White Man Falling

by Mike Stocks

  It is two days since the sweat-drenched and flesh-shudderingly awful catastrophe of Mohan and Jodhi’s date. Mr P and his youngest son Anand are in the shiny new living room of their shiny new home, slouched on the considerably less shiny and far from new plastic chairs of their old home, watching a test match on TV. The windows are open, and a single battered rotating fan stands on a table in front of them. They share its faint breeze, moving their faces in slow sweeps, left to right, right to left, to maximize its meagre respite from the stultifying heat.

  India and England are battling through the third day of the test in Nagpur. England’s strong position has not been worrying them unduly, but now Sachin Tendulkar has been clean-bowled for three in his second over, and the father and son are awash with the disappointment of seeing their god unmasked as a man.

  “See that big, hulking, clumsy bowler there, what is his name again?”

  “Hoggard.”

  “Yes him – what is he doing, bowling out Sachin? Doesn’t he realize Sachin is our best player?”

  “Appa, England are trying to win.”

  “That is the problem with these foreigners coming to India. Wherever they are going in India they are abusing our hospitality. This Hog fellow, now he is ruining my day completely! As if we don’t have enough to put up with, with that weeping lover-boy in there, mental-break-downing all over the place!”

  “Yes Appa,” Anand says wearily. As it happens, he’s not feeling too good himself, he rather feels like doing what Mohan is doing.

  Mohan is much too busy to watch the cricket. He is engaged in the laborious and time-consuming activity of lying face-down on his bed for sixteen hours. He has risen only twice during that time – once to urinate, and once to hurl How to Attract Women out of the window and onto the large flat roof of the Bharat Petroleum garage, where it will lie – bleached and baked by the sun – for many months, until the next wet sweeps it away and turns it into pulp.

  “Come on, my very own Rajah, my King,” Mrs P is murmuring at his bedside, stroking his hair, caressing the back of his neck, “don’t be sad, everything will turn out all right, don’t upset your Amma like this, Mohan.” In some despair she looks at her middle son’s prone body; he is flat out, head turned away from her, face buried in his arms, beyond her reach. She has appropriated two of the household’s three fans and trained them on his unmoving form, so that in his desolation he doesn’t overheat. His shirt collar flaps in the breeze.

  “Mohan, Mohana, Mohan kannu… See, my pet, what very best snacks I have for you! How hungry you must be, my life…”

  Mohan is refusing to eat, even though his mother has assembled an ever more tantalizing and comprehensive array of titbits to tempt the lovelorn loser out of his sullen self-pity.

  “See, look at what I’ve got for you—” and she dangles some home-made halva over his head, saying “Mmmmmm” and – who can blame her, it would be a shame to waste it – she pops it into her mouth. “Delicious, baby, don’t let Amma eat it all! Amma will get fat,” she suggests, thirty years too late.

  Can nothing ease Mohan out of his face-down hunger strike? Not even the most lip-wetting sweetest luxury nibbles? Not even the sound of Mrs P ripping into them like a combine harvester going through a ripened crop?

  “Mohan chellam, you cannot be lying down here like this for the rest of your life.”

  From the living room comes a commentator’s glum pronouncement – “He’s out, he’s out, another wicket tumbling!” – and groans of dismay from Anand and Mr P, and then a frustrated “Wife, leave that stupid lover-boy in there alone!” from Mr P. “Stop humouring him, wife! He’ll get up when he’s hungry!”

  Poor Mohan; his passion for Jodhi is of boundless extent, but he knows that when it comes to her passion for him, boundless is not the first word that trips off the tongue. Is it any wonder that he just wants to lie face-down and die? His every hope with her keeps getting dashed, and all because of her father receiving a white man on his head, being abducted, dying and living again and becoming God – how can a young girl concentrate on falling in love, even with the holder of the Sri Aandiappan Swamigal Tamil Nadu Information Superhighway Endowment Scholarship, when the father is pulling off amazing stunts like that? Mohan groans aloud just thinking about it all. It’s been downhill ever since he ecstatically walked Jodhi to the Tamil Nadu Milk Board outlet during their first pre-engagement meeting, and pointed out that a goat was a goat. The romance and sweet intimacy of that brief walk is something he still cherishes every sleepless night of his life – and in the traditional manner – as he lies awake in bed thinking of his true love. Since then, Jodhi is evading meetings; Jodhi is complicating negotiations between the parents; Jodhi isn’t answering most of his long and passionate emails, and is replying with brusque two-liners to the rest…

  “Come now, my brave King, my eyes, help your mummy-amma help you, talk to amma-mummy.”

  “Amma, she’s not going to marry me,” he says into his pillow.

  “What? What’s that?” Sixteen hours of silence and now she misses it, she couldn’t catch a word, she leans down close and strains to hear.

  “Not going to marry me,” Mohan repeats fatly.

  “Mohan, why are you saying this? What are these worries? Everything will be fixed, only yesterday I am speaking to the mother, you know how much she likes you; it is the mothers who decide what happens, my son, not the daughters. I will have a daughter-in-law in a few months!”

  “Likes another boy.”

  “What Mohan? What’s that?”

  “Other boy.”

  “No my Son, all this is cleared up, I am telling you this already, the younger sister is a very naughty girl, she is making it up.”

  “No Amma.”

  “Yes Mohan.”

  “No Amma.”

  “Yes Mohan.”

  “Jeans.”

  “What’s that, my darling ?”

  “Jeans.”

  “What’s that?”

  Mohan spins round and shouts, “Jeans! She is flying around here and there and everywhere with other boys in jeans, Amma! Everyone knows it! She is trying to make complete fool of me!”

  5

  Having shaved their chins and trimmed their moustaches with extra-scrupulous care, and having chastised their wives to iron their shirts with extra elbow grease and backbone, the off-duty and impeccably turned-out Murugesan and Apu are about to make contact with D.D. Rajendran. They are speeding along on Apu’s scooter, bouncing over the potholes of the illegal road that DDR has built to connect his house to the main road more directly. They arrive – rather apprehensively – at the mansion on the outskirts of town. Murugesan steps off the back and smoothes down his trousers as Apu parks the bike nearby. Two guards greet them at the compound gate of Mullaipuram Mansions.

  “He’s at home?” Murugesan asks; he thinks he knows one of these guards, the fatter one with the badly stitched-up harelip. Murugesan racks his brains – he’s sure he arrested him once, yes, for assault, three or four years ago. The fellow was sentenced to nine years, but Murugesan is neither surprised nor disappointed to see him now; it attests to DDR’s extrajudicial influence.

  “Yes Saar.”

  “Give him this and find out if he can see us – we’ll wait here.”

  “Saar,” the guard says, taking the envelope from Murugesan, “you can be coming inside and waiting there.”

  “No, here is fine.”

  Murugesan steps into the shade of the high wall of the compound and squats down on his haunches, looking at the horizon – Mullaipuram’s tatty skyline – across a mile or two of wasteland, fields, scrub, building plots, light industry. Apu joins him.

  “So hot,” Apu complains.

  * * *

  This is a time of great flux and personal development for DDR. With his slack pot belly in his lap and his snorting paraplegic dog at his side, he is sitting at a snooker-table-sized desk in his office, fiddling with Bobby’s ears as he flicks through s
ome paperwork. Bobby grunts ecstatically, sounding not unlike DDR’s mysterious and reclusive wife on those rare occasions when DDR grants her some physical attention.

  If this year had gone as expected and planned and financed, DDR would at this very moment be campaigning in the state elections for a seat in the Legislature. Yes, he would be hitting the dusty election trail in a fleet of honking, tooting, speeding 4x4s, he would be standing on the backs of Maruti vans in godforsaken hellholes, declaiming his promises to slack-jawed villagers: lower taxes, bigger subsidies, less corruption, cleaner water, cheaper gas, better crops, better cricketers, better politicians, fewer potholes, more happiness, computer access for all, supplementary nuclear weapons and victory in Kashmir. There would be free ghee today and tomorrow and the day after tomorrow for old people, children, newly-weds, widows, married couples, pregnant mothers, educationally deprived fathers, the disabled, the backward classes, the scheduled classes, the middle classes, the advantaged classes, the jobless, the workers, retired freedom fighters, reformed criminals, tribals, pensioners, students, farmers, landless labourers, women, men, eunuchs and livestock. During such soaring flights of oratory – which will now never take place – his henchmen would have been distributing pens and sweets to excited squabbling children, while his senior team would be in some village elder’s house, drinking tea and buying votes with hard cash. Sometimes the backing of a village leader or a dominant family or a revered matriarch with a face like a jungle bison could sew up every available vote in the entire village. Sometimes even more favourable results can occur: one astute local politician of DDR’s acquaintance is known to have secured the votes of 746 people from a village with only 545 registered voters – now that is the kind of supercharged very best special turbo democracy that could once make DDR’s heart swell with pride: the democratic process in action, such as the heroes and freedom fighters of India’s Independence fought for and suffered for and died for. And so, somewhere on this earth or elsewhere, there is a small and misty-eyed avatar of D.D. Rajendran that regrets sacrificing his political aspirations – either for the TDTTM Party or the DTTTM Party, he was never quite sure which one he’d plump for – for the sake of Swamiji.

  But only a small part. Since a long time ago, even before the coming of Swamiji, the starved and monobrowed inner ape of DDR’s conscience has been making guttural protests about its filthy living conditions, jumping up and down angrily and evolving in crude leaps towards a new morality. One could argue that this new morality is as rank as a rotting fish in the hot, but at least it represents an improvement on DDR’s old morality, which was as rank as two rotting fish in the hot.

  From where does such affecting moral improvement spring? Perhaps it is from DDR’s metaphysical anguish. His deeply credulous inner longings have been tormenting him for a couple of years with irksome physical manifestations: sleepless nights, a spotty back, and hard, knobbly, once-a-week stools. The doctor cannot explain these ailments – and DDR doesn’t expect him too. DDR knows they are symptoms of his mental corruption. Sometimes he finds himself looking long and hard into Bobby’s blameless eyes as if to fathom how a paraplegic dog in a handcart, a dog without the wherewithal even to wag its own tail, can be as happy as Bobby is – and with such frequent and unproblematic bowel motions.

  The result of all this is that DDR has reached a stage in his life when he can hardly be bothered to get richer and more powerful. To most observers this might seem an obvious manifesto for less anguish, more meaning, better happiness and extra fun, but if you consider the tiny proportion of rich and powerful people that tends to implement such a common-sense policy, then you may wish to concede that DDR is a veritable saint among the filthy rich.

  The coming of the guru Swamiji has advanced and accelerated the ramifications and intensity of DDR’s life changes. He has visited Swami five times already in Thendraloor, and experienced with his own mind the blessed peace of the hour of silence – and a racing imagination afterwards. He has sought, and believes he has been granted, Swami’s permission to develop the outline of a kind of spiritual business plan for the guru to follow in his teachings and dealings with devotees. He has sat down with an overawed Amma and sketched out these plans – the way forwards, the ashram, the social work, the short-term steps, the long-term vision. He has not felt so energized and excited for years.

  What about his old guru, Sri Sri Dravidananda Gurkkal? Pah, says D.D. Rajendran, Sri Sri Dravidananda Gurkkal is an ordinary human link to the godhead – good fellow, tries hard, but anyone can get a funny tattoo and claim to have penetrated to the starting point of the centre of the spiral of all knowledge… being with the Guru Swamiji is in another realm of experience entirely. DDR sits back in his chair and sighs like a lover; to be with Swamiji is to know, however briefly, that the truth behind things is peace in the present tense.

  There is only one fly in the ointment. A white man was abused by the police in one of his hotels; he launched himself from a window on the seventh floor, and died in the street below. Anyone who is serious about following the Guru Swamiji will, sooner or later, have to confront this little difficulty. For DDR, it is sooner.

  * * *

  He looks up at the two off-duty police officers standing respectfully in front of him as they stumble their way through an incomprehensible preamble. After a time he looks back down at the note that they had written to him:

  Respected Sir,

  We are friends and devotees of the new guru Swamiji. We wish to talk to you in confidence about important super-extra-special matter.

  Sub-Inspector K.P. Murugesan

  Constable S.P. Apumudali.

  “…is when I knew he was guiding my journey from afar,” Apu is saying.

  “Guiding from afar?” DDR asks.

  “Sir, I am ashamed to tell you my guilty action in full, what I did to Swamiji, but I have been going backwards and forwards and here and there and everywhere in my head, wondering what it all means, wondering how to confront Swamiji with my filthy black deeds, how to pay for the deed I did, and then I started to understand, Sir.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “No – I mean, what is it that you started to understand?”

  Apu puffs himself up in a kind of vicarious pride for Swami.

  “That there is no need for me to tell Swamiji anything like this – he is already knowing, and guiding me towards correct resolution.”

  “What resolution?”

  “Sir, I am not fully certain yet,” Apu admits, “but I know Swamiji is leading me closer and closer to it. That is why I’m standing in front of you now.”

  “And the same with me Sir,” Murugesan chips in. “I was not comfortable with my conduct in relation to the guru, and several times I am seeking him out and trying to tell him, but all the time he is knowing my situation better than myself, and is guiding me towards my decision in very best direction.”

  “But – what decision?” DDR asks

  “I am not completely sure at this precise minute, Sir,” Murugesan admits. “We are coming here today to talk to you about this…”

  DDR rests back in his chair, twiddling the tips of his fingers together lightly, glancing from Apu to Murugesan and then back to Apu again. There is much he doesn’t understand about this, and something he doesn’t like. What has any of it got to do with him?

  The three of them remain silent for a while, Murugesan and Apu standing in front of the desk uneasily, DDR looking up at them. At times Apu can’t help flicking his glance towards the bloated hound marooned in its handcart next to D.D. Rajendran; and Bobby, as though to register a dirty protest at the arrival of these visitors who have distracted his master from tickling him, distends his jaws in a foul-smelling yawn, which triggers certain processes within, so that a small coil of excrement extrudes from his back passage at a slow and regular speed. DDR watches it – rather enviously – then shouts “Boy!” – and Bobby’s boy runs in immediately, wraps up the turd in scraps of ne
wspaper, cleans up the cart, washes Bobby’s bottom with an old rag and a plastic beaker of water, and exits. He feeds two TB-riddled parents by such skills. The policemen watch with a morbid fascination.

  “But – I am just not understanding why you are coming to me to tell me all this,” DDR says eventually, after the boy has disappeared.

  Apu rubs at his chin, says “Yes Sir” and “Well Sir” and “The thing is Sir” and falls silent.

  “It is about the white man, Sir,” Murugesan offers, at last. “That is how this began, that is what connects us all, isn’t it…”

  A frown steals across DDR’s forehead, narrowing his eyes. His heartbeat gets faster without him knowing why. “What about the white man? What has he got to do with anything?”

  “Sir, this white man…” Murugesan hesitates – and yes, it is true that a seasoned observer of his moustache would detect the makings of a twitch – “…this white man, his unfortunate death was creating the problems for me, and for Apu, and also for you Sir, little bit…” No answer from DDR, who seems suspended between an admission and a denial, so Murugesan presses on. “Sir, we are feeling very anxious that we are risking your angry feelings, but this white man, this white man who fell on Swamiji on that fateful day, his unfortunate case is not just a matter of right and wrong and what-all – that is what I am coming to understand through my meditations on the guru Swamiji—”

  For DDR, it had seemed as though the white man ceased to be a problem long ago, when the heat of the case cooled down and the authorities lost interest; since Swami became Swamiji, he has hardly thought about such ancient history, he has been absorbed in plans for the future. Are the repercussions of that white man plummeting from his second-worst hotel still reverberating?

  “I am not sure how or why,” Murugesan is saying, when DDR shows no signs of replying, “but right from the beginning I was seeing something I was not understanding about Swamiji and this white fellow, Sir. When Swamiji was Swami, I just hoped it was all a damn-fool business, I couldn’t understand why my old friend and colleague was becoming troublemaker to us all for the sake of this dead foreigner. But now, when we know that Swami became Swamiji, well, if you think about it, and if you know what we know…” – he gestures at Apu and himself – “…then—”