White Man Falling

by Mike Stocks

  “Amma, Sister,” she calls softly, frightened that her daddy will die and that it will be all her fault, “come back!” But when nobody comes she doesn’t call again. She walks around the bed, to where Pushpa had been sitting, and picks up the book of Agam poems. “Appa,” she tries, with an edge of panic to her voice, “shall I read to you as well, Appa?” And so she finishes the poem Pushpa had started:

  “My pride, my love, I am dancer.

  It is for his love that these shell bangles

  slip off my wasted hands.”

  Elsewhere, in the corridors, in the wards, in the hospital compound and in the streets beyond them, the conscious human world is going about its business in all its fractious, noisy ways. Leela starts to feel a little calmer. She places the book on the bed, by her father’s legs, and holds him by the hand.

  “Appa, when will you wake up? Appa? When will you talk to me again?”

  But the only answer is the whirr of the apparatus and the hum of Mullaipuram.

  Leela picks up her father’s limp and heavy hand and lowers her head to it, defying an urge to weep as she brushes her lips against his hairy wrist.

  “Please don’t die again – one time is enough.”

  In another part of the hospital D.D. Rajendran is advancing uneasily. The patients’ relatives thronging the corridors are parting respectfully to let him pass unhindered – everyone knows who DDR is – then turn around and watch him from behind, puzzled, as though he is an unusual vessel sighted in unlikely waters. As he walks, DDR is deep in thought.

  He is a man who takes his spiritual life seriously. His devotion to the guru Sri Sri Dravidananda Gurkkal – whose silence has penetrated to the starting point of the centre of the spiral of all knowledge – has granted him a certain amount of self-acceptance over the years, but now he is troubled, and his faith in Sri Sri Dravidananda Gurkkal is not helping him. His growing foreboding is that although he doesn’t understand why this limping fellow R.M. Swaminathan has entered his life in such a disturbing fashion, yet everything is developing in such a way as to suggest that there is some meaning behind it all – that it is all going to make sense eventually, but in ways which might not prove comfortable for himself. The rumours sweeping Mullaipuram about R.M. Swaminathan returning from death to walk with God have thrilled him and appalled him. Yes, DDR is becoming sure of it, there’s something of the indefinable-infinite-everything in this fellow’s experiences – the fellow’s disability and suffering, the way a white man fell on his head and expended his death gaze on him, his strange way of talking, the numbers he spouts, the breakdown, the falling silent for a week… and then death, and then life, and then, maybe, God. Aren’t these exactly the kind of events that happen when a man’s earthly existence and cosmic fate are leading him beyond the merely human towards a glimpse of the universal? Always, DDR reminds himself, always this is the way – it is not the priest, it is not the scholar, it is not the initiate who truly glimpses God. It is the ones you don’t expect. It is the madman who stands under a tree for fifteen years, being beaten and laughed at; it is the ten-year-old girl who has fits and visions and manias and is locked away and starved and thrashed; it is the limping, spluttering, urinating, silent six-daughtered imbecile who half-brains himself courtesy of a plummeting white man – these are the ones who are granted glimpses of the godhead… I am involved now, DDR muses, both fearful and flattered – I brought him to my house, he urinated on my marble floor, he fell apart in my presence, he entered upon silence after I told him about the silence of Gandhi, the silence of Sri Sri Dravidananda Gurkkal…

  “Oh God, why did I end up shouting and bellowing at this holy fellow?!” he blurts, to the discomfort of a sweeper woman who is watching him stride past her.

  Dabbing at his moustache as he walks, still sunk in schizophrenic cogitations as to the meaning of all this what-not and what-all, he reaches the little knot of people outside Swami’s hospital room. He glances with disdain at the hospital porters stationed at the door. They are under instructions from the hospital management to prevent any unauthorized access.

  “Shall I go in?” he says, to one of the men – who nods minutely and steps aside. Everyone knows who DDR is and what he looks like. Everyone but Leela.

  Inside, the machine powering the pulsatile stockings gives a great heaving groan and then falls silent. The curtain is three-quarters drawn against the fierce light outside, granting a warm subdued glow to Swami and his daughter. Leela is hunched over the bed, resting her cheek on her father’s chest. She has placed her left-hand palm downwards on Swami’s forehead, while her right hand rests lightly on his thigh. Her hair is splayed in a black, glossy fantail across his bare torso, so long and full and thick that it covers his chest without a gap or a chink. What is this? DDR wonders, moved by such a vision of beauty and devotion – and as he stands there gaping, the most beautiful child he has ever laid eyes on lifts her head, her hair gently rolling off Swami’s chest and sweeping down over her shoulders.

  “This is my Appa,” she declares.

  He gently closes the door behind him, and nods. From his immaculate appearance and bearing, Leela can see that he is a VIP.

  “Saar, do you want to touch my Appa’s feet?” she whispers, conspiratorially.

  DDR shifts from one heel to another, unwilling to cede power to such a young girl, but wondering, too, if this is some kind of test to which he should submit.

  “Maybe,” he admits. He can abruptly feel his heart knocking against his chest wall, and feels irritated with himself. “Maybe later.”

  He approaches the bed and looks down at Swami, nervous and melancholic. There is a faint whiff of stale urine in the air, because a bag is nearly full, a detail which DDR notes with distaste. And there is a fly in the room, whose flight he follows for a few seconds from the corner of his eye, until such a point as the little creature lands on the very feet that have been the subject of so much respect and speculation, as if even the smallest of God’s beasts feels compelled to touch the feet that may be walking beyond the earthly realms. What does it all mean, DDR grunts to himself miserably. Do these, do these and other signals, mean that the fellow is at one with the godhead? He gazes with longing at Swami’s face.

  “Which daughter are you, child?” he asks, without looking at the girl.

  “I am Leela, Saar. I am the youngest daughter.”

  “Where’s your Amma, my Daughter?”

  “I told her to leave,” Leela says, with a flash of pride.

  “Hm. Not the words of a dutiful daughter.”

  “Appa wanted to be alone with me,” Leela explains, with a dash of resentment.

  DDR arches his eyebrows, impressed despite himself.

  “Why is that?” he breathes.

  “Because, Saar,” Leela says, “because, because…” She wonders who he is, and realizes she feels frightened. He is looking at her too urgently.

  “Because?”

  “Because he knew that you were coming,” she gulps breathlessly.

  He pulls a chair up to the bedside, next to Leela, and they both gaze at the unconscious man’s face.

  He turns to her, as though he expects her to say something else, and so, for want of anything more imaginative, “Touch his feet, Saar,” Leela implores him, “touch them.”

  DDR is sorely tempted. He looks down at the small peak in the sheet at the bottom of the bed. But he is not ready to submit. There is something holding him back.

  “When I met your Appa, he said something which I didn’t understand. I’ve been wondering about it ever since.”

  “Yes Saar?”

  “Do you know what it is?”

  “Yes Saar.”

  “What?” He turns to her in dismay. His question had been purely rhetorical. “You’re saying you know what it is that he said to me?”

  “Yes Saar,” Leela repeats.

  Half doubting her honesty, half longing for her truthfulness, he gazes at her dubiously.

  “Well?�
��

  “Yes Saar?”

  “What is it? What did he say to me?”

  “Saar, you already know what he said to you.”

  “Yes yes, I know what he said to me – but do you know what he said to me? That is the question.”

  “Yes Saar. I’m already telling you I did,” Leela points out.

  “Yes yes, that is all very well,” DDR answers her irritably, “but I’m telling you to tell me what he said to me.”

  “But Saar, If I know what he said to you, and if you know what he said to you, why do you need me to tell you?”

  He leans back in his seat, eyes blazing, abruptly convinced that he is being taken for a fool, and that the man lying prone in front of him is no more walking with God than hanging out with monkeys in the trees. Leela senses his dangerous temper flashing, and her eyes fill with hot tears.

  “I’m very sorry, Saar. Please forgive. But Saar, I am believing that Appa told you a number, didn’t he…”

  “What what?”

  Leela stands up and goes to a pile of three or four books under one of the plastic seats. She extracts one and starts flicking through the pages.

  “Tell me the number, Saar, and then you will understand. What is that number?”

  “What is that book?”

  “The Sacred Couplets. Appa was trying to communicate a wisdom to you. What number?”

  “Ninety-five, my Daughter,” says DDR, submitting to her. Once again his heart is knocking in his chest.

  So Leela reads:

  “Sweet words and humble conduct are the greatest jewels; no other kinds of jewel exist.”

  “Now do you understand, Saar?” she asks him, simply.

  “Oh God,” DDR moans, sinking his head in his hands – “I am bellowing and raging at your Appa, who is unearthly wisdom personified, like the mighty Tiruvalluvar himself, revered author of our famous Sacred Couplets, and he deigns to educate me in the error of my ways – and I do not even hear him!”

  He walks around the bed and reverently places the tips of his fingers on the guru’s feet.

  “You can pray if you want to,” Leela says.

  12

  Today, in Mullaipuram Anna District General Hospital, Swami is coming back to the world.

  One wife, six daughters, one brother, two grandparents, one friend, one sister-in-law, three neighbours, two nurses, and four relatives of indeterminate provenance are crowding into the room. Granddaddy regards life and death as roughly equivalent, and of little interest to anyone with half a brain, including God. He is sitting cross-legged in a corner and playing his flute – now there is a man whose insights deserve to be heeded by anyone in this world intent on attaining spiritual enlightenment. Naturally no one takes a blind bit of notice of him. Everyone is crowding round the bed in three rough tiers of homage. Amma and the girls comprise the first row, while the least influential people peer from the third tier at the bottom.

  Swami’s lightening has been picking up in pace, his eyelids have been flickering for half a day, at uneven intervals, and he has occasionally issued deep, uncomfortable moans. At times a small spasm judders his cheeks.

  “Come back to us now, my husband,” Amma breathes to him, squeezing his hand. “Wake up.”

  “Wake up Appa,” Leela pleads.

  “In his own good time, he is coming,” says Dr Pandit, as Jodhi strokes her father’s temples and prays for his eyes to open.

  Dr Pandit has become annoyed by the growing status of this patient. After all, he reasons, the fellow’s accomplishments only stretch to being unconscious. Day by day, however, rumours about Swami’s spirituality have been generating spontaneously on the flimsiest of premises, have been self-replicating and mutating: some fantasists claim that to fall asleep in Swami’s presence while touching him is to be granted a weak but tangible insight into walking with God; it has also been said that terminally ill patients are clamouring to be wheeled up and down Swami’s corridor, convinced that proximity to his aura will extend their lives and reduce their sufferings; and it has even been claimed that Swami helpfully levitates when the nurses give him a bed bath. Such speculations are creating havoc, as far as Dr Pandit is concerned.

  “Appa, wake up, wake up,” Kamala urges gently.

  Yes wake up damn it, the doctor thinks, looking at his watch, wake up and get better and go home as soon as possible; I’ve had enough of this nonsense.

  “Can’t you stop your respected elder from playing that terrible music?” he asks Amma irritably.

  “Nobody can stop Granddaddy from playing his flute, Sir,” Amma replies with dignity, “though many people are trying.”

  Dr Pandit sighs to himself; what a family!

  * * *

  Outside the hospital, Mr and Mrs P are among a great throng of well-wishers massing by the main entrance. A loose cordon of police officers holds them back. Mrs P is sweating profusely, despite the black umbrella she uses for sheltering from the sun. She is not used to standing around in the sun feeling excited – although there was that one day on the lawns of Senate House in Chennai, six months ago, when a stand-in for the Tamil Nadu Deputy Minister for Information Technology had presented her son with the whopping great cheque for the Sri Aandiappan Swamigal Tamil Nadu Information Superhighway Endowment Scholarship. She mops her brow, panting like a mule. The umbrella above her cannot generate a zone of shade below her that is large enough to shelter her body. Golfing umbrellas are yet to become the next big thing in Mullaipuram.

  A hundred excitable conversations are taking place among Swami’s new devotees.

  “Levitated,” some skinny, wrinkled, middle-aged man in a dirty dhoti is affirming to anyone who will listen, “just rose up like a gas-filled balloon!”

  “Adaa-daa-daa!” someone exclaims at the miracle.

  “Rose up like a balloon,” the man continues, “for the convenience of the nurses, granting them first-class easy access for full bed-bath washing!”

  All through the growing crowd people are debating the extraordinary powers of their cherished Sub-Inspector of Police (retired), Mr R.M. Swaminathan.

  “Medical expenses come to lakhs of rupees,” someone is declaiming, “family can’t afford to buy an out-of-date aspirin, and yet all medical expenses mysteriously paid from mystical high sources!”

  “What rubbish,” someone disagrees, “what is this mystical-high-sources nonsense? The gods and saints are having bank accounts now, is it? Medical expenses are being paid by DDR, everyone knows that by now!”

  “Exactly!” spits his conversational combatant eagerly, “that is exactly what I am saying. Who can explain why D.D. Rajendran would pay such a bill? Truly it is a miracle!”

  Further back in the crowd a schoolmaster from a nearby village is holding court:

  “When the white man from the sky died at our guru’s feet,” he pontificates to a knot of family and friends around him, through spectacular bucked teeth and loose, spittle-flecked lips, “when the white man expired there at his feet,” he adds, for he has a rhetorical bent, “oh yes, my Brothers and Sisters, then I was knowing something godly was up, praise be to my saviour Jesus and Lord Krishna if you like and also Sai Baba! Some people were mocking Swamiji that day—”

  “Some idiots were really taking Swamiji to pieces!” an onlooker agrees, indignantly.

  “—yes Brother, it’s true, to the shame of the whole Mullaipuram District and every Taluk and village in it, to the shame of Tamil Nadu and all South India…” – this fellow is wasted as a hopeless schoolmaster, he would make a first-rate terrible pastor – “…there were some who were not wise enough to recognize the true import of events. Always it is like this with these holy men and saints, with my Lord Saviour Lord Jesus Lord Christ himself it was like this too, Lord Jesus was mocked and spurned and denied, but as for me I knew straight away—”

  “Not just levitated,” another fellow nearby is gleefully fibbing to a small circle of grimy, green-shirted sceptical bus conductors, as his ten-y
ear-old son pushes and shoves to stay within the circle, enthralled; “actually turning round in mid-air, rotating full 360 degrees!”

  “Appa Appa, why is he rotating?”

  “Why? Son, where is your common sense? For all-over bed-wash!”

  He repeats his cry ecstatically, and it carries over the heads of the crowd like a call to worship – For all-over bed-wash, bed-wash, bed-wash! – mingling with other attestations and magnificences, as the sun beats down on everyone’s brains while some three hundred metres away, in a small room now guarded by police, a man is coming out of his coma.

  “Why won’t they let us in?” Mr P is saying to his wife grumpily outside the hospital entrance, offended by all the common gossip swilling around. “We’re practically family.”

  Since the marriage of Mohan and Jodhi was first posited – a lifetime ago, it seems, and in a superseded world – Mr and Mrs P’s views on the suitability of the match have had their ups, their downs, their arounds and their every-which-ways. “Not looking like best available option,” Mrs P had told her sobbing boy genius, in the hours after Jodhi’s father had been abducted and all the fellow’s womenfolk had thrown themselves to their knees on the dirty road in a crazy bleating heap. “We have had enough of these sob-story crazies, forget about this girl.” And Mr P too, though retaining a liking for the disaster-prone Swami and his pretty daughter Jodhi, had agreed that paternal abduction was an eccentricity too far in a would-be’s family.

  Their blockhead wonder-boy, adamant as he is that Jodhi is the only woman he will marry, needs a miracle to sway his parents’ decision. But maybe a miracle is what he is getting.

  * * *

  One of Swami’s eyes opens fractionally, and quivers under the assault of the light. As Jodhi hears herself take in a sharp intake of breath at her father’s tentative lurch into consciousness, the image comes into her mind of a wobbly newborn calf struggling to remain upright.