White Man Falling (19 page)

Murugesan’s eyes widen in wonder when he emerges from the jungle path into the clearing with Swami and Kamala – at least three hundred people are already waiting there, sitting in
expectant knots amongst the rocks and shrubs. They observe Swami eagerly, watching his slow progress through their number, bringing their palms together in
namaskarams
and
vanakkams
as he passes them. Swami reaches his tree and sits down cross-legged at its base. And that is all there is to it. Though some new devotees or sceptical onlookers may start
talking, they invariably cease in the end. The stream flows, the breeze passes, the shadows on the rocks shift gradually, the sun travels, the leaves of the trees rustle, the unseen beasts and
birds of the nearby jungle call and kill and eat and die and fly and leap – and the people sit at the centre of this scene, silently gazing at Swami.

At the start, Murugesan wonders what lies at the centre of the process: is it peer pressure? Is it nothing more than the unremarkable comfort that derives from a joint endeavour in a setting of
natural beauty? Or can only Swami engender this kind of response? For now, Murugesan doesn’t know. After a while, he doesn’t care. His thoughts are ebbing away. The longer the silence
lasts, the more he becomes part of it. Only afterwards will he recall that all his problems left his consciousness, his very sense of self almost disappeared, and he experienced that intense level
of living in the moment as is usually shown only by children.

And what is going on in Swami’s mind as the collective will of the people submits to him? Much the same as is going on in theirs – a gradual letting go of almost everything, until
only now is left. Before the hour of silence, and after the hour of silence, he may reason that there is some irreducible spiritual utility in what they all do together – they are claiming
the present, because only the present exists, and to be in it is to be alive. Before the hour of silence, and after the hour of silence, he knows that any one of these accidental initiates could
perform the role that he performs, if they only believed that they could; but during the hour of silence he just sits down and forgets everything.

Some forty minutes after the hour of silence started – after all, it wasn’t Swami who named it and who claimed it was an hour – Swami shifts and yawns, and Kamala helps him up.
A collective, satisfied, sibilant sigh emanates from his admirers. The hour of silence is over, and as people come out of their trances they smile and chuckle at each other, shake their heads in
wonder; Swami is threading through them, his hand on Kamala’s shoulder, and some of them are so elated that they prostrate themselves on the ground as he passes. As Murugesan watches, halfway
between his own inner silence and his new outer awareness, he sees Apu for the first time, bowing down to the guru Swamiji. For a few seconds Murugesan feels a surge of peaceful amazement –
Apu is here?! Swami is masterminding everything! But within minutes the anxieties attached to his everyday life and to his long personal charge sheet of small bad deeds seep back into him. Apu is
here as well?! Apu, one of the very fellows I’ve perjured myself for, is also coming to see Swami? What is to be done?

* * *

“Yes yes, I was going to tell Swami everything,” Murugesan admits, rather irritably, “three times I have come here to tell him everything, but something is
always happening to stop me.”

“That is how he is teaching you,” Apu declares. “A guru is always using the ignorance of the disciple.”

“Where did you pick up this rubbish?”

“It is definitely 100% true, I am reading about all the greatest gurus, again and again they are confounding their followers with completely illogical nonsense that leaves all baffled and
unhappy – only later, when the followers are thinking about it very deeply, does the truth of what they were saying make itself clear.”

“I am not a follower,” Murugesan mutters.

“Look at how he has brought us here together. Everyday we are nodding greetings in Mullaipuram, but only here do we meet and talk.”

“Why didn’t you tell him everything already?”

“My everything is much worse than your everything,” Apu answers.

“Yes, that is so.”

“No no, it is much worse than you are thinking. You are not knowing everything I have done,” comes the anguished answer.

“Of course I am knowing everything you have done…”

Murugesan is well-aware that Apu and a junior colleague, on encountering a rare white man in Mullaipuram, had harassed the fellow half-heartedly for a bribe. Later – off-duty and partly
drunk and feeling their dignity impugned – they had tracked the foreigner down to his hotel and paid him a visit. They had got carried away, engaging in a few well-intentioned activities
designed to encourage a man to acknowledge the error of his ways. After ten minutes of first-class entertainment involving cigarette burns and a heavy kick in the testicles, the white man had
ruined everything by running at the window and jumping clean out.

Apu’s lower lip begins to tremble.

“Brother, you are one of the many who covered up the truth about the foreigner—”

“Yes yes—”

“—but I am the one who kicked the harmless fellow in the balls – he drove us mad, he said, ‘Don’t blame yourselves…’ – and watched him
jump—”

“Yes yes, I know all that, it is
you
who don’t know everything, for I am not only the dirty dog who lied to Swami to keep him off the case, I am also the dirty pig who told
him the white man was a filthy rapist, God forgive me—”

“Brother…” Apu moans miserably “…Brother, this is nothing, I am even worse than you think,
I
am the disgusting, dirty lowdown snake who killed our
beloved Swamiji!”

A sheen of dismayed disbelief comes over Murugesan’s face, as Apu – snivelling and snorting – explains the fatal push that sent Swami sprawling to his death on a Mullaipuram
road.

“What a dirty business,” Murugesan whispers.

They walk the five miles to Thendraloor, side by side, oblivious to the increasing traffic as they approach the town, the coach parties of North Indians bellowing Hindi songs, the foreigners in
the backs of chauffeur-driven jeeps, school parties crammed four to a seat in fleets of shabby battered buses – the children shrieking and emanating an almost continuous stream of sweet
papers and sick from the open windows. They pass a church, a temple, a mosque, and they remain oblivious to the cries of hawkers and beggars and guides. In the dirty, litter-strewn wasteland that
functions as the bus stand, they agonize about what they should do.

“Full explanation and confession to Swami and facing up to everything, however painful – that is the lesson,” Murugesan argues at last.

“Telling Swamiji our bad deeds, not telling Swamiji our bad deeds, what does it matter?” Apu is asking miserably, sucking on a foul-smelling bidi as they wait for the bus.

“What do you mean, what does it matter? Do you want to cleanse your actions of their terrible filth or not? The first step is confessing to Swami. That is common sense! We know that is why
we are drawn here…”

“You are not understanding anything, Brother. Swamiji is not needing my confession, your confession, anybody’s confession. Swamiji is already knowing everything. He is asking
something else of us.”

The temporary peacefulness that Murugesan had felt when he was within Swami’s aura seems very distant now; he purses his lips, sucks up some saliva from the back of his throat, swallows
it, purses his lips again, as he watches the buses coming and going. What is Apu saying? He examines the younger man’s melancholic face.

“Something better than that, that is what he is wanting from us,” Apu adds, and he throws his bidi away bitterly, saying, “I am going mad! He knows what I did. Why
doesn’t he just report me to the authorities so that I can pay for what I did? Why won’t he tell us what he wants us to do?”

Buses are roaring in and out of this place, turning in great roaring circles, gaining and losing passengers who hop on and off the steps of the moving vehicles. Murugesan looks up and sees a
crow circling. The situation has become clear to him now.

“When people tell us what to do, do we listen, and do we do it?” he asks rhetorically.

“No, of course not, but people are not Swamiji. I would listen to him, and I would do what he told me to do.”

“Yes, and the thing would be done, but you would remain the same. I am thinking, I am thinking…”

“What, Brother?”

No answer comes from Murugesan. He is thinking,
Now I understand. Swami is trying to guide us to reach understanding all by ourselves – only then will our actions mean
anything.

The sun beats down on Mullaipuram without mercy. It bounces its boundless heat around the small back plot of Swami’s home, between the crumbling plaster planes of the
surrounding bungalows and the walls which circumscribe that shabby area. Under its onslaught, a small, tentlike structure near the open back door of Number 14/B is swaying mysteriously – a
pale-green shifting shape with three round talking bulges; Amma, Pushpa and Leela are peeling garlic together under the meagre home-made shelter of one of Amma’s saris. They squat on their
heels, in a triangle, systematically working their way through the garlic pile, depositing peeled cloves in a yellow plastic bowl. Amma is going to make three jars of pickle: one for her, one for a
sister, and one to send to Kamala in Thendraloor.

Pushpa sticks her head out of the makeshift shelter of the sari, sneezes into the sun-blasted air – all three of them have streaming twenty-four-hour colds, a consequence of their
unaccustomed exposure to the freezing temperatures of Friends – then submerges herself back into the complicated, aggravating three-way combat that is taking place within the green light of
the shelter.

“You are looking incredibly stupid in those stupid things,” she says to Leela, who is wearing sunglasses, “take those stupid things off, you stupid, no one can see you here but
us!”

“Pushpa, that is enough!” Amma scolds, and the tent sways this way and that in the throes of her irritation. “She is just a little girl, let her play if she wants to. What is
the matter with you, Pushpa?”

“Yes Pushpa, what is the
matter
with you?!” Leela repeats, with great satisfaction.

The slap from Jodhi yesterday has left no lasting mark, but Leela wants to signify her suffering. In western films she knows that when a handsome dissolute husband thumps his beautiful
long-suffering wife, the saintly female partner takes to wearing a scarf and sunglasses whenever she leaves the house, to conceal the bruising; “I fell down the stairs,” the wife says,
if someone asks her what’s wrong. So Leela is sporting sunglasses in homage to this glamorous ideal, and wears her scarf over her head. She has been roaming around the compound of police
bungalows, longing for people to ask her what’s wrong. “Jodhi hit me,” she explains to anyone who asks. Her homage to the western model only goes so far.

Earlier in the day it had been Amma instructing Leela to take those stupid sunglasses off. But now she is pursuing a different strategy, and for the moment the sunglasses can stay. Stripping the
garlic cloves at twice the speed her daughters can accomplish, dropping them into the bowl, she furrows her brow; she will have to be clever with Leela if she is to get to the bottom of the bottom
of this Jodhi-and-Mohan business. Why did Leela claim that Jodhi is seeing another boy? Jodhi would never do anything as scandalous as that – would she? But why would Leela say such a thing,
and why would Jodhi react so violently, if there were not a grain of truth in it somewhere?

One daughter of mine striking another daughter of mine in front of the boy’s family
, Amma muses disapprovingly.
What would my husband be saying about this?

For a while the only sound is the rustle of garlic being peeled.

“I cannot believe my eldest daughter slapped my youngest daughter!” Amma complains.

“Amma, sometimes even you are slapping your youngest daughter,” Leela points out, ambiguously defending Jodhi’s blow.

“And your middle daughter,” Pushpa agrees.

“All your daughters,” Leela complains.

“I am your mother,” Amma says; for twenty years she has employed the authority of this all-encompassing non sequitur to vindicate her very best mistakes.

“Yes Amma.”

“I am slapping you for your own good.”

“Yes Amma.”

“Jodhi is not slapping you for your own good, she is slapping you because she is angry – because you are shaming her in front of the boy’s family.”

Silence from Leela; this is not a conversational direction which she is anxious to explore.

“And you are not seeing, Leela, how shaming it was for us?”

More silence. Pushpa pokes her head out of the tent to sneeze again, quickly followed by Leela, who sneezes three times in a row.

“Whoever heard of having a cold during the hot?!” Amma says, exasperated, as the two girls reappear under the covering; she blows her nose on the edge of her sari.

“Amma, don’t do that!” Pushpa begs.

“That is how it was done when I was young!” Amma protests.

“It is not hygienic, Amma.”

“And that dirty rag is hygienic, is it?” is Amma’s answer, as she points at the drenched handkerchief in Pushpa’s lap. When Pushpa doesn’t reply, Amma gives a
triumphant “Hmmph!”.

“How many more, Amma?” Leela asks, pointing at the pile of garlic.

“All of them of course, you know that.”

Leela sighs. She longs to roam around again, being romantically wronged and injured.

“So who is this boy Jodhi is liking?” Amma asks, in a guile-packed and deceptively conversational tone.

Leela bends her head and starts peeling garlic with extra attention. She has been evading this moment in her mind, the moment when she faces up to admitting she had invented the declaration; it
is a depressing prospect. She strips a clove of its veined white skin, already imagining Amma shouting at her, forcing her to apologize to Jodhi. Her lower lip starts to quiver. A wave of reality
washes over her, and she is just on the point of bursting into tears behind her sunglasses and confessing when Pushpa gets a dig in.