White Man Falling (24 page)

Mr P’s shoulders rise and fall heavily. This is not proving easy. He had hoped that Amma would meet them halfway in facing up to the problem, but she is proving intractable. What is he
supposed to do now? There is scarcely a protuberant aspect of his corporal matter that he has not tweaked, pinched, stroked, patted, tapped, rubbed, fondled and pawed; but at last he brings his
hands in front of him, extending the thumbs towards each other; he connects the two tips of his thumbs together, and gazes at the connection as though it might short-circuit the impasse.

Amma’s chest is heaving up and down. She senses that the parents of the boy have something terrible to say, that even now they are wheeling its monstrous engines out into open view. She
swallows. She can hear crows squabbling on the red tile roof above her, cawing and flapping, and from somewhere outside she can hear children chanting and squealing as some adult carries them
around like gunny sacks, playing the same game that she had played as a child:

“You see, Mohan is worried…” Mr P says.

“Yes?” Amma says. “What are these worries of Mohan?”

“I am very sorry for my frankness, please do not be misunderstanding me, I have best interests of both the young people at heart, but he is worried…” – the thumbs break
apart, waggle in circles, cease waggling, connect together again – “…that she is having the sweet feelings for another boy somewhere, somehow.”

There, it is out at last, and all three of them can look at it – that very shocking possibility – with all the awe it can command.

“Oh!” says Amma, dismayed.

You could argue that this suggestion is not fundamentally different to her own anxieties until a few hours ago; you could claim that it is untrue; if you combine a modern outlook with a
forgiving nature, then you might be tempted to say “so what” even if it is true – but wherever you stand in this matter, you cannot fail to appreciate how shameful it is to have
the father of the boy touch his two big fat thumbs together in your own house and come out with it.

“Oh! That is… ayyo-yo-yo!”

“Forgiving me, please, I do not like to say this, but this is the impression Mohan is getting, so what can we do?” Mr P pleads. “We must make our enquiries.”

“My Jodhi,” Amma gasps, “eldest daughter of Guru Swamiji, and this, and this, and that is how you, and this is how I…”

Amma sits up straight in her seat, lowers her brow, juts out her lower lip pugnaciously and assumes the dignity that all her years of life’s battering have granted her, all the presence
that her seventy-odd kilos of matter can afford her, and all the outrage she can chisel out of every available nook and cranny of her motherhood.

“Jodhi is best daughter in Mullaipuram, but if she is not good enough for you—” she bluffs.

At this moment, the best daughter in Mullaipuram returns from the market with her shopping bag of vegetables.

“Tell them,” Amma commands her at once, “tell them that you are a dutiful daughter!”

“Amma?” Jodhi takes in the scene at once, sees that there has been a confrontation, sees that her mother is on the warpath, and her heart sinks; “Amma, let us be calm, I shall
be making some tea…”

“Tell them! Tell them you are happy to marry Mohan – come, speak.”

Jodhi looks at all three of them – the angered, anxious face of her mother, the half aggrieved, half apologetic expressions of Mr and Mrs P. All the lights illuminating the deep and
hopeful chambers of her interior life start to go out.

“Yes Amma.”

“There!” Amma declaims in bitter triumph. “Do you see? Jodhi, tell them you are the kind of girl who obeys your Appa and Amma in all things, great and small!”

“Amma…” Jodhi protests, embarrassed, “let us not become overexcited with our guests…”

“Tell them!”

Jodhi sighs. Her shoulders sag.

“Yes Amma. I am doing whatever my parents are telling me to do. I know you will make best decisions for me.”

“You see?” Amma says to Mr and Mrs P, “you see? She is dutiful girl. Tell them, tell them you will marry Mohan!”

“Yes Amma, that is what has been decided,” Jodhi replies, quietly and with great dignity, and she walks into the kitchen.

“You see?” Amma says, almost taunting her visitors now. “Tell them you are not harbouring the wrong feelings for another boy!” she shouts after Jodhi.

Jodhi makes no reply to Amma’s demand. She takes a bunch of coriander from the shopping bag and places it on the wooden chopping block, and tackles a few of the tiny flies that are zipping
around the fragrance of it, splatting them between her palms. Next she empties a paper bag of brinjal onto a sheet of newspaper and starts sorting them by size.

“Jodhi, tell them that there are no feelings in your heart for another boy!” Amma commands once more.

In the kitchen, Jodhi’s head seems to be getting lower; the base of it is sinking into the top of her neck. As for her neck, it is retracting into her shoulders. Her shoulders would
diminish too, if they could. Jodhi does not answer the question, not this time, not next time, and not even in a few minutes, when Mr and Mrs P – still apologetic and remarkably polite, given
the circumstances – leave Number 14/B harbouring the gravest doubts about the viability of the marriage.

When Amma – calling from the verandah – fails to lure them back with promises about her husband’s powers in this affair, she goes back inside and confronts Jodhi. They are both
in tears. But Jodhi refuses to confirm or deny that she harbours feelings for another boy. She chooses not to respond to even the wildest and most destructive guesses at the putative boy’s
identity, and won’t be bullied, provoked or tricked into discussing any aspect of the marriage with Amma.

“I will do what I am told,” is her only comment.

D.D. Rajendran, Murugesan and Apu are sitting together in a dusty corner of the Mariamman Temple complex on Kamarajar Salai, in the shade afforded by a crumbling wall and a
coconut tree. They are cross-legged on a low platform, not far from a woman sleeping on the bare stone with her child, and a stray dog that whimpers as it dreams. They bear ash on their foreheads,
and they are bare-chested. They have just been through a super-deluxe, hour-long, 8,000-rupees purification ritual presided over by an old temple priest to the rhythm of kettle drums, as ululating
women – bearing bunches of neem leaves in both hands, their long black hair soaking wet and their bodies smeared all over with turmeric paste – howled “Mahamayee!
Maariaathaa!”

Other temple-goers who are engaging in their everyday temple life – clanging the bell as they enter, circling the inner sanctum, catching up with the gods – look across at the men
curiously; what is going on with DDR now, they wonder. Why is he with those fellows in ritual clothes? Some of these onlookers settle down to watch, squatting down on their haunches under the base
of one of the gopurams, or sitting on rocks between the pillars. And a reporter with the local rag, having taken some photographs discreetly, goes into the temple in search of an insider who will
tell him what DDR has been doing here. Tomorrow a garbled account of spiritual regeneration, expensive Vedic rites and personal sacrifices will be on page two of the
Mullaipuram
Murasu
.

Apu’s chest is broad and smooth and muscled; Murugesan’s chest is broad and hairy and strong and running to fat; and there is DDR’s chest, which lies beneath sloping shoulders
– the lightly haired, slack-toned, flab-layered pigeon-chest of a thin man gone to seed. He hunches over his stomach, round-backed, his slack man breasts quivering when he shifts position.
His dark-brown nipples droop down and almost touch the pot belly lying in the trough of his lungi like a deflated football in a hammock.

“Thank you sir,” Apu says.

“Yes, thank you sir,” Murugesan agrees.

“Call me Brother, Brothers.”

“Yes sir.”

“Yes sir.”

The mood they share is a mix of comforting and spiritual aspects: relief, resolution, redemption, catharsis. There is a certain dreaminess there, too, and who could be surprised at that?
Wouldn’t you feel the same, if an emaciated elderly priest in a loincloth – the son of a priest descended from priests stretching back into antiquity – had rubbed sacred ash on
your forehead in that holy place, while reciting mantras that were first composed over three thousand years ago? Mantras that have been memorized backwards from one generation to the next to ensure
that not a word will ever change or be corrupted? Mantras that have been recited millions and millions of times over thousands of years to hundreds of long-dead kings and thousands of long-dead
artists and numberless long-dead ordinary Hindus? These are not some johnny-come-lately rites, tacking and gybing according to the prevailing cultural winds.

The decision to undergo a ritual purification ceremony is no light matter for the three men. It is a solemn preparatory step in the process that lies ahead of them, for they are going to face up
to what they have done. At an appropriate time, they are going to hand in written testaments to the authorities about their various transgressions in connection with the death of the white man and
the subsequent cover-up, and accept with equanimity the consequences. DDR will probably be the least affected. If his political aspirations had remained intact, then his strenuous efforts to
deflect attention away from Hotel Ambuli could have been damaging. But what does he care now for the dazzling machinations of politics?

It is a different story for the other two. Murugesan’s efforts to cover up on behalf of his colleagues risk a severe penalty – a demotion at best, possibly dismissal. As for Apu, the
loss of his job is a certainty, and the prospect of prison is likely.

“Swamiji will be excellently pleased with us,” Murugesan suggests.

“When shall we tell the guru?” Apu asks.

“When he is coming back, when he is rested, then we are telling him,” DDR answers authoritatively.

They fall into silence again. Small children are racing around in the courtyard, squabbling and bartering violence. A lame old woman limps through their chaos with extreme difficulty, leaning on
a wooden staff, muttering to herself. The three men watch her painful progress absent-mindedly.

“Swamiji is already knowing our decision,” Apu says blithely. “Only the detail he is not knowing.”

No one replies.

“I wish he would come back,” Apu sighs. “It could be months.”

“Don’t worry about that,” DDR answers, “he’ll be back in days.”

“Sir?”

“Please be calling me Brother.”

“Brother, sir.”

“I am speaking to his wife this morning, she is writing him the letters nearly every day, he is not listening to her advice, he is insisting he is coming back to Mullaipuram, to a normal
life. So when he has decided the day, I will bring him back in a mighty convoy.”

“Thanks be to God!” Apu says. He can hardly wait to confess his transgressions before Swami. Indeed, he fervently longs to turn himself in to the authorities, he yearns to bring
shame upon his entire family, he’s desperate to go to a hellhole of a prison where the inmates will persecute him, he’s ecstatic about leaving his wife and child to struggle on without
him – it feels like the least he can do. Such is the power of faith.

“Normal life in Mullaipuram,” Murugesan muses. “That is not going to happen, Mullaipuram will go crazy when he comes back.”

DDR has a strange look about him; the power and the responsibility of his new life are settling upon him, like a richly embroidered ceremonial shawl being laid across his shoulders.

“The Guru Swamiji is humble,” he declares, “and does not realize his own power. He changes lives. He is like the most precious jewel,” DDR suggests, with an impressive
rhetorical bent, “which is forever unaware of its own fathomless beauty and value…”

“Adaa-daa-daa,” whispers Apu, in admiration of this inspired poetry.

“Such a jewel,” DDR continues, “is in need of a powerful steward to secure its destiny, and such a steward is in need of faithful guards to protect the jewel from, from…
from hanky-panky,” DDR says. Perhaps his impressive rhetorical powers have let him down a little bit at this point, but he recovers his position soon enough. “Such a jewel – the
jewel we have been blessed with – requires a magnificent setting in which everyone can admire its awe-inspiring beauty.”

DDR’s eyes close, and he breathes in the ecstatic oxygen of the right-hand man of the Guru Swamiji – he is imagining the glorious spectacle that will occur when he brings Swami back
to his hometown. Meanwhile, the eyes of Murugesan and Apu widen; they have seen, for the first time, where D.D. Rajendran is coming from.

* * *

A few days later, at 6.30 a.m. in the dusty bus station at Thendraloor, Swami is sitting by the street stalls in a red plastic chair offered by the manager of a one-booth
STD-ISD telephone outlet. Kamala squats on her haunches, one protective hand lying across their two suitcases. A crowd of onlookers and passers-by and snivelling devotees is building up, impeding
the buses that are arriving and departing every ten minutes. For Swami is leaving his refuge at Highlands. He is abandoning the daily hour of silence in the jungle clearing, he is leaving behind
his solitary dawn meditations, he is removing himself from the hopes and dreams of the ruined, the broken-boned, the withered-limbed, the cancerous, the beaten, and all those trusting individuals
who are forever assuming he is on the brink of interceding in their miserable destinies.

“Appa, any water, Appa?”

Swami grunts a no.

“I hope the bus isn’t late, Appa, too many people are here.”

Some people are shocked that a man whom they believe to be a living godhead intends to board a common bus to transport his corporeal matter back to Mullaipuram – how can such a dirty
workhorse as a municipal bus be an appropriate mount for someone who has walked with God? A few of the most credulous are puzzled as to why Swami is bothering to engage with the tiresome
constraints of time and space at all – why doesn’t he just project himself to Mullaipuram instantly, via a handy astral plane? And while the majority of people wouldn’t go as far
as that, most of them feel that a more impressive vehicle is required. They desire their guru to be worthy of their awe. After all, the very biggest contemporary holy men swan around in fleets of
air-conditioned luxury cars while police keep the roads clear of other traffic; during processions they repose in huge paladins carried by teams of human donkeys, as lackeys fan them down with
banana leaves; on long-distance trips they charter their own planes, or are flown around in private jets lent to them by murky industrialists. And so while the devotees are impressed by the humble
simple lifestyle of their guru, they wouldn’t mind witnessing dashes of extravagant splendour, too, to set off his praiseworthy humility. A facility to entertain paradoxes with equanimity has
always been a signal feature of spiritual sensitivity at the highest levels.