White Man Falling (17 page)

“We are all having Scotch on the rocks!” he shrieks hilariously, capping the joke with an ear-splitting “Ha Ha Ha” for good measure. He adds a late and sound-barrier
painful “HA!” to finish off.

Jodhi, Pushpa, Devan, Mrs Devan, the waiter, other waiters, the manager, the table boys, a visiting inspector from the Mullaipuram District Board of Food Preparation and Hygiene, and all the
clientele of Friends stare at him; businessmen in the atrium turn their heads and frown at the wild shouting; distant strangers in the furthest reaches of the hotel – lift boys between two
floors, a honeymoon couple behind locked doors, chefs in busy subterranean kitchens – pause for an instant, cock their ears, wonder if they heard something.

“I am having coffee,” says Devan, after the longest conversational pause in recent history, scrutinizing his younger brother sadly; Mohan’s tragic mouth is still open, having
been petrified by the excruciating shock of being unfunny beyond current scientific thinking in this field.

“We will be having coffee also, isn’t it Pushpa?” Jodhi says, now starting to shake with the cold, wrapping her scarf around her neck more closely.

“Yes,” says Pushpa, and then, “Oh no,” in the tone of voice of someone who cannot believe that things can get any worse.

“No? Yes?” Devan says.

What is Pushpa talking about? Of course things can get worse. Isn’t that why things were invented? Everyone looks to where she is looking, and here comes Amma plodding into Friends,
looking exactly like the hard-working, coarse-skinned, unsophisticated, financially burdened, self-sacrificing, rupee-careful, daughter-obsessed, marriage-fixated, lower-middle-class overweight
Indian housewife that she is – though newly empowered by having a husband who is reputed to have walked with God. She is dragging Leela by the hand.

“Just happened,” Amma says, attempting to breeze in nonchalantly, “just happened to be passing cinema after you came out! What a happy coincidence! Saw you all jolly as
anything coming here!”

“Most welcome, Madam, please be sitting,” Devan declares gravely. “How is your respected husband Swamiji?”

“Yes, seat,” Mrs Devan adds, gesturing.

“Yes thank you,” Amma says, thrusting an annoyed-looking Leela into Pushpa’s side and lowering her rear into an armchair. She has never sat within such accommodating padded
luxury before, it takes her by surprise. She tips backwards inexorably, like something toppling off a wall, and for a few undignified moments her legs are cycling the air. Everyone watches with
some interest.

“I tried to stop her,” Leela whispers apologetically to her sister, who nudges her to be quiet.

“Husband is very well,” Amma is saying, as she struggles with the furniture, “he is still recuperating in the mountains. Trying to keep low profile, but everyone and all is
coming to him for spiritual bliss!”

“When he comes back to Mullaipuram, everyone will be going mad,” Devan predicts.

“DDR is having very big plans for husband,” Amma boasts, “DDR says he is going to—”

“Amma!” Jodhi pleads, embarrassed at these boasts. It is an open secret that DDR is funding the family now, from Swami’s stay in Thendraloor to the girls’ educations, but
there is no need to crow about it.

“Yes yes Daughter, be quiet, just for a moment I am stopping by, stop worrying. What a very beautiful coffee house!” Amma is wearing a sari, and has no scarf to pull closer around
her neck. She is already shivering. “How are we liking the movie?” She asks Mohan hopefully.

“Not very best quality,” Mohan admits, still crestfallen at his failure to locate Jodhi’s laughter button and pump it till she had begged him to stop.

Amma glares at Jodhi; it must be her fault.

“Please be choosing refreshments,” Devan says, in a faint voice, passing Amma a menu – this is proving more expensive than in his worst nightmares.

Amma’s eyes lock onto the menu. A vein starts throbbing on her goose-pimpled neck. At home she could supply some of these drinks at twice the quality and a fiftieth of the price.

“Nothing for us,” she says, on the back of a repressed choking gulp, “just stopping by.”

“Pushpa,” Leela whispers, “I am very very cold.”

“Shush,” Pushpa whispers.

“Cold?” Amma says, approaching deep-frozen, her teeth just about chattering. “Not cold at all. Very refreshingly cool,” she claims. “Well then…” and
she directs a piercing gaze at Jodhi, and threatens her: “…having very wonderful time?”

Everyone looks at Jodhi, who fakes a grisly smile and implements two and a half nods.

“Pushpa,” Leela hisses, “Jodhi is liking some other boy, isn’t she?!”

She says it a little bit too loudly; she says it during an unfortunate gap in the western muzak; she says it with horrifying conviction and revelatory relish, even though she has made it up.
Before anyone can fully comprehend, Jodhi – already embarrassed beyond endurance by every wince-rich detail of this date – lands a stinging slap across her little sister’s face.
They stare into each other’s eyes and share a second of intense mutual shock, then Leela splits the airwaves with inconsolable howls, and Jodhi throws her head into her hands, sobbing.

Devan and his wife sit limply agog at yet another pre-engagement meltdown, a monstrous marriage implosion. Even Mohan – instinctively exploiting the unexpected, narrow window of
opportunity that is Jodhi’s high neckline by glancing down her
chudidhar
as she hunches forwards – can’t help wondering, as he strains for a glimpse of that thrilling
bra, what it is about this family…

Two thousand metres up the jungle-cloaked Vadapradesam Hills of the Western Ghats – a mountain range that snakes down the southern states of India – lies the hill
station of Thendraloor. Founded in the early nineteenth century by hot-tormented American missionaries and British administrators, its temperate climate gave them relief from the scorched dust bowl
of the plains. Every April, during the first seventy years of the settlement, a sweating army of coolies and packhorses would guide, tow, push and carry colonials and the Indian élite up the
winding, perilous mountain tracks. An even bigger army was entrusted with lugging up the essential bits and pieces which this privileged band couldn’t possibly do without: Persian rugs,
mahogany davenports, fruit trees in vast urns, looted stone artefacts from village temples, silver tea sets, marble busts of Charles Dickens, iron baths, formal wear for every style of occasion
from balls to pig-sticking parties, harmoniums, three-cylinder mangles and other essential little knick-knacks. After a meagre four months’ rest and recreation, the privileged interloping
indolents and all their multifarious paraphernalia had to be transported back to Madurai, Madras, Tiruchirapalli, Cuddalore.

The town’s appeal and facilities grew rapidly. By 1916, British civil engineers had designed and built a fifty-mile road from Thendraloor to the railway junction at Kodai Road –
although a pedant might be minded to challenge the description “designed and built”, given that the British ingeniously utilized legions of bonded labourers to do all the work. The
settlement developed into a full-blown English town from the Home Counties, complete with boating lake, golf course, churches of three denominations and a Rotary Club, as well as its own
tally-hoing hunt, which rode out to hounds three times a week – through the pastures and dolmens and centuries-old middens of the surrounding stone-age tribal peoples – to harry
astonished wild dogs and hyenas. After Independence in 1947 the Indians embraced Thendraloor enthusiastically, even the fox hunt, which is still going strong. These days tens of thousands of
holidaymakers descend on the town every year by car and bus and luxury coach, overtaking one another on blind hairpin bends just because they can. It’s true that the town itself is not very
relaxing any more, given the Indian genius for enhancing any quiet unspoilt beauty spot with vast concrete viewing platforms, immense heaps of stinking refuse and speakers blaring out distorted
film songs, but anyone who chooses to can still find a sort of quiet in the outlying villages, and a peace in the nearby dense jungle, and awe on the mountainsides.

It is just after dawn in the Vadapradesam Hills; the sky is mostly clear and the temperature is slightly chilly, but not uncomfortably so. A man is watching the sun rise in the present tense,
which is to say, with much attention and not much thought. He squats on a wide ledge on the hillside, one hand clutching a sapling that grows from a cleft in the rock, the other hanging limply by
his side. He is looking out over a great valley to a series of verdant peaks. Thin strips of cloud below the peaks are changing in hue, from orange-edged black to bruised purple to – as the
sun outstrips them – translucent wisps of white. Swami grunts involuntarily. He has started coming here most mornings, without really knowing why. He was never much of a nature lover, but
since his death and rebirth he no longer feels much interest in the consolations of books.

Kamala accompanies him. She is waiting in an autorickshaw parked a hundred metres away, at the end of an intermittently navigable track. The driver of the auto, a well-meaning but overeager
fellow with a streak of impertinence, is struggling to contain his curiosity about her father. He sits in the front of his vehicle, imploring her to tell him all about Swamiji’s enlightenment
in Mullaipuram, when it is said that no less than seven curd-faced devils bearing evil talking giant
rudraksha
beads flew into the town spreading malice and misfortune, but were repulsed
by Swamiji’s innate and burgeoning saintliness – Swami’s story gets a different mangling in different parts of Tamil Nadu. Kamala is not in the mood for this kind of thing, and
she gets out of the auto. She is interested in looking after her father’s material needs – cooking his food and washing his clothes and facilitating his day and being his human walking
stick. She walks some of the way towards him, then stops next to a bleached, lightning-blasted tree trunk, and squats, and waits.

Swami finds it easy to attend to the rising of the red sun and nothing else; only when the sun crests the highest peak might any strong thoughts kick in. He is sometimes aware of that feeling of
transition between the two states of not-thinking and thinking. When he is not thinking, he cannot think about not-thinking; and when he is thinking, he can think too much about thinking. But when
he is moving from one condition to the other, he can not only understand intellectually that thought is the source of all fear; he can for a few brief moments feel its truth, with all the heft and
texture of a rough stone weighed in the palm of the hand. And then there is a trick he has learnt – to let it go, that undiluted experience. Trying to hang on to the feeling it grants is to
submit to the fear of losing it.

There is the sun, moving higher, becoming too bright to look at as it abandons the mountains below it, and now here are Swami’s thoughts kicking in.

Many people have firm ideas about what Swami should think about. Amma thinks he should think about Jodhi’s marriage. D.D. Rajendran thinks he should think about certain ambitious plans
that are being formulated on his behalf. Jodhi thinks he should think about saving her from Mohan. Pushpa thinks he should think about his health. Leela thinks he should think about going home and
cuddling her. The least fortunate people of Thendraloor and its environs think he should think about their diseased limbs, their sick children, their dirty wells, their crippling debts and their
miraculous hopes. The spiritually excitable think he should think about explaining his enlightenment. Only Kamala and Granddaddy hold few views on what Swami should think about. Kamala is fulfilled
by serving him, and Granddaddy is not big on thinking.

Swami will never attain Granddaddy’s purchase on the present tense, but sometimes he comes close.

I want my breakfast
, Swami thinks.

A serpent eagle soars easily in the distance. Some jungle beast – a common langur – is screeching in the canopy. Without warning Swami briefly slides into the dream world that comes
to him on occasion – the one with the white man. Sometimes the white man can just appear next to him, like an imaginary friend conjured up by a small child, but at the moment the white man is
more of a warmth, communicating elementally in units of acceptance. So the two of them just hang around together for a few moments, and then the white man is gone.

Whether Sub-Inspector (retired) R.M. Swaminathan has inadvertently accessed some spiritual plane beyond ordinary human experience is an excellent question. Don’t ask – that is the
best advice. Isn’t it enough that he’s at peace with himself in a way he has never known before? This is the way of it for many people who have died and come back. Now that Swami
possesses the power of being at peace, he is wielding a force that is irresistibly attractive to people near and far. They crave it, that peacefulness of his. Because they do not have it, because
they know they cannot buy it, because they rarely encounter it, their souls would suck it out of him, if they could.

He gets up from his haunches, laboriously – the shooting pains down one side are far less intense than they used to be – looking at Kamala as she starts walking towards him up the
rocky path. When they meet he rests his hand on her shoulder and allows her to guide him back to the auto. With his new beard streaked with bars of white, his crisp green kurta, his confident way
of inhabiting the fettered motion of his own body, and his silent devoted handmaiden at his side, he looks every inch the living saint that some say he is.

The auto driver sits up straight as his passenger approaches. His starving, junk-fed inner life longs to sink its teeth into Swami, but the man is too shy to put his questions to him directly.
Eager to please, he wrenches the starter cord of the auto’s cacophonous two-stroke, proud of his youth and his strength, proud of his passenger. The engine ignites on his first attempt.

“Ready Saar,” he says.

Kamala helps her father into the back seat and gets in besides him. The auto swings round, and the driver makes a slow and careful zigzag along the uneven, rock-studded track. He expresses his
respect for the guru with a series of blindingly obvious one-word commentaries on their journey.