by Mike Stocks
Forces and pressures far above Murugesan’s sphere of control are pushing and pulling at the case. Aware of the potential damage to tourism that could spread across the entire state of Tamil Nadu, various regional government agencies are overtly anxious to see the case concluded as quickly and as tidily as possible; it is known that the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu is hopping mad and advocating a speedy low-profile resolution; and as for DDR – Doraisamy Devanamapettai Rajendran, the filthy-rich domineering Mr Mullaipuram of this town, who is also a State Legislature political hopeful and an influential member of Mullaipuram District Police Board of Governors and the owner of five hotels and a score of other businesses, including Hotel Ambuli from which the unfortunate white man is suspected to have fallen… well, he’s got half the town in his pocket. He’s already been telling Murugesan’s superiors that nothing could be worse for the prosperity of Mullaipuram, nothing could be more detrimental to the operation of natural justice, nothing could be more contrary to the principles of effective police investigation, “than if that bouncing white man is found to have been killed in my hotel!” In brief, anyone with a sliver of common sense is agreed that this case is a clear instance of suicide by an unidentifiable foreign drifter of low worth and no importance.
But when did common sense hold unfettered sway over one second of time or one atom of matter? Several western consulates, anxious to know from where the victim hails, have been urging the Indian authorities to investigate the nationality and identity of the dead man; central government officials in Delhi, under pressure from a concerned American Embassy, are also dissatisfied with the response of the authorities in Tamil Nadu. So pressed this way and that way to do one thing or another thing, Murugesan’s bosses are trying to find responses which seem proactive and useful while being the opposite. This is why it has been decided, at the highest levels of political futility, that Swami will be taken by Murugesan to a Madurai morgue, to confirm formally that the body currently lying there is the same one that fell on him a week earlier.
Murugesan turns into Swami’s street, and starts thinking about Amma’s breakfast idlis, which are famous.
* * *
Jodhi, Kamala and Pushpa are standing outside the toilet waiting for Appa to come out. Kamala has a bar of soap, Jodhi holds a jug of water, and Pushpa bears a small towel. They wait in a row, talking in very quiet voices against the background noise of traffic.
“Taking very long time,” Kamala hisses.
“Taking longer every day,” Jodhi whispers, sadly.
Everyone is feeling very sorry for Jodhi now that Appa has ruined her life. They marvel at her courage in the face of adversity.
At last Appa comes out and moves up and down this row of dutiful daughters. First he stares at the top of Jodhi’s head as she pours water over his hand. Then he looks at the top of Kamala’s head as she dispenses and receives the soap which he jiggles around in one hand. Then he looks at the top of Jodhi’s head once more as she pours water again. Finally he looks at the top of Pushpa’s head as she dries him with the towel. It is a solemn process.
The tops of my children’s heads are beautiful… He would like to touch their cheeks lovingly, but daren’t. It would make him weep again.
“Appa,” says Leela, coming out of the kitchen in her school uniform as she hands Jodhi a stiffly ironed and starched shirt, “Mr Murugesan is come.”
Swami nods.
Jodhi hands the shirt to her father, who puts it on awkwardly. She itches to do the buttons up, but Swami does it by himself. He is halfway through when he reminds himself that she has lost her happiness because of him; let the girl put my shirt on me if she wants to.
“You girls,” Swami says, when she’s finished. “What,” he says, “what when,” he tries, “when what.”
“Appa?”
“College?”
“Yes Appa, going to college today.”
“Attending practicals,” Pushpa confides.
“Good girl,” says Swami.
“No college for me Appa,” Kamala says. “Staying here with you only, Appa.”
“Good girl. Hurry three,” he tells Pushpa. “To, through – over,” he tries. Hurry up is what he was aiming for.
Inside the bungalow, Amma is speaking on the phone. Something about the way she is saying “Okay” and “Very good” and “Very happy” and “I will do the needful” and “Most kindly of you” and “Yes yes we will fix it without delay most certainly” is entering their minds as significant, and drawing them inside.
“Rest assured,” says Amma, smiling anxiously as she speaks, “we are most happy to hear this news, very happy.”
Inside, Appa greets Murugesan with a nod as everyone gathers around Amma.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” Amma trills, on the point of tears. “Such a good boy! Yes very soon. Goodboy! – I mean, Goodbye!” she says, laughing girlishly.
She puts the receiver down, then picks it up again to polish it on the edge of her sari, trying not to cry as all the girls except Jodhi beg her to tell them the news. She replaces the receiver back in its cradle, and gently drapes a little cloth over it.
“God is doing this for you, Jodhi,” she says at last. “Boy’s family want to visit again, even after everything that happened, even though a white man fell on Appa.”
“Didn’t—” Appa blurts wearily, but no one takes the slightest bit of notice. Jodhi’s hand is clamped over her mouth in shock, and her three sisters are exclaiming “Ayyo-yo-yooooooooooo!” over and over again.
“Boy is wanting this most particularly,” Amma says, “he is insistent, so Mother and Father have finally agreed, despite the descent of the snow-faced sky demon.”
“Very happy news,” Murugesan says, as Swami burns in shame to be the obstacle that has occasioned such a concession.
“God is all-powerful,” Amma says huskily, knowing that this development is an example of the all-encompassing protection, the legendary boons, for which Lord Murugan is famous. “Go!” she barks at Leela, fiddling on a shelf for twenty rupees, “run to the market before school and buy three coconuts!” Later she will go to the temple and make an offering of them.
4
That is all I am these days, a passenger escorted from this place to that place by people who have no interest in what I say or think… From his passenger window, Swami watches the fields giving way to fetid plots of wasteland, to hideous corporate company headquarters, to fields again, to a row of tottering roadside stalls, then more benighted plots. The car is approaching the outskirts of Madurai, where the morgue is located, and Murugesan, driving, has not made a tactful job of explaining why Swami is being asked to confirm that the body being held there is the white man’s corpse. It is clear to Swami that he is being used by Mullaipuram Police as a diversionary pawn in a game of political pressures. Only because no one is interested in what I do or say am I being asked to do something and say something.
“Good news about this boy,” Murugesan offers in a conciliatory tone, after some hesitation, wobbling the steering wheel fractionally so that a small stray puppy in the road ahead might – with a bit of luck – pass under the speeding car without being squashed. It’s the first thing either of them has said for ten minutes.
The car jolts slightly.
“What is he like, this boy?”
“Gnngow,” Swami answers.
“Oh-oh,” Murugesan says, nodding.
I don’t know, is what Swami had tried to say. Don’t pretend to understand me, Murugesan…
As a driver, Murugesan is in a realm of his own. He is so superior to the slapdash norm as to be an impressive menace on an almost moment-by-moment basis, routinely forcing other road users to give way or join him in death. This is the only aspect of the journey Swami takes any pleasure in. Each time a near-miss situation arises, he hankers after his life’s conclusion, where he imagines sanctuary might lie. But no, when Murugesan overtakes a lorry on a blind side, then the oncoming drivers lurch to t
heir side of the road in horror, and when Murugesan hurls the car here and there to avoid being squeezed between two buses, he somehow always makes the gap.
Murugesan is feeling anxious about Swami’s silence. He doesn’t realize that Swami is feeling disempowered and offended. He thinks that his old friend is suspicious about something. But why, he wonders? After all, Swami’s been around, he knows the score, he understands that in the application of law and order – especially as interpreted through the eyes of the Mullaipuram police – justice can sometimes take a circuitous path… What is he up to, this old friend of mine, Murugesan asks himself – what’s going on in that old head of his?
“So then,” he says emphatically, screeching the car into the hospital car park. He jumps out of the car and walks round to Swami’s side to help him out.
It is a while since Swami has been to the Johansson Memorial Post-Mortem Centre attached to a private hospital in Madurai – not since he was a serving police officer, clogged up in an interminable case involving two vicious and vengeful family clans in an ever-simmering, fifty-year land dispute.
Inside, once they have passed from the 35°C heat of the corridor to the constant 4°C cold of Mortuary Two, Murugesan walks patiently beside the shuffling, shivering Swami, leading him past shrouded bodies on slabs; here and there a foot or a hand pokes out from under the shrouds. A pair of mortuary attendants are playing cards on the floor; they leap up sharply and run to assist – Dalits, wrapped up in their ragged mufflers and their mended woollen balaclavas. Murugesan waves them away, and they stand together, watching the police officer and his disabled companion. No one has a kind word for these fellows, even though their responsibilities can be onerous. Sometimes they have to conduct post-mortems themselves, cutting the bodies open crudely, yanking the organs out, and shouting what they discover to a doctor twenty metres away. That doctor, disdainful of some low fellow’s dirty old toddy-sozzled kicked-to-death carcass, will be hunched over the post-mortem paperwork, filling it in briskly, not even looking up from his forms. It is the kind of thing that happens nearly every week, but only to the bodies of poor men and women. There is no chance of the white fellow’s body being subjected to this system. Even after death, his whiteness grants him some privileges.
They pass through the door at the end of Mortuary Two, and wait in a shabby little antechamber outside the deep-freeze room until the technician inside is ready for them. Swami sits blank-faced on the single chair. Murugesan stalks his own shadow under the harsh strip lights.
“You’re lucky you’re not a police officer these days,” Murugesan says. “D.D. Rajendran has gone completely crazy, he’s breathing fire on the backside of every officer in Mullaipuram about the reputation of his damn hotel.”
Swami doesn’t answer.
“Every year it gets worse with that fellow, he’s got too many people in his pocket, he’s virtually running the police service in our town.” Murugesan looks across at Swami, who is sulking. “So you see,” Murugesan continues, made uneasy by the silence – what is wrong with Swami today? – “so you see, about this case, they just want me to take a deposition from you, that this is the same fellow and all.”
“Who him? Who is?” Swami asks, looking up – it’s the same question he’d asked in the car.
“Just some dumb hippy,” Murugesan answers, deflecting it again. “Who knows, he could be any western dopehead.”
“Papers?”
“Papers I’m not knowing about,” says Murugesan. “Maybe papers, maybe not papers. All I’m knowing is this, I’m not knowing anything about papers.”
“Oh,” Swami says. “Slike that,” he says, offended that he is not trusted enough to be in the loop.
“It’s like that,” Murugesan repeats; there is an unavoidable little cover-up going on that Swami, with all his experience, ought to sense and understand; but Swami just doesn’t get it. For Swami, all this cloak-and-dagger stuff is just another indication that he is no longer regarded as a worthwhile human being.
A door opens and a technician jumps out.
“Okay, come.” Behind him is a brief flash of grey-white leg on a metal trolley.
* * *
Amma is determined that the second pre-engagement meeting will be considerably more successful than the first. For starters, to guarantee Swami’s presence at the great event and to ensure that nothing spectacular happens to him, it has been decided that he will not be allowed out of the house beforehand. Granddaddy, on the contrary, is to be respectfully banished – which will not be difficult, since his attendance last time had been so against his will as to necessitate abduction. As for the general tone of the affair, Amma is being much more rigorous about the number and quality of participants; after all, a house bursting at the seams, a disastrously behaved youngest daughter, a husband turning up not merely late but half-brained by a white man… such indignities cannot be risked again. So there are to be fewer relatives from both sides and no hangers-on, there are to be better-drilled daughters, there is to be a new sari for Jodhi, there are to be extra special titbits for Mrs P, there is to be a stately, dignified Swami sitting underneath the photo of himself in full ceremonial uniform and nodding sagely at every word which the mighty sire of Mohan P might utter… With such techniques is Amma hoping to convince her guests that Jodhi is a good girl from a good family, a girl more than deserving of Mohan.
* * *
“A drug-addled Indian who fell out of a hotel window would be ashes in the river by now,” Murugesan says. “Why should this fellow get different treatment? What is so important about him, the dirty rapist?”
“Heh?”
“Ah well,” Murugesan says, apparently annoyed with himself as he waves an arm ineffectually, “you might as well know, there are rumours about this fellow.”
Rapist? Swami feels shock. He looks at his friend reproachfully, assuming the admission is accidental, as Murugesan prowls around the aluminium trolley. He can see he will get no further explanation. And here is the corpse. Shivering, Swami looks down at the frozen matter that had once enfolded a human life. Poor fellow, Swami tut-tuts to himself automatically, taking in the details. The eyes are closed and will never open again, unless some boffin peels the lids back. Wherever the body has escaped the dark hues of injury and trauma, death has given the deeply tanned skin a grisly lustre, as though a faint grey matt varnish has been applied. But much of the skin surface is obscured by livid contusions and abrasions, and the face itself is very badly beaten. Swami can hardly recognize him, which goes to show that tiffin cans, when full of rice and sambar, and when wielded by mothers protecting their tiny precious sons, make effective weapons. Swami tries to see beyond the purple swellings and the dried black blood, through to the face of the man he had seen alive, when life was animating him for a few final seconds. Poor fellow, he repeats, automatically, but his sympathy is shallow and merely going through the motions, because it is difficult to link this frozen slab of beaten body to the living-dying man with whom Swami had connected. Yes, Swami realizes, it’s not his humanity I was granted access to, not the rapist of this world, but the spirit beyond it – and what does his spirit have to do with this bag of cutlets? He stands over the corpse. Murugesan, looking on a little nervously, thinks he is scrutinizing it closely, but Swami is somewhere else, reliving the strange communication between his spirit and the white man’s spirit, more vividly now than any time since it happened, and an inscrutable expression descends on his face as he stares unseeing at the corpse. What did he want from me?
“Don’t worry about all that business,” Murugesan says uneasily, after a few moments, “it’s nothing important.”
Swami jolts out of his reverie: “What?”
“Not our business,” Murugesan says, pointing vaguely to the chest. Swami peers intently and sees three cigarette burns, two on the left side of the left nipple, and one almost fully on the nipple itself, half-obscured by the bruised and bloody condition of the corpse. He hadn’t noticed them b
efore, but now that Murugesan has pointed them out, there they are.
Why did he have to speak just then? Swami asks himself, scowling, resentful at having his attention diverted to these small strange circles; for a moment, just for a moment, I was close…
“Fashion thing,” Murugesan says, improbably, of the burns. “Who knows why these hippies do this kind of thing?” He is shaking his head rather too theatrically. “You know, once in Goa I saw a hippy who had piercings on the back of his neck! These westerners, they roam around pretending to be as natural as trees, but all they do is drink beer and take drugs for three months, then go home on a jumbo jet when it gets too hot.”
Swami can’t help smiling at the caricature.
“Anyway you’d better sign the form,” says Murugesan, sighing. “I know this is the fellow, you know this is the fellow, everyone knows this is the fellow, there has never been any doubt that this is the fellow, nor are there any other dead white fellows within one hundred miles of here, but you’d better sign the form all the same to say that this is the fellow.”
Yes give me the form and I’ll sign it. That is my role.
On the drive back to Mullaipuram little is said. Murugesan is sure that Swami is wondering about the cigarette burns, while Swami is thinking about the dowries of his six daughters, and vaguely hoping for an immediate fatal collision. He has life insurance. They would be better off without him.
5
What a contrast, what a relief, what a godsend! – so Amma is thinking, a couple of weeks later, as she plays host to the boy’s family for a second time. She radiates smiles around the stalwarts of the boy’s immediate party, as Mr P regales them all with one of his most fascinating railway anecdotes.
