White Man Falling (31 page)

“I was there, it felt very bad,” Pushpa points out.

“And then, while Amma is chasing around Mullaipuram worried that I’m wearing jeans and what-all, I am bumping into Anand one day outside the Bharat Petroleum garage – just
passing by—”

“But how are you just passing by, in Thenpalani?”

“—just… passing… and… you see… when we met… it’s difficult to explain…” Jodhi peters out.

“And what, Sister?”

“We are just seeing each other and knowing,” Jodhi says simply, flushing.

“But – knowing what, Sister?”

“Yes Sister, what is the knowing?”

“Knowing. It is the knowing. Just – knowing. It is knowing the beautiful thing.”

Kamala begins to cry – perhaps she somehow senses that she will never know the beautiful thing.

“And then he is saying to me – things, and then… and now… We haven’t seen each other since, we haven’t spoken, didn’t email. The situation is too very
hopeless! How can I marry Mohan?” she pleads. “Even if Appa is the God, the God can’t stop the Amma,” and she starts to sob once more, and this time she will not be
consoled.

Though Jodhi’s estimation of the power of the God in relation to the power of the Amma may or may not be accurate, yet she is completely unaware of the power of the Leela.

* * *

When Amma wakes up later in the near-darkness, on the end of a snore that could make any nearby tree shed all its leaves, she finds that she is alone. Never in her life has she
been in this situation – not one sleeping moment of her existence has been passed in a room by herself. The glass doors to the verandah are wide open, and a slow hot breeze is oozing in.

“Husband – help – Daughters – thief – help!” she moans incoherently, lurching up into a sitting position, looking around her wildly. “Husband –
Jodhi – murder!” she cries, her voice rising in pitch and panic.

Leela comes in from the verandah, saying, “Yes Amma, don’t worry, everything is fine.”

“Where is my family?!” Amma cries.

“Calm down Amma, everything is fine, they are just chatting.”

“Chatting?” Amma asks incredulously. “It is the middle of the night! Where are they?”

“Bathroom,” Leela admits.

“Bathroom?! Why are they chatting in the bathroom?” comes the disbelieving response.

Swami comes limping in from the verandah. He carefully gets to his knees next to Amma, lies down on the rug with a grunt and a shiver, and as Amma and Leela watch – one in indignation, the
other in admiration – he falls asleep in less than five seconds.

“What are you doing?” Amma cries abruptly, shaking him awake, “What is going on? I am waking up all alone and my family is having secret meetings all over the place about who
knows what, and later you must be telling the boy’s family that Jodhi will marry him, and all you are doing is being the guru and roaming around and sleeping!”

“Anand,” says Swami’s dislocated voice, in the gloom – and Leela slinks away, to lie down on the rug, hoping to put herself out of the way of Amma’s suspicions. For
Leela has tried to make up for all her gossip with some new, different, better, more accurate gossip.

Swami hasn’t spoken for a long while. Amma processes the phenomenon like a bemused traveller testing a new foodstuff on the tongue.

“Anand,” she repeats, “Anand… Anand…”

Swami is already falling asleep again.

“Anand?!” Amma exclaims – she shakes Swami again. “Husband, yes yes, thank God, you are making the decision at last! But it’s Mohan you mean, isn’t
it!”

“Anand,” says the voice, in the gloom.

“Husband, what are you talking about, the boy is called Mohan, Mohan is the boy – Anand is the brother who is no good at anything, he is the useless one, he is the one who
won’t be earning 300,000 rupees per year, you are confused! This is not what you are saying! Thank God you are making the decision. Mohan! Thank you husband, at last you are – you
are…”

Swami is struggling to sit upright. Amma helps him, and then finds herself helping him to stand up. Once he’s on his feet, Swami walks over to a table lamp on a table, and switches it on.
Light floods the room. Swami limps over to his wife and looks deep into her eyes.

“Jodhi,” he says. “Anand,” he says. “Fifty-Seven,” he says.

And even as he is getting back down on the rug to fall asleep – Swami no longer dreams when he sleeps, by the way – a stricken Amma is crying out for a copy of
The Sacred
Couplets
.

In the future, not less than five years away but no more than ten, a family visit is coming to a close in the little bungalow of Number 14/B. Jodhi and Mohan are sitting on the
floor with the children, six-year-old Rajah and five-year-old Geetha, playing snakes and ladders on a small cardboard grid from
The Big Bumper Box of 101 Board Games
, a recent purchase by
Mohan. It is a cheap and underwhelming present, but it is all he can afford, and the children are young enough to like it. But at a sudden shout from outside, the children are on their feet and
scampering out, scattering the pieces heedlessly, squealing “Me first, me, me!” as they rush into the backyard.

Mohan looks down at his hands as he listens to them laughing and shrieking:

“I am playing this game too when I am a child,” he says, smiling awkwardly. He is gaunt, and strained, and shabby. The pocket on the breast of his shirt has come
unstitched.

“Yes, and I was playing this game, and our parents, and our parents’ parents.”

“Yes, that is so,” Mohan concurs.

“The children’s children will play this game.”

“Yes, and their children too.”

This is among the best and longest conversations they have ever had. Maybe, one far-off day, when they are old, they will always talk so easily.

They lapse into their usual excruciating silence, and pretend to be absorbed in listening to the game going on beyond them, instead of being lost to melancholy.

“Amma,” says Rajah running in, “Appa is letting Geetha have two goes in a row, but that is not fair!” He looks to be on the edge of tears.

“Uncle will let you have three goes in a row!” Jodhi claims, and as Rajah races back outside she smiles at Mohan, who is dutifully lumbering to his feet. Soon she is watching from
the open kitchen door as her husband and her brother-in-law cavort around the small backyard carrying the children around like gunny sacks. Everyone is laughing, but only the children are
happy.

Apart from taking advantage of Number 14/B – the Indian Police Service would like to have the bungalow back, but does not like to press its claim – Anand and Jodhi have stepped
outside the powerful world of the Guru Swamiji Ashram. All the other members of the family live on the complex. Kamala is Swami’s devoted personal assistant – a mini sub-cult of
Swami’s followers almost venerate her, in a very minor way. Pushpa is engaged to the fellow whom D.D. Rajendran has appointed as Assistant Director of the Guru Swamiji Educational Outreach
Program – instigating and arranging that match kept Amma happy for six months. Leela is a junior dance instructor at the Guru Swamiji Cultural and Traditional Activities Centre. Suhanya and
Anitha live with Swami and Amma and Kamala in a simple, purpose-built bungalow at the edge of the ashram, from where they go to college each day. As for Swami and Amma, they have hardly changed
– except to become more and more like themselves – while DDR, President of the Guru Swamiji Ashram, has been steadily building up the infrastructure, scope and reach of the project.
Swami doesn’t do much these days – less than he ever did, as befits a man who is much better at being than doing. He has almost ceased to exist in any mode that an ordinary human being
can comprehend. He hasn’t spoken in three years now. The last time he did so he said a number, but there is a dispute as to which number it was, and to which sacred couplet it referred, and
to what that sacred couplet might mean, and in what light the Guru Swamiji’s citation of it should be interpreted. Some are still arguing about it – the debate can be followed in
The Silence and the Breaking of the Silence
(Guru Swamiji Press), which can be found in the Guru Swamiji Devotional Bookshop, amongst many other tracts and publications.

The core of Guru Swamiji’s message is still centred beyond articulation in his deeply affecting hour of silence, a practice which benefits countless thousands from all over the world.
Nobody knows how it works, only that it does. An impressive tiered amphitheatre now surrounds the ancient banyan tree where, each day, Kamala leads the guru – escorted by K.P. Murugesan, who
heads up security, or his deputy S.P. Apumudali.

Jodhi and Anand have not been drawn into this parallel society. Anand is losing money hand over fist on the literary magazine he has founded. He secretly publishes his own poetry in the journal
under a series of pen names – perhaps that’s why no one is buying it? Jodhi is in charge of the production side of things. It is too much for her to handle; she is also in the middle of
her doctorate, while holding down a full-time job as junior lecturer at the Madurai University-affiliated local college. In fact, though no one says so, to all intents and purposes Anand is
Mullaipuram’s first and only house husband. Jodhi would never admit to it, but Amma was 100% correct about several aspects of Anand’s uselessness. His sleeping powers, without question,
are unusually over-developed, and he does indeed spend far too much time contemplating mundane objects for reasons that no one can fathom. Yesterday he spent over an hour looking at a wooden spoon.
As for his poetry, it has got steadily worse, and from a very low starting point.

Mohan no longer lives in nearby Thenpalani, and can bring himself to visit only once each year. He has not fulfilled the high expectations that were vested in him. Though a convincing recipient
of the
Sri Aandiappan Swamigal Tamil Nadu Information Superhighway Endowment Scholarship
, and a worthy student at the South Indian Institute of Integrated Information Technology in
Bangalore, he dropped out of his studies after losing his IT hunger. Unrequited love tends to do that to a man’s interest in information technology. He lives in a tiny, dirty, sub-subletted
room, on the seventh floor of a perilously built and very ugly block of flats, in a teeming neighbourhood of Chennai some 200 miles away. He spends his days puffing on bidis, exhaling the smoke out
of the window and onto the city, and repairing the second-hand computers of the lower middle classes.

After a while Anand and Mohan stop playing with the children in the backyard, and it is time for Mohan to go back to his parents’ house in Thenpalani before catching the overnight train
back to Chennai.

“I’ll go and come back,” he says, at the door.

“Yes please come back very soon,” Anand says, “children always asking for Uncle.”

“Very soon I am coming back,” Mohan agrees.

After a few steps, he turns around to give an awkward wave to his brother’s family. He sees Anand’s hand resting on Rajah’s shoulder, while Jodhi holds her daughter on her
hip.

“Uncle!” says Geetha, and bursts into tears, as Mohan walks away, tall and stooped, past the crumbling wall that the British built.

Heartfelt thanks to Alessandro Gallenzi, Elisabetta Minervini, William Chamberlain, Christian Müller and Jonny Gallant at Alma Books for their talent and hard work; I am
particularly indebted to Alessandro and Elisabetta for their long-standing support. I am deeply grateful to Dr Bharath Srinivasan in Chennai for providing feedback under severe time constraints
– his input has improved the novel in many places. A.M. Rajah, R. Jayanthi and M.A. Sundar kindly supplied all kinds of useful information which has found its way into the book – thanks
to all of them. My thanks are also due to Dr James Jobanputra for his feedback on medical issues. Finally, many thanks to my brother Paul, whose eye for grammar is ruthlessly beady, and from whom I
have received much encouragement over many years. All the people mentioned here have improved the book; the flaws and errors that remain are a result of my own stubbornness in occasionally not
taking their advice.