by Mike Stocks
“Husband!” Amma whispers, and she starts sobbing in a wretched way, hunched over him, cradling his face between both hands.
Swami’s other eye opens. All his weeping womenfolk are holding on to him fiercely, as though frightened that the gods might take him back at any moment.
“Husband, you have been sick, you have been sleeping, you have been with God!”
There is gentle commotion from everyone crowded into that small room; there are tears and there are praises to God; there are great sighs of relief and noisy harrumphing vibratos of excitement; and there are whispers and prayers and exultations.
Swami looks around, confused. He can just about recognize his wife. Who are all these others? He has a headache, a painfully dry mouth, and there is a noise reverberating around his mind which he does not understand, an eerie, distant call, like an echo of the sounds of another world. He feels as though he knew that noise once, in another time… What is it? But no, no, he can no longer recognize it. It is like trying to cling on to the narrative of a fading dream. He closes his eyes as if to evade the sound, slightly surprised that he is here and that he can perform such feats as eye-opening and eye-closing. Then, with a greater awareness of himself and his context coming to him steadily – my daughters, my daughters – he attempts an experimental licking of the lips. But his mouth is so dry that his tongue sticks to his skin. It stays there, stuck out of his mouth and to one side, in a manner that looks neither dignified nor godly.
Amma seems in two minds over whether to pick the tongue up and put it back in, but the nurse is already dribbling a little water over Swami’s lips and tongue. The tongue slides back in of its own accord. Swami opens his eyes again and looks at his wife and daughters, attempting to smile, but failing comprehensively.
“He’s going to speak,” Leela pronounces. “Appa, what is it?”
“Don’t trouble him, my Daughter,” Dr Pandit says in a kindly way. “Mr Swaminathan, you’ve been in a coma, now you are awake, but please be taking your time, please, you are all right and your family is all right and everything is all right, don’t be frightened, don’t worry.”
“But he is going to speak,” Leela says, apologetically.
“Husband, what is it?” Amma says, watching her husband swallowing and working his lips.
Everybody strains to hear the first conscious words that Swami will utter since his sojourn with the gods. Swami’s gaze flickers between his wife and his daughters. A flash of irritation animates his face for a moment, taking them by surprise, for he has just come to a revelatory understanding of the mysterious and unearthly noises that are resonating around the chambers of his cranium.
Damn father-in-law, damn flute, he thinks… Doesn’t he ever stop?
“Speak, my husband,” Amma begs, beginning to cry again.
Swami nods slowly on his pillow, twice, and bares his teeth experimentally.
“T…” he says.
“Husband?”
“T…” Swami tries, “t… t…”
At that moment Granddaddy – having transported himself to a higher realm through the portal of the beauty of his playing – is cavorting through his most incredible vision yet: he can see the young Lord Krishna playing his flute and gallivanting with big-bosomed gopis, playing tricks with them, teasing them, and being amorous… It is a wondrous vision, and for a few seconds that seem to last for ever but that he will never recall afterwards, he is so lost in the sacred landscape his meditations have led him to that he even forgets to wheeze into his flute; the slobber-saturated scrap of wood sits limp in his gnarled old fingers, half hanging off his lips.
In the brief silence that marks Granddaddy’s spiritual ecstasy, Swami’s family and friends hear the first profound declaration of their Swami, who has cheated death and come back from the gods to share it with them.
“Tea,” he says.
Granddaddy, shaking his head in complacent wonder at the beauty of his own visions, begins to blow again.
13
“Daughter, tea!” Amma orders urgently, to any or all of her daughters.
Jodhi gets to the door first. Crying with relief and gratitude that her daddy has come back to her, she bustles out of the room and goes scurrying down the corridor, as the hangers-on outside the door shout in surprise.
There is no way that Jodhi will suffer her father to drink the weak and tepid brew of the roaming hospital tea vendors; a daddy who has been unavoidably deprived of tea by an eight-day coma deserves the very best tea available, and the very best tea available is made by Hairy Pugal. Clutching at the scarf of her chudidhar to stop it from flailing behind her, she runs for the street outside. Fixated by her commission, she barely registers the throng of people outside the hospital as she scoots past the policemen guarding the entrance. Her body plunges into the pulsating ranks. “Swamiji’s eldest!” someone cries, as she goes barging through, and the people in her wake start following her excitedly, while the people in front of her surge forwards to meet her. Within a short time she is the unmoving centre of a circle of people that is forever getting smaller and denser, as everyone crowds in on her.
“Let me through!” Jodhi cries, dismayed, “Tea, I must be having tea for my Appa, Appa is wanting tea!”
“Swamiji is awake!”
“Swamiji lives!”
“Swamiji drinks tea!”
The throng surges in, packing the people even more closely towards the centre. Umbrellas are knocked out of hands, a few ladies are wailing, some individuals gasp for breath, and all the time Jodhi is crying “tea, tea!” and trying to scrabble through the people in front of her.
K.P. Murugesan has just come on duty and has taken over the supervision of the police at the hospital. During his long service with the Indian Police Service in Tamil Nadu he has policed many overcrowded gatherings, and he has a perhaps overdeveloped sense of how easily they can degenerate into stampedes. So he blows his whistle and takes his men into battle, leading by example in the noble art of thrashing the general public, just in case it is the right thing to do.
Yells break out as the dozen policemen wade in, striking out with their lathis. They make quick progress, burrowing into the crowd even as the people break up in panic. Within a minute a panting Murugesan and his men have rescued Jodhi. There are a few casualties nursing bruises and bitter grievances, but in the circumstances it has been an effective action.
“Tea, Appa, tea, Appa!” Jodhi is insisting, despairing that her father has asked for tea and that tea has not materialized.
“All right, Daughter, come,” Murugesan says, in his kindly way, panting from his exertions, and he leads her to the Sugam Tea Stall. Behind him his men fan out, still waving their lathis at the sullen crowd that has been forced back.
“He’s awake? He’s okay?” Murugesan asks.
Jodhi nods blindly.
“Thanks to God,” Murugesan says.
The Sugam Tea Stall stands where it has always stood, shabby and decrepit, its paint peeling onto the patch of dirt it occupies. A great vat of hot milk simmers over a gas flame, the vat’s dented tin lid flapping gently over the rising steam. Yes, the tea stall is there, almost as important a fixture in this part of Mullaipuram as the hospital itself – but where is Hairy Pugal? As Murugesan looks around in irritation, the fellow appears from the back of an autorickshaw, where he’d been sheltering.
“Tea!” Murugesan shouts, “Tea! Swami is awake!”
“Yes Saar!”
The master starts to brew his famous potion.
A large man and a larger woman are making their way tentatively towards Jodhi and Murugesan, negotiating clumps of onlookers and hostile policemen. “No no, let us pass, parents of the girl’s would-be!” they are pleading, hands held up submissively whenever a constable impedes them.
“I am the mother-in-law!” Mrs P claims.
“We are the family members, let us pass!” her husband shouts.
They get to Jodhi more or less unmolested, and Mrs P
, bypassing the awkward male authority of Murugesan, instinctively hugs Jodhi to her breast. Jodhi starts crying, and does not protest as most of her head disappears into the superabundant across-the-board immensity of Mrs P’s bosom.
“Parents of the girl’s boy,” Mr P explains to Murugesan, with a dash of pride.
Mrs P, fat, hot, sweating profusely, her heart beating like a drum at a wedding because of all this excitement and expenditure of energy, strokes Jodhi’s hair protectively.
“Not to be worrying,” she says, over and over and over, between her pants, “not to be worrying.”
Hairy Pugal is determined to create the best super-tea he has ever brewed up in his life. “Hurry up hurry up!” Murugesan sometimes urges, but Hairy Pugal is a great artist fulfilling the most significant commission of his career, and great artists will not be hurried up. It is another few minutes before he is ready with a battered aluminium jug.
“Saar,” he says, “the tea that I have brewed is not for pouring in this dirty spot and then carrying in a glass to Swamiji in there, skin will be forming on top, Saar—”
“Yes yes, never mind that, just—”
“—this tea I only am taking to the hospital, Saar! This tea I only am pouring inside the hospital!” Hairy Pugal’s eyes are shining religiously as he holds up his tannin-stained vessel in one hand, and two battered glasses in the other.
“Yes yes, all right all right,” Murugesan says. He barks a few orders at his men, and Jodhi – under the care of Mr P and Mrs P – is escorted back into the hospital by Murugesan. The tea vendor walks in their wake, bearing his tea as though it is the nectar of immortality from sacred couplet number Eighty-Two.
Swami is propped up on his pillows when Jodhi returns with not just his tea but a tea vendor too, and Murugesan, and a full complement of potential in-laws. She hurls herself to her knees by his bedside.
“Forgive me Appa, big crowd is outside and I am getting stuck like anything.”
Swami blinks benignly.
“Appa!” Jodhi blurts, ecstatic and overcome by his mere sentience.
Swami smiles weakly. He is not used to sentience. Ten minutes of the stuff have left him plumb-exhausted.
Mr and Mrs P shuffle forwards awkwardly, behind Murugesan, who is lifting his hand in a wordless and shiny-eyed greeting to his friend Swami.
“How is our respected Brother, Sister?” Mrs P whispers hoarsely to Amma.
Amma, taken aback by their presence, doesn’t know what to say for a moment. She gapes and smiles at them, then looks at Jodhi as though the girl must have hidden depths – how else could she land the parents of the prodigy while buying tea?
“What about Appa’s tea, Amma?” Jodhi says. “The fellow there has it, Amma.”
Hairy Pugal steps up in his dirty shirt and lungi, sheepish and proud.
“Just the tea Appa is asking for, Daughter, not the fellow making it.”
“Yes Amma, sorry Amma.”
“Madam,” says the tea vendor, “fault is all mine, I am insisting Swamiji has freshest, best-brewed, most professionally attended and lovingly administered quality super-tea! So I am pouring freshly Madam, please to observe.”
Swamiji? Swami is thinking blearily, as his mouth fills with saliva at the sight of the hot sweet steaming tea that is being poured into a glass.
Hairy Pugal pours the tea back and forth from the first glass to a second glass, hypnotically, some three, four times, holding the lower glass at waist level and the higher one above his head, until he deems the temperature of that graceful arc of tea is optimal for a sick man who has just been hobnobbing with the gods.
He passes the precious vessel to Murugesan, who carefully delivers it to Jodhi, who solemnly places it in Amma’s outstretched hand.
“Tea, husband,” she says, and Swami nods feebly as she holds it to his lips.
One small sip of that famous concoction is all it takes to reconnect Swami to the here and the now and the wherewithal of his life in a full and meaningful way, not just for the first time since he has come out of his coma, but for the first time in two whole self-pitying, depression-deluded years. He smacks his lips, weakly but appreciatively, and someone towards the back of the room – some cousin of who knows whom, some fellow who shouldn’t really be there but has somehow got in – shouts “Adaa-daa-daa-daa!” rather loudly.
Swami takes a larger gulp of tea, gazes at his wife and daughters, and smiles at them beatifically, because they exist.
He falls into a deep and peaceful sleep.
Book Two
1
Mullaipuram, which lies like a stunned and sitting duck on the unforgiving central plains of Tamil Nadu, is blasted all year round by its three seasons: the wet, the cool and the hot. The wet, lasting from October to December, is unbearably hot and torrentially wet; the cool, lasting from January to the middle of March, is unbearably hot and bone-bleachingly dry; and as for the hot, which occupies all the months left over… the furnace blast of its insufferable forty degrees centigrade scorches the will to live out of every breathing beast the plains can muster, and anything that foolishly continues to exist is made doubly miserable by a sweat-hoovering 100% humidity.
Some two months after Swami emerges from his coma, the hot takes Mullaipuram in its vicious grip. Mange-riddled dogs lie on their sides in any patch of shade they can claim, holding their legs straight out in big “W”s, lolling their tongues across the dirt. Wincing taxi drivers with itchy heat-rash buttocks hunch in front of their melting dashboards, nosing the searing air from portable fans wired up to the car batteries. People with nowhere to go and nothing to do are spontaneously catching buses in despair, spurning the seats inside to cling to the roof or hang off the sides – they close their eyes in delirious relief to feel the moving air circulate around their hottest bits and pieces.
In these intolerable conditions, and under the stewardship of Amma and Mrs P, the uncertain romance of Jodhi and Mohan is taking another hesitant step. After weeks of maternal arbitration, the young couple are – at this very moment – sitting side by side in the flea-bitten auditorium of Mullaipuram Theatre Palace, watching a film called When I Saw You I Knew. They are chaperoned loosely enough to encourage a certain degree of intimacy, and yet tightly enough to foreclose any hint of impropriety. Negotiations on the identity and function of the chaperones were time-consuming and complicated, with the two mothers campaigning for as many chaperones as possible (to maximize the impression of respectability), and with Jodhi campaigning against Amma being one of the chaperones under any circumstances (to minimize the possibility of mortification). Mohan campaigned neither for nor against any detail of the much-awaited great day, on the grounds that no humiliation is too much trouble for him. The end result is that the happy would-bes have Pushpa sitting to their left, while to their right are Devan and his wife, and then an empty seat which Anand is supposed to be occupying; to the disappointment of Pushpa and Jodhi he has not shown up.
Everyone in this cinema sweats like a roasting pig. Chubby Devan squirms in his sodden shirt and trousers on his grimy half-sprung seat. The petite and delicate Mrs Devan moans under her breath, fanning her face and panting for oxygen in the fetid dark. Pushpa and Jodhi sit with their heads close together, as far away from Mohan as possible – even in near darkness he is visibly leaching sexual excitement from every clogged-up pore of his body. The two girls can feel the sweat under their arms spreading outwards into saucers, into small plates, into large plates that eventually meet and form giant, drowned butterflies over their breasts. They are trying not to cry in boredom and discomfort. It is a three-hour film and there are ninety minutes to go.
This is great, thinks Mohan. Drops of sweat are rolling off the tip of his nose as though from a dripping tap. His left hand is carefully edging towards Jodhi’s right hand at a speed of one millimetre per minute.
Mohan has an ideal of how the date might pan out, an ideal he has lovingly and obsessively tended over the long nights of waiting
for the negotiations to be concluded. In this heart-warming vision, he is sitting next to Jodhi in a dark and luxurious auditorium, thigh-to-straining-thigh with his Jodhi in the dark, their hearts hammering for one another, the very hairs on their arms sticking straight out of their eroticized goose-fleshed skin and yearning to touch and tingle as he senses her hand nudging closer to his, closer, closer, as he edges his hand closer to hers, closer, closer, and he feels – oh yes, oh, oh this is it, oh – he feels her hand merging with his hand, like a, just like a – oh yes – as though it’s a, like, like…
Curiously the vision often falters at this juncture, when what is required is a powerful and inventive simile to summon up the incomparable beauty of young love.
…like eight fingers and two thumbs, comprising ten digits in total, all interconnected, Mohan thinks.
Ninety-one minutes later, five sopping-wet and exhausted individuals exit the dusty foyer of Mullaipuram Theatre Palace and stand blinking under the canopy of an electrical goods shop. They are all dispirited, even Mohan, whose testosterone-fuelled clammy paw – when it had finally met with the delicate fingers of his beloved after two-hundred and forty-five minutes of digital stalking – had caused Jodhi to jump out of her seat.
“Thirsty,” Pushpa gasps, to Jodhi.
“Bad thirst,” croaks Mrs Devan, to her husband; he is standing a little to one side, legs apart, discreetly fanning his private parts with a newspaper.
“I want to die,” Jodhi tells Pushpa.
She catches Mohan looking at some rather personal highlights of her anatomy, which her drenched chudidhar is clinging to obligingly, just as in all the obligatory monsoon scenes in all the films Mohan has ever seen, and so she turns away from him sharply.
“Friends,” Mrs Devan is groaning, inexplicably, to Jodhi and Pushpa, to her husband, to God, “Friends, Friends,” and she heads across the road, still saying, “Friends, Friends.”
