White Man Falling (12 page)

Chitraguptan doesn’t acknowledge Swami. Frowning again, as though there is something in the enthusiasm of Swami’s reply that doesn’t add up, he scratches at his head once more,
this time behind the left ear, and gestures minutely to two or three notaries. They scuttle over to him. There is a short, furtive consultation, before the notaries rush off to instruct further
notaries and clerks and archivists and registrars and scribes – all the pen-pushers of the afterlife who inhabit the smaller chambers of rippled infinity. There is much riffling through books
and decaying papers, and Swami sees great clouds of dust rising up all around, from uncountable numbers of rarely thumbed tomes, and he has the definite impression that this is not how it should
be, for how can there be dust in paradise? He starts to feel, even in this most glorious of places, some stirrings of unease. No longer does he feel as though he is harboured in the universal
presence of everyone who ever existed, and that they all make up one single organic consciousness and universality – of which he is a vanishingly small, infinitely significant part. Though he
is trying to fend off a strange new idea – it is called fear – he is starting to be aware of the meagre, the small and the personal…

A wrinkled clerk comes hobbling down a long corridor carrying a scroll wound around two femurs. The clerk places the scroll in front of Chitraguptan, and methodically unwinds it to the correct
place, pointing. Chitraguptan looks down at the scroll, shaking his head as though there has been a ridiculous procedural error.

“We didn’t ask for R.M. Swaminathan the police officer, from the Vanniyar community,” Chitraguptan explains to Yama Dharmarajan. “We asked for R.M. Swaminathan the grain
trader, from the Goundar caste. We need the other one. This one will have to go back, he’s still got work to do.”

“I don’t want to go back,” Swami says, but Yama Dharmarajan is unconcerned as to what Swami wants, he is still staring impassively, naked on his high wooden chair, and already
the four black messengers have Swami in their grip and are speeding him away from the King of the Dead.

“Isn’t there some work for me here?” Swami begs Yama Dharmarajan.

But away they go, down the vast chambers, Swami struggling violently and impotently – the guides have hold of a limb each, and now they grip their vicious-looking clubs in a threatening
way, as though they are worried Swami might somehow break free and become part of the afterlife before it is ready for him. Swami feels everything blissful leaching away, until all that remains of
his insight into universal peace is a ragged sense of a few individual presences; and here is his mother again, an unsatisfactory fragment of her, a shred that has torn itself away from the
absolute whole in a fruitless attempt to try and soothe him; and there he is, the white man from Mullaipuram, this time Swami can see him in a corporeal form, tanned, clothed like an ageing hippy
at a Goan beach party, making ridiculously human apologetic gestures.

“They’re taking me back!” Swami cries, “Oh God, no, don’t let them take me back!”

“You have to go,” says the white man, “don’t struggle, it will be okay. There’s a reason.”

But it is not okay, Swami doesn’t want to go back, it hurts, he screams in agony as the black messengers hurl him contemptuously down, down, flailing back down the awful tunnel; the yellow
light, that had wrapped around him like swaddling clothes, falls away and away from him. Like some man tumbling from the heavens to the paltry earth of human smallness, he sees his body far below
– how pathetic and uninviting and contemptible it seems, that useless agglomeration of cells – and he notices the doctors around it, monitors flatlining, shouts and instructions, and on
the fourth application of the CRU paddles Swami hurtles back into his shell screaming in horror as his body spasms violently – and the doctors, gazing at the jumping line on the monitor,
simultaneously crow, “Got him!”

“Sinus rhythm. Looks like an MI,” says one of the doctors, “we’ll try some thrombolytic stuff.”

The paddles are replaced in their holders, the nurse is inserting a drip, the oxygen mask goes back on, blood samples are being taken, and here is an anaesthetist to put a tube down the windpipe
of Swami – who was dead, and is alive.

It is dawn in Mullaipuram, after a night with no moon and little movement in the air. The stars are fading as quickly as the sun is rising, and many people in the town are
ahead of the light, washing and stretching, performing their devotions and their ablutions with the same methodical care. Jodhi, Kamala, Pushpa and Leela are on one side of a bed in the Intensive
Care Unit. On the other side are Amma and the twins she had to give away two years ago, Suhanya and Anitha, who have just arrived with Uncle Kandan, Swami’s brother in Coimbatore, after
travelling overnight. Half the members of this unhappy family are ceaselessly snivelling, and the other half seem frozen and expressionless in their distress. Amma, with the twins slumped against
her breasts, slowly counts – again – the tubes and pipes that are sticking out of her husband’s unconscious body: five. Now that she has counted them again, she counts them again
again
, as though next time the answer could be four, or six – and as though such an outcome might matter – but no, it’s five, always five. She follows the snaking path of
each one, from each aperture in her husband, natural and contrived, to its source, and invariably ends up looking in incomprehension at some piece of gadgetry such as only the Mohan Ps of this
world could possibly understand. A great surging sweep of powerlessness and ignorance has her in its grip. Her brother-in-law holds her by the arm tightly, as though propping her up.

Outside, the world carries on carrying on, and Jodhi hears it with some resentment, its junctions building up to the morning gridlock, its street vendors preparing to sell their wares, its
drivers honking their horns to win their minute and trivial advantages over one another. She wants to run out of the hospital and into the town, screaming at everyone and everything, “Please
be stopping all this at once! Stop it now!” – then, in an ensuing silence, she would explain carefully that today is a day that is different to all the other days, and that is why
everything has to stop.

“Amma, Appa!” the twins are whimpering at random intervals, and in unison, in a way that might be explained by the dynamics that apply to schools of fish turning all at once, to
flocks of birds wheeling round together. They do not go into specifics – moaning “Amma” and “Appa” seems sufficient. The two girls burrow into Amma’s soft
breasts, inadvertently wiping their runny noses on her sari.

“Why did we go to Coimbatore?” says Anitha.

“We shouldn’t have gone to Coimbatore,” Suhanya adds.

“What has Coimbatore got to do with any of this, you foolish girls?” says Uncle Kandan in irritation.

“Yes Uncle.”

“Sorry Uncle.”

“There’s one now!” Leela hisses, as a white-coated man glides past in the corridor outside and stops to speak with a nurse. All through the long and unbearable night they have
been trying to talk to a consultant about Appa, but Amma’s courage fails her now that one is standing close by. She looks towards the fellow with an urgent longing. Amma is in awe of
doctors.

Uncle Kandan goes over to the man sombrely and murmurs respectfully. The doctor comes over at last.

“I am Dr Pandit,” he tells Amma. “You are Mrs Swaminathan,” he adds, as though she might have overlooked her own identity. He is a pale fellow from the north, speaking
Tamil with a Hindi accent. He doesn’t even have a moustache. What is a North Indian doctor doing in this place, Amma thinks. How can a man without a moustache be a good doctor? But she says,
“Yes Doctor,” and immediately bursts into tears, which sets off the whole family, so that the ones who weren’t crying before start crying now, and the ones who were crying before
continue to do so, with more vigour.

“Yes yes, all right, stop crying, I am begging you,” Dr Pandit says, “it is not helpful. Hasn’t anyone spoken to you about your husband yet?”

“No, Doctor. Only about medical fees,” Amma gulps, her shoulders heaving up and down in distress – 12,000 rupees is the going rate for a day in intensive care. It is more than
a month’s income. Whatever happens to Swami, Amma knows it’s all up for her family. They will be indebted for generations, and all her daughters’ lives are ruined – no
wonder she’s so upset, what does the fancy Hindi doctor expect?

“Your husband is scoring a three or a four on the Glasgow Coma Scale,” says the doctor, “but there’s no evidence of significant myocardial damage. He was clinically dead,
but they got him back within ten minutes of dying. That is not too bad – anything longer than that is difficult. He may or may not be waking up soon, it’s too early to have a clue.
We’ve no idea yet if his brain is affected – speaking frankly, it might be fine, it might be chutney, it might be some place in between. If he’s showing no change in a week, we
should do a brain scan, but it’s expensive. Also, the longest time you can afford to keep him in intensive care the better – if he goes onto a general ward he’ll probably get a
chest infection and he might not survive that. I’m very sorry,” and with that Dr Pandit pads away.

There are many configurations in which six daughters and their mother can look at each other fearfully, and most of them happen now as the women snivel and sob and hold on to one another. Amma
lowers her head onto Swami’s thighs and cries “My husband, my husband!”, which sets the rest of her family off again, and there is a short period of unfettered grief and howling
– Leela boo-hooing like a six-year-old, her arms rigid at her sides and tears racing one another down her cheeks, Kamala attempting to speak as she sobs but succeeding only in uttering
incomprehensible moans and gasps – until they start to pull themselves together, with Uncle Kandan saying “Come come” uselessly from behind his weeping red-rimmed eyes.

The sun has risen, and Pushpa draws back the threadbare curtain of the hospital room to let natural light come in. Its aspect is kinder than the strip light that had illuminated Swami like a
corpse on a slab of stone. Now the family keep watch over Swami in a calmer way. They attend to every move of a nurse who comes in to monitor his data and to shift his limbs into new positions.
After the nurse has gone, they crowd round again.

“Sooo peaceful,” Jodhi whispers, gently holding her father’s hand.

“Appa is very handsome,” Kamala says, smoothing Swami’s hair into place.

“Wake up Appa,” says Leela.

The day passes interminably, and not a flicker of consciousness disturbs the brow of Swami, no matter how intently his loved ones search for it. By late afternoon, his wife and daughters have
been awake for thirty-six hours, and one by one they fall asleep. Amma fills up a red plastic chair with her buttocks, leaning to one side with her head against the wall, her cheek hunched
awkwardly against her left shoulder. Each one of her long, far-apart snores sounds like an elephant being forced backwards through a wind tunnel. The twins sit on the floor at her feet, their arms
intertwined across Amma’s lap, their heads resting on their arms. Pushpa and Kamala are on the floor on a thin pale-green mat, sleeping on their sides in almost identical positions; at their
feet, on another mat, Jodhi and Leela hug each other like sleeping lovers, Leela mumbing in her sleep. Only Uncle Kandan is awake. Now that all the women are sleeping he keens to himself gently,
terrified that his brother is going to die. He kisses Swami’s bare shoulder and says, “Wake up!” helplessly, then walks away, out of the room, in search of a bidi to smoke and a
place to smoke it, one of Amma’s hair-raising snores following him through the door.

Is it the broken catch in Uncle Kandan’s wretched, grief-sodden voice that does it, or the tickle of one of Uncle Kandan’s hairs against Swami’s ear? Is it some deep dream that
is only dreamt by men in comas, or just a random intrusion of misfiring neurons, signifying nothing? Swami groans, croaks “super-computer” and then sinks back down into the even murkier
depths of unconsciousness that lie in whatever deep-down dark and mysterious dream world he’s lost in.

A nurse comes in to shift the position of his arms and legs, but seeing the whole family fast asleep she thinks better of it; it can wait an hour or two. She gazes at the family group, struck at
so much unconsciousness around the unconscious patient. Very distinguished face, she tells herself, looking at Swami. Looking very peaceful as anything, she thinks.

* * *

A further day passes before Murugesan visits Swami in hospital, and let it be said immediately and very firmly – during the passing of those twenty-four hours there may or
may not have been a miracle in Mullaipuram Anna District General Hospital.

Murugesan had left for his night shift after Swami had disappeared on his final, fatal walk, and afterwards he had gone to sleep at home, unaware of the tragedy through all the long hot day. His
wife had woken him in the afternoon. He had shouted at her and made her cry. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?!” he’d yelled, which was unfair because she’d woken him
as soon as she’d found out. Murugesan had gone straight to the police station to raise a collection from his colleagues, and had gathered over 3,000 rupees; there were different degrees of
shock and guilt and unease and sympathy behind the giving of each contribution. Then he had headed for the Mariamman Temple, made some offerings of fruit and money, and paid for the blessings and
prayers of a temple priest. Finally he had gone to the shops to buy a few gifts. Only now is he lurking awkwardly at the door of the Intensive Care room, self-conscious and embarrassed, as though
seeking permission to do something not entirely permissible. He’s not sure why he feels as guilty as he does – rationally, he cannot find much of a link between his own behaviour and
his friend’s misfortune – but remorse has him in its clammy grip and isn’t letting go. He feels miserable and worthless.