White Man Falling (30 page)

“Swamiji,” DDR is saying at a further point, “my life was empty of meaning, and you have filled it. I see my destiny ahead, entwined with yours, serving you – but in the
past I did not listen to you, and I abused you,” he observes, in self-disgust.

What are they saying?
Swami asks the white man, who appears to be lying on his side nearby, resting his head on his hand.

It doesn’t matter
, comes the reply.

There is a hazy patch in the middle of all this, during which who knows what DDR and Murugesan and Apu have been revealing, and then Swami finds himself looking at all three men on their knees
in front of him, prostrated. Curiously disembodied observations come to him –
I didn’t realize Murugesan’s hair grew so far down the back of his neck
, and
I’ve
seen this young man before, where was it?

This is the main bit.
The white man says. He is sitting in a chair now, watching with some interest.

But what are they doing?

Weren’t you listening?

I don’t know, wasn’t I?

They think they killed me. You too.

Killed us?

One of them thinks he tortured me and forced me to jump from a window, another thinks he covered up the investigation into my death, the third one thinks he hushed everything up so his
reputation wouldn’t suffer.

It isn’t true?

Yes yes, all true. It always is. And one of them threatened you when you were about to kill yourself – you had a heart attack instead. They did these deeds – but that’s
just the detail. I had to jump, it was arranged like that. It was all so that you could become what you are becoming.

What am I becoming?

You don’t need to know. The part of you that cares about such things is dwindling. That is why you are becoming it.

Murugesan – whose moustache-twitching ended for good some weeks ago, when he submitted to the guru – is painfully reconstructing for Swami’s benefit the process which has been
taking place:

“…supernaturally masterminding all my… spiritual development… struggled with… conscience… overriding love and wisdom… only now…
understanding… by refusing to lead me… bless with the chance to take responsibility… ready for…”

What is he saying?

Some nonsense.

Which one thinks he killed me?

They all look the same to me.

Yes that is the problem
, Swami agrees.
The shapes of their thoughts, they’re all the same. I can’t tell them apart.

It’s because they’re alive.

Am I alive?

Oh
, the white man comments, as though responding to an unwelcome summons, and he’s going – this time walking out of the room in an ordinary way as Swami looks on.

Can I come with you?
Swami asks.

You are me
, comes the answer – and then, more faintly,
only greater
.

“We are going to report ourselves, Swamiji,” Apu is mumbling into the rug half hysterically. “I will lose my job and go to prison for some years – oh, how my child will
suffer!” he adds, with a flash of pride. “Forgive me, Swamiji!”

Swami shakes his head with some vigour. “Don’t do it,” he wants to say. After all, why are these men opting for public disgrace when they could be doing something much more
sensible instead, like getting away with it? But no sounds will come out of Swami’s mouth. What to do? At this moment, as Kamala looks at him a little anxiously, hoping he will stop this
session soon – he is too tired, too much has happened today – Swami receives an image of himself standing up strongly, casting his arms out wide, trumpeting like an elephant just to
prove his vigour, and then bellowing, “I am not a god!” If he could persuade these fools that he isn’t a god, perhaps they wouldn’t voluntarily choose to be so
self-destructive.

But Swami cannot say “I am not a god”.

For a full hour DDR, Murugesan and Apu are prostrated before the absent guru. They are watched by a small group of distinguished devotees as they spill their guts out in every particular as to
how they executed all manner of sins and colluded in covering them up. They are elated. They finish each other’s sentences, rephrase the worst aspects of their crimes, wallow in their guilt.
They await the guru’s response in much excitement.

“Appa is tired,” Kamala says gently – suddenly there behind the guru, helping him up.

“But—”

“Yes but—”

“What—”

The deflated men and their bemused audience watch the guru walking out without a glance at them.

Idiots
, Swami thinks.

* * *

It is the middle of the night in Mullaipuram. Murugesan stirs in his sleep, whimpers – he is dreaming that his moustache has started quivering again – and clobbers
his wife with a hairy spare arm. D.D. Rajendran sits at a desk in an office, with a snoring Bobby, ogling a series of technical drawings in which Mullaipuram Mansions is extended, expanded,
transformed into a vast ashram complex centred on the Guru Swamiji. In a much poorer part of town, in a one-and-a-half-room rented flat, Apu and his wife are sleeping on a bed mat with their child
between them; all three of their faces are streaked with tears.

Swami has taken to getting up in the night and going for solitary walks, attended by a company of dogs and, at a respectful distance, two nightwatchmen. He limps around the unkempt gardens. He
feels more human at night than at any other time. Perhaps he is. Perhaps it is because darkness and unconsciousness nudges everyone else closer to the gods, easing people into their subconscious
topographies where they can cavort without bodies and consequences.

Sometimes he walks along the wall until he reaches the gate, then sneaks a look at the outside world – he sees a growing shanty town of devotees, he sees locked-up stalls selling
everything from milk to mobile phones, the hawkers stretched on the ground next to their stalls, and he sees clusters of men sitting around fires in the dark, talking and playing cards. Just once,
he’d like to be a man who could sit with other men at one of those fires, talking and playing cards. But that will never happen again.

It hasn’t been mentioned yet that sometimes Swami receives an overwhelming and convincing signal that he is going to die imminently – it could happen at any moment, such as this one
now, as he spies on the world he has left behind him. When those signals come in, he immediately waits to be dead – not in despair or in pleasure, but with acceptance. But so far the feeling
has always passed, in a confusing and trivial fashion, as though the death that is going to take him but doesn’t is on a par with a sneeze that nearly comes but won’t. Death only
matters if life matters too, but maybe life doesn’t matter much to people at their highest levels of wisdom. Perhaps Swami doesn’t die because he isn’t wise enough yet. In any
case, death doesn’t take him, and as he limps away from the no-show sneeze of it, head down, he thinks
Poor Jodhi
– in a sudden surge of feeling. Hasn’t Amma all but
ruined her prospects by turning her into a laughing stock?

By the time he is standing on the verandah outside his family’s rooms, looking in through the window, he has largely forgotten the pity that has brought him here, but he stares at those
recumbent forms anyway. It seems incredible to know that four of those lives would not be existing without his existence first. A vague image of happy times in a different era is still swimming
about half-known in what’s left of his old mind, memories of sitting on the little verandah of Number 14/B, reading some books – what were they, those books? What did they say? –
while his daughters attended to him.

Yes, I will renounce all this guru nonsense
, he tells himself,
go back to being the father of my girls. I don’t need – there is no need – I
don’t…

Bats are zipping in and out of the gloom around him, and his glance latches onto an indistinct form, follows it flitting around, loses it in less than a second – and thought is over for
Swami for the next hour. He sits down on the verandah, nothing more than a detached observer of the landscape unfolding in the constructions of the brain in his head. The half-glimpsed bats make
strange patterns in the air around him, and Swami loses any sense of selfhood or identity as these patterns inhabit his mind, for seeing things is really being here.

The nightwatchmen later report that the guru, after checking on his family, stayed on the verandah for an hour and delved into the blackness.

* * *

Given Jodhi’s astonishing fortitude in contemplating the kind of betrothal that would inspire many women to make enquiries about government sterilization programmes, and
taking into account her endurance in suffering so many private humiliations and public embarrassments not of her making, a dispassionate commentator might conclude that Swami and Amma’s
eldest daughter has something almost superhuman about her. Maybe it’s in the genes? Her father seems to be no slouch in the spiritual-achievement stakes, and look at Granddaddy –
although unheralded, his visions are ten times more impressive than the guru’s. Granddaddy is so superhuman that sometime he plays his flute even while asleep. But no, Jodhi is not of this
bent. With Mr P’s manly deadline ticking down relentlessly, and with Amma insistent that the wedding will go ahead because Swami will endorse it, and with Swami failing to do anything to
prevent it, Jodhi’s fortitude is disintegrating. Though she has made a good stab at trying to accept her fate with equanimity, behind her calm façade she is suffering more than anyone
involved in this matrimonial saga – except for Mohan, of course. Nobody is suffering more than Mohan. A few hours ago he inexplicably cut up a new pair of trousers into very small pieces
– only a genius of unsurpassed lovelorn misery can suffer more than that.

Pushpa wakes up in the night from a strange sense that something is dislocated or wrong. Amma is snoring like a dam
burst not far away, so that’s okay; Leela is babbling about tyres, plinths and condensation, which seems largely normal; Appa is away on one of his nighttime ambles, which is not
unprecedented; Kamala is silent and unmoving, which is absolutely typical; and Jodhi – Pushpa props herself up on an elbow, what are those noises? – Jodhi is crying. Jodhi is not
weeping inconsolably or keening in despair – that would not be her way. But she is softly crying, she is issuing low-volume whimpers, discreet but distressing catches of the throat. Pushpa
watches and listens, wondering what to do. After a while she feels a hand on her waist, and looks over in the gloom to see that Kamala has woken up and is also looking at Jodhi. The two of them
shuffle over to their sister, and whisper, and stroke her hair.

Some minutes later, the three of them are sitting together by the far wall of the room, huddled in the dark. “I must do my duty,” Jodhi is saying in a tragic whisper, while Amma and
Leela sleep on.

“He is a very handsome boy,” Kamala says valiantly.

“His prospects are excellent,” Pushpa confirms, uncomfortably, feeling that this is a very grown-up thing to say.

“A wife’s duty is to love her husband and support him in all his endeavours,” Jodhi instructs herself.

“You could do a lot worse than Mohan,” Pushpa points out, still with half an eye on how grown-up she is.

“That is true,” Jodhi says – but then again, she could do a lot better – and she breaks down again, snivelling and snorting gently.

“Hush Sister, hush, don’t worry, everything will be all right, let us not wake Amma – imagine the commotion!” Kamala whispers, and she glances across at snoring Amma and
babbling Leela – “Don’t step in the wet cement,” Leela is moaning.

“Don’t cry, Sister – you’ll get used to Mohan.”

“I am in love with Anand!” Jodhi splutters.

As she covers her face in her hands from shame and hopelessness, Pushpa and Kamala stare into each other’s chronic amazement through the gloom. Kamala glances across at Amma fearfully, but
it’s all right, Amma is still snoring like a hibernating bear.

“Come,” Kamala hisses decisively, getting to her feet, pulling up her sisters after her, making for the safety of a locked bathroom and the kind of in-depth crisis conversation that
can only be generated by three sisters, a disastrous would-be and a secret love interest.

“That’s not a bucket!” Leela nearly declares; but she decides against it.

* * *

“…All these crazy emails I was getting from Mohan,” Jodhi is explaining – they are perched on some of DDR’s most ostentatious bathroom fittings.
“He is telling me you don’t know what rubbish, he is completely crazy, and then one day Anand sent me an email too, and we started writing, every day…”

“Ayyo-yo-
yooooooo
…” Pushpa breathes.

“…and we are enjoying it like anything, getting on like a burning house, talking about everything under the sun…”

“Oh my God,” Kamala breathes, the latent lover in her getting uncomfortably excited; she wonders what it would be like to know a boy like that, to get on like a burning house, to
talk about everything under the sun.

“…and all the time he, him – Mohan,” Jodhi forces herself to say, “he is sending me these pledges about how he would do anything for me, he is making me the
world-champion-beating anagrams of Graham Greene, and saying he will eat silicon chips if I ask him to, and—”

“Eat silicon chips?”

“Yes! Eat silicon chips! But how can I marry a boy who would eat silicon chips if I asked him to?”

Even that notable text,
How to Attract Women
, did not advocate the eating of silicon chips.

“He would eat silicon chips for you,” Kamala repeats, with a slightly dreamy air; perhaps she would like to meet a man like that. Not every man is capable of such love. But she
rouses herself and demands, indignantly, “What kind of a boy would do that?!”

“For all I know he’s munching through a whole dish of them right now!” Jodhi sobs in despair, and for a few moments they all nearly giggle as they catch each other’s eye
– but Jodhi’s situation is too desperate for that. “I only agreed to go to the cinema because I thought Anand would go, I just wanted to… just see him, look at him…
and when he wasn’t there I felt – you don’t know how I felt – you can’t know how bad it feels until you’ve felt how bad it is.”