament that’ve been disclosed a million times before, that the world is indeed composed of these cyclical, wellworn tracks that every generation shambles about on, age upon age, that nothing that falls to one’s lot is new, that maturing and growing old really signifies encountering, in the particular, what has already occurred numberless times in the universal.MoreLess
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