by Mike Stocks
He remembers how much his body had shaken with terror and desire on his own wedding night. His wife had been so very beautiful. “Film star matrimonials” – some wit had come up with the phrase early on, during the morning of the ceremony; a perfect description for such a handsome couple, it was still doing the rounds eighteen hours later on platform five of Mullaipuram station, when a vast wedding party had waved them off on their three-day honeymoon. Later, his heartbeat drumming against hers, the train moaning past dark-drenched villages, he had entered her and had known she would conceive immediately. That was the beginning of Jodhi, right then at the beginning of the marriage.
Inside the bungalow, Amma is reaching for a large volume called the Tirukkural that is face up on a shelf, so that, some twenty-two years after creating her, she can chastise her eldest daughter.
“What is the number Appa is shouting at you?” she scolds.
“Four Hundred, Amma.”
“Why are you so naughty, provoking him all the time?” she asks, pursing her lips as she searches the pages.
“But Amma, I don’t know anything about all this Classical Tamil that Appa reads.” Jodhi prefers Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh and E.M. Forster. Her dissertation is on English novelists of the 1930s.
The “Four Hundred” with which Swami had rebuked Jodhi refers to a couplet from the Tirukkural, otherwise known as The Sacred Couplets, by the ancient poet Tiruvalluvar. There are 1,330 sacred couplets in The Sacred Couplets. And although no one has fully comprehended the scale of Swami’s achievement, nor its connotations, since losing his employment he has memorized all of them by heart, like some kind of divinely blessed holy man.
Jodhi, Kamala, Pushpa and Leela wait for Amma to find sacred couplet Four Hundred, suspended as always between sincere filial respect and dread hilarity. Amma mouths the page numbers with exaggerated respect – she can read, but she hasn’t made a habit of it.
“Sacred couplet Four Hundred is in section forty of Part One of The Sacred Couplets,” she begins. She always begins like that. And she always pauses before reciting the words of wisdom:
“The learning that you achieve in this birth
Will benefit you in all seven births.”
Silence from the girls.
“Let us reflect on this thought-provoking nugget of wisdom,” she ventures, gamely.
The girls try very hard not to giggle or to catch one another’s eye. Quite recently Leela, forgetting the number with which Appa had chastised her, had generated an entirely random Nine Hundred and Thirteen to Amma.
“Sacred couplet Nine Hundred and Thirteen is in section ninety-two of Part Three of The Sacred Couplets,” Amma had said:
“The false embrace of loose women is like
That of a cursed corpse in the dark.”
Her face! They had all collapsed with laughter. Pushpa and Leela had slumped to the ground helplessly and cried in pain from the general hysteria. Even Amma had joined in. It was the tension, which had to find release somewhere in that unhappy bungalow. But Appa had reacted very badly, and in the evening he had tried to drown himself in a bucket of water.
2
Mullaipuram is situated on the hot, flat plains of Tamil Nadu. An isolated goitre of rock protrudes from the face of the settlement. The rock is only seventy metres high, but it is visible for many miles. Rival South Indian dynasties – the Cholas, the Pandyas and the Pallavas – fought for control of it for centuries. Then Tipu Sultan, the British and the French fought over it for a further two hundred years, bequeathing ungraceful additions to the ancient and ruined fortifications. No one fights over it now. An employee of the Tamil Nadu Board of Tourism climbs up it every day and sits in the cool of a dungeon to wait for tourists who do not come, tourists who will never come, tourists who will go to Madurai and Chennai and Pondicherry but who will never come to Mullaipuram, not even with a pistol at their temple. This fellow has a pee, eats his tiffin, takes a nap, then climbs down some four hours early and goes back home to his wife.
The rock carries on regardless, like they do.
Swami often goes on small trips into town. For short distances he limps, although a round trip to the nearest shop might take him twenty minutes. For longer trips he uses an antiquated three-wheeled wheelchair purloined from an amputee beggar by police colleagues. Usually one of his daughters pushes him, but when none of the girls is available he employs a thirteen-year-old Christian boy called Alexander – the son of a poor widowed flower-seller who lives in a shack built against the crumbling compound wall of the Indian Police Service bungalows. For five rupees an hour the boy bounces him across the potholed streets. “What are you doing, squandering our daughters’ dowries on that stupid beggar boy?” Amma is always complaining. She has a soft spot for that boy. She sneaks him snacks like vadai whenever Swami isn’t looking.
Alexander earns ten rupees today, because none of the girls is available to push Swami into town. They are too busy being harangued, beautified and instructed by Amma, for this is a very important day. In only one hour, that mighty young god of the Information Technology Era, Mohan P, B.Sc. – holder of this year’s illustrious Sri Aandiappan Swamigal Tamil Nadu Information Superhighway Endowment Scholarship – is due to descend on Swami’s family with his direct relations and indirect relations and maternal confidantes and household neighbours and every Raman and Krishnan from Thenpalani who has a nosy nature and an hour to spare.
Swami has promised Amma that he will be back in plenty of time to wash his face, comb his hair, change his shirt and look distinguished. Alexander is pushing him down Station Street, in the shadow of the rock. Swami is thinking about the shocking age of that great outcrop, which mocks the living matter swarming around it. And that, you know, is a consolation. They are returning from the police station, which Swami likes to visit once a week or so to listen to the latest goings-on. There is a long-running case gripping Mullaipuram. The dissolute son of a state politician long known for his extreme Eve-teasing and sexual harassment of young women has been charged with rape, and although the best and brightest brains of the Indian Police Service have been assigned to the case, it looks as though the accused might not get off scot-free.
“Shaani,” Swami warns periodically, as the cow pats loom up; Alexander, absorbed in the hostile press of the crowded street and the sheer effort of wheeling a grown man down the rubbish-strewn road in the high heat of the day, has a habit of stepping into them in his bare feet.
Swami looks at his watch. “Hurry up,” he grunts.
* * *
Amma, Jodhi, Kamala, Pushpa, Leela, Granddaddy, Auntie and Uncle on Appa’s side, Auntie and Uncle and Auntie and Uncle and Auntie and Auntie and Auntie on Amma’s side, two of Amma’s close cousins (fellow gurus in the mysterious arts of matchmaking), and an unmanageable number of random well-wishers and gossip-ravenous neighbours are all crowding the little bungalow of Number 14/B. Jodhi has barely said a word from the moment she woke up this morning until now, patiently submitting to whatever Amma tells her to do, even when what Amma is telling her to do is incompatible with everything else that Amma is telling her to do. Granddaddy too does not speak. Ever since his wife, Amma’s own mother, died ten years ago, he has preferred music to people, obsessively playing his flute all day long. It is a special flute, fashioned by his own hand from a storm-damaged sacred peepul tree in his ancestral village; it is a flute which he regards as god – god whom he can carry tenderly in his hands, god whom he can render his very breath to and worship with music; it is a flute that he resents being parted from for any longer than it takes to swallow the meagre amount of rice and pepper water that his family can persuade him to eat for the sustenance of his scrawny frame, because who in his right mind would voluntarily divide from god, even for a minute? As he plays, everyone else except Jodhi is talking non-stop. None of them can imagine the chaos that is shortly going to be unleashed.
“Why did you wear this when I told you to wear that?”
“What tim
e will they come?”
“Give it to me Auntie, I’ll do it.”
“Where’s Appa?”
“Respected Granddaddy, please stop playing your flute, my head is hurting.”
“Father, now remember what I said, as soon as they arrive I’m taking the flute, just this once – the boy’s family don’t want to listen to you and your flute.”
“Sister, what will you do if this boy is the ugliest boy in Tamil Nadu?”
“Leela! Don’t bother your sister, you’ve seen his photo, you know he’s a nice-looking boy.”
“Truly truly ugly, so ugly that we all scream and run away?”
“Leela, enough! Leave your sister alone!”
“Yes Amma – but what if we all faint from an inability to withstand his skin-puckering ugliness?”
“LEELA!”
“Where’s Appa?”
“Shall I eat this?”
“What time is it?”
And then the panic, because “Amma, Amma, Amma they’re here!”
“What? Don’t be silly, don’t, you, I… Oh my God they’re here, they’re so early, where’s Appa?! Jodhi go and sit, Sisters, Brother come with me, Kamala take Granddaddy’s flute away – oh my God, why are they so early?! Oh my God – where’s Appa?!”
While Amma and Pushpa and a dense crowd of uncles and aunties and a surge of minor hangers-on go out onto the verandah as an advance welcome party, and while Kamala wrestles decorously with Granddaddy over possession of the flute, and while other aunties and uncles and sisters arrange Jodhi in the designated chair, Leela and Pushpa rush to the window and ogle in high excitement at what is taking place outside. A small burgundy Maruti van is disgorging a village onto the roadside – boys, girls, women, men, middle-aged relatives, antique patriarchs, shifty ne’er-do-wells, chortling householders, bespectacled intimates, incapacitated crones, complaining extras and a range of hungry freeloaders.
“Ayyo-yo-yo it’s an army!”
“I never saw so many people in one Maruti van.”
“Which one is the hero?”
“Where is he?”
“Ayyo-yo-yo look at that fat lady! Who is that fat lady?”
“Oh that is so fat!”
“That is very fat!”
“Did you ever see a lady so fat as that? Is that the Mummy?”
“A lady as fat as that must sit in the middle of the van, or it will fall over, isn’t it?”
“There he is – here is our Mohan! Here is our Sita’s Rama! He is coming!”
“Don’t be so stupid.”
“Jodhi, I think your boy is the very tallest person there! He is very handsome!”
“But goodness what a very fat lady!” Leela repeats. “I can’t stop looking at her!”
“Good afternoon,” says a deep and unfamiliar voice.
Leela turns round to find that half her extended family, and a fair portion of the immediate neighbourhood, is staring at her, limp with dismay, while Mr P – a large, dark, hairy and not entirely un-fat personage himself, who has slipped away from the throng outside and has just this moment entered the bungalow – is framed in the doorway of the room. He conducts a slow sweep of all the mortified faces looking up at him, and settles his gaze on Leela. She screams.
“Somebody give me my flute,” says Granddaddy, into the void.
* * *
Swami is looking at his watch every few seconds by the time Alexander gets him to within half a mile of home. “Push!” and “Faster!” he is saying to poor little Alexander, who is doing his best, but whose skinny undernourished thirteen-year-old body is not best-suited to a task like this. Straining and sweating to keep a good pace going, Alexander gives a high-pitched grunt as he forces Swami’s wheelchair over a hump of fetid rags. Swami lurches in his seat. “Watch it,” a woman in front of them says angrily, feeling the chair’s footrest bang into her Achilles tendon.
When it happens, it happens as these things ought to happen, in a manner appropriate to the clichés that witnesses will later attach to it – “suddenly”, “in a flash”, “out of nowhere”.
Suddenly, in a flash, out of nowhere, a white man falls out of the sky. He bounces on the hard dirt road, directly in front of Swami – somehow he lands in a gap between the swarming pedestrians, although not without knocking a small boy off balance. The screams seem to begin instantly and from everywhere. Swami gazes down at his feet to where the man is lying in the kind of mangled position one would expect. He is looking at an ageing hippy with dirty blond-grey locks and a creased face almost orange from years of exposure to the sun. Their gazes lock together, and Swami knows that the white man is moments from death. The expression on the man’s face is turning from confusion and pain towards a strange new place, somewhere between peace and vacancy.
A riot is developing around the dying man and Swami, surrounded as they are by angry onlookers, but neither of them is aware of this. I’m here, Swami finds himself communicating to this man, I’m here – it is an instinctive offering, though what is being offered is unclear. And when he does this, he hears in his mind the I’m going of the white man’s dying consciousness – he sees it, and feels it, and knows it; it is as clear and powerful as a panoramic view from a high peak on a cloudless day. The white man is already leaving this world.
“I didn’t know…” the white man sighs. Who knows what he didn’t know, and to whom he is speaking? His eyes turn inwards to greet the death waiting within him.
The whole thing is happening in seconds, but to Swami it feels like minutes. He tears his gaze away from the fresh dead face and looks up to where the man might have fallen from, a seven-storey building with a neon sign: “Hotel Ambuli – full A/C – non-veg”.
“Saar,” Alexander squeals, trying to hang on to the wheelchair as hundreds of individuals turn into a mob. Swami feels the chair rocking this way and that. A woman is now standing over the mangled white man and beating him ferociously with her husband’s tiffin can. With her other hand she grips her howling infant, the boy who had lost his balance and fallen over.
“He nearly landed on my precious son!” she screeches, thwacking the metal container into a dead man’s head. “My son could have been killed by this snow-faced sky demon!” The mob eggs her on. Spittle flies out of her mouth, then springs back on its own trail to hang from her chin.
“Saar!” Alexander yelps desperately. He is no longer holding the wheelchair, he has been wrenched away.
“My – little – son,” the woman pants, cracking down the unlikely weapon. “My – tiny – son is – precious!” Now more people have joined in, using their bare hands, as men shout to each other, at each other, to God and at the world. Swami is still in his chair, the white man’s bloody head inches from his feet. He isn’t scared at all, he hasn’t felt as peaceful for a long time. Snow-faced sky demon, he finds himself thinking, that’s good. The chair tips back and he’s over, lying there in the dirt with the dead man. People are scrambling over him and over each other, piling in to get at the white man and beat him: he’s white, after all, which makes a change, and he’s dead, so it doesn’t really matter. Chances like these don’t grow on trees.
Swami briefly sees Hotel Ambuli again through the flailing arms and legs – “What a Refreshing Place to Stay, for your Busyness and your Holiday” – then feels bare feet trampling him. He wonders if this is his death, and hears himself calling God, Rama, Rama, Rama, but not out of fear. It is more out of politeness, as one would call to friendly neighbours through the half-open door of their house – quietly, in case they were busy, or sleeping.
Whistles are ringing, batons are flashing, members of the mob are being grabbed by the collar, by the hair, by the seat of the pants, and sent spinning. The police are here and are weighing in. They lash out and force their way through, calling everyone sons of prostitutes in their time-honoured and reassuring fashion. The intent of the people goes this way and that way for a few seconds, then sensibly goes that way for good. The mob divides i
nto individuals again, onlookers only.
“Well Brother, what are you doing down there?”
Swami is looking up at the prodigious moustache of his old friend and colleague from Mullaipuram Police Station, Sub-Inspector K.P. Murugesan. He opens his mouth to say something.
“Dead, tiffin – didn’t know!” he says. It isn’t what he’d planned to say, but since the stroke he can’t be too fussy.
“Are you hurt?” Murugesan asks, speaking to him but looking with dread at the corpse.
“No.”
“Saar!” Alexander shouts, finally wriggling his way through and taking his position behind the toppled wheelchair.
“Don’t worry boy, he’s very fine.” says Murugesan. “A bit shocked. We’ll get him up. Hey! You and you! Come here!”
Two constables lever the wheelchair up, then get Swami to his feet. He collapses into his chair, half-dazed and abruptly exhausted, as Alexander brushes him down with the dirtiest rag in Tamil Nadu.
“Go home now Brother, have some tea, leave me to deal with this god-almighty disaster. My God, a dead white man,” Murugesan laments, appalled, “there’ll be hell to pay!”
“Dead before,” Swami says, indicating the body with his eyes.
“Yes yes, never mind these details.” Murugesan looks disappointed. “Dead before they beat him?”
“Mm.”
“Alive when he landed or dead already?”
“Living.”
“My God,” Murugesan mutters, looking up at Hotel Ambuli, “what does it mean?”
* * *
A choice between Granddaddy playing his flute continuously and Granddaddy continuously asking for his flute back is not much of a choice. Granddaddy is playing his flute. The immediate family members of both clans are corralled together in the little lounge. The most significant elders and one unidentified baby have been allocated the shiny blue fraying sofa. Two or three dozen other people are thronging the remaining two rooms of the bungalow and the small back plot outside. Some of these people are hungry. They are stripping Number 14/B of edibles with the automatic efficiency of a swarm of locusts. Meanwhile, Leela is miles away, mortified and hiding – “Such a little monkey,” Mr P keeps saying, ambiguously – and Swami is missing. A disinterested commentator might hazard the opinion that this is not the smoothest possible start to a pre-engagement meeting, but the principal players in both families are coping.
