White Man Falling (25 page)

“Appa, maybe we can sit somewhere private, this crowd is definitely in strange mood…”

Swami doesn’t reply. He intends to sit here while the bus is not here, and get on the bus when the bus is here. What could be simpler than that? But it’s true that something strange
is in the air. The crowd would like to sit at Swami’s feet and have the freedom to wallow in his proximity, but there is no room or opportunity to settle anywhere for long, buses would mow
them down, and the early morning’s regular travellers are milling around everywhere. So an unseemly pulsing throng is pushing here and there according to the arrival and departure of the
buses, and with increasing frequency people are yelling warnings: “Give the guru room,” and “Sisters, Brothers, don’t crowd Guru Swamiji!”

Oh dear, this throng is not happy with the guru’s undignified predicament. There are dark mutterings about D.D. Rajendran; everyone knows by now that he is the guru’s fixer, surely
he should have taken this matter in hand and ensured that the guru’s dignity is not abused in this way? But they are wrong to hold DDR at fault. DDR fully intended to arrive at Highlands on
the appropriate day with three silver Mercedes, a Toyota Land Cruiser and a battered van of heavies, each vehicle bearing resplendent flags and very loud horns and supremely arrogant drivers. He
had hoped to escort the guru back to Mullaipuram in a triumphant high-speed convoy – up to forty miles an hour at times – of non-stop tooting, parping triumphalism. It is Swami who has
jumped the gun, travelling home of his own volition several days before he had intimated, thereby cheating DDR and Mullaipuram and the world of the splendour they require.

Or has he? You see, it starts when the bus arrives. Once the driver and the conductor have overcome their amazement at seeing the new Guru Swamiji hobbling towards their battered old vehicle
– he is orbited by a semi-hysterical retinue of devotees, who squabble over the two suitcases that are being passed overhead – they help Kamala to manhandle the great man up the three
steep steps and inside. Swami sits down with his daughter on a seat two-thirds of the way down the bus. Then the driver gets back into his seat, a little discomfited, and confers with the conductor
who is standing in the open doorway, also a little confused. For there are no other passengers climbing into the bus.

“Mullaipuram!” shouts the conductor. “Mullaipuram Mullaipuram Mullaipuram Mullaipurammmmmm!”

He has wads of differently coloured tickets wedged between the fingers of his left hand, and a leather bag at his waist full of coins, and pockets stuffed with low-denomination notes; he has
seventeen years of experience, he can conduct a bus like a maestro can conduct an orchestra, he can thread through a swaying jam-packed bus from one end to the other and sell the correct ticket to
every passenger without missing anyone or forgetting who is owed some change and who is in debt. He is a supremely accomplished bus conductor, and furthermore, this bus goes via the rail link at
Kodai Road, and so is the means by which people can travel on to the large cities of Madurai, Chennai, Coimbatore. Finally, there are at least one hundred people in and around Thendraloor who got
up very early this morning with the intention of barging and fighting and abusing their way onto this bus, taking with them their baggage and their sacks of grain and their chickens and, in one
case, a goat with three legs.

Despite all these important details and pressing contingencies, no one is getting on the bus.

“Mullaipurammmmmm!” shouts the conductor, desperately, scanning the crowd that is gathered by the bus. If one person clambered in, surely the rest would follow? But it’s no
good – no one wishes to be the first to put themselves on an equal footing with the guru.

“Give us another bus!” shouts a young man with a pencil-thin moustache.

“This is the Mullaipuram bus!” shouts the conductor, exasperated, “if you people want to go to Mullaipuram, get on the bus, and if you don’t, then go to hell!
Mullaipurammmmmmm!”

Meanwhile the driver has walked down the bus to speak to Swami.

“Guruji saar, they are not getting on the bus because of very greatest respect for you, what shall I do saar guruji?”

Swami looks at Kamala, exasperated, then looks out of the window and down at a knot of people who are standing in solemn reverence below his window.

“Appa is definitely wanting everyone to get on the bus,” Kamala tells the driver, and Swami nods his approval.

“Yes guruji.”

The driver tramps up to the front of the bus, and interrupts the conductor, who is still cursing people willy-nilly – “How can you have another bus, you monkeys?” the conductor
is exclaiming, “there isn’t another bus, can I just summon up another bus because you monkeys are wishing it?! This is the bus!” The conductor cocks his head to listen to the
driver’s urgent advice, then turns back to the crowd. “Mullaipuram! Guru Swamiji says it is your duty to get on this bus, this is the guru’s official position, he is not wanting
you to stand there refusing to get on the bus! Mullaipuram Mullaipuram Mullaipurammmmmm!”

It’s no good. No one will get on that bus – not when an aspect of the living godhead appears to be sitting in it, as plain as a spot on the end of your nose; not even when the
station supervisor comes bustling over, and gets mobbed with voluble complaints. He waves his clipboard around as though that might help – perhaps it does, in some situations – and mops
his brow with a big handkerchief, and is helpless in the face of these demands to conjure up a second bus that will tail the first bus respectfully all the way to Mullaipuram.

“What am I?” he is shouting rhetorically, “what am I? Am I instant-bus manufacturer? Am I Managing Director of Tata Buses Supernatural Inc., Instant Bus Department? What am
I?!”

“You are lazy stupid son of a prostitute!” someone shouts – he is furious that the bus company has not thought to lay on a second bus, given that it is only fair and proper
that the guru should take the first. A scuffle breaks out.

The driver of the bus has seen enough. He revs up the roaring belching beast under his command, and with the conductor still shouting “Mullaipuram, Mullaipurammmmm!” the bus sets
off.

“Swamijiiiii!”

“Gurujiiiiii!”

“Guru Swamijiiiiii!”

Devotees are running along with the bus, beating on the side panels as they say goodbye. The bus turns out of the station calamitously, pursued by loping supplicants. A lazing stray dog
doesn’t get out of the way quickly enough – it yelps as the vehicle runs over its tail, and bolts away shakily. The bus picks up speed. Swami and Kamala are watching out of the window,
Swami with his now trademark one-handed
namaskaram
. Then he turns to face forwards, a glum look on his face.

What to do? If people would just leave him alone, perhaps he would live in the present tense more often than not, without a thought in his head, without a care in the world… If people
would just leave him alone, perhaps he could perceive his moment-by-moment experience with full force, never identifying anything with a limiting name or cataloguing its components or comparing it
to other experiences… Something has happened to Swami that makes him receptive at times to a wisdom, the kind that the religions usually ignore, the kind that is known as it happens and then
let go, rather than the kind with objectives to be analysed and clawed for. It longs to exist in a vacuum, which is why its purchase is so tenuous.

But Swami can’t think anything for long. Thinking bores him intensely. Coming back from death seems to have altered his hard-wiring so that he naturally avoids thought where possible.
Important strategic decisions are facing him – how to deal with Jodhi’s marriage, how to live with his family in his new guise as guru, and how to deal with responsibilities and
structures that are assembling around him without his input or interest or comprehension – but his default condition is acceptance. He clutches Kamala’s hand. They watch the passing
scenes as the Mullaipuram bus negotiates the messy outskirts of Thendraloor, admiring a grassed area adorned by sheets that have been washed in the river by
Vannaan
folk and are now drying
in the sun. Soon he isn’t looking at anything much. He is like a sleeping, helpless baby in a cot, whose overpowering appeal feeds every action and anxiety of those orbiting that small life,
who can’t help loving it, though it is selfish and unaware.

The vehicle roars down the roads, through the jungle of the Western Ghats, round the crumbling hairpins that the British supervised, bearing, for the first time in the history of the 6.30 a.m.
Thendraloor-Mullaipuram bus – it is a very small and distinct part of history, that no historian has yet covered – only two passengers. The driver sits straight-backed and portentous as
he contemplates his good fortune in being a chariot-driver to the gods; this is a story that he will relate for the rest of his life. He is intent on the perfect bus drive. If he can help it, this
will be a bus drive to surpass all others – he has never accelerated and decelerated so smoothly, nor taken corners with such remarkable efficiency and finesse. Admittedly he ran over a dog,
but that was at the beginning, and since then he’s been superb. Sometimes he finds himself imagining he is in a film, undertaking an important mission on behalf of the great will of the
universe that is Brahma, and at those times he unconsciously looks out of narrowed eyes with a certain swaggering arrogance. But as for the conductor, alas, he does not derive such satisfaction.
For a whole hour he is lost in an agony of indecision: should he ask the guru to buy a ticket, because the guru would prefer to be treated as everyone else is treated? Or should he not ask the guru
to buy a ticket – because, after all, gurus shouldn’t need tickets, should they?

In one way or another, it is said by many people of most faiths that God moves in mysterious ways. This is a truism that D.D. Rajendran has encountered several times as his
involvement with the phenomenon that is the Guru Swamiji has grown. This morning, too, he finds that God has moved mysteriously. For while DDR and Bobby are enjoying their morning massage side by
side, a flunkey apologetically interrupts them with the news that Swami has set off from Thendraloor, early, and in a bus…

“Oh, no, oh no—” DDR moans, springing up and pushing his masseuse away. “A bus! What is the guru playing at, Bobby? What will the people think of him if he sits on a
clanking bus next to a farmer whose behind is pressed up against a sack of millet?!”

Bobby doesn’t seem to know.

DDR leaps into damage-limitation mode, getting his fleet of magnificent vehicles on the road within half an hour, with him in the lead car in a foul temper. The impressive convoy sets out to
meet the bus on the road, honking splenetically and almost without cease for the entire journey as though to express DDR’s feelings. He intends to transfer Swami into a Mercedes as soon as is
humanly possible, for it is surely unthinkable that Swami should arrive in Mullaipuram in a bus.

The convoy intercepts the bus just outside a village about three hours from Mullaipuram. It is then, greeting Swami respectfully, that DDR comprehends the godsend that he has been
granted… The guru and the guru’s daughter are
alone
in the bus! He travels in the vehicle of the common people, and yet he is apart from them! He is both humble and
magnificent… What a guru this guru is, DDR rejoices, nobody could come up with a better guru than this one, everything this guru does is gold dust!

He soon has things organized. Swami and Kamala remain in the bus, the driver and the conductor have a substantial amount of money pressed into their palms – it is their proximity to the
guru which explains this good fortune, they agree later – and the bus starts on the next leg of its soon-to-be-fabled journey, only now it follows an escort of three Mercedes-Benz and a
Toyota Land Cruiser and a lurching van packed with sundry flunkeys and bodyguards. Has there ever been a public bus journey like this one throughout the whole of India, even in North India, where
all kinds of peculiar things are reputed to occur? What a bus ride – and Swami and Kamala haven’t even bought a ticket.

* * *

“Oh,” Swami says, as they approach the bus station in Mullaipuram.

This is the first word he has spoken in days. It is the last word he says for a week or more. It is emitted somewhere in the middle of a groaning sigh. So it is not true that the guru never
speaks, as some like to claim, but it’s certainly true that he doesn’t speak much; only the extent of the anarchy going on at Mullaipuram Bus Station can explain his garrulous
moment.

Who knows, perhaps people will denounce him as a fraud in a week or a year, but today half the town is here, ready to greet their illustrious son. They all agree that he who was once their
highly regarded and overwhelmingly beloved and super-intensely cherished Sub-Inspector (retired) R.M. Swaminathan is now their much simpler, their far greater, their very own Swamiji… The
convoy and the bus are barely crawling, the police can hardly maintain a clear path for them, and the people are in a state of wild excitement.

“Swamijiiiiii! Swamijiiiii!”

He makes his one-handed
namaskaram
to all and sundry in a respectful but weary manner, as the crowds beat on the panels of the bus and hurl blossom and sweets through the bars of the
open windows.

“Appa!” Kamala cries – she had no idea it would be like this.

It is fully five minutes before the driver succeeds in parking his bus in the allotted bay without running anyone over, and the police have to beat some people almost senseless to clear a path
so that DDR is able to board the bus and escort Swami and Kamala outside and to the waiting Mercedes; on that short walk, Swami is garlanded more times than is physically supportable by a host of
local worthies whom he hardly registers, from politicians and priests to businessmen and a film boss. Two of DDR’s men have to carry the offerings for him.

Swami and Kamala and DDR sit in the back of the most accessorized Mercedes, DDR beaming.
Ayyo-yo-yo!
Kamala is marvelling; she has rarely been in an Ambassador taxi before, never mind a
Mercedes. She is in a state of shock at all these people, and at all this adoration and anarchy for her father. Her hands go gliding over the luxurious fixtures of the car.