White Man Falling

by Mike Stocks

  Apu’s chest is broad and smooth and muscled; Murugesan’s chest is broad and hairy and strong and running to fat; and there is DDR’s chest, which lies beneath sloping shoulders – the lightly haired, slack-toned, flab-layered pigeon-chest of a thin man gone to seed. He hunches over his stomach, round-backed, his slack man breasts quivering when he shifts position. His dark-brown nipples droop down and almost touch the pot belly lying in the trough of his lungi like a deflated football in a hammock.

  “Thank you sir,” Apu says.

  “Yes, thank you sir,” Murugesan agrees.

  “Call me Brother, Brothers.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Yes sir.”

  The mood they share is a mix of comforting and spiritual aspects: relief, resolution, redemption, catharsis. There is a certain dreaminess there, too, and who could be surprised at that? Wouldn’t you feel the same, if an emaciated elderly priest in a loincloth – the son of a priest descended from priests stretching back into antiquity – had rubbed sacred ash on your forehead in that holy place, while reciting mantras that were first composed over three thousand years ago? Mantras that have been memorized backwards from one generation to the next to ensure that not a word will ever change or be corrupted? Mantras that have been recited millions and millions of times over thousands of years to hundreds of long-dead kings and thousands of long-dead artists and numberless long-dead ordinary Hindus? These are not some johnny-come-lately rites, tacking and gybing according to the prevailing cultural winds.

  The decision to undergo a ritual purification ceremony is no light matter for the three men. It is a solemn preparatory step in the process that lies ahead of them, for they are going to face up to what they have done. At an appropriate time, they are going to hand in written testaments to the authorities about their various transgressions in connection with the death of the white man and the subsequent cover-up, and accept with equanimity the consequences. DDR will probably be the least affected. If his political aspirations had remained intact, then his strenuous efforts to deflect attention away from Hotel Ambuli could have been damaging. But what does he care now for the dazzling machinations of politics?

  It is a different story for the other two. Murugesan’s efforts to cover up on behalf of his colleagues risk a severe penalty – a demotion at best, possibly dismissal. As for Apu, the loss of his job is a certainty, and the prospect of prison is likely.

  “Swamiji will be excellently pleased with us,” Murugesan suggests.

  “When shall we tell the guru?” Apu asks.

  “When he is coming back, when he is rested, then we are telling him,” DDR answers authoritatively.

  They fall into silence again. Small children are racing around in the courtyard, squabbling and bartering violence. A lame old woman limps through their chaos with extreme difficulty, leaning on a wooden staff, muttering to herself. The three men watch her painful progress absent-mindedly.

  “Swamiji is already knowing our decision,” Apu says blithely. “Only the detail he is not knowing.”

  No one replies.

  “I wish he would come back,” Apu sighs. “It could be months.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” DDR answers, “he’ll be back in days.”

  “Sir?”

  “Please be calling me Brother.”

  “Brother, sir.”

  “I am speaking to his wife this morning, she is writing him the letters nearly every day, he is not listening to her advice, he is insisting he is coming back to Mullaipuram, to a normal life. So when he has decided the day, I will bring him back in a mighty convoy.”

  “Thanks be to God!” Apu says. He can hardly wait to confess his transgressions before Swami. Indeed, he fervently longs to turn himself in to the authorities, he yearns to bring shame upon his entire family, he’s desperate to go to a hellhole of a prison where the inmates will persecute him, he’s ecstatic about leaving his wife and child to struggle on without him – it feels like the least he can do. Such is the power of faith.

  “Normal life in Mullaipuram,” Murugesan muses. “That is not going to happen, Mullaipuram will go crazy when he comes back.”

  DDR has a strange look about him; the power and the responsibility of his new life are settling upon him, like a richly embroidered ceremonial shawl being laid across his shoulders.

  “The Guru Swamiji is humble,” he declares, “and does not realize his own power. He changes lives. He is like the most precious jewel,” DDR suggests, with an impressive rhetorical bent, “which is forever unaware of its own fathomless beauty and value…”

  “Adaa-daa-daa,” whispers Apu, in admiration of this inspired poetry.

  “Such a jewel,” DDR continues, “is in need of a powerful steward to secure its destiny, and such a steward is in need of faithful guards to protect the jewel from, from… from hanky-panky,” DDR says. Perhaps his impressive rhetorical powers have let him down a little bit at this point, but he recovers his position soon enough. “Such a jewel – the jewel we have been blessed with – requires a magnificent setting in which everyone can admire its awe-inspiring beauty.”

  DDR’s eyes close, and he breathes in the ecstatic oxygen of the right-hand man of the Guru Swamiji – he is imagining the glorious spectacle that will occur when he brings Swami back to his hometown. Meanwhile, the eyes of Murugesan and Apu widen; they have seen, for the first time, where D.D. Rajendran is coming from.

  * * *

  A few days later, at 6.30 a.m. in the dusty bus station at Thendraloor, Swami is sitting by the street stalls in a red plastic chair offered by the manager of a one-booth STD-ISD telephone outlet. Kamala squats on her haunches, one protective hand lying across their two suitcases. A crowd of onlookers and passers-by and snivelling devotees is building up, impeding the buses that are arriving and departing every ten minutes. For Swami is leaving his refuge at Highlands. He is abandoning the daily hour of silence in the jungle clearing, he is leaving behind his solitary dawn meditations, he is removing himself from the hopes and dreams of the ruined, the broken-boned, the withered-limbed, the cancerous, the beaten, and all those trusting individuals who are forever assuming he is on the brink of interceding in their miserable destinies.

  “Appa, any water, Appa?”

  Swami grunts a no.

  “I hope the bus isn’t late, Appa, too many people are here.”

  Some people are shocked that a man whom they believe to be a living godhead intends to board a common bus to transport his corporeal matter back to Mullaipuram – how can such a dirty workhorse as a municipal bus be an appropriate mount for someone who has walked with God? A few of the most credulous are puzzled as to why Swami is bothering to engage with the tiresome constraints of time and space at all – why doesn’t he just project himself to Mullaipuram instantly, via a handy astral plane? And while the majority of people wouldn’t go as far as that, most of them feel that a more impressive vehicle is required. They desire their guru to be worthy of their awe. After all, the very biggest contemporary holy men swan around in fleets of air-conditioned luxury cars while police keep the roads clear of other traffic; during processions they repose in huge paladins carried by teams of human donkeys, as lackeys fan them down with banana leaves; on long-distance trips they charter their own planes, or are flown around in private jets lent to them by murky industrialists. And so while the devotees are impressed by the humble simple lifestyle of their guru, they wouldn’t mind witnessing dashes of extravagant splendour, too, to set off his praiseworthy humility. A facility to entertain paradoxes with equanimity has always been a signal feature of spiritual sensitivity at the highest levels.

  “Appa, maybe we can sit somewhere private, this crowd is definitely in strange mood…”

  Swami doesn’t reply. He intends to sit here while the bus is not here, and get on the bus when the bus is here. What could be simpler than that? But it’s true that something strange is in the air. The crowd would like to sit at Swami’s feet and have the freedom to wa
llow in his proximity, but there is no room or opportunity to settle anywhere for long, buses would mow them down, and the early morning’s regular travellers are milling around everywhere. So an unseemly pulsing throng is pushing here and there according to the arrival and departure of the buses, and with increasing frequency people are yelling warnings: “Give the guru room,” and “Sisters, Brothers, don’t crowd Guru Swamiji!”

  Oh dear, this throng is not happy with the guru’s undignified predicament. There are dark mutterings about D.D. Rajendran; everyone knows by now that he is the guru’s fixer, surely he should have taken this matter in hand and ensured that the guru’s dignity is not abused in this way? But they are wrong to hold DDR at fault. DDR fully intended to arrive at Highlands on the appropriate day with three silver Mercedes, a Toyota Land Cruiser and a battered van of heavies, each vehicle bearing resplendent flags and very loud horns and supremely arrogant drivers. He had hoped to escort the guru back to Mullaipuram in a triumphant high-speed convoy – up to forty miles an hour at times – of non-stop tooting, parping triumphalism. It is Swami who has jumped the gun, travelling home of his own volition several days before he had intimated, thereby cheating DDR and Mullaipuram and the world of the splendour they require.

  Or has he? You see, it starts when the bus arrives. Once the driver and the conductor have overcome their amazement at seeing the new Guru Swamiji hobbling towards their battered old vehicle – he is orbited by a semi-hysterical retinue of devotees, who squabble over the two suitcases that are being passed overhead – they help Kamala to manhandle the great man up the three steep steps and inside. Swami sits down with his daughter on a seat two-thirds of the way down the bus. Then the driver gets back into his seat, a little discomfited, and confers with the conductor who is standing in the open doorway, also a little confused. For there are no other passengers climbing into the bus.

  “Mullaipuram!” shouts the conductor. “Mullaipuram Mullaipuram Mullaipuram Mullaipurammmmmm!”

  He has wads of differently coloured tickets wedged between the fingers of his left hand, and a leather bag at his waist full of coins, and pockets stuffed with low-denomination notes; he has seventeen years of experience, he can conduct a bus like a maestro can conduct an orchestra, he can thread through a swaying jam-packed bus from one end to the other and sell the correct ticket to every passenger without missing anyone or forgetting who is owed some change and who is in debt. He is a supremely accomplished bus conductor, and furthermore, this bus goes via the rail link at Kodai Road, and so is the means by which people can travel on to the large cities of Madurai, Chennai, Coimbatore. Finally, there are at least one hundred people in and around Thendraloor who got up very early this morning with the intention of barging and fighting and abusing their way onto this bus, taking with them their baggage and their sacks of grain and their chickens and, in one case, a goat with three legs.

  Despite all these important details and pressing contingencies, no one is getting on the bus.

  “Mullaipurammmmmm!” shouts the conductor, desperately, scanning the crowd that is gathered by the bus. If one person clambered in, surely the rest would follow? But it’s no good – no one wishes to be the first to put themselves on an equal footing with the guru.

  “Give us another bus!” shouts a young man with a pencil-thin moustache.

  “This is the Mullaipuram bus!” shouts the conductor, exasperated, “if you people want to go to Mullaipuram, get on the bus, and if you don’t, then go to hell! Mullaipurammmmmmm!”

  Meanwhile the driver has walked down the bus to speak to Swami.

  “Guruji saar, they are not getting on the bus because of very greatest respect for you, what shall I do saar guruji?”

  Swami looks at Kamala, exasperated, then looks out of the window and down at a knot of people who are standing in solemn reverence below his window.

  “Appa is definitely wanting everyone to get on the bus,” Kamala tells the driver, and Swami nods his approval.

  “Yes guruji.”

  The driver tramps up to the front of the bus, and interrupts the conductor, who is still cursing people willy-nilly – “How can you have another bus, you monkeys?” the conductor is exclaiming, “there isn’t another bus, can I just summon up another bus because you monkeys are wishing it?! This is the bus!” The conductor cocks his head to listen to the driver’s urgent advice, then turns back to the crowd. “Mullaipuram! Guru Swamiji says it is your duty to get on this bus, this is the guru’s official position, he is not wanting you to stand there refusing to get on the bus! Mullaipuram Mullaipuram Mullaipurammmmmm!”

  It’s no good. No one will get on that bus – not when an aspect of the living godhead appears to be sitting in it, as plain as a spot on the end of your nose; not even when the station supervisor comes bustling over, and gets mobbed with voluble complaints. He waves his clipboard around as though that might help – perhaps it does, in some situations – and mops his brow with a big handkerchief, and is helpless in the face of these demands to conjure up a second bus that will tail the first bus respectfully all the way to Mullaipuram.

  “What am I?” he is shouting rhetorically, “what am I? Am I instant-bus manufacturer? Am I Managing Director of Tata Buses Supernatural Inc., Instant Bus Department? What am I?!”

  “You are lazy stupid son of a prostitute!” someone shouts – he is furious that the bus company has not thought to lay on a second bus, given that it is only fair and proper that the guru should take the first. A scuffle breaks out.

  The driver of the bus has seen enough. He revs up the roaring belching beast under his command, and with the conductor still shouting “Mullaipuram, Mullaipurammmmm!” the bus sets off.

  “Swamijiiiii!”

  “Gurujiiiiii!”

  “Guru Swamijiiiiii!”

  Devotees are running along with the bus, beating on the side panels as they say goodbye. The bus turns out of the station calamitously, pursued by loping supplicants. A lazing stray dog doesn’t get out of the way quickly enough – it yelps as the vehicle runs over its tail, and bolts away shakily. The bus picks up speed. Swami and Kamala are watching out of the window, Swami with his now trademark one-handed namaskaram. Then he turns to face forwards, a glum look on his face.

  What to do? If people would just leave him alone, perhaps he would live in the present tense more often than not, without a thought in his head, without a care in the world… If people would just leave him alone, perhaps he could perceive his moment-by-moment experience with full force, never identifying anything with a limiting name or cataloguing its components or comparing it to other experiences… Something has happened to Swami that makes him receptive at times to a wisdom, the kind that the religions usually ignore, the kind that is known as it happens and then let go, rather than the kind with objectives to be analysed and clawed for. It longs to exist in a vacuum, which is why its purchase is so tenuous.

  But Swami can’t think anything for long. Thinking bores him intensely. Coming back from death seems to have altered his hard-wiring so that he naturally avoids thought where possible. Important strategic decisions are facing him – how to deal with Jodhi’s marriage, how to live with his family in his new guise as guru, and how to deal with responsibilities and structures that are assembling around him without his input or interest or comprehension – but his default condition is acceptance. He clutches Kamala’s hand. They watch the passing scenes as the Mullaipuram bus negotiates the messy outskirts of Thendraloor, admiring a grassed area adorned by sheets that have been washed in the river by Vannaan folk and are now drying in the sun. Soon he isn’t looking at anything much. He is like a sleeping, helpless baby in a cot, whose overpowering appeal feeds every action and anxiety of those orbiting that small life, who can’t help loving it, though it is selfish and unaware.

  The vehicle roars down the roads, through the jungle of the Western Ghats, round the crumbling hairpins that the British supervised, bearing, for the first time in the history of the 6.3
0 a.m. Thendraloor-Mullaipuram bus – it is a very small and distinct part of history, that no historian has yet covered – only two passengers. The driver sits straight-backed and portentous as he contemplates his good fortune in being a chariot-driver to the gods; this is a story that he will relate for the rest of his life. He is intent on the perfect bus drive. If he can help it, this will be a bus drive to surpass all others – he has never accelerated and decelerated so smoothly, nor taken corners with such remarkable efficiency and finesse. Admittedly he ran over a dog, but that was at the beginning, and since then he’s been superb. Sometimes he finds himself imagining he is in a film, undertaking an important mission on behalf of the great will of the universe that is Brahma, and at those times he unconsciously looks out of narrowed eyes with a certain swaggering arrogance. But as for the conductor, alas, he does not derive such satisfaction. For a whole hour he is lost in an agony of indecision: should he ask the guru to buy a ticket, because the guru would prefer to be treated as everyone else is treated? Or should he not ask the guru to buy a ticket – because, after all, gurus shouldn’t need tickets, should they?

  9

  In one way or another, it is said by many people of most faiths that God moves in mysterious ways. This is a truism that D.D. Rajendran has encountered several times as his involvement with the phenomenon that is the Guru Swamiji has grown. This morning, too, he finds that God has moved mysteriously. For while DDR and Bobby are enjoying their morning massage side by side, a flunkey apologetically interrupts them with the news that Swami has set off from Thendraloor, early, and in a bus…

  “Oh, no, oh no—” DDR moans, springing up and pushing his masseuse away. “A bus! What is the guru playing at, Bobby? What will the people think of him if he sits on a clanking bus next to a farmer whose behind is pressed up against a sack of millet?!”