White Man Falling (29 page)

The ghastly apparition of Anand’s brother Mohan is ruining this happy gathering. Mohan exudes the
joie de vivre
quotient of a depressive who has been charged with escorting a
bleating kid through a compound of starving tigers, and the mild-mannered Mr P, whose bad tempers normally only get as far as exasperation before subsiding once more into affability, has had
enough.

“We must have a resolution!” he declares. “It is becoming an insult!” he more or less thunders.

Maybe it’s the authority vested in his uniform that is making him so vigorous at this moment, for he is testing out a new uniform, identical to his old one in all respects except that it
is slightly bigger. It is slightly bigger because he is slightly bigger. He has been getting slightly bigger all his adult life. Mrs P is looking forward to polishing the buttons on that jacket.
She likes her husband to have the second-shiniest buttons at Mullaipuram Station. She feels that only the Station Director should have shinier buttons.

“Look at the boy!” Mr P instructs everyone, pointing at his middle son. “He is complete nervous wreckage!”

Everyone’s gaze follows the jabbing prompt of Mr P’s dark hairy index finger, and fixes on the wreckage he is indicating. The cumulative weight of disbelieving pity in the gazes of
those five people – Mr P and Mrs P and Anand and Devan and Mrs Devan – would inspire most people to snap out of it, or to muster enough altruism to quietly end their lives. But Mohan,
his lower lip trembling above his unshaven chin, is unreachable in his misery. He is beyond doing anything so optimistic as killing himself. His shining eyes are haunted by the awful fear of losing
Jodhi, and the space just behind them is tormented beyond endurance by the hopeless hope that he might still get her. What a mess. He has stopped eating, stopped studying, stopped building
super-computers before breakfast. He has even stopped having difficulties below the belt. Nothing stirs down there any more, he is far too depressed for that.

“The mother is 100% certain that Jodhi wants to—”

“You women!” Mr P shouts at his wife. He doesn’t shout much, Mr P, and overall he’s not very good at it. “You women!” he tries again. He isn’t sure what
he wants to accuse women of – something to do with never making a decision about anything, or with making decisions too quickly – but he does want to accuse women of something or other,
if only in a general fashion. “You drive me mad!” he shouts.

“Depression,” Mrs Devan observes, indicating Mohan.

No one says anything for a while. They fume and chew their food and sip water and sigh.

“The mother says that Jodhi wants to do exactly what the guru decides,” Mrs P tries again; she hasn’t eaten anything in ten minutes, despite the array of edibles all around
– it’s an indication of how upset she is.

“If she’s liking another boy,” says Devan portentously, “then there is no point in this marriage, even if it’s agreed on all sides. Find another girl.” Devan
is the most sensible person here, because he was born without an imagination. It’s a rare gift, but one with which his wife is also blessed.

“Back-up plan,” she says.

“No!” Mohan breathes. The tormented space behind his eyes is throbbing with pain. “I’m wanting that girl, only that one – I am in love with that girl!” he
declares. “You know I want that girl! That is the girl I want! That girl!” He shakes his head in despair. “That,” he says. “Girl,” he adds.

Nobody responds to this. It is perturbing to hear Mohan say he is in love. The word should not be spoken like that, the idea should not be exposed in this raw and vulnerable way. Devan picks up
a
vadai
and starts chewing. He is an incredibly noisy eater, one of the noisiest in Mullaipuram, a town where many of the menfolk take a fierce local pride in the volume and speed at which
they can eat. He chews so noisily that everyone can hear him, even above the noise of buses roaring past outside.

“What if the father—” Anand says.

“The guru,” says Mrs P.

“Yes, the guru, what if he is saying no to this marriage?” There is a slightly hopeful air to his question.

“He walked with God yesterday morning,” Devan says matter-of-factly, through food-flecked teeth.

“How do you know he walked with God?” Anand asks his elder brother irritably.

“Because a roomful of people saw him do it!” Devan replies, rather more irritably, through his chews.

“What, they saw God walking with him? How did they see him walk with God if they did not see God walk with him? And if they did see God, then they are the gurus too!”

“Idiot,” Devan says. He has no time for people who question anything anyone says with the word “God” in it.

“Anand, please don’t talk in this way,” Mrs P says nervously. Her youngest son is always showing signs of not believing in God. He hangs back at religious ceremonies and
festivals, he smiles in kind and enigmatic ways when elderly relatives quote from the
Vedas
, and he reads improbable books about philosophy whose titles Mrs P doesn’t understand. It
makes her nervous just to think about all the things her youngest son might not believe. “The guru will not say no,” Mrs P insists, “his wife is 100% certain
that—”

“His wife is 100% full of the crazy nonsense-making!” Mr P points out.

“It doesn’t matter what you say, husband, I am the mother, I can feel the connection – I know the Guru Swamiji will say yes to my son.”

“Then he can say yes by tomorrow, because we are not waiting any longer than that!” Mr P says. “Guru or no guru, he has till tomorrow night to say this thing or that thing.
That is my final word on this matter!”

Mohan looks down at the table, a spasm of instant nausea and imminent diarrhoea clutching at him.

“Husband, not tomorrow night, that is too little time.”

“They’ve had months! In the mean time our boy is dying of a broken heart. And are we to endure this cretinous lover-boy for the rest of our lives? Better to find out by tomorrow
night. This is my final word.”

Mohan’s head slumps into his arms –
Oh God,
he implores,
let the guru say yes
. Anand plays with his chutneys in an abstracted fashion. Devan and his wife are
nodding implacably. And as for Mrs P, she is already scurrying out of the room to go and see Amma without delay, and impress upon her that her husband has been unfortunately manly in a very
deplorable way, and is imposing a final deadline on the pressing, complicated business of the marriage.

“Life,” says Mrs Devan, still nodding; this is the nearest she gets to philosophy.

“More,” says Devan, pointing at the snacks.

“Existence,” says his wife, as she serves him.

* * *

Ever since the guru came home to Mullaipuram, thousands of ordinary people have flocked to Mullaipuram Mansions to be near him. They wait outside the compound day and night,
neglecting their families, risking their jobs, getting ill, and engaging in many other strenuous proofs of their commitment to spiritual enlightenment. An encampment has established itself, and
hawkers have already set up stalls selling votive offerings. During the daytime the throng’s collective hum of excitement and frustration and living activity goes vibrating throughout the
mansion and its grounds. Those exalted individuals inside the building can never quite get away from it; it throbs in the air, it informs all frequencies that the guru belongs to the people, that
the people are angry with DDR, that they want their guru.

At first D.D. Rajendran had fought this alarming phenomenon, treating it as an unfortunate distraction from the main event, as an operational challenge requiring his powers of logic. Those
powers of logic brought him to the view that the most appropriate response was to arrange for the police to break up the crowd with tear gas. When that strategy proved to be of only temporary
success, he tried making all manner of threats to the common people hankering after their Swamiji; and when that didn’t work, he issued numerous lavish promises about the “dedicated
Guru Swamiji ashram of the future” that he is already planning, where tens of thousands of the guru’s devotees will be able to access their hero. But it’s no good – people
want to be near the guru now, not in a year’s time. They will tear down the compound wall brick by brick if Swami is withheld from them for much longer.

Today, that low throb of communal dissatisfaction is turning into something more threatening. A humming twang of mutiny is in the air. DDR is in despair as to how to solve this problem. Over the
past few days he has asked the guru about it several times, but the guru merely looked at him in a calming manner.

At this moment, a baying mob outside the gate is hurling stones and refuse at an abusive man addressing them from within the compound through a distorted megaphone; this man – who is
undoubtedly one of DDR’s least fortunate associates at this time – is cowering behind the rudimentary defensive emplacements that the bodies of two guards can afford. These two guards
are DDR’s most unfortunate employees in an absolute and objective sense.

It seems that all megaphones in India – whether manufactured at home or imported from abroad – take whatever sound is fed into them, distort it until it is incomprehensible, and then
amplify it to a volume at which it can distress mammals of all sizes. Nothing can be done about this. People are used to it, and they can’t understand a word unless the megaphone is seriously
defective. It is a kind of homage to how megaphones in India have always been.

“Mr Rajendran,” the man is bellowing into his hissing instrument, “Mr Rajendran is respectfully imploring you to go home, go home while the guru and he devise best possible
arrangements for fair and future visitings!”

“
Herrriiinnnjjeee ferrrriiinnnnjjjeee merrriiinnnjjjeee!
” shrieks the megaphone, in various permutations.

Everyone understands perfectly, and by way of reply to this abject failure to give them their guru and his spiritual peace and wisdom, they renew their pelting of the poor speaker with their
stones, and shout at him that he is a stupid bastard.

“
Kerrriiiinnnjjjeeee meliiiinnnjjjeeee baliiinnnjjjeee!
” the megaphone man shouts back, unwisely – it is an action that he is in no position to execute – so that
the missiles rain down twice as ferociously; the guards flinch and grunt as they take the impact, until one of them slumps to the ground with a moderate head wound.

It is into this unpromising scenario that Swami comes walking. Nobody notices him at first – hurling missiles at a man with a megaphone is an absorbing business, being both fun to
undertake and yet harbouring an underlying seriousness of intent. The missiles are still raining down as he walks calmly past the injured man, straight up to the gate.

“Swamijjjiii!”

“Guruji Swamijjiiii!”

“The guru has come!”

The gates open, Swami walks through them, and in a series of muscled pulsing ripples, the crowds prostrate themselves. Swami walks into the middle of the people, finds a five-foot-tall tatty
goat-gnawed bush, sits down next to it, and doesn’t speak. It is his very vulnerability that seems to keep him safe.

From now on Swami will come here every day, leaning on Kamala’s shoulder, sharing his serenity with the god-hungry desperados of far and near. The hour of silence has come to
Mullaipuram.

Swami is not very good at doing anything, or remembering anything, or deciding anything. In fact Swami is not very good at anything – that might be the best way of
putting it. He doesn’t mind this, or notice it – he’s not very good at minding things either, or noticing them. And anyway, although doing has its place, being is more important
– that’s a little something he somehow understands since coming back from the other side. And how could anyone expect a man like Swami to do anything much? He barely engages in ordinary
human consciousness for more than fifteen minutes in every hour, and those minutes are getting fewer every day; the rest of the time his mind is knocking about in accidental states of the most
profound banality, while everyone around him and beyond him interprets the vacuum. And yet there are two persistent problems from the outside world that press against his minutes so relentlessly
that they sometimes coincide with his more lucid human desires to do something about them… There is Jodhi’s marriage, of course – Amma’s obsessive interest in securing
Mohan for her eldest daughter is still dominating family life. And there is the problem of whether to tell the world that he might not be part of the godhead – though during any lucid moments
that he happens to stumble into he would be the first to admit that maybe he is not the best-qualified person to judge.

One day, after Swami has passed in and out of attentiveness during a morning session with VIP devotees who are fervently hoping that he’s going to promenade with a series of notable gods
before their admiring eyes, this pressure about whether he is a god or not becomes keener. He finds that he is looking at D.D. Rajendran, Murugesan and Apu. The three of them are cross-legged
before him, all wearing white clothes and expressions of sublime self-sacrifice. They have been waiting in front of him in silence for at least ten minutes, although Swami has only just noticed
them. Today is the day that they are choosing to reveal to the guru (“He is already knowing anyway,” Apu insists) that they understand the sacrifices he requires of them. Swami’s
comprehension of the details is pretty hazy, to be honest – he only catches a quarter of what is said, and only understands a quarter of what he catches – but even with just one
sixteenth of the dialogue to go on, he has an awareness that these men are deluded.

“Swamiji,” Murugesan is saying at one point, “some twenty-five years I have known Swami, but Swamiji I am not knowing at all, I did not even recognize Swamiji when Swamiji
arrived. Only with Swamiji’s incredible patience has everything become plain to me.”

“Swamiji,” Apu is saying at another point, weeping in soft ecstasy, “I know you know what I did! You have not told anyone! You have taught me what I must do! Let the Destroyer
with the third eye in his forehead come, but I will do it! Thank you Swamiji!”