White Man Falling (11 page)

I can’t even kill myself
.

But maybe he is jumping to a premature conclusion. For on that dusty patch of sweltering street, as the crowds barge over him and kick against him, there is a sense of overwhelming doom coming
from somewhere he doesn’t recognize; it is building up within him like some peculiarly appalling and terrifying form of indigestion, he can feel it taking a hold of him from the outside and
filling him up on the inside, and he is fighting it; it is too terrible, he does not want to be overcome by it. A stroboscopic effect of light passing through gaps in the swarming people above is
assaulting him, the shock of finding himself on the ground and yet alive is oppressing him, and it is at this moment – when the tightness around his heart sets in – that he has a
split-second vision of the white man passing from life to death. The word
Rama
is there, enclosing everything, and at the same time that his body starts to thrash out a relentless,
last-ditch panic for life, his mind goes under peacefully.

The bus that Swami had intended to expire under is roaring away to Palani in its regular hourly fashion, tailgated by another that is going to Cuddalore. They pass within a
metre of him, and passengers inside press their faces against the greasy bars of the open windows, straining to see the man lying face-up in the dirt road. Swami also sees himself.
Who is
that?
he is wondering. There is a sense of idle curiosity and irrelevance to the question, such as might occur when solving a puzzle in a lazy hour during a time of sleepy contentment. He
waits for a time, looking at his own body from above. Two men are now crouching next to that body, buffeted by the crowd. They put it in the recovery position, so that one of its arms flops over,
and while one of them bends down to place his ear over the chest, listening for life, the other one is wafting a newspaper in front of the face. Swami is more amused than surprised to realize that
the chest they are listening to, the face they are wafting air over, belong to him. He places himself higher, to get a better view of himself, and sees the whole picture: how his own body lies
there, tended by a middle-aged man who has a ring of sparse and unkempt hair circling a very large bald spot, and who has a dirty mark on the back of his otherwise spotless white shirt; and there
is another man, much younger, perhaps the son of the middle-aged fellow, a lanky youngster who now stands up and looks mournfully at the spectacle at his feet. There is a growing circle of
onlookers jutting into the road on one side, to the anger of passing drivers in cars and buses and taxis and autorickshaws, all honking their horns violently and brushing against people as they try
to nudge their way past. In the commotion, a decision is taken to move the body. Swami is distantly pleased to see three or four people pick him up and lift him – rather roughly, but he
forgives them – away from the traffic. The circle of onlookers quickly forms again, while around it Mullaipuram carries on, its people shoving at the edges and shouting complaints. Swami is
getting used to his new condition now
. Why are they bothering with that body when I’m not even in it?
Nevertheless it is interesting to see the body picked up once more and carried,
with some urgency, to a taxi. And now Swami finds that he knows what people are saying. His impression is that their words – compared to his own understanding – are pitifully inadequate
signals, tragic misfirings of cosmic incomprehension; one day they will cease to speak so uselessly, he knows, and he wishes he could let them know how ineffectual they are being.

Meanwhile a negotiation is taking place over the going rate for half a mile in the back of a yellow-and-black Ambassador taxi.

“Saar, that fellow is dead,” the taxi driver is pointing out indignantly as he turns the ignition, “it is not auspicious to be having the dead man in my motor
vehicle.”

“Very well, don’t take him, you miserable son of a louse, we will get out immediately!” shouts the middle-aged fellow who has taken it upon himself to get Swami to hospital; he
is a professor of chemistry, and he has no idea why he’s involved himself in this business. On any other day of the week he might have stepped over the body with a curious glance. He mops at
his balding pate as he struggles with Swami’s inert matter.

“But Saar—”

“Enough!”

“But Saar—”

“Enough!”

“But Saar, maybe you are working in an office, but are you wanting a stranger dragging a corpse inside that office without a word of warning? Even a highly respected gentleman like you,
Saar. Answer me this, Saar!”

“Enough, desist, cease!” shouts the professor, who has been struggling all this time to pull one of Swami’s feet into the back of the car, “we will not deign to use your
miserable, ungodly taxi, which disgraces Lord Ganesha and the goddess Lakshmi who are residing on your filthy dashboard, we are getting out without delay!” As he barks the words he succeeds
in banging shut the back door at last. “Okay, go.”

“Saar, I didn’t say I wouldn’t take him,” the taxi driver says sulkily, setting off.

“Doesn’t matter,” the professor shouts, as he and his son arrange Swami across the back seat of the taxi. “It doesn’t matter what you say you’ll do, and it
doesn’t matter what you say you won’t do, we don’t want to travel in your miserable, godless taxi, so if you say another word then you can stop the car immediately and we will get
out now!”

“Saar, don’t be angry with me,” says the taxi driver, “I have children to feed and clothe like any other man, and I can’t have a dead fellow in my taxi for less
than three hundred rupees.”

“Three hundred? To go to the hospital? It can’t be costing more than fifty! You louse, will you take advantage of a dying man?”

“Taxis are for the living, Saar. If you want a vehicle for the dead, call an ambulance.”

“I order you to stop immediately!”

“Two hundred and fifty, Saar, that is very best and very lowest discount fare in Mullaipuram for dead people!”

With negotiations and arguments at this extremely gentle, early and delicate stage, the taxi struggles through a sluggish river of traffic, and relentlessly honks its way towards the hospital.
“You louse!” says the professor, “we are getting out immediately, stop this car!” he declares at each juncture in the haggling process. Meanwhile the professor’s son
sits in the back with Swami’s head and torso lying across his lap, scowling, nursing murderous feelings of resentment against taxi drivers and men who drop dead in public.

“Appa,” he hisses sulkily, “we should never have got involved in this.”

“Don’t lecture me, boy,” barks the professor, furious – furious not merely because he does not want his authority questioned in front of this insolent taxi driver, but
also because he knows his son is right. What has possessed him to get involved like this? It can only be some small cosmic alignment beyond his comprehension.

“You crazy sonovapig!” the taxi driver abruptly yells out of the window – there seems to be a man out there who is guilty of riding a bicycle while exhibiting insufficient
terror of taxi drivers. The professor slumps back in his seat, exhausted by anger, confrontation and the deaths of strangers. One hundred and twenty-five rupees, that is where negotiations are
stalled. This is at least twice as much as the going rate, but after all, thinks the professor, there is some logic in the driver’s argument – the man lying across him appears to be
dead, as dead as a drowned snake chopped in two and both halves thrown on different fires; such a freight ought to carry a premium, given that the taxi driver probably sleeps in the back of his
taxi six nights a week.

“All right, you cheating wastrel, one hundred and twenty five,” he agrees gruffly.

“Oh very good Saar, thank you Saar, we are reaching fairest and very best excellent agreement!”

The professor nurses Swami’s folded legs against his chest, and – in that lurching taxi with a cheating driver and a furious son and a dead man – concentrates on achieving the
calming vision he always relies on in times of acute stress. It involves beautiful chemical formulae, and the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, and splendid shawls being draped over his shoulders by
worthy dignitaries, while an audience of international big shots – amongst whom is the President of India – looks on admiringly.

Swami doesn’t know and doesn’t care whether his self and his matter have separated. Maybe an analgesic hallucination is occurring in his dying brain that can account for his current
experiences, but why should Swami care? It is clear to him that worrying at the reasons and causes behind things is a choice made by living men, every one of them. Dead men such as Swami have no
interest in all that nonsense. He is currently experimenting with where to position himself in relation to his body. It feels too cramped, too human almost, to rest below the roof of the taxi, but
he still feels slightly attached, almost by some physical bond, to these three men with their pitiful emotional outbursts, the deluded sallies of their redundant language, and he wonders as to the
outcome of all this, so he drifts in and out of the taxi as it forces its way through the centre of town to Mullaipuram Anna District General Hospital… until, abruptly, he finds himself no
longer attached at all, not to that world he’d been alive in, with all its taxis and all its people. Not to anything.

There is the darkest tunnel stretching ahead of him, of the most profound and compelling aspect, such as no one who has seen it could refuse to enter. Though its appearance and aura is ominous
and something to be mightily afraid of, yet he knows that its purpose is irresistibly beautiful, and as soon as it opens up in front of him he enters it willingly, losing every link to the mortal
world.

In a dilapidated resuscitation room in the overstretched Accident and Emergency wing of the hospital, while an exhausted doctor rips Swami’s shirt open and checks for signs of life and
clamps an oxygen mask over the breathless mouth and nose, and while a second exhausted doctor hooks the body up to a monitor and shouts “VF” and applies salmon patches to the chest and
shouts at a nurse to set the defibrillator at 150 – and scolds her, too, with a “Well don’t leave the mask on”, because the first doctor has forgotten to take it off –
there are still some moments to pass before the two defibrillator paddles will deliver their surge and try to shock the useless flailing chambers of Swami’s heart into pumping blood. Swami is
far away from such trivial matters, passing without bodily form down that vast, noisy dark tunnel, at speeds outside description, towards a warm, yellow glow that becomes exponentially brighter and
more compelling until he hurtles into it with a sense of inexpressible relief and gratitude.

“So this is it,” he calmly tells the figures who come to greet him, in a medium beyond speech, these four black naked wordless guides. It is surprising to notice that the messengers
are armed with clubs, and surprising, too, that they take hold of Swami brusquely. But it is not alarming. The light that surrounds Swami and that extends in every direction without variation is
overwhelming, it hugs the higher self with a loving peacefulness, and in the grip of these guides he feels safer and more accepted than he has ever dreamt of. They lead him through an infinite
chamber that is thronged with indescribable forms, all of which Swami can communicate with and recognize, though he feels no need or compulsion to do so. Certainly his mother is here, he can feel
her presence simultaneously distinct from all other presences and merged with them into one absolute presence; also his ancestors since time began, all of them, every dead loved one and
acquaintance is here, and not just as he knew them, but in a distillation of all their incarnations, so that they are every aspect of themselves that they ever were. They are emanating a love that
is so universal as to be beyond the meagre attributes of the personal; the personal seems so meaningless in this place that it no longer exists, and Swami can no longer recognize it. Swami –
we shall continue to call him this, although now he is something far greater that can’t be adequately described – is infused with contented peace and has no fear as the guides calmly
transport him through the time and space that lies beyond time and space to a great god. Swami knows him, of course: it is Yama Dharmarajan, the King of the Dead.

The god is small and naked and withered. He seems monumentally bored. He sits on his high wooden chair and gazes at Swami over his beard with an inscrutable look. To one side, sitting
cross-legged on the floor, is his helper Chitraguptan, who has an immense book open in front of him. Behind Chitraguptan a mass of clerks and scribes are endlessly engaged in transcribing records
of lives and deaths. And behind them, stretching far, far away, is a long narrow series of antechambers lined on both sides with books and scrolls and records.

“Here he is,” Chitraguptan tells Yama Dharmarajan, in his utter wordlessness. Yama Dharmarajan doesn’t react.

Swami has never felt such downright relief as he says to Chitraguptan, “Yes I’m here now.”

No one replies.

“I didn’t know,” Swami says wonderingly, to Yama Dharmarajan. “I didn’t know.” He knows that Yama Dharmarajan knows he didn’t know. He knows that Yama
Dharmarajan knows everything. Life after death is so simple and beautiful.

Yama Dharmarajan yawns.

This is the most blissful moment of Swami’s death, as he stands in front of the yawning King of the Dead, knowing that he is merged with something great. But – and this sometimes
happens – it seems there has been a mistake. Chitraguptan is frowning and scratching at his bald head, just behind his right ear.

“He’s not R.M. Swaminathan the grain trader,” Chitraguptan murmurs lugubriously, so interjecting – with a meticulous attention to the demands of an infinite bureaucracy
– a strangely unexpected sour note into what had seemed to be the blissful site of the afterlife.

“No no, I’m R.M. Swaminathan the police officer,” Swami says, after a moment, very eager to please, and aware more than ever of the ineffable beauty of being here, under Yama
Dharmarajan’s heavy, bored gaze, as that great King of the Dead emits another long, slow, indolent yawn.