White Man Falling (22 page)

“Yes Sir.”

“Most sorry Sir.”

“Just tell me what you want from me!”

“Sir, you see, when we were all trying to stop Swami from poking about in these matters, Apu is taking very bad and specially extra-worse step. Brother, tell Mr
Rajendran…”

Apu’s eyes start watering, and a perfect tear tops the rim of his left eyelid, races down his cheek, hangs around on his chin for a few moments. It drops onto his left shoe.

“I killed the white man and I killed Swamiji too, God be forgiving me, Sir.”

“You? You killed Swamiji? How did… how did you kill Swamiji? Swamiji had heart attack in the street!” DDR says, appealing to Murugesan.

“He is giving him a push and warning him off the white-man case,” Murugesan explains. “He is pushing him to the ground and setting off the heart attack.”

“Oh my—”

“Yes Sir,” Murugesan agrees, putting an arm around the snivelling Apu, while DDR gazes at the younger man as though he’s a leper. “But Sir, everything is in the pattern,
in one way Apu is killing Swami, but in another…” – a series of nods and grimaces and unusual facial expressions precede Murugesan’s thesis – “…if Swami
hadn’t died, then Swamiji wouldn’t live. Because of this, we have talked and talked, Sir. We have examined everything that has happened, every way in which Swamiji is teaching us, and
we are believing he is guiding us to see for ourselves that the number-one very best, most noble action is to make amends, Sir – but if we make amends, Sir, we are dragging in everyone
involved in the abuse and cover-up, small and large. Like you, Sir. That is the difficulty.”

DDR’s head sinks lower over his chest, and his back hunches. So that is what this is about. He has never willingly faced up to a bad deed and paid the price. Is this what the guru wants of
him?

In an obscure side street off Periyar Road in Mullaipuram, in the permanent shadow of the 120-year-old Church of St Xavier and St Sebastian, sandwiched between a failing travel
agency that organizes temple pilgrimages to Chidambaram, Srirangam, Kumbakonam and Thiruvaiyaru, and a DVD-rental store that only opens when the owner’s psoriasis is easing up, lies a portal
into a strange world beyond Amma’s comprehension. It is called Anjaneya’s International Internettings.

Anjaneya’s International Internettings comprises one super-tiny room divided into eight cubicles, each cubicle containing one chair, one table and one computer terminal. The tap-tap of
fingers on battered keyboards goes on until late at night. Street dust and bidi stubs litter the corners of the room, fraying posters hang off the walls, and a naked light bulb hangs down at waist
level. It is not one of the more popular or well-run Internet caf
és in Mullaipuram, with its slow connection
speeds, dreadful coffee and virus-afflicted machines, but it is
a wise choice of Pushpa’s to bring her mother to this out-of-the-way place. The task they are about to undertake is of a delicate nature.

Elements of Mullaipuram are awash with talk that Jodhi has been gallivanting around in jeans with boys; yes, in jeans and in who knows what else – tight T-shirts, diaphanous
chudidhars
– for there is no limit to the depravity people require in others when they are not getting enough of it for themselves. Some people are on the brink of going into open
season on Jodhi’s sluttish failings, so thank God that Amma is unaware of the worst gossip doing the rounds. Nevertheless, a fraction of those preposterous whisperings have reached her ears.
She has been informed that Jodhi, despite ongoing marriage negotiations with her peerless boy, has advertised herself without her parents’ consent on a matrimonial matchmaking site on the
Internet.

Furtive youths peer over the tops of their scruffy partitions as the two women enter the Internet shop; left hands are slowly withdrawn from below the table line, and right hands click on mouse
buttons with some alacrity. Pushpa grabs a spare chair from an unused cubicle and sets it down for her mother. For the first time in her life, Amma sits down in front of that mysterious inanimate
god of modern life, the computer. She is po-faced and solemn, like a child in front of a doctor. She watches blankly as Pushpa searches for Indian matrimonial sites.

“What are you doing?” Amma complains. “Just look in the computer and see if it has Jodhi inside.”

“Amma, this is number-one Tamil matrimonial site, we’ll try this one first.”

Amma watches, still bewildered, as Pushpa starts searching on www.tamilbrides.co.in.

“What are you doing, Daughter?”

“Amma, be patient, I am putting in correct age and height range and weight range and location and education details of Jodhi, then if she is there she will appear on screen.”

“Ayyo-yo!” Amma exclaims, as a column of earnest faces appears in front of her. “Look at all these girls! What are their parents thinking of, letting them be displayed like
fillets of fish on a slab! As if a computer can find a good boy!”

“It is just the modern way, Amma.”

“It is the job of the parents and the matchmaker.”

“Now the computer is the matchmaker.”

Pushpa scrolls down a page of photographs and short excerpts from written profiles, and Amma can’t help locking on to the write-ups.

22 years, 5’2”, 46 kg, wheatish complexion, slim, M.Sc. Marketing, Brahmin, caste no bar
—

“Desperate,” Amma sniffs.

22 years, 5’0”, 48 kg, slim, very attractive, NI. Tech Services, divorced, marriage annulled on grounds of groom unable to consummate
—

“Ha!” Amma says.

22 years, 5’1”, pleasant-looking, 75 kg—

“Water buffalo,” Amma points out.

For nearly an hour they sit hunched over the keyboard in Anjaneya’s International Internettings, scouring www.southindiamatrimonials.co.in and www.vanniyar-mates.co.in and
www.wife-to-go.com, but their chances of finding Jodhi here are about the same as their chances of stumbling across her in the street in a pair of jeans – which is to say, on the slim
side.

* * *

Anyone with a background in diagnostic medicine may be wondering if Amma suffers from NSwF syndrome, a degenerative brain condition affecting the synapses and neuronal pathways.
The full medical term for this syndrome is No Smoke without Fire. We can see the debilitating effects of this illness in Amma right now: her failure to find any evidence that Jodhi is advertising
herself on the Internet has no bearing whatsoever on her fears that Jodhi might be doing so. Only if Amma had stumbled across a website called www.jodhi-not-up-for-grabs.com, complete with
cutting-edge Flash presentation of her eldest daughter renouncing denim and declaring her undying commitment to Mohan, would the symptoms of her NSwF have found relief at this time. A fruitless
hour in Anjaneya’s International Internettings has only exacerbated her anxieties, and she returns home to Number 14/B on the warpath, trailing Pushpa behind her. In one way or another, the
storm is about to break.

“Jodhi!” she cries, bursting through the door, “Jodhi? Jodhi!
Jodhi?! Jodhi!
”

Jodhi and Leela, having come to an uneasy truce about the slap, are in the bedroom watching TV together; they look at each other, hearts sinking. From the timbre, volume and quantity of
Amma’s “Jodhi”s it is immediately clear that their mother is in one of her least reasonable, most excitable moods.

Jodhi emerges from the bedroom, Leela behind her. Pushpa comes and stands by them, and the three girls watch Amma jostling around the little bungalow as she deposits her plastic shopping bag
here and her silk money purse there and her bad mood in every place. At last she turns around, and at the highest pitch of frustration, she’s off:

“Just tell me, Daughter, is it true?”

“Amma?”

“Don’t Amma your Amma, just tell me now, is it true what they are saying?”

“Amma, what are they saying?”

“Jodhi, you know what they are saying!”

“No Amma!”

Amma glares at her eldest.

“You two,” she tells Pushpa and Leela, without looking at them, “go and sit at the front!”

The younger girls troop the three yards to the verandah, shutting the front door behind them; this is not so much to afford privacy to Amma and Jodhi, which would be impossible given the size of
the bungalow and the loudness at which Amma can shout, but merely to lower the volume a little. Pushpa sits down on the top step, sighing heavily.

“This is all your fault, you dummy,” she says.

Leela doesn’t reply. She knows that Pushpa is right. She sits down next to Pushpa, and they both gaze at the nearby bustling road, where India is getting on with being itself. An
egg-seller on a bicycle is passing by, pulling off his ordinary everyday miracle, riding slowly down the street with a five-feet-high stack of six-by-six egg cartons wobbling on the back of the
bike. On a moment-by-moment basis he must deal with the anarchic traffic, the treacherous road, the reckless pedestrians, and so he sways left and right minutely in the small moving arena of space
that is granted him on the busy street, he slows down and speeds up fractionally, adjusting and compensating, forever modulating, keeping the precarious swaying stack on a vertical axis even when
the bike is not. The girls’ eyes lock onto him as the most interesting spectacle available, and follow him as he progresses down the street.

“How is he doing that?” Pushpa sighs, as if this unheralded feat of balancing symbolizes a difficult life sensibly negotiated, all pitfalls and traps avoided with high skill and
wisdom.

They watch him turn a corner – where, unknown to them, a feverish cow with an infected foot makes a sudden lurch into his path, and for the first time in several years he goes crashing to
the ground with his eggs, all 900 of them, most of which smash. Within minutes, a medium-sized crowd is watching a pack of stray dogs snapping and snaffling over a mud of raw egg and road dust, as
a weeping egg-seller cycles away with a stubby stack of only 200 eggs on the back of his bicycle.

Inside Number 14/B, things are hotting up too.

“Look me in both eyes, you have advertised yourself on internetting marriage site, haven’t you!” Amma is barking at Jodhi; Jodhi is so amazed by this accusation that she
can’t reply immediately. “Well?!” Amma raps.

“No Amma! Of course not!
Who
is telling this rubbish!?
Why
are you believing it?!”

Amma is used to being at least slightly right sometimes, even when she’s notably wrong; but Jodhi’s reaction is so clear and bold that even the most limbic reaches of her
unreasonableness take a heavy hit. It is only many years’ experience in maintaining her position in the face of all opposition, logic and justice that help her to limp on for a little while
longer.

“A perfect boy! Ready and waiting! Parents not even bothered about dowry any more! And this is all because of my hard work, Daughter! And instead of thanks all I am getting is jeans and
dirty Internet doings and gossip all round the town!”

“Amma, please, what are you
talking
about?”

“What everyone is talking about, that is what I am talking about!”

“Amma, please, stop believing every gossip and tittle-tattle you hear!”

“How will I marry my five other daughters if my first daughter disgraces us all in her jeans?!” Amma continues, gamely, like a card-player with a weak hand going for an
all-or-nothing bluff.

“How will I survive another day if my mother keeps treating me like this!” Jodhi complains, with some feeling. “Amma, I am only ever doing what you and Appa are telling me to
do!”

They stare at each other, sharing the horror of a good Indian daughter and a loving Indian mother reduced to a bitter stand-off. Amma’s chin and lower lip start to tremble, followed
shortly afterwards by Jodhi’s lower lip and chin, and within a few seconds they are both weeping on either side of the void between them, not knowing what to do. Jodhi turns and runs into the
kitchen and out into the backyard.

“Daughter,” Amma mouths helplessly and soundlessly, “I’m sorry, please forgive.”

Here is Leela, being pushed into the room by Pushpa at the open door. Leela herself is not looking too good at the moment in the trembling-chin and lower-lip department of life, now that she is
finally going to admit to Amma that she has been cobbling up a whole heap of rubbish about Jodhi, and that it is all her fault.

* * *

The retired tax collector who built Highlands died of a very bad mood in 1947, mainly to register his fervent disapproval of Indian Independence. Little of his thirty
years’ occupancy remains. Successive Indian owners of Highlands have stripped the cottage of its colonial past. One of them even installed a puja room complete with bronze statues of four
notable gods, which is exactly the kind of thing that would have made the tax collector very angry indeed. But at least there is something from the tax collector’s days that has survived. It
is the desk that Swami is sitting at. It is a large sloping desk, with deep drawers and two long-empty inkwell holders, and it stands on the verandah of Highlands, its rich veneer in tatters,
disintegrating. The tax collector used to write letters of indignation on it, and keep his private papers in the drawers, and conceal a small collection of ethnic erotica – of a distinctive
Victorian stamp, and of a mostly pseudo-scientific character – in a secret internal chamber.

It is 10 a.m. The sky is clear. The jungle is pristine after an overnight rain, and langur monkeys are gambolling under the verandah and in the long-abandoned gardens of Highlands, sizing up a
raid on the kitchen where Kamala is preparing
parotas
and a potato kurma. Swami sits on the verandah, Amma’s latest letter on the desk in front of him, reading, pausing, reading,
pausing, watching the monkeys, reading, pausing. He is not a natural writer of letters, and as for Amma, who is a burst waterpipe of words in any medium, she wields a pen with all the control of a
baboon using a fire-hose – but letters are all they have for as long as he is in Thendraloor.