White Man Falling (15 page)

“In his own good time, he is coming,” says Dr Pandit, as Jodhi strokes her father’s temples and prays for his eyes to open.

Dr Pandit has become annoyed by the growing status of this patient. After all, he reasons, the fellow’s accomplishments only stretch to being unconscious. Day by day, however, rumours
about Swami’s spirituality have been generating spontaneously on the flimsiest of premises, have been self-replicating and mutating: some fantasists claim that to fall asleep in Swami’s
presence while touching him is to be granted a weak but tangible insight into walking with God; it has also been said that terminally ill patients are clamouring to be wheeled up and down
Swami’s corridor, convinced that proximity to his aura will extend their lives and reduce their sufferings; and it has even been claimed that Swami helpfully levitates when the nurses give
him a bed bath. Such speculations are creating havoc, as far as Dr Pandit is concerned.

“Appa, wake up, wake up,” Kamala urges gently.

Yes wake up damn it
, the doctor thinks, looking at his watch,
wake up and get better and go home as soon as possible; I’ve had enough of this nonsense.

“Can’t you stop your respected elder from playing that terrible music?” he asks Amma irritably.

“Nobody can stop Granddaddy from playing his flute, Sir,” Amma replies with dignity, “though many people are trying.”

Dr Pandit sighs to himself; what a family!

* * *

Outside the hospital, Mr and Mrs P are among a great throng of well-wishers massing by the main entrance. A loose cordon of police officers holds them back. Mrs P is sweating
profusely, despite the black umbrella she uses for sheltering from the sun. She is not used to standing around in the sun feeling excited – although there was that one day on the lawns of
Senate House in Chennai, six months ago, when a stand-in for the Tamil Nadu Deputy Minister for Information Technology had presented her son with the whopping great cheque for the
Sri
Aandiappan Swamigal Tamil Nadu Information Superhighway Endowment Scholarship
. She mops her brow, panting like a mule. The umbrella above her cannot generate a zone of shade below her that is
large enough to shelter her body. Golfing umbrellas are yet to become the next big thing in Mullaipuram.

A hundred excitable conversations are taking place among Swami’s new devotees.

“Levitated,” some skinny, wrinkled, middle-aged man in a dirty dhoti is affirming to anyone who will listen, “just rose up like a gas-filled balloon!”

“Adaa-daa-daa!” someone exclaims at the miracle.

“Rose up like a balloon,” the man continues, “for the convenience of the nurses, granting them first-class easy access for full bed-bath washing!”

All through the growing crowd people are debating the extraordinary powers of their cherished Sub-Inspector of Police (retired), Mr R.M. Swaminathan.

“Medical expenses come to lakhs of rupees,” someone is declaiming, “family can’t afford to buy an out-of-date aspirin, and yet all medical expenses mysteriously paid from
mystical high sources!”

“What rubbish,” someone disagrees, “what is this mystical-high-sources nonsense? The gods and saints are having bank accounts now, is it? Medical expenses are being paid by
DDR, everyone knows that by now!”

“Exactly!” spits his conversational combatant eagerly, “that is exactly what I am saying. Who can explain why D.D. Rajendran would pay such a bill? Truly it is a
miracle!”

Further back in the crowd a schoolmaster from a nearby village is holding court:

“When the white man from the sky died at our guru’s feet,” he pontificates to a knot of family and friends around him, through spectacular bucked teeth and loose,
spittle-flecked lips, “when the white man expired there at his feet,” he adds, for he has a rhetorical bent, “oh yes, my Brothers and Sisters, then I was knowing something godly
was up, praise be to my saviour Jesus and Lord Krishna if you like and also Sai Baba! Some people were mocking Swamiji that day—”

“Some idiots were really taking Swamiji to pieces!” an onlooker agrees, indignantly.

“—yes Brother, it’s true, to the shame of the whole Mullaipuram District and every Taluk and village in it, to the shame of Tamil Nadu and all South India…”
– this fellow is wasted as a hopeless schoolmaster, he would make a first-rate terrible pastor – “…there were some who were not wise enough to recognize the true import of
events. Always it is like this with these holy men and saints, with my Lord Saviour Lord Jesus Lord Christ himself it was like this too, Lord Jesus was mocked and spurned and denied, but as for me
I knew straight away—”

“Not just levitated,” another fellow nearby is gleefully fibbing to a small circle of grimy, green-shirted sceptical bus conductors, as his ten-year-old son pushes and shoves to stay
within the circle, enthralled; “actually turning round in mid-air, rotating full 360 degrees!”

“Appa Appa, why is he rotating?”

“Why? Son, where is your common sense? For all-over bed-wash!”

He repeats his cry ecstatically, and it carries over the heads of the crowd like a call to worship –
For all-over bed-wash, bed-wash, bed-wash! –
mingling with other
attestations and magnificences, as the sun beats down on everyone’s brains while some three hundred metres away, in a small room now guarded by police, a man is coming out of his coma.

“Why won’t they let us in?” Mr P is saying to his wife grumpily outside the hospital entrance, offended by all the common gossip swilling around. “We’re practically
family.”

Since the marriage of Mohan and Jodhi was first posited – a lifetime ago, it seems, and in a superseded world – Mr and Mrs P’s views on the suitability of the match have had
their ups, their downs, their arounds and their every-which-ways. “Not looking like best available option,” Mrs P had told her sobbing boy genius, in the hours after Jodhi’s
father had been abducted and all the fellow’s womenfolk had thrown themselves to their knees on the dirty road in a crazy bleating heap. “We have had enough of these sob-story crazies,
forget about this girl.” And Mr P too, though retaining a liking for the disaster-prone Swami and his pretty daughter Jodhi, had agreed that paternal abduction was an eccentricity too far in
a would-be’s family.

Their blockhead wonder-boy, adamant as he is that Jodhi is the only woman he will marry, needs a miracle to sway his parents’ decision. But maybe a miracle is what he is getting.

* * *

One of Swami’s eyes opens fractionally, and quivers under the assault of the light. As Jodhi hears herself take in a sharp intake of breath at her father’s tentative
lurch into consciousness, the image comes into her mind of a wobbly newborn calf struggling to remain upright.

“Husband!” Amma whispers, and she starts sobbing in a wretched way, hunched over him, cradling his face between both hands.

Swami’s other eye opens. All his weeping womenfolk are holding on to him fiercely, as though frightened that the gods might take him back at any moment.

“Husband, you have been sick, you have been sleeping, you have been with God!”

There is gentle commotion from everyone crowded into that small room; there are tears and there are praises to God; there are great sighs of relief and noisy harrumphing vibratos of excitement;
and there are whispers and prayers and exultations.

Swami looks around, confused. He can just about recognize his wife. Who are all these others? He has a headache, a painfully dry mouth, and there is a noise reverberating around his mind which
he does not understand, an eerie, distant call, like an echo of the sounds of another world. He feels as though he knew that noise once, in another time… What is it? But no, no, he can no
longer recognize it. It is like trying to cling on to the narrative of a fading dream. He closes his eyes as if to evade the sound, slightly surprised that he is here and that he can perform such
feats as eye-opening and eye-closing. Then, with a greater awareness of himself and his context coming to him steadily –
my daughters, my daughters
– he attempts an
experimental licking of the lips. But his mouth is so dry that his tongue sticks to his skin. It stays there, stuck out of his mouth and to one side, in a manner that looks neither dignified nor
godly.

Amma seems in two minds over whether to pick the tongue up and put it back in, but the nurse is already dribbling a little water over Swami’s lips and tongue. The tongue slides back in of
its own accord. Swami opens his eyes again and looks at his wife and daughters, attempting to smile, but failing comprehensively.

“He’s going to speak,” Leela pronounces. “Appa, what is it?”

“Don’t trouble him, my Daughter,” Dr Pandit says in a kindly way. “Mr Swaminathan, you’ve been in a coma, now you are awake, but please be taking your time, please,
you are all right and your family is all right and everything is all right, don’t be frightened, don’t worry.”

“But he
is
going to speak,” Leela says, apologetically.

“Husband, what is it?” Amma says, watching her husband swallowing and working his lips.

Everybody strains to hear the first conscious words that Swami will utter since his sojourn with the gods. Swami’s gaze flickers between his wife and his daughters. A flash of irritation
animates his face for a moment, taking them by surprise, for he has just come to a revelatory understanding of the mysterious and unearthly noises that are resonating around the chambers of his
cranium.

Damn father-in-law, damn flute,
he thinks…
Doesn’t he ever stop?

“Speak, my husband,” Amma begs, beginning to cry again.

Swami nods slowly on his pillow, twice, and bares his teeth experimentally.

“T…” he says.

“Husband?”

“T…” Swami tries, “t… t…”

At that moment Granddaddy – having transported himself to a higher realm through the portal of the beauty of his playing – is cavorting through his most incredible vision yet: he can
see the young Lord Krishna playing
his
flute and gallivanting with big-bosomed gopis, playing tricks with them, teasing them, and being amorous… It is a wondrous vision, and for a
few seconds that seem to last for ever but that he will never recall afterwards, he is so lost in the sacred landscape his meditations have led him to that he even forgets to wheeze into his flute;
the slobber-saturated scrap of wood sits limp in his gnarled old fingers, half hanging off his lips.

In the brief silence that marks Granddaddy’s spiritual ecstasy, Swami’s family and friends hear the first profound declaration of their Swami, who has cheated death and come back
from the gods to share it with them.

“Tea,” he says.

Granddaddy, shaking his head in complacent wonder at the beauty of his own visions, begins to blow again.

“Daughter, tea!” Amma orders urgently, to any or all of her daughters.

Jodhi gets to the door first. Crying with relief and gratitude that her daddy has come back to her, she bustles out of the room and goes scurrying down the corridor, as the hangers-on outside
the door shout in surprise.

There is no way that Jodhi will suffer her father to drink the weak and tepid brew of the roaming hospital tea vendors; a daddy who has been unavoidably deprived of tea by an eight-day coma
deserves the very best tea available, and the very best tea available is made by Hairy Pugal. Clutching at the scarf of her
chudidhar
to stop it from flailing behind her, she runs for the
street outside. Fixated by her commission, she barely registers the throng of people outside the hospital as she scoots past the policemen guarding the entrance. Her body plunges into the pulsating
ranks. “Swamiji’s eldest!” someone cries, as she goes barging through, and the people in her wake start following her excitedly, while the people in front of her surge forwards to
meet her. Within a short time she is the unmoving centre of a circle of people that is forever getting smaller and denser, as everyone crowds in on her.

“Let me through!” Jodhi cries, dismayed, “Tea, I must be having tea for my Appa, Appa is wanting tea!”

“Swamiji is awake!”

“Swamiji lives!”

“Swamiji drinks tea!”

The throng surges in, packing the people even more closely towards the centre. Umbrellas are knocked out of hands, a few ladies are wailing, some individuals gasp for breath, and all the time
Jodhi is crying “tea, tea!” and trying to scrabble through the people in front of her.

K.P. Murugesan has just come on duty and has taken over the supervision of the police at the hospital. During his long service with the Indian Police Service in Tamil Nadu he has policed many
overcrowded gatherings, and he has a perhaps overdeveloped sense of how easily they can degenerate into stampedes. So he blows his whistle and takes his men into battle, leading by example in the
noble art of thrashing the general public, just in case it is the right thing to do.

Yells break out as the dozen policemen wade in, striking out with their lathis. They make quick progress, burrowing into the crowd even as the people break up in panic. Within a minute a panting
Murugesan and his men have rescued Jodhi. There are a few casualties nursing bruises and bitter grievances, but in the circumstances it has been an effective action.

“Tea, Appa, tea, Appa!” Jodhi is insisting, despairing that her father has asked for tea and that tea has not materialized.

“All right, Daughter, come,” Murugesan says, in his kindly way, panting from his exertions, and he leads her to the Sugam Tea Stall. Behind him his men fan out, still waving their
lathis at the sullen crowd that has been forced back.

“He’s awake? He’s okay?” Murugesan asks.

Jodhi nods blindly.

“Thanks to God,” Murugesan says.

The Sugam Tea Stall stands where it has always stood, shabby and decrepit, its paint peeling onto the patch of dirt it occupies. A great vat of hot milk simmers over a gas flame, the vat’s
dented tin lid flapping gently over the rising steam. Yes, the tea stall is there, almost as important a fixture in this part of Mullaipuram as the hospital itself – but where is Hairy Pugal?
As Murugesan looks around in irritation, the fellow appears from the back of an autorickshaw, where he’d been sheltering.