White Man Falling (13 page)

“Brother, come,” says Amma softly, when she sees him.

All the daughters are there, ranged around the bed like lovely guards, keeping vigil over their father. There are a few gaudy cards from well-wishers on the window ledge –
Be Hopeful
and Happiest
, one of them declares, over an image of a blissfully content hospital patient eating the finest South Indian titbits under the gaze of an adoring and ecstatic family, while being
comprehensively cured of the trickiest fatal diseases by a crack team of consultants in a vast and luxuriously appointed medical facility. It seems a far cry from this shabby cube of Intensive
Care, with its well-used apparatus crowding the family members.

Walking in, Murugesan feels discomfited. Something is not as he would like it to be. Amma and her daughters seem too… He gropes around for the right word as his gaze flicks from Swami to
Amma and from Amma to the girls, then back to Swami again; too
contented
, he realizes. Kamala is smiling at him sweetly, almost as though this is any old regular happy occasion.

“So?…” he says gruffly, looking around at them all. “What is the news?”

“Come, Uncle,” says Jodhi, giving up her chair for him, “please sit.”

Murugesan sits, uneasily. He is staring over Swami’s face to Amma at the other side of the bed, and what he sees does not make him feel any more comfortable: she seems criminally peaceful
– where is her wifely distress? He focuses on his old friend’s profile, the firm thrust of the nose, the tiny rise and fall of the chin, the fractional movement of the tube entering a
nostril as Swami breathes in and out, and as the pillow gives under his head. Then he refocuses, looks at Amma again, looks into her eyes and tries to understand. Something, he feels sure, is not
right: it is not right that Swami’s womenfolk are so peaceful and assured, it is not right that there is no grieving or worrying in this place. Look at her, he is thinking, look at her
– as though there isn’t a care in the world! He leans down and starts taking things from a plastic bag.

“Card,” he says, passing it across to Amma, who takes it and nods, “and this is something towards medical expenses,” he adds, handing her an envelope. “All the
police officers in Mullaipuram are contributing large and small. And there’s this,” he finishes, holding up some fruits – mangoes, jackfruits, bananas – and feeling
inexplicably foolish. “Fruits,” he says feebly.

“Thank you Brother,” Amma says, smiling at him too kindly, so that he feels more uncomfortable than ever.

“Uncle,” Pushpa says earnestly from the foot of the bed, “Appa is very happy you have come.”

Murugesan stares at her blankly, then looks at the evidently unconscious Swami.

“What is his prognosis?” he asks Amma.

“Everything is with the gods now,” Amma tells him. “I have left everything to the goddess Mariamman and Lord Murugan,” she adds, as though it is the easiest thing in the
world to detach oneself from one’s troubles in this world and leave their resolution to the gods.

“But what do the doctors say?” Murugesan persists, irritated.

A nurse enters the room, rather shyly, and looks at Swami in a curious fashion. Murugesan waits for her to do whatever she is going to do. The nurse hesitates, smiling all the time at Amma.

“What is it?” Murugesan says, brusquely. He has his uniform on, he feels authoritative. “Please do your work.”

The nurse smiles awkwardly at him and then looks towards Amma, saying, “Sister, what I mentioned to you before, here it is.” She takes a large bundle out of a plastic bag, and from
several grubby cloths she unwraps an elderly camera. “My husband has brought it to me,” she says. “The picture…”

Murugesan sits back in his chair, looking around him in an exaggerated fashion as though everyone else must surely feel as bewildered and irritated as himself at this bizarre behaviour.

“Come,” Amma indicates, “please, yes, you must be having the picture.”

To Murugesan’s beggared belief, the nurse steps up to the end of the bed, frames Swami in her viewfinder, and presses the shutter. A flash goes off.

“But what is this?” Murugesan asks, looking between Amma and the nurse. “What kind of behaviour is this? When a man is in, when a man… what is the meaning behind
this?”

“Brother, please be calm,” Amma says.

“But what is happening?” Murugesan asks.

The nurse touches Swami’s feet through the bed sheet, then brings her hands together reverently.

“Thank you,” she says, and rushes out.

Touching his feet?
Murugesan, shaking his head slightly, one hand smoothing the hair down on the back of his head, waits for any hint of sense or reason to manifest itself, as his old
friend lies unconscious next to him.

“Uncle, please be happy,” one of the twins says.

“She took a picture and touched his feet!” Murugesan bursts out.

“Uncle, Appa is walking with God,” the other twin informs him, gravely.

* * *

A short while after Anitha – or is it Suhanya? – informs Murugesan about Swami’s cosy ambles with the godhead, Murugesan is standing by the Sugam Tea Stall
just outside the hospital gates. The Sugam Tea Stall, manned for seventeen years by a five-foot, 40-kg ex-convict and toddy-distiller called Pugal – known as Hairy Pugal, on account of his
extreme baldness – is commonly perceived to brew the finest roadside tea in the town of Mullaipuram. The stall itself is in deplorable condition – an ancient rotting wooden cart on four
seized-up broken wheels – but the tea… Many patients and doctors at the hospital swear that Hairy Pugal’s concoction is an important component of their medical regimes. He is
never short of customers, which explains why so many beggars lie in the sun nearby, like a row of decaying fruits. Hairy Pugal lets them get so close, but not any closer – any closer than
where they are and he thrashes them.

Murugesan watches the renowned tea vendor brewing up a battered old urn of strong milky tea. He has been drawn here by a hankering for familiarity. The incomprehensible burblings of
Swami’s womenfolk disturbed him, and he had stalked off with ill-disguised impatience. He likes predictability and the everyday known. Against the arbitrary buffeting of large events beyond
his comprehension, he derives immense comfort in small certainties. He likes to be told in advance by his wife what food he will be eating later. He enjoys his own subtle expertise in interpreting
the many different ways in which she can hang his pressed uniform from the handle of the great metal wardrobe in their house, and he likes the small unspoken rituals that punctuate the tasks of his
working life – an ancient joke often repeated with this colleague here, an old trivial problem chewed over with that one there. What he doesn’t like is the everyday known slowly
transmuting into something no longer known nor everyday – and this is how it has been with his old friend Swami for some time now. How did Swami change from being a regular guy to being an
outsider? From being a close friend to a wary acquaintance? And how did the fellow’s womenfolk, so sensible and down-to-earth, turn into the kind of people who claim a desperately sick man is
not sick but walking with God? When did all this nonsense start? Was it when the white man fell on Swami? Or was it afterwards, when Swami started to investigate the white man’s death? Or was
it long before then, when he suffered his stroke? Murugesan doesn’t know. All he knows is that when it comes to Swami, each day has seemed slightly more peculiar than the last, to the point
that today seems very strange indeed. And if this is today, what of tomorrow? Murugesan pulls several faces in protest at what the future might bring.

Hairy Pugal, satisfied that the concoction in his vintage tannin-black urn is hot enough to scald a turtle, pours Murugesan’s tea from one glass to another in tall and daring parabolas, to
cool it down slightly, then presents it to his customer. Murugesan takes it without a word or a glance and turns to the street, sipping at it quickly. Staff and patients and relatives are standing
around the stall in ones and twos, out of reach of the beggars in the dirt, drinking tea and smoking, pawing at the dusty road with the soles of their sandals, staring into the passing flow of
traffic and pedestrians and thinking about death. But there is nothing more comforting on the face of this earth than drinking Hairy Pugal’s sweet milky tea by the roadside, and then smacking
one’s lips and banging the empty glass down on the vendor’s dirty tray – that is a truth that Murugesan learnt some fifteen years ago. So he polishes off the tea, and smacks his
lip, then bangs the glass down noisily – and belches too, as a bonus. Hairy Pugal’s eyebrows rise fractionally as though to say, “Yes, I am a skilled artisan in the craft of
making tea, one of the best you will ever encounter, and the tea you have just consumed is amongst the finest tea ever concocted since the art and practice of tea-drinking was first developed. It
is super-tea.”

As Murugesan contemplates entering the post-tea world once more, he notices a doctor arriving at the stall with the words “Consultant Cardiologist” on his name badge. Murugesan
watches the man receive his glass of tea, then approaches him.

“Doctor, I am Sub-Inspector K.P. Murugesan.”

“Yes?”

“It’s possible you have treated my colleague, retired Sub-Inspector R.M. Swaminathan?”

“Yes yes, I saw him immediately after my colleagues brought him back and stabilized him.”

“Yes Doctor. Doctor—” Murugesan gestures in the air vaguely, not knowing how to put his question.

Dr Pandit, sipping his tea, watches him with very little curiosity or interest, as though something like this happens every day, as though he has heard every permutation of query for every
conceivable sickness and situation, and now merely awaits confirmation as to which permutation this one will prove to be.

“Doctor,” Murugesan tries again, “this fellow, my friend, R.M. Swaminathan, Sub-Inspector, retired…”

“Yes?”

“He was acting very strangely for some time before this heart attack, his whole character changed…”

“Yes?”

“…and also a white man fell on him…”

“Yes?”

“…ever since when, he seems to find things out without my really knowing how…”

“Yes?” Strangeness, white men, psychic prowess – Dr Pandit is not easily impressed.

“…and you see, now he has died, and he has come back from death, and his family say he is walking with God, and with my own eyes I saw one of your nurses entering the room and
taking his photograph, Doctor…”

“Yes?”

“…and touching his feet!”

“Yes yes,” says Dr Pandit decisively, finishing his tea and banging it down on the tray with the special authority that comes with being a cardiologist, “and you’re not
knowing why?”

“I have no idea,” Murugesan says. “I cannot get any sense from his womenfolk, they’ve all gone crazy, that is why I am asking you.”

“Well now,” said Dr Pandit, “it is quite simple. In the night, as two nurses were changing his position, he said ‘Rama, Rama, Rama’ – three times he said it,
like that. One of the nurses ran out of the room, and the other decided she was with a patient who was walking with God. You see? I’ve seen it before, this kind of thing. It happened like
this with a patient in Pune, his whole village started worshipping him. And you see, true or false, the rumour spreads like wildfire. Of course,” says Dr Pandit, fiddling in his pockets for
three rupees to give to Hairy Pugal, “the other day your Mr Swaminathan also said ‘slum biscuit’ in a very powerful and impressive manner, I heard it myself, with my own
ears.”

“Slum biscuit, Doctor?”

“Slum biscuit.”

“What is slum biscuit?”

“I have no idea. But he is showing signs of lightening, Sub-Inspector—”

“Lightening?”

“—coming out of his coma… but on that occasion, that slum-biscuit occasion…” Dr Pandit raises an eyebrow “…on that occasion, no one decided he was
walking with God.”

“So he’s not walking with God?”

Dr Pandit shrugs. “I didn’t say that. That is something I am neither saying nor not saying. How am I knowing if he is walking with God or not? I know about his heart. I know that
life departed from his body and then returned to it – who knows where it went to in the meantime? These near-death experiences are not understood. More tea!” he raps at Hairy Pugal
– Dr Pandit drinks oceanic quantities of tea – leaving Murugesan to scratch at the stubble on his neck, deep in thought.

Having learnt that her husband said “Rama, Rama, Rama” while in a profound state of non-being, Amma has started to emanate an irritating serenity. She has taken to
smiling beatifically at startled innocents on the smallest premise, and to walking more slowly down the hospital corridors so that she doesn’t huff and puff in front of curious onlookers.
Huffing and puffing in front of curious onlookers would be inappropriate in a woman who is the wife of a man who is believed to be walking with God.

For all Amma knows, Swami’s brain might only be notionally more useful than a plantain stepped on by Mrs P – but if God is taking care of Swami, what does it matter? So she sits in
the centre of her serenity in Swami’s hospital room, as complacent as a tired elephant being scrubbed down by a conscientious mahout at the end of a long day’s logging.

For five days Swami has been adrift in a strange un-tellable tale that does not belong to the ordinary lives of his wife and his daughters, to his town and to his lived experience. He is not
dead, but nor is he completely alive. He exists, like a machine that has been plugged in but not turned on. As for his family, the panic of the first few days after his death and resuscitation has
eased away. The girls are almost getting used to him like this. At the moment Pushpa is reading Agam poems to him from the Sangam literature, as Leela executes dance exercises in the corner of the
room. Jodhi and Kamala are at home, looking after Suhanya and Anitha.