White Man Falling
Page 9
Swami doesn’t know and doesn’t care whether his self and his matter have separated. Maybe an analgesic hallucination is occurring in his dying brain that can account for his current experiences, but why should Swami care? It is clear to him that worrying at the reasons and causes behind things is a choice made by living men, every one of them. Dead men such as Swami have no interest in all that nonsense. He is currently experimenting with where to position himself in relation to his body. It feels too cramped, too human almost, to rest below the roof of the taxi, but he still feels slightly attached, almost by some physical bond, to these three men with their pitiful emotional outbursts, the deluded sallies of their redundant language, and he wonders as to the outcome of all this, so he drifts in and out of the taxi as it forces its way through the centre of town to Mullaipuram Anna District General Hospital… until, abruptly, he finds himself no longer attached at all, not to that world he’d been alive in, with all its taxis and all its people. Not to anything.
There is the darkest tunnel stretching ahead of him, of the most profound and compelling aspect, such as no one who has seen it could refuse to enter. Though its appearance and aura is ominous and something to be mightily afraid of, yet he knows that its purpose is irresistibly beautiful, and as soon as it opens up in front of him he enters it willingly, losing every link to the mortal world.
In a dilapidated resuscitation room in the overstretched Accident and Emergency wing of the hospital, while an exhausted doctor rips Swami’s shirt open and checks for signs of life and clamps an oxygen mask over the breathless mouth and nose, and while a second exhausted doctor hooks the body up to a monitor and shouts “VF” and applies salmon patches to the chest and shouts at a nurse to set the defibrillator at 150 – and scolds her, too, with a “Well don’t leave the mask on”, because the first doctor has forgotten to take it off – there are still some moments to pass before the two defibrillator paddles will deliver their surge and try to shock the useless flailing chambers of Swami’s heart into pumping blood. Swami is far away from such trivial matters, passing without bodily form down that vast, noisy dark tunnel, at speeds outside description, towards a warm, yellow glow that becomes exponentially brighter and more compelling until he hurtles into it with a sense of inexpressible relief and gratitude.
“So this is it,” he calmly tells the figures who come to greet him, in a medium beyond speech, these four black naked wordless guides. It is surprising to notice that the messengers are armed with clubs, and surprising, too, that they take hold of Swami brusquely. But it is not alarming. The light that surrounds Swami and that extends in every direction without variation is overwhelming, it hugs the higher self with a loving peacefulness, and in the grip of these guides he feels safer and more accepted than he has ever dreamt of. They lead him through an infinite chamber that is thronged with indescribable forms, all of which Swami can communicate with and recognize, though he feels no need or compulsion to do so. Certainly his mother is here, he can feel her presence simultaneously distinct from all other presences and merged with them into one absolute presence; also his ancestors since time began, all of them, every dead loved one and acquaintance is here, and not just as he knew them, but in a distillation of all their incarnations, so that they are every aspect of themselves that they ever were. They are emanating a love that is so universal as to be beyond the meagre attributes of the personal; the personal seems so meaningless in this place that it no longer exists, and Swami can no longer recognize it. Swami – we shall continue to call him this, although now he is something far greater that can’t be adequately described – is infused with contented peace and has no fear as the guides calmly transport him through the time and space that lies beyond time and space to a great god. Swami knows him, of course: it is Yama Dharmarajan, the King of the Dead.
The god is small and naked and withered. He seems monumentally bored. He sits on his high wooden chair and gazes at Swami over his beard with an inscrutable look. To one side, sitting cross-legged on the floor, is his helper Chitraguptan, who has an immense book open in front of him. Behind Chitraguptan a mass of clerks and scribes are endlessly engaged in transcribing records of lives and deaths. And behind them, stretching far, far away, is a long narrow series of antechambers lined on both sides with books and scrolls and records.
“Here he is,” Chitraguptan tells Yama Dharmarajan, in his utter wordlessness. Yama Dharmarajan doesn’t react.
Swami has never felt such downright relief as he says to Chitraguptan, “Yes I’m here now.”
No one replies.
“I didn’t know,” Swami says wonderingly, to Yama Dharmarajan. “I didn’t know.” He knows that Yama Dharmarajan knows he didn’t know. He knows that Yama Dharmarajan knows everything. Life after death is so simple and beautiful.
Yama Dharmarajan yawns.
This is the most blissful moment of Swami’s death, as he stands in front of the yawning King of the Dead, knowing that he is merged with something great. But – and this sometimes happens – it seems there has been a mistake. Chitraguptan is frowning and scratching at his bald head, just behind his right ear.
“He’s not R.M. Swaminathan the grain trader,” Chitraguptan murmurs lugubriously, so interjecting – with a meticulous attention to the demands of an infinite bureaucracy – a strangely unexpected sour note into what had seemed to be the blissful site of the afterlife.
“No no, I’m R.M. Swaminathan the police officer,” Swami says, after a moment, very eager to please, and aware more than ever of the ineffable beauty of being here, under Yama Dharmarajan’s heavy, bored gaze, as that great King of the Dead emits another long, slow, indolent yawn.
Chitraguptan doesn’t acknowledge Swami. Frowning again, as though there is something in the enthusiasm of Swami’s reply that doesn’t add up, he scratches at his head once more, this time behind the left ear, and gestures minutely to two or three notaries. They scuttle over to him. There is a short, furtive consultation, before the notaries rush off to instruct further notaries and clerks and archivists and registrars and scribes – all the pen-pushers of the afterlife who inhabit the smaller chambers of rippled infinity. There is much riffling through books and decaying papers, and Swami sees great clouds of dust rising up all around, from uncountable numbers of rarely thumbed tomes, and he has the definite impression that this is not how it should be, for how can there be dust in paradise? He starts to feel, even in this most glorious of places, some stirrings of unease. No longer does he feel as though he is harboured in the universal presence of everyone who ever existed, and that they all make up one single organic consciousness and universality – of which he is a vanishingly small, infinitely significant part. Though he is trying to fend off a strange new idea – it is called fear – he is starting to be aware of the meagre, the small and the personal…
A wrinkled clerk comes hobbling down a long corridor carrying a scroll wound around two femurs. The clerk places the scroll in front of Chitraguptan, and methodically unwinds it to the correct place, pointing. Chitraguptan looks down at the scroll, shaking his head as though there has been a ridiculous procedural error.
“We didn’t ask for R.M. Swaminathan the police officer, from the Vanniyar community,” Chitraguptan explains to Yama Dharmarajan. “We asked for R.M. Swaminathan the grain trader, from the Goundar caste. We need the other one. This one will have to go back, he’s still got work to do.”
“I don’t want to go back,” Swami says, but Yama Dharmarajan is unconcerned as to what Swami wants, he is still staring impassively, naked on his high wooden chair, and already the four black messengers have Swami in their grip and are speeding him away from the King of the Dead.
“Isn’t there some work for me here?” Swami begs Yama Dharmarajan.
But away they go, down the vast chambers, Swami struggling violently and impotently – the guides have hold of a limb each, and now they grip their vicious-looking clubs in a threatening way, as though they are worried Swami might somehow b
reak free and become part of the afterlife before it is ready for him. Swami feels everything blissful leaching away, until all that remains of his insight into universal peace is a ragged sense of a few individual presences; and here is his mother again, an unsatisfactory fragment of her, a shred that has torn itself away from the absolute whole in a fruitless attempt to try and soothe him; and there he is, the white man from Mullaipuram, this time Swami can see him in a corporeal form, tanned, clothed like an ageing hippy at a Goan beach party, making ridiculously human apologetic gestures.
“They’re taking me back!” Swami cries, “Oh God, no, don’t let them take me back!”
“You have to go,” says the white man, “don’t struggle, it will be okay. There’s a reason.”
But it is not okay, Swami doesn’t want to go back, it hurts, he screams in agony as the black messengers hurl him contemptuously down, down, flailing back down the awful tunnel; the yellow light, that had wrapped around him like swaddling clothes, falls away and away from him. Like some man tumbling from the heavens to the paltry earth of human smallness, he sees his body far below – how pathetic and uninviting and contemptible it seems, that useless agglomeration of cells – and he notices the doctors around it, monitors flatlining, shouts and instructions, and on the fourth application of the CRU paddles Swami hurtles back into his shell screaming in horror as his body spasms violently – and the doctors, gazing at the jumping line on the monitor, simultaneously crow, “Got him!”
“Sinus rhythm. Looks like an MI,” says one of the doctors, “we’ll try some thrombolytic stuff.”
The paddles are replaced in their holders, the nurse is inserting a drip, the oxygen mask goes back on, blood samples are being taken, and here is an anaesthetist to put a tube down the windpipe of Swami – who was dead, and is alive.
10
It is dawn in Mullaipuram, after a night with no moon and little movement in the air. The stars are fading as quickly as the sun is rising, and many people in the town are ahead of the light, washing and stretching, performing their devotions and their ablutions with the same methodical care. Jodhi, Kamala, Pushpa and Leela are on one side of a bed in the Intensive Care Unit. On the other side are Amma and the twins she had to give away two years ago, Suhanya and Anitha, who have just arrived with Uncle Kandan, Swami’s brother in Coimbatore, after travelling overnight. Half the members of this unhappy family are ceaselessly snivelling, and the other half seem frozen and expressionless in their distress. Amma, with the twins slumped against her breasts, slowly counts – again – the tubes and pipes that are sticking out of her husband’s unconscious body: five. Now that she has counted them again, she counts them again again, as though next time the answer could be four, or six – and as though such an outcome might matter – but no, it’s five, always five. She follows the snaking path of each one, from each aperture in her husband, natural and contrived, to its source, and invariably ends up looking in incomprehension at some piece of gadgetry such as only the Mohan Ps of this world could possibly understand. A great surging sweep of powerlessness and ignorance has her in its grip. Her brother-in-law holds her by the arm tightly, as though propping her up.
Outside, the world carries on carrying on, and Jodhi hears it with some resentment, its junctions building up to the morning gridlock, its street vendors preparing to sell their wares, its drivers honking their horns to win their minute and trivial advantages over one another. She wants to run out of the hospital and into the town, screaming at everyone and everything, “Please be stopping all this at once! Stop it now!” – then, in an ensuing silence, she would explain carefully that today is a day that is different to all the other days, and that is why everything has to stop.
“Amma, Appa!” the twins are whimpering at random intervals, and in unison, in a way that might be explained by the dynamics that apply to schools of fish turning all at once, to flocks of birds wheeling round together. They do not go into specifics – moaning “Amma” and “Appa” seems sufficient. The two girls burrow into Amma’s soft breasts, inadvertently wiping their runny noses on her sari.
“Why did we go to Coimbatore?” says Anitha.
“We shouldn’t have gone to Coimbatore,” Suhanya adds.
“What has Coimbatore got to do with any of this, you foolish girls?” says Uncle Kandan in irritation.
“Yes Uncle.”
“Sorry Uncle.”
“There’s one now!” Leela hisses, as a white-coated man glides past in the corridor outside and stops to speak with a nurse. All through the long and unbearable night they have been trying to talk to a consultant about Appa, but Amma’s courage fails her now that one is standing close by. She looks towards the fellow with an urgent longing. Amma is in awe of doctors.
Uncle Kandan goes over to the man sombrely and murmurs respectfully. The doctor comes over at last.
“I am Dr Pandit,” he tells Amma. “You are Mrs Swaminathan,” he adds, as though she might have overlooked her own identity. He is a pale fellow from the north, speaking Tamil with a Hindi accent. He doesn’t even have a moustache. What is a North Indian doctor doing in this place, Amma thinks. How can a man without a moustache be a good doctor? But she says, “Yes Doctor,” and immediately bursts into tears, which sets off the whole family, so that the ones who weren’t crying before start crying now, and the ones who were crying before continue to do so, with more vigour.
“Yes yes, all right, stop crying, I am begging you,” Dr Pandit says, “it is not helpful. Hasn’t anyone spoken to you about your husband yet?”
“No, Doctor. Only about medical fees,” Amma gulps, her shoulders heaving up and down in distress – 12,000 rupees is the going rate for a day in intensive care. It is more than a month’s income. Whatever happens to Swami, Amma knows it’s all up for her family. They will be indebted for generations, and all her daughters’ lives are ruined – no wonder she’s so upset, what does the fancy Hindi doctor expect?
“Your husband is scoring a three or a four on the Glasgow Coma Scale,” says the doctor, “but there’s no evidence of significant myocardial damage. He was clinically dead, but they got him back within ten minutes of dying. That is not too bad – anything longer than that is difficult. He may or may not be waking up soon, it’s too early to have a clue. We’ve no idea yet if his brain is affected – speaking frankly, it might be fine, it might be chutney, it might be some place in between. If he’s showing no change in a week, we should do a brain scan, but it’s expensive. Also, the longest time you can afford to keep him in intensive care the better – if he goes onto a general ward he’ll probably get a chest infection and he might not survive that. I’m very sorry,” and with that Dr Pandit pads away.
There are many configurations in which six daughters and their mother can look at each other fearfully, and most of them happen now as the women snivel and sob and hold on to one another. Amma lowers her head onto Swami’s thighs and cries “My husband, my husband!”, which sets the rest of her family off again, and there is a short period of unfettered grief and howling – Leela boo-hooing like a six-year-old, her arms rigid at her sides and tears racing one another down her cheeks, Kamala attempting to speak as she sobs but succeeding only in uttering incomprehensible moans and gasps – until they start to pull themselves together, with Uncle Kandan saying “Come come” uselessly from behind his weeping red-rimmed eyes.
The sun has risen, and Pushpa draws back the threadbare curtain of the hospital room to let natural light come in. Its aspect is kinder than the strip light that had illuminated Swami like a corpse on a slab of stone. Now the family keep watch over Swami in a calmer way. They attend to every move of a nurse who comes in to monitor his data and to shift his limbs into new positions. After the nurse has gone, they crowd round again.
“Sooo peaceful,” Jodhi whispers, gently holding her father’s hand.
“Appa is very handsome,” Kamala says, smoothing Swami’s hair into place.
“Wake up Appa,” says Leela.
Is it the broken catch in Uncle Kandan’s wretched, grief-sodden voice that does it, or the tickle of one of Uncle Kandan’s hairs against Swami’s ear? Is it some deep dream that is only dreamt by men in comas, or just a random intrusion of misfiring neurons, signifying nothing? Swami groans, croaks “super-computer” and then sinks back down into the even murkier depths of unconsciousness that lie in whatever deep-down dark and mysterious dream world he’s lost in.
A nurse comes in to shift the position of his arms and legs, but seeing the whole family fast asleep she thinks better of it; it can wait an hour or two. She gazes at the family group, struck at so much unconsciousness around the unconscious patient. Very distinguished face, she tells herself, looking at Swami. Looking very peaceful as anything, she thinks.