White Man Falling (14 page)

“Amma,” Leela says again, abandoning her exercises, teasing at her hair idly because she is restless and looking for something to do or say or imagine.

“Amma, Amma…” Leela says; finding anything worth doing or saying or imagining is a struggle.

“Stop it Leela!” says Pushpa, from the other side of Swami. “Stop Amma-Ammaing all day long!”

Leela directs a scornful glance at Pushpa, and tugs at her sleek coconut-oiled hair as though combing it for ideas.

“Amma,” she says abruptly, “I need to be alone with Appa.”

“What is that, Daughter? Alone with Appa?”

“Why are you wanting to be alone with Appa?” Pushpa asks, frowning in suspicion.

Leela closes her eyes with an air of mystery, the better to trawl through her boredom for a plausible reason.

“Appa is wanting this,” she says, experimentally.

Amma and Pushpa turn to look at the freshly shaved face fronting Swami’s unconsciousness, and then swivel back round to contemplate Leela.

Always this youngest daughter of mine is like this,
Amma tells herself, moving her happy head side to side fractionally in the manner of an enraptured connoisseur at a fine
concert…
Think of the things she is always saying, look at the way she can dance like candle smoke without even knowing it…

“Amma!” Pushpa explodes, from a deep well of envy, “she is telling an untrue thing!” – but Amma is already rising, splendidly.

“Come my daughter,” she says to Pushpa, and “be quiet,” she adds, ominously, as a half-syllable of protest escapes from Pushpa’s lips. She exits the hospital room,
a sullen Pushpa trailing behind, to be received with wide-eyed curiosity by the handful of hangers-on who are loitering in the corridor outside. On the way out Pushpa glares at her youngest sister,
but Leela, alarmed at what she has just done, is unwilling to meet her gaze. She keeps her eyes tight-shut, in an approximation of someone who is involuntarily partaking in mysterious bouts of
cosmic wisdom. Only when she hears the door shutting does she peep out from her eyelids, to stare open-mouthed around a room which now seems fearful but for her father in the middle of it, in all
the strange and horizontal mystery of his situation. The recurrent wheezing and whirring that emanates from his lower legs – mechanically inflating pulsatile stockings on his calves are
minimizing the risk of blood clots – takes on a louder and more sinister tone.

“Amma, Sister,” she calls softly, frightened that her daddy will die and that it will be all her fault, “come back!” But when nobody comes she doesn’t call again.
She walks around the bed, to where Pushpa had been sitting, and picks up the book of Agam poems. “Appa,” she tries, with an edge of panic to her voice, “shall I read to you as
well, Appa?” And so she finishes the poem Pushpa had started:

Elsewhere, in the corridors, in the wards, in the hospital compound and in the streets beyond them, the conscious human world is going about its business in all its fractious,
noisy ways. Leela starts to feel a little calmer. She places the book on the bed, by her father’s legs, and holds him by the hand.

“Appa, when will you wake up? Appa? When will you talk to me again?”

But the only answer is the whirr of the apparatus and the hum of Mullaipuram.

Leela picks up her father’s limp and heavy hand and lowers her head to it, defying an urge to weep as she brushes her lips against his hairy wrist.

“Please don’t die again – one time is enough.”

In another part of the hospital D.D. Rajendran is advancing uneasily. The patients’ relatives thronging the corridors are parting respectfully to let him pass unhindered – everyone
knows who DDR is – then turn around and watch him from behind, puzzled, as though he is an unusual vessel sighted in unlikely waters. As he walks, DDR is deep in thought.

He is a man who takes his spiritual life seriously. His devotion to the guru Sri Sri Dravidananda Gurkkal – whose silence has penetrated to the starting point of the centre of the spiral
of all knowledge – has granted him a certain amount of self-acceptance over the years, but now he is troubled, and his faith in Sri Sri Dravidananda Gurkkal is not helping him. His growing
foreboding is that although he doesn’t understand why this limping fellow R.M. Swaminathan has entered his life in such a disturbing fashion, yet everything is developing in such a way as to
suggest that there is some meaning behind it all – that it is all going to make sense eventually, but in ways which might not prove comfortable for himself. The rumours sweeping Mullaipuram
about R.M. Swaminathan returning from death to walk with God have thrilled him and appalled him. Yes, DDR is becoming sure of it, there’s something of the indefinable-infinite-everything in
this fellow’s experiences – the fellow’s disability and suffering, the way a white man fell on his head and expended his death gaze on him, his strange way of talking, the numbers
he spouts, the breakdown, the falling silent for a week… and then death, and then life, and then, maybe, God. Aren’t these
exactly
the kind of events that happen when a
man’s earthly existence and cosmic fate are leading him beyond the merely human towards a glimpse of the universal? Always, DDR reminds himself, always this is the way – it is not the
priest, it is not the scholar, it is not the initiate who truly glimpses God. It is the ones you don’t expect. It is the madman who stands under a tree for fifteen years, being beaten and
laughed at; it is the ten-year-old girl who has fits and visions and manias and is locked away and starved and thrashed; it is the limping, spluttering, urinating, silent six-daughtered imbecile
who half-brains himself courtesy of a plummeting white man – these are the ones who are granted glimpses of the godhead… I am involved now, DDR muses, both fearful and flattered
– I brought him to my house, he urinated on my marble floor, he fell apart in my presence, he entered upon silence after I told him about the silence of Gandhi, the silence of Sri Sri
Dravidananda Gurkkal…

“Oh God, why did I end up shouting and bellowing at this holy fellow?!” he blurts, to the discomfort of a sweeper woman who is watching him stride past
her.

Dabbing at his moustache as he walks, still sunk in schizophrenic cogitations as to the meaning of all this what-not and what-all, he reaches the little knot of people outside Swami’s
hospital room. He glances with disdain at the hospital porters stationed at the door. They are under instructions from the hospital management to prevent any unauthorized access.

“Shall I go in?” he says, to one of the men – who nods minutely and steps aside. Everyone knows who DDR is and what he looks like. Everyone but Leela.

Inside, the machine powering the pulsatile stockings gives a great heaving groan and then falls silent. The curtain is three-quarters drawn against the fierce light outside, granting a warm
subdued glow to Swami and his daughter. Leela is hunched over the bed, resting her cheek on her father’s chest. She has placed her left-hand palm downwards on Swami’s forehead, while
her right hand rests lightly on his thigh. Her hair is splayed in a black, glossy fantail across his bare torso, so long and full and thick that it covers his chest without a gap or a chink.
What is this?
DDR wonders, moved by such a vision of beauty and devotion – and as he stands there gaping, the most beautiful child he has ever laid eyes on lifts her head, her hair
gently rolling off Swami’s chest and sweeping down over her shoulders.

“This is my Appa,” she declares.

He gently closes the door behind him, and nods. From his immaculate appearance and bearing, Leela can see that he is a VIP.

“Saar, do you want to touch my Appa’s feet?” she whispers, conspiratorially.

DDR shifts from one heel to another, unwilling to cede power to such a young girl, but wondering, too, if this is some kind of test to which he should submit.

“Maybe,” he admits. He can abruptly feel his heart knocking against his chest wall, and feels irritated with himself. “Maybe later.”

He approaches the bed and looks down at Swami, nervous and melancholic. There is a faint whiff of stale urine in the air, because a bag is nearly full, a detail which DDR notes with distaste.
And there is a fly in the room, whose flight he follows for a few seconds from the corner of his eye, until such a point as the little creature lands on the very feet that have been the subject of
so much respect and speculation, as if even the smallest of God’s beasts feels compelled to touch the feet that may be walking beyond the earthly realms. What does it all mean, DDR grunts to
himself miserably. Do these, do these and other signals, mean that the fellow is at one with the godhead? He gazes with longing at Swami’s face.

“Which daughter are you, child?” he asks, without looking at the girl.

“I am Leela, Saar. I am the youngest daughter.”

“Where’s your Amma, my Daughter?”

“I told her to leave,” Leela says, with a flash of pride.

“Hm. Not the words of a dutiful daughter.”

“Appa wanted to be alone with me,” Leela explains, with a dash of resentment.

DDR arches his eyebrows, impressed despite himself.

“Why is that?” he breathes.

“Because, Saar,” Leela says, “because, because…” She wonders who he is, and realizes she feels frightened. He is looking at her too urgently.

“Because?”

“Because he knew that you were coming,” she gulps breathlessly.

He pulls a chair up to the bedside, next to Leela, and they both gaze at the unconscious man’s face.

He turns to her, as though he expects her to say something else, and so, for want of anything more imaginative, “Touch his feet, Saar,” Leela implores him, “touch
them.”

DDR is sorely tempted. He looks down at the small peak in the sheet at the bottom of the bed. But he is not ready to submit. There is something holding him back.

“When I met your Appa, he said something which I didn’t understand. I’ve been wondering about it ever since.”

“Yes Saar?”

“Do you know what it is?”

“Yes Saar.”

“What?” He turns to her in dismay. His question had been purely rhetorical. “You’re saying you know what it is that he said to me?”

“Yes Saar,” Leela repeats.

Half doubting her honesty, half longing for her truthfulness, he gazes at her dubiously.

“Well?”

“Yes Saar?”

“What is it? What did he say to me?”

“Saar, you already know what he said to you.”

“Yes yes,
I
know what he said to me – but do
you
know what he said to me? That is the question.”

“Yes Saar. I’m already telling you I did,” Leela points out.

“Yes yes, that is all very well,” DDR answers her irritably, “but I’m telling you to tell me
what
he said to me.”

“But Saar, If I know what he said to you, and if you know what he said to you, why do you need me to tell you?”

He leans back in his seat, eyes blazing, abruptly convinced that he is being taken for a fool, and that the man lying prone in front of him is no more walking with God than hanging out with
monkeys in the trees. Leela senses his dangerous temper flashing, and her eyes fill with hot tears.

“I’m very sorry, Saar. Please forgive. But Saar, I am believing that Appa told you a number, didn’t he…”

“What what?”

Leela stands up and goes to a pile of three or four books under one of the plastic seats. She extracts one and starts flicking through the pages.

“Tell me the number, Saar, and then you will understand. What is that number?”

“What is that book?”

“
The Sacred Couplets
. Appa was trying to communicate a wisdom to you. What number?”

“Ninety-five, my Daughter,” says DDR, submitting to her. Once again his heart is knocking in his chest.

So Leela reads:

“Now do you understand, Saar?” she asks him, simply.

“Oh God,” DDR moans, sinking his head in his hands – “I am bellowing and raging at your Appa, who is unearthly wisdom personified, like the mighty Tiruvalluvar himself,
revered author of our famous
Sacred Couplets
, and he deigns to educate me in the error of my ways –
and I do not even hear him
!”

He walks around the bed and reverently places the tips of his fingers on the guru’s feet.

“You can pray if you want to,” Leela says.

Today, in Mullaipuram Anna District General Hospital, Swami is coming back to the world.

One wife, six daughters, one brother, two grandparents, one friend, one sister-in-law, three neighbours, two nurses, and four relatives of indeterminate provenance are crowding into the room.
Granddaddy regards life and death as roughly equivalent, and of little interest to anyone with half a brain, including God. He is sitting cross-legged in a corner and playing his flute – now
there is a man whose insights deserve to be heeded by anyone in this world intent on attaining spiritual enlightenment. Naturally no one takes a blind bit of notice of him. Everyone is crowding
round the bed in three rough tiers of homage. Amma and the girls comprise the first row, while the least influential people peer from the third tier at the bottom.

Swami’s lightening has been picking up in pace, his eyelids have been flickering for half a day, at uneven intervals, and he has occasionally issued deep, uncomfortable moans. At times a
small spasm judders his cheeks.

“Come back to us now, my husband,” Amma breathes to him, squeezing his hand. “Wake up.”

“Wake up Appa,” Leela pleads.