White Man Falling (16 page)

“Tea!” Murugesan shouts, “Tea! Swami is awake!”

“Yes Saar!”

The master starts to brew his famous potion.

A large man and a larger woman are making their way tentatively towards Jodhi and Murugesan, negotiating clumps of onlookers and hostile policemen. “No no, let us pass, parents of the
girl’s would-be!” they are pleading, hands held up submissively whenever a constable impedes them.

“I am the mother-in-law!” Mrs P claims.

“We are the family members, let us pass!” her husband shouts.

They get to Jodhi more or less unmolested, and Mrs P, bypassing the awkward male authority of Murugesan, instinctively hugs Jodhi to her breast. Jodhi starts crying, and does not protest as most
of her head disappears into the superabundant across-the-board immensity of Mrs P’s bosom.

“Parents of the girl’s boy,” Mr P explains to Murugesan, with a dash of pride.

Mrs P, fat, hot, sweating profusely, her heart beating like a drum at a wedding because of all this excitement and expenditure of energy, strokes Jodhi’s hair protectively.

“Not to be worrying,” she says, over and over and over, between her pants, “not to be worrying.”

Hairy Pugal is determined to create the best super-tea he has ever brewed up in his life. “Hurry up hurry up!” Murugesan sometimes urges, but Hairy Pugal is a great artist fulfilling
the most significant commission of his career, and great artists will not be hurried up. It is another few minutes before he is ready with a battered aluminium jug.

“Saar,” he says, “the tea that I have brewed is not for pouring in this dirty spot and then carrying in a glass to Swamiji in there, skin will be forming on top,
Saar—”

“Yes yes, never mind that, just—”

“—this tea I only am taking to the hospital, Saar! This tea I only am pouring inside the hospital!” Hairy Pugal’s eyes are shining religiously as he holds up his
tannin-stained vessel in one hand, and two battered glasses in the other.

“Yes yes, all right all right,” Murugesan says. He barks a few orders at his men, and Jodhi – under the care of Mr P and Mrs P – is escorted back into the hospital by
Murugesan. The tea vendor walks in their wake, bearing his tea as though it is the nectar of immortality from sacred couplet number Eighty-Two.

Swami is propped up on his pillows when Jodhi returns with not just his tea but a tea vendor too, and Murugesan, and a full complement of potential in-laws. She hurls herself to her knees by his
bedside.

“Forgive me Appa, big crowd is outside and I am getting stuck like anything.”

Swami blinks benignly.

“Appa!” Jodhi blurts, ecstatic and overcome by his mere sentience.

Swami smiles weakly. He is not used to sentience. Ten minutes of the stuff have left him plumb-exhausted.

Mr and Mrs P shuffle forwards awkwardly, behind Murugesan, who is lifting his hand in a wordless and shiny-eyed greeting to his friend Swami.

“How is our respected Brother, Sister?” Mrs P whispers hoarsely to Amma.

Amma, taken aback by their presence, doesn’t know what to say for a moment. She gapes and smiles at them, then looks at Jodhi as though the girl must have hidden depths – how else
could she land the parents of the prodigy while buying tea?

“What about Appa’s tea, Amma?” Jodhi says. “The fellow there has it, Amma.”

Hairy Pugal steps up in his dirty shirt and lungi, sheepish and proud.

“Just the tea Appa is asking for, Daughter, not the fellow making it.”

“Yes Amma, sorry Amma.”

“Madam,” says the tea vendor, “fault is all mine, I am insisting Swamiji has freshest, best-brewed, most professionally attended and lovingly administered quality super-tea! So
I am pouring freshly Madam, please to observe.”

Swamiji?
Swami is thinking blearily, as his mouth fills with saliva at the sight of the hot sweet steaming tea that is being poured into a glass.

Hairy Pugal pours the tea back and forth from the first glass to a second glass, hypnotically, some three, four times, holding the lower glass at waist level and the higher one above his head,
until he deems the temperature of that graceful arc of tea is optimal for a sick man who has just been hobnobbing with the gods.

He passes the precious vessel to Murugesan, who carefully delivers it to Jodhi, who solemnly places it in Amma’s outstretched hand.

“Tea, husband,” she says, and Swami nods feebly as she holds it to his lips.

One small sip of that famous concoction is all it takes to reconnect Swami to the here and the now and the wherewithal of his life in a full and meaningful way, not just for the first time since
he has come out of his coma, but for the first time in two whole self-pitying, depression-deluded years. He smacks his lips, weakly but appreciatively, and someone towards the back of the room
– some cousin of who knows whom, some fellow who shouldn’t really be there but has somehow got in – shouts “Adaa-daa-daa-daa!” rather loudly.

Swami takes a larger gulp of tea, gazes at his wife and daughters, and smiles at them beatifically, because they exist.

He falls into a deep and peaceful sleep.

Mullaipuram, which lies like a stunned and sitting duck on the unforgiving central plains of Tamil Nadu, is blasted all year round by its three seasons: the wet, the cool and
the hot. The wet, lasting from October to December, is unbearably hot and torrentially wet; the cool, lasting from January to the middle of March, is unbearably hot and bone-bleachingly dry; and as
for the hot, which occupies all the months left over… the furnace blast of its insufferable forty degrees centigrade scorches the will to live out of every breathing beast the plains can
muster, and anything that foolishly continues to exist is made doubly miserable by a sweat-hoovering 100% humidity.

Some two months after Swami emerges from his coma, the hot takes Mullaipuram in its vicious grip. Mange-riddled dogs lie on their sides in any patch of shade they can claim, holding their legs
straight out in big “W”s, lolling their tongues across the dirt. Wincing taxi drivers with itchy heat-rash buttocks hunch in front of their melting dashboards, nosing the searing air
from portable fans wired up to the car batteries. People with nowhere to go and nothing to do are spontaneously catching buses in despair, spurning the seats inside to cling to the roof or hang off
the sides – they close their eyes in delirious relief to feel the moving air circulate around their hottest bits and pieces.

In these intolerable conditions, and under the stewardship of Amma and Mrs P, the uncertain romance of Jodhi and Mohan is taking another hesitant step. After weeks of maternal arbitration, the
young couple are – at this very moment – sitting side by side in the flea-bitten auditorium of Mullaipuram Theatre Palace, watching a film called
When I Saw You I Knew
. They
are chaperoned loosely enough to encourage a certain degree of intimacy, and yet tightly enough to foreclose any hint of impropriety. Negotiations on the identity and function of the chaperones
were time-consuming and complicated, with the two mothers campaigning for as many chaperones as possible (to maximize the impression of respectability), and with Jodhi campaigning against Amma
being one of the chaperones under any circumstances (to minimize the possibility of mortification). Mohan campaigned neither for nor against any detail of the much-awaited great day, on the grounds
that no humiliation is too much trouble for him. The end result is that the happy would-bes have Pushpa sitting to their left, while to their right are Devan and his wife, and then an empty seat
which Anand is supposed to be occupying; to the disappointment of Pushpa and Jodhi he has not shown up.

Everyone in this cinema sweats like a roasting pig. Chubby Devan squirms in his sodden shirt and trousers on his grimy half-sprung seat. The petite and delicate Mrs Devan moans under her breath,
fanning her face and panting for oxygen in the fetid dark. Pushpa and Jodhi sit with their heads close together, as far away from Mohan as possible – even in near darkness he is visibly
leaching sexual excitement from every clogged-up pore of his body. The two girls can feel the sweat under their arms spreading outwards into saucers, into small plates, into large plates that
eventually meet and form giant, drowned butterflies over their breasts. They are trying not to cry in boredom and discomfort. It is a three-hour film and there are ninety minutes to go.

This is
great
, thinks Mohan. Drops of sweat are rolling off the tip of his nose as though from a dripping tap. His left hand is carefully edging towards Jodhi’s right hand at a
speed of one millimetre per minute.

Mohan has an ideal of how the date might pan out, an ideal he has lovingly and obsessively tended over the long nights of waiting for the negotiations to be concluded. In this heart-warming
vision, he is sitting next to Jodhi in a dark and luxurious auditorium, thigh-to-straining-thigh with his Jodhi in the dark, their hearts hammering for one another, the very hairs on their arms
sticking straight out of their eroticized goose-fleshed skin and yearning to touch and tingle as he senses her hand nudging closer to his, closer, closer, as he edges his hand closer to hers,
closer, closer, and he feels – oh yes, oh, oh this is it, oh – he feels her hand
merging
with his hand, like a, just like a – oh yes – as though it’s a, like,
like…

Curiously the vision often falters at this juncture, when what is required is a powerful and inventive simile to summon up the incomparable beauty of young love.

…like eight fingers and two thumbs, comprising ten digits in total, all interconnected, Mohan thinks.

Ninety-one minutes later, five sopping-wet and exhausted individuals exit the dusty foyer of Mullaipuram Theatre Palace and stand blinking under the canopy of an electrical goods shop. They are
all dispirited, even Mohan, whose testosterone-fuelled clammy paw – when it had finally met with the delicate fingers of his beloved after two-hundred and forty-five minutes of digital
stalking – had caused Jodhi to jump out of her seat.

“Thirsty,” Pushpa gasps, to Jodhi.

“Bad thirst,” croaks Mrs Devan, to her husband; he is standing a little to one side, legs apart, discreetly fanning his private parts with a newspaper.

“I want to die,” Jodhi tells Pushpa.

She catches Mohan looking at some rather personal highlights of her anatomy, which her drenched
chudidhar
is clinging to obligingly, just as in all the obligatory monsoon scenes in all
the films Mohan has ever seen, and so she turns away from him sharply.

“Friends,” Mrs Devan is groaning, inexplicably, to Jodhi and Pushpa, to her husband, to God, “Friends, Friends,” and she heads across the road, still saying,
“Friends, Friends.”

“Friends, oh my God, Friends!” says her husband, following her, “that is not best value for money, wife, some other place, not Friends, wife—”

“Only place,” she calls from the other side of the road.

“Friends!” Mohan exclaims to Jodhi and Pushpa rapturously; this is an unexpected bonus, surely his Jodhi cannot but fail to be impressed by Friends? “I am only going there once
before, for my sister-in-law’s birthday! Please be coming,” he tells them.

Friends is Mullaipuram’s one and only western-style café. It is located in Mullaipuram’s top hotel, the four-star Hotel Sangam owned by D.D. Rajendran. If you are visiting
Mullaipuram for some obscure reason known only to yourself – and if you are a VVIP, or a VIP, or an IP, or even just a P – then you are recommended to stay in the Hotel Sangam. Jodhi
and Pushpa have never been inside such an opulent establishment. They stick closely together as they follow Devan and his wife through the garish marble atrium, past businessmen in western business
suits who are smoking and talking in loud voices on black sofas that are very far apart, one sofa to each businessman – and enter the wholly unfamiliar environment of Friends, with its soft
armchairs and peculiar
objets d’art
, its foreign newspapers and cultural magazines, and the underwhelming
élite of
Mullaipuram who comprise its clientele.
Mohan trails in the wake of the two sisters, limping because of the unfortunate lie of his underpants as he watches their buttocks.

The party sits down on facing sofas, Jodhi and Pushpa on one sofa, Devan and his wife and Mohan on the other.

“Coolness,” says Mrs Devan, with relief.

It is indeed nice and cool in Friends
.
The air conditioning in here could keep milk fresh for a month.

“Ayyo-yo-yo,” says Devan, flapping his damp shirt over an ample, glistening belly.

Jodhi and Pushpa stare blankly ahead. They have never experienced air-conditioning like this before. They are already freezing, they feel their wet clothes turn from clammy to chilled.

“Refreshments,” Mrs Devan says – it seems she only speaks in nouns – as a waiter arrives with menus. Jodhi and Pushpa hunch over the menu proffered to them, and try to
keep their eyes from popping out and bouncing all over the place:
Tea, Rs.45, South Indian Coffee Rs.50, Cappuccino Rs.75, Coca-cola Rs.50, Lassi Rs.70, Mango Juice Rs.60
. Neither of them
has ever paid more than fifteen rupees for a tea or a coffee or a coke or a fruit juice, and then only as a special treat. Hairy Pugal’s super-tea only costs three rupees…

“Don’t be worrying, I am settling this,” Devan reassures them, queasily. “What is your refreshment?”

The two sisters look at each other dubiously, signalling all manner of mutual miseries by the uneasy fractional adjustments of their expressions. A waiter stands in attendance.

“We will be taking what you will be taking,” Jodhi says at last.

In the book
How to Attract Women
, a well-thumbed copy of which lies inside brown wrapping paper in a blue plastic bag under a pile of
Computer Programmer Wow!
magazines in
Mohan’s metal cabinet, it is confidently asserted that no woman can resist a man who makes her laugh. Mohan has read the relevant sentence dozens of times, so he knows it off by heart:
“Where is the woman alive who can resist the charms of a man who makes her helpless with laughter? If only you can find her laughter button, and keep pressing it, then we guarantee
she’ll be putty in your hands!” This dictum has made a lasting impression on Mohan.
Putty in my hands!
he is always thinking, shaking his head in wonder. He has been
desperately waiting for his opportunity to locate Jodhi’s laughter button. He intends to press it, vigorously and repeatedly, till she spasms with uncontrollable hilarity – and this is
the moment, he judges, to strike.