White Man Falling

by Mike Stocks

  That vision of Swami’s yesterday – it was rubbish.

  Today’s is a bit better. Within minutes of sitting down, after he has thought about thought, and then thought about Jodhi, and then not thought about thought, nor thought about Jodhi, nor thought about anything, the emptiness settles – the emptiness he doesn’t know he has. His blank gaze somehow hints that the world might be relevant in some small way – perhaps this is why strangers get such succour from it? His lungi is hitched up so that he can flop his knees out to the sides, his spine hugs the banyan bark, and the slightly pointy bit at the back of his head rests against that 1,000-year-old tree. An immense vulture comes flapping over the roof of D.D. Rajendran’s tasteless residence and lands unceremoniously in front of Swami. Without hanging around or waiting for permission, it takes a couple of jumps forwards into Swami’s lap, then incorporates itself into his matter. Once it is part of him, it starts flying around his mental landscape of unbroken mountains and noisy jungle and, for some reason, a vast bicycle parking lot. Swami watches it fly around inside his head. Sometimes it descends onto a dead body – a decomposing goat, for example, or maybe just an ugly trunkless leg of some unidentified monster – and tears away at it, gobbling it down greedily till there’s nothing left but white bone. After a while it can’t find any more rotting matter to dispose of. Swami watches the bird emanate from his stomach and lurch onto the grass. It is noticeably fatter than before, and has some trouble taking wing, but finally it lumbers into the air and crests – just – the rooftop of DDR’s house.

  Going on strictly spiritual criteria, that vision isn’t so impressive either – but at least it means something, probably.

  After returning to the house for breakfast with his family, Swami goes and sits in a reception room in the main part of the house. He does this every morning these days, so that various people can access his silent wisdom – old acquaintances, visiting notables. DDR schedules the appointments, and administrates hefty donations from the rich towards his aspirations for an ashram. Kamala does her best to look after her father and make sure he doesn’t get too tired. But really, there’s nothing very tiring about doing nothing at all. It just requires sufficient peace of mind to be completely uninterested in what people say, and in who they are, and in what they think of you. Most of them give up talking when they get no reply, and many of them fall into Swami’s blankness with relief; they subside into a new state of consciousness, if only for an hour, one that they never quite forget even when going back to their compromised lives; one that changes some of them for the better.

  “Swamiji,” says the director of a private university near Coimbatore who accepts large bribes to matriculate very stupid boys, “what is honesty?” – he thinks that philosophy will help his low-down dirty doings. But Swami isn’t very good at philosophy any more.

  “Swamiji,” says an expensively bejewelled woman whose distinguished husband removes the kidneys from the torsos of poor malnourished landless labourers and puts them inside the torsos of rich overnourished foreigners, “Are there limits to matrimonial love?”

  “Swamiji,” says a gloomy youth sent here by his rich father for unspecified reasons, “why am I here?” – and that is definitely the best question so far.

  Swami sits on the simple, low platform that DDR has cobbled up at one end of the reception room, thinking and not thinking, ranging his glance over the faces that come and go, come and go, seeing some of them and not others. Sambrani incense is smouldering away in two elaborate copper holders, one on each side of the room. Kamala sits at the edge of the room – very occasionally she steps in to arrange Swami’s clothes, or to give him a glass of water. There is a small audience of other visitants waiting to see the guru. That is why most questions to the guru are couched so obliquely. Who wants to admit in public that he’s fleecing disabled pensioners of their alms money – even in front of some other crook who is stealing and selling off the state-subsidized cooking oil of a dozen orphanages?

  You’re putting on weight, says the white man – he is abruptly present, and for the first time Swami realizes that the white man’s mouth doesn’t move when he talks, even now, when he’s sitting next to the disconsolate youth in full bodily apparition.

  There’s no exercise here, Swami tells him. Am I really a god?

  Take your pick.

  I wasn’t sure…

  Everyone is, now and again. Few realize it when they’re alive.

  Is that what you realized when you died?

  I don’t know.

  “Beautiful,” says Swami, aloud, his eyelids flickering, his back hunching, his bad hand beginning to quiver.

  “Swamiji,” says the suspicious youth – his father once had sex with his wife and a prostitute on the same morning, and then in the afternoon cut a deal with a state politician that kept an innocent man in prison, so no wonder he thinks his son needs spiritual guidance – “Swamiji, you have gone all strange, please tell me what I am getting in my mid-term electrical engineering examinations.”

  “Shut up boy!” cries some voice offstage. “He is having the godly visitations!”

  Kamala is trying to keep people back, but the hue and cry is building up among the enthralled spectators, people surge forwards, within seconds the whispers are rushing down the corridors of Mullaipuram Mansions, expanding into open chambers, crashing like breakers upon various assemblies of astonished VIPs and elated servants; people start crowding into the room, and there’s nothing that Kamala can do about it. The Guru Swamiji is walking with the gods in front of everyone’s eyes.

  His body slips into a slack and precarious posture, drooping over to one side. His eyelids have stopped flickering, but his eyes are listless and half-closed, and there is some dribble hanging off his lower lip; it swings gently to and fro several times before latching onto his shirt. There is quite a crowd in the reception room now, and a whole heap of adaa-daaing, and here comes D.D. Rajendran sweeping into the room in a state of imperious anxiety.

  There is the Swami who is in some kind of catatonic trance – that particular Swami is being propped up by Kamala on the platform, quivering gently; and there is the Swami who is talking to the white man – this Swami, whether he exists in the spiritual world, or in Swami’s deluded head, or perhaps both if they ever prove to be much the same thing, has six arms. The three on the right side are a little weak and withered.

  Sometimes I know I have to tell everyone I’m not God.

  Go ahead. It doesn’t matter. They wouldn’t listen.

  I never do anything,

  Excellent. The living are always doing things.

  Why do I have to wait?

  I don’t know. Look, you’ve got six arms – you know what that means…

  Swami looks down at his six arms, and moves his six hands around under his own gaze – turning up the palms of one or two, clenching a fist with another and then opening it again, wiggling the fingers of a couple more. Oh my God! he exclaims.

  It’s wise not to get overexcited when this kind of thing occurs, because it might mean nothing. A really choice spot of science might ruin it all for ever one day. But it’s undeniably impressive when it seems to happen – even to Swami, who at this moment certainly appears to be a god, or as near as damn it, and a pretty substantial one too.

  The white man starts to ascend smoothly, levitating through the ceiling, disappearing.

  Are you coming back? Swami says with a note of regret, as he watches the ceiling suck up the white man’s thighs, knees, shins, ankles, feet.

  Swami keels over on his side in front of his rapt audience, who squeal and scream and yelp and hiss and whistle and shout and even pant with concern, and Kamala and DDR lay him out on the floor as some of DDR’s staff start to clear the room. Swami has a really lovely sleep.

  12

  “Guru or no guru, walking with the gods or not, this cannot carry on any more!” Mr P is announcing at a small family gathering – they are supposed to be celebrating Anand�
�s amazing admission into one of the few colleges within a hundred miles that hasn’t rejected him several times before, or kicked him out already. The world-class expert in sleeping, with his penchant for writing unreadably bad poetry and contemplating the three dimensions of mundane objects for reasons that he can’t or won’t articulate, has been forced by his parents into studying for a Masters in Business Administration.

  The ghastly apparition of Anand’s brother Mohan is ruining this happy gathering. Mohan exudes the joie de vivre quotient of a depressive who has been charged with escorting a bleating kid through a compound of starving tigers, and the mild-mannered Mr P, whose bad tempers normally only get as far as exasperation before subsiding once more into affability, has had enough.

  “We must have a resolution!” he declares. “It is becoming an insult!” he more or less thunders.

  Maybe it’s the authority vested in his uniform that is making him so vigorous at this moment, for he is testing out a new uniform, identical to his old one in all respects except that it is slightly bigger. It is slightly bigger because he is slightly bigger. He has been getting slightly bigger all his adult life. Mrs P is looking forward to polishing the buttons on that jacket. She likes her husband to have the second-shiniest buttons at Mullaipuram Station. She feels that only the Station Director should have shinier buttons.

  “Look at the boy!” Mr P instructs everyone, pointing at his middle son. “He is complete nervous wreckage!”

  Everyone’s gaze follows the jabbing prompt of Mr P’s dark hairy index finger, and fixes on the wreckage he is indicating. The cumulative weight of disbelieving pity in the gazes of those five people – Mr P and Mrs P and Anand and Devan and Mrs Devan – would inspire most people to snap out of it, or to muster enough altruism to quietly end their lives. But Mohan, his lower lip trembling above his unshaven chin, is unreachable in his misery. He is beyond doing anything so optimistic as killing himself. His shining eyes are haunted by the awful fear of losing Jodhi, and the space just behind them is tormented beyond endurance by the hopeless hope that he might still get her. What a mess. He has stopped eating, stopped studying, stopped building super-computers before breakfast. He has even stopped having difficulties below the belt. Nothing stirs down there any more, he is far too depressed for that.

  “The mother is 100% certain that Jodhi wants to—”

  “You women!” Mr P shouts at his wife. He doesn’t shout much, Mr P, and overall he’s not very good at it. “You women!” he tries again. He isn’t sure what he wants to accuse women of – something to do with never making a decision about anything, or with making decisions too quickly – but he does want to accuse women of something or other, if only in a general fashion. “You drive me mad!” he shouts.

  “Depression,” Mrs Devan observes, indicating Mohan.

  No one says anything for a while. They fume and chew their food and sip water and sigh.

  “The mother says that Jodhi wants to do exactly what the guru decides,” Mrs P tries again; she hasn’t eaten anything in ten minutes, despite the array of edibles all around – it’s an indication of how upset she is.

  “If she’s liking another boy,” says Devan portentously, “then there is no point in this marriage, even if it’s agreed on all sides. Find another girl.” Devan is the most sensible person here, because he was born without an imagination. It’s a rare gift, but one with which his wife is also blessed.

  “Back-up plan,” she says.

  “No!” Mohan breathes. The tormented space behind his eyes is throbbing with pain. “I’m wanting that girl, only that one – I am in love with that girl!” he declares. “You know I want that girl! That is the girl I want! That girl!” He shakes his head in despair. “That,” he says. “Girl,” he adds.

  Nobody responds to this. It is perturbing to hear Mohan say he is in love. The word should not be spoken like that, the idea should not be exposed in this raw and vulnerable way. Devan picks up a vadai and starts chewing. He is an incredibly noisy eater, one of the noisiest in Mullaipuram, a town where many of the menfolk take a fierce local pride in the volume and speed at which they can eat. He chews so noisily that everyone can hear him, even above the noise of buses roaring past outside.

  “What if the father—” Anand says.

  “The guru,” says Mrs P.

  “Yes, the guru, what if he is saying no to this marriage?” There is a slightly hopeful air to his question.

  “He walked with God yesterday morning,” Devan says matter-of-factly, through food-flecked teeth.

  “How do you know he walked with God?” Anand asks his elder brother irritably.

  “Because a roomful of people saw him do it!” Devan replies, rather more irritably, through his chews.

  “What, they saw God walking with him? How did they see him walk with God if they did not see God walk with him? And if they did see God, then they are the gurus too!”

  “Idiot,” Devan says. He has no time for people who question anything anyone says with the word “God” in it.

  “Anand, please don’t talk in this way,” Mrs P says nervously. Her youngest son is always showing signs of not believing in God. He hangs back at religious ceremonies and festivals, he smiles in kind and enigmatic ways when elderly relatives quote from the Vedas, and he reads improbable books about philosophy whose titles Mrs P doesn’t understand. It makes her nervous just to think about all the things her youngest son might not believe. “The guru will not say no,” Mrs P insists, “his wife is 100% certain that—”

  “His wife is 100% full of the crazy nonsense-making!” Mr P points out.

  “It doesn’t matter what you say, husband, I am the mother, I can feel the connection – I know the Guru Swamiji will say yes to my son.”

  “Then he can say yes by tomorrow, because we are not waiting any longer than that!” Mr P says. “Guru or no guru, he has till tomorrow night to say this thing or that thing. That is my final word on this matter!”

  Mohan looks down at the table, a spasm of instant nausea and imminent diarrhoea clutching at him.

  “Husband, not tomorrow night, that is too little time.”

  “They’ve had months! In the mean time our boy is dying of a broken heart. And are we to endure this cretinous lover-boy for the rest of our lives? Better to find out by tomorrow night. This is my final word.”

  Mohan’s head slumps into his arms – Oh God, he implores, let the guru say yes. Anand plays with his chutneys in an abstracted fashion. Devan and his wife are nodding implacably. And as for Mrs P, she is already scurrying out of the room to go and see Amma without delay, and impress upon her that her husband has been unfortunately manly in a very deplorable way, and is imposing a final deadline on the pressing, complicated business of the marriage.

  “Life,” says Mrs Devan, still nodding; this is the nearest she gets to philosophy.

  “More,” says Devan, pointing at the snacks.

  “Existence,” says his wife, as she serves him.

  * * *

  Ever since the guru came home to Mullaipuram, thousands of ordinary people have flocked to Mullaipuram Mansions to be near him. They wait outside the compound day and night, neglecting their families, risking their jobs, getting ill, and engaging in many other strenuous proofs of their commitment to spiritual enlightenment. An encampment has established itself, and hawkers have already set up stalls selling votive offerings. During the daytime the throng’s collective hum of excitement and frustration and living activity goes vibrating throughout the mansion and its grounds. Those exalted individuals inside the building can never quite get away from it; it throbs in the air, it informs all frequencies that the guru belongs to the people, that the people are angry with DDR, that they want their guru.

  At first D.D. Rajendran had fought this alarming phenomenon, treating it as an unfortunate distraction from the main event, as an operational challenge requiring his powers of logic. Those powers of logic brought him to the view that the most appropriate response
was to arrange for the police to break up the crowd with tear gas. When that strategy proved to be of only temporary success, he tried making all manner of threats to the common people hankering after their Swamiji; and when that didn’t work, he issued numerous lavish promises about the “dedicated Guru Swamiji ashram of the future” that he is already planning, where tens of thousands of the guru’s devotees will be able to access their hero. But it’s no good – people want to be near the guru now, not in a year’s time. They will tear down the compound wall brick by brick if Swami is withheld from them for much longer.

  Today, that low throb of communal dissatisfaction is turning into something more threatening. A humming twang of mutiny is in the air. DDR is in despair as to how to solve this problem. Over the past few days he has asked the guru about it several times, but the guru merely looked at him in a calming manner.

  At this moment, a baying mob outside the gate is hurling stones and refuse at an abusive man addressing them from within the compound through a distorted megaphone; this man – who is undoubtedly one of DDR’s least fortunate associates at this time – is cowering behind the rudimentary defensive emplacements that the bodies of two guards can afford. These two guards are DDR’s most unfortunate employees in an absolute and objective sense.