by Mike Stocks
After a couple of miles they are climbing again. The driver pulls at the starter cord and the engine judders into life.
“Engine Saar!”
All the people they come across are travelling in the other direction, mostly on bicycles, going from the outlying villages to their jobs in the hotels and eateries and shops and businesses of Thendraloor; they free-wheel down at breakneck speed, two and three and occasionally four people to each bicycle, many of them waving and shouting respectful greetings when they see Swami.
When the auto is not far from the turn-off to Highlands, a man looms up ahead of them, walking up the hill. He looks behind him at the sound of the auto and steps to one side to let it pass – then jumps out at the last minute, shouting, forcing the driver to lurch to a veering halt.
“STOPPING SAAR!”
Swami’s and Kamala’s bottoms rock forwards off the back seat and then fall back again, heavily.
“Hey, you dimwit donkey!” the driver shouts at the man in the road, but the man takes no notice.
“Swamiji Swamiji,” the fellow is moaning, rushing up, “I have come to see you, I must see you!”
He is a young man, short and heavily built, unshaven for two or three days, with a proud and slightly over-the-top moustache.
“Not to be bothering Swamiji like this!” the driver yells, and he gets out of his seat saying, “Get lost, get out, get away from here you son of a dog and a donkey!”
More by accident than design, for Swami is already indicating that he will speak to the fellow, the two young men engage in a complicated and uneasy wrestling match, neither of them fully committed to fighting, but neither willing to concede to the other.
“Wait,” Kamala pleads with them, “what are you doing?!” – but they take no notice, and now their four-legged stand-off gets more serious, and they begin to lurch around perilously.
Swami has been struggling to lever himself out of his seat without Kamala’s help; once he manages it he steps out of the auto and says “No no” to the two young men. They start to disengage, gradually, over three or four de-escalating stages. The intruder, panting from his exertions, hanging on to the driver’s shoulders more out of comradeship than aggression, pleads, “Swamiji, you are knowing me, Swamiji?” When Swami nods, the man blurts, “Forgive me!” and bursts into tears, dropping to his knees so that he can touch Swami’s feet in respect.
“Come,” Swami says.
Raising his hand to Kamala and the driver, to indicate that everything is all right, he leads the visitor down the road a short way – and waits to see what this is all about. He knows the visitor by sight: a young constable called Apumudali, a recent recruit on probation with the IPS.
Swami is becoming less and less taken aback at the way people are seeking him out willy-nilly – but still, what is this man doing here, so far away from his duties, crying on a mountainside?
“Swamiji, you know what I did, Swamiji—”
Apu wrings his hands and casts tortured glances at Swami, at the surrounding forest, at the sky, at Swami again.
“Swamiji, how can you be so calm after what I have done? I have come here before you, my fate is in your hands, Swamiji—”
The man is hysterical. Swami waits for him to come out with his terrible problem or his awful guilty secret. His wife has left him? He has monstrous debts? His brother has a brain tumour? There are all manner of terrible problems and guilty secrets killing any number of people right now, but the tear-stained Apu cannot bring himself to say what his particular terrible problem or guilty secret might be. Perhaps it’s pretty bad.
“Swamiji, Swamiji – Swamiji…” Apu squats down on his haunches, rocking on his feet, shaking his head in self-disgust.
Swami feels hungry, and wonders how long this encounter might take. He raises his hand slightly to his watching anxious daughter, as if to say “don’t worry”, and shifts on his feet, settling down to wait for Apu to spill the beans in his own good time – and is taken by surprise when Apu’s own good time is now.
“Swamiji, mighty Swamiji!” and the fellow hurls himself on to Swami’s feet and starts pawing at Swami’s legs in a pathetic fit of hysteria, shouting “I killed Swamiji… I was the one, it was me… forgive me, Swamiji!”
Swami rocks back on his heels, almost falling over.
He’s crazy, Swami realizes – but Swami is wrong. It is true that Apu killed Swami. He was the fellow who pushed Swami over in a busy Mullaipuram street and hissed “You dirty bastard son of a prostitute”, precipitating Swami’s fatal heart attack. In fact, if he’s not careful then he’s going to kill Swami all over again, but here are Kamala and the driver running over, shouting, and as the driver pulls Apu away from Swami, Kamala tends to her father. She gets him steady on his feet, and brushes him down solicitously, and takes control.
“You must not be behaving like this with Swamiji,” she lectures the sobbing young police constable, who is now being held loosely by the driver.
“Sister—”
“Come and sit with him in the hour of silence, at three o’clock – then you will find peace.”
“Sister… Swamiji—” Apu watches as Kamala leads her now passive father back to the auto. She helps him into the back. Apu remains kneeling in the road, still shedding tears.
As the vehicle phut-phuts away, Swami takes a final glance at the wretched Apu. What does he mean, he killed me? Just before Swami’s head lurches back and the auto zips away, he and Apu exchange glances, and Swami can read the words that the crying man is mouthing: forgive me, Swamiji.
3
Swami’s elevation from derided cripple to possible spiritual guide is playing havoc with the consciences of more than one Mullaipuram policeman. At lunchtime Murugesan arrives at Highlands. Unlike Apu, at least he is expected, and in control of himself. This is the third time in six weeks he has sacrificed a day off from work to endure fourteen bone-rattling hours on a bus, seven torturous hours each way – and all so that he can sit with Swami for a while and feel a kind of peace within reach, and yet wholly fail to say what is on his mind. Each time he comes, he finds evidence of Swami’s spiralling status: the respect of the locals; the daily “hour of silence” in a jungle clearing near Pambarpuram village, at which first dozens and now hundreds of devotees are said to attend; and the most effective evidence of all – Swami’s imperturbable aura of calm.
They sit in wicker basket chairs on the verandah of Highlands, staring out at a vista of scrub and jungle. Just being near to his friend affords Murugesan some temporary relief from the deep-seated anxieties that are plaguing him back in Mullaipuram, but he is not absolutely at ease. He has a natural resistance to small changes just as much as large changes. He has never sat on a wicker basket-chair before, for example, and he doesn’t approve of starting now. As far as Murugesan is concerned, too many new experiences have come his way since that fateful day when a white man fell on Swami, wicker basket-chairs being merely the latest. Sometimes he wishes the rotation of the earth would reverse, and he could go backwards in time to when his certainties were unchallenged.
He is looking across at Swami, thinking, did he really walk with God? Literally? Symbolically? Everyone is believing it – but how does anyone know a thing like that? Isn’t it the case, he remembers, that in an earlier time I held a mechanic’s arms behind his back so that Swami could punch the fellow in the stomach more easily? – something to do with shoddy work on Swami’s scooter… Now, what kind of a guru is it that punches a garage hand in the stomach? Would God walk with such a man?
These are the kinds of doubts that assail Murugesan day by day back in Mullaipuram, where he registers the town’s hysteria with bemusement. And yet… To be with Swami is to feel one’s doubts peel away. Swami is indisputably emanating an aura of potent peacefulness – everyone wants to be with him, and Murugesan is no exception.
“Uncle,” Kamala says gently, breaking his trance, handing him a metal cup of cardamom tea; she pads softly away.
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Cradling the cup, Murugesan watches her go back inside the dark, slightly chilly cottage. No matter that its foreignness has been overwhelmed by India, there is an alien feel to its architecture and atmosphere. He observes Kamala through two doorways, as she sets to work in the kitchen. She is now standing by a kitchen sink, washing some utensils under a tap. A hundred, a thousand times he has seen Swami’s wife and daughters washing utensils, and were they in some strange stone foreign-built cottage on a jungle mountainside, standing up, at a sink that has a tap? No. They were outside in the baked back plot of Number 14/B, squatting on their haunches under the hot sun of the plains, next to a red plastic bucket of water. Everything has changed, Murugesan thinks, rather vaguely; nothing is the same any more; I don’t understand. But, there is Swami…
The two old friends look at each other with a mixture of affection and bemusement.
“Swami,” Murugesan says – he is the only person left who still says Swami rather than Swamiji, and even he won’t hold out much longer – “Swami—”
The calm, patient, almost vacant expression on Swami’s face is exasperating to the sceptic in Murugesan. Why won’t Swami respond? Why doesn’t he smile, or nod, or speak? Why does he just wait?
“Swami, I have decided to become a better police officer.”
It has cost him a month’s anguish to grind out this oblique, preparatory, grudging, ambiguous and not overly ambitious declaration, but there is nothing much by way of a response from Swami – maybe his eyebrows rise fractionally.
“You know me of old,” Murugesan says, “you know I’m not one of the worst, but – you know I’m not one of the best…”
Nothing. Damn him, Murugesan fumes, he is not going to help me one bit! He will force me to take this path all by myself. First he runs rings round us all over this dead white man, now he runs rings round my spiritual condition. Well, all right, if that is the way it must be…
Murugesan rubs his face in his hands, knowing he is coming close to telling Swami everything, everything about the white man, complete surrender and repentance. For that is the first and most difficult step. As Kamala clatters pots in the kitchen, he tries to work out what he will say, how he will say it: Swami, I have obstructed the course of justice in this matter, please advise me… he goes over various formulations in his head, nearly speaking several times but always drawing back, and marvelling to himself at the superhuman serenity of his old colleague.
“Swamiji, I did a bad thing, I—”
“Appa,” Kamala calls from inside, “we must be getting ready.”
Swami is already struggling up as she comes out onto the verandah. She helps her father to his feet as Murugesan looks on open-mouthed. How can he be so passive, this great “Swamiji”? That is his slightly scornful question. How can he allow himself to be led away at this moment of my confession?
Kamala takes Swami into his bedroom, where she helps him to wash and change – leaving Murugesan to stare into the scrub and the jungle beyond it, agonizing about what he might be doing wrong. Surely Swami can see the process I am going through? Why would he walk away from me like that?
* * *
Like most aspects of Swami’s new existence, the hour of silence is a phenomenon that he neither foresaw nor intended. D.D. Rajendran – a frequent visitor of Swami’s, now busy in Mullaipuram with ambitious plans for the future – would have rubbed his hands in glee at such a brilliant concept, and set to work on exploiting it. But the hour of silence came into being all by itself. During his first week in Thendraloor, Swami took to going on an afternoon walk. A relatively gentle jungle path leads to the village of Pambarpuram, and halfway along it there is a clearing by a mountain stream, where a shallow basin scattered with large smooth rocks creates a natural amphitheatre, at the centre of which is an impressive teak tree. It is here that he would pause for a rest. Within a few days curious onlookers were assembling, lured by the wild and escalating rumours about his spirituality, sitting in ones and twos and threes on the choicest rocks, squatting on the bankside, resting cross-legged under trees. After three weeks, there were more than a hundred – a motley bunch of proto-devotees, villagers, tourists, idlers, sceptics, well-wishers. At first they were waiting for something to happen. Nothing happened. Swami would reach the tree with his daughter; he would sit down and rest; after a while, ten minutes or two hours, he would get up and walk back to his cottage. But nobody was disappointed. They found their gossip and whispers tailing away into silence. If Swami rested for more than twenty minutes, all talk would have ceased, and many people were infused with a sense of spiritual rejuvenation. The word spread in Thendraloor and beyond, and the hour of silence was born.
Murugesan’s eyes widen in wonder when he emerges from the jungle path into the clearing with Swami and Kamala – at least three hundred people are already waiting there, sitting in expectant knots amongst the rocks and shrubs. They observe Swami eagerly, watching his slow progress through their number, bringing their palms together in namaskarams and vanakkams as he passes them. Swami reaches his tree and sits down cross-legged at its base. And that is all there is to it. Though some new devotees or sceptical onlookers may start talking, they invariably cease in the end. The stream flows, the breeze passes, the shadows on the rocks shift gradually, the sun travels, the leaves of the trees rustle, the unseen beasts and birds of the nearby jungle call and kill and eat and die and fly and leap – and the people sit at the centre of this scene, silently gazing at Swami.
At the start, Murugesan wonders what lies at the centre of the process: is it peer pressure? Is it nothing more than the unremarkable comfort that derives from a joint endeavour in a setting of natural beauty? Or can only Swami engender this kind of response? For now, Murugesan doesn’t know. After a while, he doesn’t care. His thoughts are ebbing away. The longer the silence lasts, the more he becomes part of it. Only afterwards will he recall that all his problems left his consciousness, his very sense of self almost disappeared, and he experienced that intense level of living in the moment as is usually shown only by children.
And what is going on in Swami’s mind as the collective will of the people submits to him? Much the same as is going on in theirs – a gradual letting go of almost everything, until only now is left. Before the hour of silence, and after the hour of silence, he may reason that there is some irreducible spiritual utility in what they all do together – they are claiming the present, because only the present exists, and to be in it is to be alive. Before the hour of silence, and after the hour of silence, he knows that any one of these accidental initiates could perform the role that he performs, if they only believed that they could; but during the hour of silence he just sits down and forgets everything.
Some forty minutes after the hour of silence started – after all, it wasn’t Swami who named it and who claimed it was an hour – Swami shifts and yawns, and Kamala helps him up. A collective, satisfied, sibilant sigh emanates from his admirers. The hour of silence is over, and as people come out of their trances they smile and chuckle at each other, shake their heads in wonder; Swami is threading through them, his hand on Kamala’s shoulder, and some of them are so elated that they prostrate themselves on the ground as he passes. As Murugesan watches, halfway between his own inner silence and his new outer awareness, he sees Apu for the first time, bowing down to the guru Swamiji. For a few seconds Murugesan feels a surge of peaceful amazement – Apu is here?! Swami is masterminding everything! But within minutes the anxieties attached to his everyday life and to his long personal charge sheet of small bad deeds seep back into him. Apu is here as well?! Apu, one of the very fellows I’ve perjured myself for, is also coming to see Swami? What is to be done?
* * *
“Yes yes, I was going to tell Swami everything,” Murugesan admits, rather irritably, “three times I have come here to tell him everything, but something is always happening to stop me.”
“That is how he is teaching you,” Apu declares. “A guru is alw
ays using the ignorance of the disciple.”
“Where did you pick up this rubbish?”
“It is definitely 100% true, I am reading about all the greatest gurus, again and again they are confounding their followers with completely illogical nonsense that leaves all baffled and unhappy – only later, when the followers are thinking about it very deeply, does the truth of what they were saying make itself clear.”
“I am not a follower,” Murugesan mutters.
“Look at how he has brought us here together. Everyday we are nodding greetings in Mullaipuram, but only here do we meet and talk.”
“Why didn’t you tell him everything already?”
“My everything is much worse than your everything,” Apu answers.
“Yes, that is so.”
“No no, it is much worse than you are thinking. You are not knowing everything I have done,” comes the anguished answer.
“Of course I am knowing everything you have done…”
Murugesan is well-aware that Apu and a junior colleague, on encountering a rare white man in Mullaipuram, had harassed the fellow half-heartedly for a bribe. Later – off-duty and partly drunk and feeling their dignity impugned – they had tracked the foreigner down to his hotel and paid him a visit. They had got carried away, engaging in a few well-intentioned activities designed to encourage a man to acknowledge the error of his ways. After ten minutes of first-class entertainment involving cigarette burns and a heavy kick in the testicles, the white man had ruined everything by running at the window and jumping clean out.
