White Man Falling

by Mike Stocks

  Apu’s lower lip begins to tremble.

  “Brother, you are one of the many who covered up the truth about the foreigner—”

  “Yes yes—”

  “—but I am the one who kicked the harmless fellow in the balls – he drove us mad, he said, ‘Don’t blame yourselves…’ – and watched him jump—”

  “Yes yes, I know all that, it is you who don’t know everything, for I am not only the dirty dog who lied to Swami to keep him off the case, I am also the dirty pig who told him the white man was a filthy rapist, God forgive me—”

  “Brother…” Apu moans miserably “…Brother, this is nothing, I am even worse than you think, I am the disgusting, dirty lowdown snake who killed our beloved Swamiji!”

  A sheen of dismayed disbelief comes over Murugesan’s face, as Apu – snivelling and snorting – explains the fatal push that sent Swami sprawling to his death on a Mullaipuram road.

  “What a dirty business,” Murugesan whispers.

  They walk the five miles to Thendraloor, side by side, oblivious to the increasing traffic as they approach the town, the coach parties of North Indians bellowing Hindi songs, the foreigners in the backs of chauffeur-driven jeeps, school parties crammed four to a seat in fleets of shabby battered buses – the children shrieking and emanating an almost continuous stream of sweet papers and sick from the open windows. They pass a church, a temple, a mosque, and they remain oblivious to the cries of hawkers and beggars and guides. In the dirty, litter-strewn wasteland that functions as the bus stand, they agonize about what they should do.

  “Full explanation and confession to Swami and facing up to everything, however painful – that is the lesson,” Murugesan argues at last.

  “Telling Swamiji our bad deeds, not telling Swamiji our bad deeds, what does it matter?” Apu is asking miserably, sucking on a foul-smelling bidi as they wait for the bus.

  “What do you mean, what does it matter? Do you want to cleanse your actions of their terrible filth or not? The first step is confessing to Swami. That is common sense! We know that is why we are drawn here…”

  “You are not understanding anything, Brother. Swamiji is not needing my confession, your confession, anybody’s confession. Swamiji is already knowing everything. He is asking something else of us.”

  The temporary peacefulness that Murugesan had felt when he was within Swami’s aura seems very distant now; he purses his lips, sucks up some saliva from the back of his throat, swallows it, purses his lips again, as he watches the buses coming and going. What is Apu saying? He examines the younger man’s melancholic face.

  “Something better than that, that is what he is wanting from us,” Apu adds, and he throws his bidi away bitterly, saying, “I am going mad! He knows what I did. Why doesn’t he just report me to the authorities so that I can pay for what I did? Why won’t he tell us what he wants us to do?”

  Buses are roaring in and out of this place, turning in great roaring circles, gaining and losing passengers who hop on and off the steps of the moving vehicles. Murugesan looks up and sees a crow circling. The situation has become clear to him now.

  “When people tell us what to do, do we listen, and do we do it?” he asks rhetorically.

  “No, of course not, but people are not Swamiji. I would listen to him, and I would do what he told me to do.”

  “Yes, and the thing would be done, but you would remain the same. I am thinking, I am thinking…”

  “What, Brother?”

  No answer comes from Murugesan. He is thinking, Now I understand. Swami is trying to guide us to reach understanding all by ourselves – only then will our actions mean anything.

  4

  The sun beats down on Mullaipuram without mercy. It bounces its boundless heat around the small back plot of Swami’s home, between the crumbling plaster planes of the surrounding bungalows and the walls which circumscribe that shabby area. Under its onslaught, a small, tentlike structure near the open back door of Number 14/B is swaying mysteriously – a pale-green shifting shape with three round talking bulges; Amma, Pushpa and Leela are peeling garlic together under the meagre home-made shelter of one of Amma’s saris. They squat on their heels, in a triangle, systematically working their way through the garlic pile, depositing peeled cloves in a yellow plastic bowl. Amma is going to make three jars of pickle: one for her, one for a sister, and one to send to Kamala in Thendraloor.

  Pushpa sticks her head out of the makeshift shelter of the sari, sneezes into the sun-blasted air – all three of them have streaming twenty-four-hour colds, a consequence of their unaccustomed exposure to the freezing temperatures of Friends – then submerges herself back into the complicated, aggravating three-way combat that is taking place within the green light of the shelter.

  “You are looking incredibly stupid in those stupid things,” she says to Leela, who is wearing sunglasses, “take those stupid things off, you stupid, no one can see you here but us!”

  “Pushpa, that is enough!” Amma scolds, and the tent sways this way and that in the throes of her irritation. “She is just a little girl, let her play if she wants to. What is the matter with you, Pushpa?”

  “Yes Pushpa, what is the matter with you?!” Leela repeats, with great satisfaction.

  The slap from Jodhi yesterday has left no lasting mark, but Leela wants to signify her suffering. In western films she knows that when a handsome dissolute husband thumps his beautiful long-suffering wife, the saintly female partner takes to wearing a scarf and sunglasses whenever she leaves the house, to conceal the bruising; “I fell down the stairs,” the wife says, if someone asks her what’s wrong. So Leela is sporting sunglasses in homage to this glamorous ideal, and wears her scarf over her head. She has been roaming around the compound of police bungalows, longing for people to ask her what’s wrong. “Jodhi hit me,” she explains to anyone who asks. Her homage to the western model only goes so far.

  Earlier in the day it had been Amma instructing Leela to take those stupid sunglasses off. But now she is pursuing a different strategy, and for the moment the sunglasses can stay. Stripping the garlic cloves at twice the speed her daughters can accomplish, dropping them into the bowl, she furrows her brow; she will have to be clever with Leela if she is to get to the bottom of the bottom of this Jodhi-and-Mohan business. Why did Leela claim that Jodhi is seeing another boy? Jodhi would never do anything as scandalous as that – would she? But why would Leela say such a thing, and why would Jodhi react so violently, if there were not a grain of truth in it somewhere?

  One daughter of mine striking another daughter of mine in front of the boy’s family, Amma muses disapprovingly. What would my husband be saying about this?

  For a while the only sound is the rustle of garlic being peeled.

  “I cannot believe my eldest daughter slapped my youngest daughter!” Amma complains.

  “Amma, sometimes even you are slapping your youngest daughter,” Leela points out, ambiguously defending Jodhi’s blow.

  “And your middle daughter,” Pushpa agrees.

  “All your daughters,” Leela complains.

  “I am your mother,” Amma says; for twenty years she has employed the authority of this all-encompassing non sequitur to vindicate her very best mistakes.

  “Yes Amma.”

  “I am slapping you for your own good.”

  “Yes Amma.”

  “Jodhi is not slapping you for your own good, she is slapping you because she is angry – because you are shaming her in front of the boy’s family.”

  Silence from Leela; this is not a conversational direction which she is anxious to explore.

  “And you are not seeing, Leela, how shaming it was for us?”

  More silence. Pushpa pokes her head out of the tent to sneeze again, quickly followed by Leela, who sneezes three times in a row.

  “Whoever heard of having a cold during the hot?!” Amma says, exasperated, as the two girls reappear under the covering; she blows her nose on the edge of her s
ari.

  “Amma, don’t do that!” Pushpa begs.

  “That is how it was done when I was young!” Amma protests.

  “It is not hygienic, Amma.”

  “And that dirty rag is hygienic, is it?” is Amma’s answer, as she points at the drenched handkerchief in Pushpa’s lap. When Pushpa doesn’t reply, Amma gives a triumphant “Hmmph!”.

  “How many more, Amma?” Leela asks, pointing at the pile of garlic.

  “All of them of course, you know that.”

  Leela sighs. She longs to roam around again, being romantically wronged and injured.

  “So who is this boy Jodhi is liking?” Amma asks, in a guile-packed and deceptively conversational tone.

  Leela bends her head and starts peeling garlic with extra attention. She has been evading this moment in her mind, the moment when she faces up to admitting she had invented the declaration; it is a depressing prospect. She strips a clove of its veined white skin, already imagining Amma shouting at her, forcing her to apologize to Jodhi. Her lower lip starts to quiver. A wave of reality washes over her, and she is just on the point of bursting into tears behind her sunglasses and confessing when Pushpa gets a dig in.

  “She is a naughty dirty fat liar, Amma!”

  “No I am not!” Leela is yelping halfway through this stream of unflattering adjectives, “you just shut up, you stupid!” She pulls the sheet off her head and delivers four explosive panic-induced sneezes, thinking now what? on each miserable atch-ooo.

  “Pushpa,” Amma scolds, “don’t be saying these bad words to your little sister.”

  Leela fumbles her way back under the sheet, and glances fearfully at Amma and Pushpa.

  “It doesn’t matter, Leela, if you got a little bit carried away in that Himalaya of a hotel,” Amma continues winningly, “no one is going to blame you or punish you, Leela, I am just wanting to know why you said it. After all, it didn’t just come from nowhere – did it?”

  Amma shreds the skin from the garlic cloves methodically, eyes on the job in hand, waiting for an answer. Now Leela longs for Pushpa to interrupt – even some more “naughty”s and “dirty”s would buy a bit more time, even a “fat” wouldn’t go amiss – but Pushpa remains unhelpfully silent.

  “Or did it?” Amma murmurs, into the silence.

  It is make-or-break time for Leela. She stands at a fork in the path of this matter, and contemplates which direction to take: the Yes Amma of disgrace, repentance, suffering and ultimate redemption; or the No Amma of short-term relief and further disgrace. She is ashamed of herself, but she also feels offended that Pushpa and Amma doubt her story – what gives them the right to think I’m lying, she asks herself furiously, even though she is.

  “No Amma.”

  “Well then,” Amma says, her voice trembling a little; it is costing her dearly to maintain this careful illusion of self-control, she is more comfortable blurting out whatever comes into her head. “Well then, tell your Amma why you said – what you said – about Jodhi…”

  The small, hot, sweaty germ-infested makeshift shelter seems as cavernous as the thousand-pillared hall of the Meenakshi Temple at Madurai as Amma and Pushpa wait for Leela to speak. Even Leela is waiting for Leela to speak; she knows she is going to say something, but what on earth will it be? Whatever it is, it will need to be good, it will need to yoke together two incompatibles and exhibit slippy semantic qualities: it must make clear that Jodhi is not liking another boy, while at the same time indicating that Leela is not a naughty dirty fat liar.

  “Amma,” Leela whispers, conspiratorially, “Amma, you see Amma, this is what I am knowing, the thing is…”

  Amma hunches down lower as she waits for the revelation, stripping the garlic cloves at top speed; if there were a world championship in garlic-peeling, Amma would win it hands down with this kind of performance, the stripped cloves are dropping into the plastic bowl at three-second intervals; Pushpa, on the other hand, has stopped working altogether. She concentrates on looking at the drenched handkerchief in her lap, wondering not so much what Leela is going to say, but whether on earth it will be true or not.

  “Amma, somebody told me that somebody saw Jodhi wearing a pair of jeans.”

  Jeans! Amma thinks.

  Jeans? Pushpa puzzles.

  Jeans?! Leela asks herself desperately; where did that come from? But although the revelation has been dredged from a very small and obscure cranny of her back-to-the-wall imagination, it is by no means a bad effort. Hardly anyone wears jeans in Mullaipuram, maybe a few people who frequent Hotel Sangam and Friends, and some of the students at the Madurai University-affiliated college in Mullaipuram, young rich people who have been abroad.

  Amma struggles to comprehend what a pair of jeans cladding the slender hips of her eldest daughter might signify.

  “Must be at college she is wearing these jeans?” she says.

  “At college,” Leela confirms solemnly.

  “Just one time she was seen or more than once?”

  “Just one time Amma.”

  “Hmmph…”

  Leela and Pushpa anxiously wait for her considered reaction. She is deep in thought and peeling cloves of garlic ever more effectively, her fingers a whirl of activity, her jaw working overtime as she ponders that small and enigmatic word, jeans, jeans, jeans, while the cloves of garlic drop, drop, drop into the bowl… No, she is not happy about these jeans; jeans represent a world she knows nothing about, jeans might be suspicious, jeans could mean anything from nothing to everything and all the terrible things that come in between – all the things that are much worse than nothing, and almost as bad as everything. These jeans could mean that Jodhi is blameless, but these jeans could mean that she is drenched in the all-out western decadence and moral degeneracy of – and Amma’s eyes clench shut momentarily at the worst-case Chennai-bar-girl scenario – drinking and smoking and secret unsuitable boyfriends…

  “And this you are knowing for sure, Leela?” she asks, thin-lipped.

  “No Amma – I am just telling you what I am hearing, you can imagine what it made me think – but I’m not knowing if it is true or not.”

  “Leela, you are a very foolish girl! Very bad girl! Why did you imagine what you imagined in front of the boy’s family like that?”

  “Yes Amma. Sorry, Amma.”

  “Don’t imagine things out loud any more!”

  “Yes Amma.”

  “Do it in your imagination, that is the place for it!”

  “Sorry, Amma. Yes Amma.”

  Clever Leela – she breathes more easily, knowing she has got herself off the hook as lightly as she could have hoped for.

  “Don’t be doing anything like this again!”

  “No Amma. Sorry, Amma.”

  “Hmmph.” Amma’s scolding is automatic, she is barely attending to it, her overactive thoughts are racing around the situation of her eldest daughter. Is the girl wearing jeans or not, and if so, what is the purpose behind such disturbing and exotic behaviour? She turns it all over in her head, and misses Pushpa scowling at Leela, Leela sticking her tongue out childishly at Pushpa. What is to be done? How to get to the bottom of this business? How to do the best thing for Jodhi and land her that handsome boy-wonder for a lifetime of marital security and wifely status and unfettered shopping?

  “Yes, just you keep out of it from now on, you naughty child.”

  “Yes Amma.”

  “You naughty…”

  “Sorry, Amma.”

  “You listen to me,” Amma says conspiratorially, leaning towards Leela and Pushpa, at last granting temporary respite to the remaining unpeeled cloves of garlic, “you just keep your eyes open for any more of this fishy jeans business, go with her when you can, be following her to college sometimes, be meeting her unexpectedly, be finding out what she is doing and who she is doing it with. Understand? If Jodhi is really wearing jeans, I want to know about it, I want to know when and where and who with!”

  “Yes Amma.”
r />   “Yes Amma.”

  It will take more than a pair of jeans to prevent Amma from marrying Jodhi to the computer genius… She shifts from squatting to cross-legged, and gets started on the garlic cloves again.

  “You girls, you listen,” she abruptly chastises them, “not a word about these jeans to anyone, understand?”

  “Yes Amma.”

  “Yes Amma, of course Amma.”

  “Not – to – anyone!”

  The scandalous insertion of Jodhi’s dainty legs into blue denim is an image that resides in these three heads and in no others – after all, it was only a few minutes ago that Leela made this nonsense up. And if, tomorrow, you interrogate any one of these three heads, all three heads will swear blind to sporting sealed lips, zipped lips, lips welded together with titanium rivets. What an incredible mystery, then, that within twenty-four hours the matter of Jodhi’s deplorable jean-wearing activities is an open secret throughout Mullaipuram.

  * * *

  The P family home is a superior dwelling to Swami’s dilapidated IPS-owned, British-built soldier’s bungalow. After thirty-one years’ employment with the Indian Railways, starting as a refrigeration mechanic and rising to the level of Assistant Station Supervisor, Mr P earns a salary double that of anything achieved by Swami. And notwithstanding Mrs P’s pitiless efficiency in converting his hard-won cash into edible matter, he has been a careful steward of his earnings, putting aside at least twenty per cent a month since he was nineteen years old. These savings, and the sale of a small plot of land in his ancestral village following the death of his father, have recently allowed Mr and Mrs P to achieve a long-cherished ambition: they have moved into a brand-new apartment in Thenpalani’s third most respectable area; it is a spacious four-roomer on the second floor of a gleaming-white concrete low-rise, just by a Tata Agricultural Peripherals Ltd regional office, with a balcony overlooking the Bharat Petroleum garage.