White Man Falling (20 page)

“She is a naughty dirty fat liar, Amma!”

“No I am not!” Leela is yelping halfway through this stream of unflattering adjectives, “you just shut up, you stupid!” She pulls the sheet off her head and delivers four
explosive panic-induced sneezes, thinking
now what?
on each miserable atch-ooo.

“Pushpa,” Amma scolds, “don’t be saying these bad words to your little sister.”

Leela fumbles her way back under the sheet, and glances fearfully at Amma and Pushpa.

“It doesn’t matter, Leela, if you got a little bit carried away in that Himalaya of a hotel,” Amma continues winningly, “no one is going to blame you or punish you,
Leela, I am just wanting to know why you said it. After all, it didn’t just come from nowhere – did it?”

Amma shreds the skin from the garlic cloves methodically, eyes on the job in hand, waiting for an answer. Now Leela longs for Pushpa to interrupt – even some more “naughty”s
and “dirty”s would buy a bit more time, even a “fat” wouldn’t go amiss – but Pushpa remains unhelpfully silent.

“Or did it?” Amma murmurs, into the silence.

It is make-or-break time for Leela. She stands at a fork in the path of this matter, and contemplates which direction to take: the
Yes Amma
of disgrace, repentance, suffering and
ultimate redemption; or the
No Amma
of short-term relief and further disgrace. She is ashamed of herself, but she also feels offended that Pushpa and Amma doubt her story – what
gives them the right to think I’m lying, she asks herself furiously, even though she is.

“No Amma.”

“Well then,” Amma says, her voice trembling a little; it is costing her dearly to maintain this careful illusion of self-control, she is more comfortable blurting out whatever comes
into her head. “Well then, tell your Amma why you said – what you said – about Jodhi…”

The small, hot, sweaty germ-infested makeshift shelter seems as cavernous as the thousand-pillared hall of the Meenakshi Temple at Madurai as Amma and Pushpa wait for Leela to speak. Even Leela
is waiting for Leela to speak; she knows she is going to say
something
, but what on earth will it be? Whatever it is, it will need to be good, it will need to yoke together two
incompatibles and exhibit slippy semantic qualities: it must make clear that Jodhi is not liking another boy, while at the same time indicating that Leela is not a naughty dirty fat liar.

“Amma,” Leela whispers, conspiratorially, “Amma, you see Amma, this is what I am knowing, the thing is…”

Amma hunches down lower as she waits for the revelation, stripping the garlic cloves at top speed; if there were a world championship in garlic-peeling, Amma would win it hands down with this
kind of performance, the stripped cloves are dropping into the plastic bowl at three-second intervals; Pushpa, on the other hand, has stopped working altogether. She concentrates on looking at the
drenched handkerchief in her lap, wondering not so much what Leela is going to say, but whether on earth it will be true or not.

“Amma, somebody told me that somebody saw Jodhi wearing a pair of jeans.”

Jeans!
Amma thinks.

Jeans?
Pushpa puzzles.

Jeans?!
Leela asks herself desperately; where did
that
come from? But although the revelation has been dredged from a very small and obscure cranny of her back-to-the-wall
imagination, it is by no means a bad effort. Hardly anyone wears jeans in Mullaipuram, maybe a few people who frequent Hotel Sangam and Friends, and some of the students at the Madurai
University-affiliated college in Mullaipuram, young rich people who have been abroad.

Amma struggles to comprehend what a pair of jeans cladding the slender hips of her eldest daughter might signify.

“Must be at college she is wearing these jeans?” she says.

“At college,” Leela confirms solemnly.

“Just one time she was seen or more than once?”

“Just one time Amma.”

“Hmmph…”

Leela and Pushpa anxiously wait for her considered reaction. She is deep in thought and peeling cloves of garlic ever more effectively, her fingers a whirl of activity, her jaw working overtime
as she ponders that small and enigmatic word,
jeans
,
jeans
,
jeans
, while the cloves of garlic drop, drop, drop into the bowl… No, she is not happy about these
jeans; jeans represent a world she knows nothing about, jeans might be suspicious, jeans could mean anything from nothing to everything and all the terrible things that come in between – all
the things that are much worse than nothing, and almost as bad as everything. These jeans could mean that Jodhi is blameless, but these jeans could mean that she is drenched in the all-out western
decadence and moral degeneracy of – and Amma’s eyes clench shut momentarily at the worst-case Chennai-bar-girl scenario – drinking and smoking and secret unsuitable
boyfriends…

“And this you are knowing for sure, Leela?” she asks, thin-lipped.

“No Amma – I am just telling you what I am hearing, you can imagine what it made me think – but I’m not knowing if it is true or not.”

“Leela, you are a very foolish girl! Very bad girl! Why did you imagine what you imagined in front of the boy’s family like that?”

“Yes Amma. Sorry, Amma.”

“Don’t imagine things out loud any more!”

“Yes Amma.”

“Do it in your imagination, that is the place for it!”

“Sorry, Amma. Yes Amma.”

Clever Leela – she breathes more easily, knowing she has got herself off the hook as lightly as she could have hoped for.

“Don’t be doing anything like this again!”

“No Amma. Sorry, Amma.”

“Hmmph.” Amma’s scolding is automatic, she is barely attending to it, her overactive thoughts are racing around the situation of her eldest daughter. Is the girl wearing jeans
or not, and if so, what is the purpose behind such disturbing and exotic behaviour? She turns it all over in her head, and misses Pushpa scowling at Leela, Leela sticking her tongue out childishly
at Pushpa. What is to be done? How to get to the bottom of this business? How to do the best thing for Jodhi and land her that handsome boy-wonder for a lifetime of marital security and wifely
status and unfettered shopping?

“Yes, just you keep out of it from now on, you naughty child.”

“Yes Amma.”

“You naughty…”

“Sorry, Amma.”

“You listen to me,” Amma says conspiratorially, leaning towards Leela and Pushpa, at last granting temporary respite to the remaining unpeeled cloves of garlic, “you just keep
your eyes open for any more of this fishy jeans business, go with her when you can, be following her to college sometimes, be meeting her unexpectedly, be finding out what she is doing and who she
is doing it with. Understand? If Jodhi is really wearing jeans, I want to know about it, I want to know when and where and who with!”

“Yes Amma.”

“Yes Amma.”

It will take more than a pair of jeans to prevent Amma from marrying Jodhi to the computer genius… She shifts from squatting to cross-legged, and gets started on the garlic cloves
again.

“You girls, you listen,” she abruptly chastises them, “not a word about these jeans to anyone, understand?”

“Yes Amma.”

“Yes Amma, of course Amma.”

“Not – to –
anyone
!”

The scandalous insertion of Jodhi’s dainty legs into blue denim is an image that resides in these three heads and in no others – after all, it was only a few minutes ago that Leela
made this nonsense up. And if, tomorrow, you interrogate any one of these three heads, all three heads will swear blind to sporting sealed lips, zipped lips, lips welded together with titanium
rivets. What an incredible mystery, then, that within twenty-four hours the matter of Jodhi’s deplorable jean-wearing activities is an open secret throughout Mullaipuram.

* * *

The P family home is a superior dwelling to Swami’s dilapidated IPS-owned, British-built soldier’s bungalow. After thirty-one years’ employment with the Indian
Railways, starting as a refrigeration mechanic and rising to the level of Assistant Station Supervisor, Mr P earns a salary double that of anything achieved by Swami. And notwithstanding Mrs
P’s pitiless efficiency in converting his hard-won cash into edible matter, he has been a careful steward of his earnings, putting aside at least twenty per cent a month since he was nineteen
years old. These savings, and the sale of a small plot of land in his ancestral village following the death of his father, have recently allowed Mr and Mrs P to achieve a long-cherished ambition:
they have moved into a brand-new apartment in Thenpalani’s third most respectable area; it is a spacious four-roomer on the second floor of a gleaming-white concrete low-rise, just by a Tata
Agricultural Peripherals Ltd regional office, with a balcony overlooking the Bharat Petroleum garage.

It is two days since the sweat-drenched and flesh-shudderingly awful catastrophe of Mohan and Jodhi’s date. Mr P and his youngest son Anand are in the shiny new living room of their shiny
new home, slouched on the considerably less shiny and far from new plastic chairs of their old home, watching a test match on TV. The windows are open, and a single battered rotating fan stands on
a table in front of them. They share its faint breeze, moving their faces in slow sweeps, left to right, right to left, to maximize its meagre respite from the stultifying heat.

India and England are battling through the third day of the test in Nagpur. England’s strong position has not been worrying them unduly, but now Sachin Tendulkar has been clean-bowled for
three in his second over, and the father and son are awash with the disappointment of seeing their god unmasked as a man.

“See that big, hulking, clumsy bowler there, what is his name again?”

“Hoggard.”

“Yes him – what is he doing, bowling out Sachin? Doesn’t he realize Sachin is our best player?”

“Appa, England are trying to win.”

“That is the problem with these foreigners coming to India. Wherever they are going in India they are abusing our hospitality. This Hog fellow, now he is ruining my day completely! As if
we don’t have enough to put up with, with that weeping lover-boy in there, mental-break-downing all over the place!”

“Yes Appa,” Anand says wearily. As it happens, he’s not feeling too good himself, he rather feels like doing what Mohan is doing.

Mohan is much too busy to watch the cricket. He is engaged in the laborious and time-consuming activity of lying face-down on his bed for sixteen hours. He has risen only twice during that time
– once to urinate, and once to hurl
How to Attract Women
out of the window and onto the large flat roof of the Bharat Petroleum garage, where it will lie – bleached and baked
by the sun – for many months, until the next wet sweeps it away and turns it into pulp.

“Come on, my very own Rajah, my King,” Mrs P is murmuring at his bedside, stroking his hair, caressing the back of his neck, “don’t be sad, everything will turn out all
right, don’t upset your Amma like this, Mohan.” In some despair she looks at her middle son’s prone body; he is flat out, head turned away from her, face buried in his arms,
beyond her reach. She has appropriated two of the household’s three fans and trained them on his unmoving form, so that in his desolation he doesn’t overheat. His shirt collar flaps in
the breeze.

“Mohan, Mohana, Mohan
kannu
… See, my pet, what very best snacks I have for you! How hungry you must be, my life…”

Mohan is refusing to eat, even though his mother has assembled an ever more tantalizing and comprehensive array of titbits to tempt the lovelorn loser out of his sullen self-pity.

“See, look at what I’ve got for you—” and she dangles some home-made halva over his head, saying “Mmmmmm” and – who can blame her, it would be a shame
to waste it – she pops it into her mouth. “Delicious, baby, don’t let Amma eat it all! Amma will get fat,” she suggests, thirty years too late.

Can nothing ease Mohan out of his face-down hunger strike? Not even the most lip-wetting sweetest luxury nibbles? Not even the sound of Mrs P ripping into them like a combine harvester going
through a ripened crop?

“Mohan
chellam
, you cannot be lying down here like this for the rest of your life.”

From the living room comes a commentator’s glum pronouncement – “He’s out, he’s out, another wicket tumbling!” – and groans of dismay from Anand and Mr
P, and then a frustrated “Wife, leave that stupid lover-boy in there alone!” from Mr P. “Stop humouring him, wife! He’ll get up when he’s hungry!”

Poor Mohan; his passion for Jodhi is of boundless extent, but he knows that when it comes to her passion for him, boundless is not the first word that trips off the tongue. Is it any wonder that
he just wants to lie face-down and die? His every hope with her keeps getting dashed, and all because of her father receiving a white man on his head, being abducted, dying and living again and
becoming God – how can a young girl concentrate on falling in love, even with the holder of the
Sri Aandiappan Swamigal Tamil Nadu Information Superhighway Endowment Scholarship
,
when the father is pulling off amazing stunts like that? Mohan groans aloud just thinking about it all. It’s been downhill ever since he ecstatically walked Jodhi to the Tamil Nadu Milk Board
outlet during their first pre-engagement meeting, and pointed out that a goat was a goat. The romance and sweet intimacy of that brief walk is something he still cherishes every sleepless night of
his life – and in the traditional manner – as he lies awake in bed thinking of his true love. Since then, Jodhi is evading meetings; Jodhi is complicating negotiations between the
parents; Jodhi isn’t answering most of his long and passionate emails, and is replying with brusque two-liners to the rest…

“Come now, my brave King, my eyes, help your mummy-amma help you, talk to amma-mummy.”

“Amma, she’s not going to marry me,” he says into his pillow.

“What? What’s that?” Sixteen hours of silence and now she misses it, she couldn’t catch a word, she leans down close and strains to hear.