by Mike Stocks
“Jodhi, will you ever kiss Mohan?” Leela asks. “He is very handsome.”
“Don’t talk to me about Mohan,” Jodhi begs her. “Don’t talk to me about kissing. Don’t talk to me about Mohan and kissing.”
“Okay okay.”
“Or kissing and Mohan.”
“Okay. Only asking. Why don’t you like him anyway?”
“You wouldn’t understand, you’re too young.”
“Understand what?”
“Real life,” Jodhi sighs morosely.
“Anand also is very handsome,” Leela declares, and Jodhi says nothing. “Devan is a fat pig,” Leela observes, by way of conclusion.
Soon they will have to rouse themselves and help Amma to cook the evening meal. Amma will make the chapatti dough, and Pushpa will knead it while Leela grinds cloves and fenugreek and cumin seeds to the finest powder. Kamala and Jodhi will chop and slice and sizzle under Amma’s directions. Instead of happy banter there will be shouting from Amma, until all of them stop talking for fear of irritating her, and this will make Amma feel guilty, so she will nag them to speak up for themselves, to not be like their silent father. Someone will probably burst into tears, and something will go wrong with the food because of all the upset. Appa will refuse to come in and eat with them, he will sit by himself on the verandah and stare at the metal tray of food that they will bring out to him. Perhaps he will eat some of it. Perhaps he won’t touch it.
Each of the girls is dreading the evening ahead.
“What to do about Appa?” Pushpa asks, after a lull in their desultory chat, and she sniffles involuntarily.
“Just sitting there and never responding to anything,” Jodhi replies.
“Can’t go on like this,” Pushpa says.
“Let’s not upset Leela again,” Jodhi tries, briskly.
Pushpa thinks about doling out another slap on Leela’s rump, and another “You big baby!”, but she hasn’t the heart for it. She moves Leela’s head round in her lap, closes her sister’s eyes for her, and softly strokes her cheek.
“Very nice,” Leela sighs.
“Shall we sit with Appa?” Pushpa asks; but nobody answers. They have sat and sat and sat again with Appa, they have sat cross-legged at his feet as the Mullaipuram evening has passed into night; they have sat on the verandah’s edge and chatted in low voices while Appa has stared relentlessly into his books; they have sat with him while being berated by their mother for wasting their time; they have sat with him one at a time and they have sat with him all together, and Leela has even sat on his knee, where she remained for ten minutes, waiting for Appa to cuddle her or tell her to get off. Swami did neither.
“What to do?” Jodhi whispers under her breath, in relation to all the problems of this world, concrete and abstract, personal and universal. The simple hopelessness of her question sums up all their feelings so precisely that Pushpa instinctively repeats it, “Yes, what to do?” – and Leela too: “What to do?” she is saying, “What to do?…”
The front door swings open and Kamala bustles in with a bulging shopping bag in each hand, bunches of coriander and lady’s finger sticking out of the tops, brinjal, onions, mangoes and cabbage underneath. They hear her going into the kitchen, but they don’t bother looking round. MGR is cruising around Chennai in an open-topped sports car, successfully evading the attention of not merely every gun-toting, lip-curling, villainous car-driving gangster in the criminal underworld, but also of all the forces available to an overly officious police inspector who has got hold of the wrong end of the stick and is trying to arrest him. Kamala comes and stands in the doorway to the bedroom for a moment, watching the action.
“Where’s Appa?” she asks.
“Where do you think, Kamala? Just outside.”
“No he’s not.”
Kamala turns round and goes out into the backyard, where Amma and Murugesan are still talking.
“Hello Uncle, excuse me, Amma, where’s Appa? Did he go out?”
“He’s at the front.”
“No, Amma, he must have gone out, come and see.”
Kamala leads Amma and Murugesan through the bungalow to the verandah, and the three other girls traipse out behind them. Swami is not there. Amma and the four girls look up and down the street, each of them ayyo-yo-yoing, trying to pick out his head, his shirt, his broken gait, among all those pedestrians.
“Hardly moves for five days,” Amma complains, pulling at the rings on her fingers frantically, “then disappears without telling us where he’s going and when he’s coming back!”
“Calm yourself, my daughters,” Murugesan says to the girls, “be calm, Sister,” he tells Amma, “what are you worried about? Did you want him to sit here without moving for ever? Can’t a man go for a walk before his evening meal?” He is not used to being surrounded by so many womenfolk without another man, he doesn’t know how to react, and he even feels slightly annoyed that his words of comfort are not having the slightest effect.
“Ayyo-yooooooooo,” Amma gasps. “What did we do in our previous life to deserve this? What black deeds did I commit?!”
“He’ll be back for dinner,” Murugesan says brusquely. “I have to go now.”
He strides off down the street, leaving five anxious women behind him. None of them notices, here on the verandah of Number 14/B, the copy of The Sacred Couplets lying open (at section thirty-five of Part One) on the white plastic chair. At the bottom of the page is a ring of blue ink around sacred couplet Three Hundred and Fifty:
Cleave to that One who cleaves to nothing,
and so by cleaving cease to cleave.
* * *
You would imagine that the last minutes of a man’s life feel different in kind to other minutes. Perhaps some surprising aspects of love crystallize as never before. Perhaps some unknown mental infrastructure, submerged in the consciousness, comes out into the open and is meaningful, or perhaps the mind carries on doing what it does, but with a sharp awareness that soon it won’t. Perhaps rank terror comes howling and gurning down the narrowing chambers of earthly consciousness to render us appalled and knowing. Perhaps the end comes like a gift that one accepts, or perhaps – but none of these “perhaps” happens to be Swami’s perhaps. He shuffles down the dusty roads of Mullaipuram in much the same frame of mind now as he has been in for days. He is empty. There is nothing left of him any more except a self-esteem so low as to be its own unavoidable deathtrap. He ignores the greeting of an acquaintance – doesn’t hear it or see it – and ignores too some fellow playing to the gallery with his warning shout about falling foreigners. Only a week ago the residents of Mullaipuram were still delighting in such witticisms, but today no one heeds the call, and the man who makes the joke slinks away embarrassed. It’s possible there is something so ominous in Swami’s aura that people are unconsciously picking it up. But what do these speculations matter? Swami is limping towards his death, stepping over the dead dog outside Anbumani’s Motor Car Fixings, heading for the crossroads at Begum Street and Muthiahmudali Street, next to the bus station.
Swami has elected to be comprehensively and irreversibly run over by a bus, on the grounds that being run over by a bus is something he is capable of doing. And anyway, people are always being run over by buses in Mullaipuram. Even people who have no intention of being run over by buses in Mullaipuram are often run over by buses in Mullaipuram – such a fate is one of the natural hazards of this place. How could it not be, given the location of the town as a hub between three big cities, the crowded streets, the multitude of buses, and the recklessness of the drivers who swing their dilapidated monsters out of the station with brutal disregard for the pedestrians packed against the corners of the junction?
Where, in Swami’s thoughts, are Amma, Jodhi, Pushpa, Kamala, Suhanya, Anitha and Leela at this moment, as he sees ahead of him the place he has in mind, and as the buses lurch and swing round, one after the other? Everywhere and nowhere, that’s where. He is so convinced of his superfluousnes
s to this world that all the things that most link him to it have fallen away, and whereas once he tortured himself to the point of despair as to how he wasn’t able to look after his family properly, now and for the past week he has submitted to a new dynamic: because he cannot, therefore he won’t.
“Bidis, cigarettes, betel leaves!” the street vendors are calling, “watches, combs, batteries!” they shout, “satchels, sandals, pencils!” – but nothing is getting through to Swami apart from the sight that his eyes are fixed on ahead, the almost unbroken convoy of buses swinging round the corner of the junction, and now his distinct, dragging limp is carrying him across the last thirty steps of his life. But he is too close to the shops, so he begins to edge out towards the interface of traffic and pedestrians, smelling the buses going past and feeling the heat of their exhaust fumes in his face and the dust of their passing in his eyes, and there is this bus and there is that bus and there is the bus he intends to fall underneath, that one, the dirty brown one coming out of the bus station now. Swami can see everything in his head, the precise moment and character of his tumble under the wheels, and still there is nothing going on in his emotions that is much different to how he has been for days: that he ought to be dead, that he longs to be dead, that he will be dead.
What is this hand on his arm that he doesn’t feel? This voice in his ear that he doesn’t hear? A youngish man grabs hold of him from behind, and hisses, “You dirty bastard son of a prostitute, this is your last chance, stay out of the white man case or you’re finished,” – and shoves Swami. It is not a vigorous shove. It is the kind of shove that could hardly fell a child, but Swami is not noted for being steady on his feet – and down he goes, like a stone off a ledge, there at the side of the teeming street, inches away from the thundering bus he’d set his heart on falling under. His good arm comes out instinctively to cushion his landing, and then he’s lying on his back, looking up at the complicated network of legs that are stepping over and around him.
I can’t even kill myself.
But maybe he is jumping to a premature conclusion. For on that dusty patch of sweltering street, as the crowds barge over him and kick against him, there is a sense of overwhelming doom coming from somewhere he doesn’t recognize; it is building up within him like some peculiarly appalling and terrifying form of indigestion, he can feel it taking a hold of him from the outside and filling him up on the inside, and he is fighting it; it is too terrible, he does not want to be overcome by it. A stroboscopic effect of light passing through gaps in the swarming people above is assaulting him, the shock of finding himself on the ground and yet alive is oppressing him, and it is at this moment – when the tightness around his heart sets in – that he has a split-second vision of the white man passing from life to death. The word Rama is there, enclosing everything, and at the same time that his body starts to thrash out a relentless, last-ditch panic for life, his mind goes under peacefully.
9
The bus that Swami had intended to expire under is roaring away to Palani in its regular hourly fashion, tailgated by another that is going to Cuddalore. They pass within a metre of him, and passengers inside press their faces against the greasy bars of the open windows, straining to see the man lying face-up in the dirt road. Swami also sees himself. Who is that? he is wondering. There is a sense of idle curiosity and irrelevance to the question, such as might occur when solving a puzzle in a lazy hour during a time of sleepy contentment. He waits for a time, looking at his own body from above. Two men are now crouching next to that body, buffeted by the crowd. They put it in the recovery position, so that one of its arms flops over, and while one of them bends down to place his ear over the chest, listening for life, the other one is wafting a newspaper in front of the face. Swami is more amused than surprised to realize that the chest they are listening to, the face they are wafting air over, belong to him. He places himself higher, to get a better view of himself, and sees the whole picture: how his own body lies there, tended by a middle-aged man who has a ring of sparse and unkempt hair circling a very large bald spot, and who has a dirty mark on the back of his otherwise spotless white shirt; and there is another man, much younger, perhaps the son of the middle-aged fellow, a lanky youngster who now stands up and looks mournfully at the spectacle at his feet. There is a growing circle of onlookers jutting into the road on one side, to the anger of passing drivers in cars and buses and taxis and autorickshaws, all honking their horns violently and brushing against people as they try to nudge their way past. In the commotion, a decision is taken to move the body. Swami is distantly pleased to see three or four people pick him up and lift him – rather roughly, but he forgives them – away from the traffic. The circle of onlookers quickly forms again, while around it Mullaipuram carries on, its people shoving at the edges and shouting complaints. Swami is getting used to his new condition now. Why are they bothering with that body when I’m not even in it? Nevertheless it is interesting to see the body picked up once more and carried, with some urgency, to a taxi. And now Swami finds that he knows what people are saying. His impression is that their words – compared to his own understanding – are pitifully inadequate signals, tragic misfirings of cosmic incomprehension; one day they will cease to speak so uselessly, he knows, and he wishes he could let them know how ineffectual they are being.
Meanwhile a negotiation is taking place over the going rate for half a mile in the back of a yellow-and-black Ambassador taxi.
“Saar, that fellow is dead,” the taxi driver is pointing out indignantly as he turns the ignition, “it is not auspicious to be having the dead man in my motor vehicle.”
“Very well, don’t take him, you miserable son of a louse, we will get out immediately!” shouts the middle-aged fellow who has taken it upon himself to get Swami to hospital; he is a professor of chemistry, and he has no idea why he’s involved himself in this business. On any other day of the week he might have stepped over the body with a curious glance. He mops at his balding pate as he struggles with Swami’s inert matter.
“But Saar—”
“Enough!”
“But Saar—”
“Enough!”
“But Saar, maybe you are working in an office, but are you wanting a stranger dragging a corpse inside that office without a word of warning? Even a highly respected gentleman like you, Saar. Answer me this, Saar!”
“Enough, desist, cease!” shouts the professor, who has been struggling all this time to pull one of Swami’s feet into the back of the car, “we will not deign to use your miserable, ungodly taxi, which disgraces Lord Ganesha and the goddess Lakshmi who are residing on your filthy dashboard, we are getting out without delay!” As he barks the words he succeeds in banging shut the back door at last. “Okay, go.”
“Saar, I didn’t say I wouldn’t take him,” the taxi driver says sulkily, setting off.
“Doesn’t matter,” the professor shouts, as he and his son arrange Swami across the back seat of the taxi. “It doesn’t matter what you say you’ll do, and it doesn’t matter what you say you won’t do, we don’t want to travel in your miserable, godless taxi, so if you say another word then you can stop the car immediately and we will get out now!”
“Saar, don’t be angry with me,” says the taxi driver, “I have children to feed and clothe like any other man, and I can’t have a dead fellow in my taxi for less than three hundred rupees.”
“Three hundred? To go to the hospital? It can’t be costing more than fifty! You louse, will you take advantage of a dying man?”
“Taxis are for the living, Saar. If you want a vehicle for the dead, call an ambulance.”
“I order you to stop immediately!”
“Two hundred and fifty, Saar, that is very best and very lowest discount fare in Mullaipuram for dead people!”
With negotiations and arguments at this extremely gentle, early and delicate stage, the taxi struggles through a sluggish river of traffic, and relentlessly honks its way towards the hospital. “
You louse!” says the professor, “we are getting out immediately, stop this car!” he declares at each juncture in the haggling process. Meanwhile the professor’s son sits in the back with Swami’s head and torso lying across his lap, scowling, nursing murderous feelings of resentment against taxi drivers and men who drop dead in public.
“Appa,” he hisses sulkily, “we should never have got involved in this.”
“Don’t lecture me, boy,” barks the professor, furious – furious not merely because he does not want his authority questioned in front of this insolent taxi driver, but also because he knows his son is right. What has possessed him to get involved like this? It can only be some small cosmic alignment beyond his comprehension.
“You crazy sonovapig!” the taxi driver abruptly yells out of the window – there seems to be a man out there who is guilty of riding a bicycle while exhibiting insufficient terror of taxi drivers. The professor slumps back in his seat, exhausted by anger, confrontation and the deaths of strangers. One hundred and twenty-five rupees, that is where negotiations are stalled. This is at least twice as much as the going rate, but after all, thinks the professor, there is some logic in the driver’s argument – the man lying across him appears to be dead, as dead as a drowned snake chopped in two and both halves thrown on different fires; such a freight ought to carry a premium, given that the taxi driver probably sleeps in the back of his taxi six nights a week.
“All right, you cheating wastrel, one hundred and twenty five,” he agrees gruffly.
“Oh very good Saar, thank you Saar, we are reaching fairest and very best excellent agreement!”
The professor nurses Swami’s folded legs against his chest, and – in that lurching taxi with a cheating driver and a furious son and a dead man – concentrates on achieving the calming vision he always relies on in times of acute stress. It involves beautiful chemical formulae, and the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, and splendid shawls being draped over his shoulders by worthy dignitaries, while an audience of international big shots – amongst whom is the President of India – looks on admiringly.
