by Mike Stocks
“Friends, oh my God, Friends!” says her husband, following her, “that is not best value for money, wife, some other place, not Friends, wife—”
“Only place,” she calls from the other side of the road.
“Friends!” Mohan exclaims to Jodhi and Pushpa rapturously; this is an unexpected bonus, surely his Jodhi cannot but fail to be impressed by Friends? “I am only going there once before, for my sister-in-law’s birthday! Please be coming,” he tells them.
Friends is Mullaipuram’s one and only western-style café. It is located in Mullaipuram’s top hotel, the four-star Hotel Sangam owned by D.D. Rajendran. If you are visiting Mullaipuram for some obscure reason known only to yourself – and if you are a VVIP, or a VIP, or an IP, or even just a P – then you are recommended to stay in the Hotel Sangam. Jodhi and Pushpa have never been inside such an opulent establishment. They stick closely together as they follow Devan and his wife through the garish marble atrium, past businessmen in western business suits who are smoking and talking in loud voices on black sofas that are very far apart, one sofa to each businessman – and enter the wholly unfamiliar environment of Friends, with its soft armchairs and peculiar objets d’art, its foreign newspapers and cultural magazines, and the underwhelming élite of Mullaipuram who comprise its clientele. Mohan trails in the wake of the two sisters, limping because of the unfortunate lie of his underpants as he watches their buttocks.
The party sits down on facing sofas, Jodhi and Pushpa on one sofa, Devan and his wife and Mohan on the other.
“Coolness,” says Mrs Devan, with relief.
It is indeed nice and cool in Friends. The air conditioning in here could keep milk fresh for a month.
“Ayyo-yo-yo,” says Devan, flapping his damp shirt over an ample, glistening belly.
Jodhi and Pushpa stare blankly ahead. They have never experienced air-conditioning like this before. They are already freezing, they feel their wet clothes turn from clammy to chilled.
“Refreshments,” Mrs Devan says – it seems she only speaks in nouns – as a waiter arrives with menus. Jodhi and Pushpa hunch over the menu proffered to them, and try to keep their eyes from popping out and bouncing all over the place: Tea, Rs.45, South Indian Coffee Rs.50, Cappuccino Rs.75, Coca-cola Rs.50, Lassi Rs.70, Mango Juice Rs.60. Neither of them has ever paid more than fifteen rupees for a tea or a coffee or a coke or a fruit juice, and then only as a special treat. Hairy Pugal’s super-tea only costs three rupees…
“Don’t be worrying, I am settling this,” Devan reassures them, queasily. “What is your refreshment?”
The two sisters look at each other dubiously, signalling all manner of mutual miseries by the uneasy fractional adjustments of their expressions. A waiter stands in attendance.
“We will be taking what you will be taking,” Jodhi says at last.
In the book How to Attract Women, a well-thumbed copy of which lies inside brown wrapping paper in a blue plastic bag under a pile of Computer Programmer Wow! magazines in Mohan’s metal cabinet, it is confidently asserted that no woman can resist a man who makes her laugh. Mohan has read the relevant sentence dozens of times, so he knows it off by heart: “Where is the woman alive who can resist the charms of a man who makes her helpless with laughter? If only you can find her laughter button, and keep pressing it, then we guarantee she’ll be putty in your hands!” This dictum has made a lasting impression on Mohan. Putty in my hands! he is always thinking, shaking his head in wonder. He has been desperately waiting for his opportunity to locate Jodhi’s laughter button. He intends to press it, vigorously and repeatedly, till she spasms with uncontrollable hilarity – and this is the moment, he judges, to strike.
“We are all having Scotch on the rocks!” he shrieks hilariously, capping the joke with an ear-splitting “Ha Ha Ha” for good measure. He adds a late and sound-barrier painful “HA!” to finish off.
Jodhi, Pushpa, Devan, Mrs Devan, the waiter, other waiters, the manager, the table boys, a visiting inspector from the Mullaipuram District Board of Food Preparation and Hygiene, and all the clientele of Friends stare at him; businessmen in the atrium turn their heads and frown at the wild shouting; distant strangers in the furthest reaches of the hotel – lift boys between two floors, a honeymoon couple behind locked doors, chefs in busy subterranean kitchens – pause for an instant, cock their ears, wonder if they heard something.
“I am having coffee,” says Devan, after the longest conversational pause in recent history, scrutinizing his younger brother sadly; Mohan’s tragic mouth is still open, having been petrified by the excruciating shock of being unfunny beyond current scientific thinking in this field.
“We will be having coffee also, isn’t it Pushpa?” Jodhi says, now starting to shake with the cold, wrapping her scarf around her neck more closely.
“Yes,” says Pushpa, and then, “Oh no,” in the tone of voice of someone who cannot believe that things can get any worse.
“No? Yes?” Devan says.
What is Pushpa talking about? Of course things can get worse. Isn’t that why things were invented? Everyone looks to where she is looking, and here comes Amma plodding into Friends, looking exactly like the hard-working, coarse-skinned, unsophisticated, financially burdened, self-sacrificing, rupee-careful, daughter-obsessed, marriage-fixated, lower-middle-class overweight Indian housewife that she is – though newly empowered by having a husband who is reputed to have walked with God. She is dragging Leela by the hand.
“Just happened,” Amma says, attempting to breeze in nonchalantly, “just happened to be passing cinema after you came out! What a happy coincidence! Saw you all jolly as anything coming here!”
“Most welcome, Madam, please be sitting,” Devan declares gravely. “How is your respected husband Swamiji?”
“Yes, seat,” Mrs Devan adds, gesturing.
“Yes thank you,” Amma says, thrusting an annoyed-looking Leela into Pushpa’s side and lowering her rear into an armchair. She has never sat within such accommodating padded luxury before, it takes her by surprise. She tips backwards inexorably, like something toppling off a wall, and for a few undignified moments her legs are cycling the air. Everyone watches with some interest.
“I tried to stop her,” Leela whispers apologetically to her sister, who nudges her to be quiet.
“Husband is very well,” Amma is saying, as she struggles with the furniture, “he is still recuperating in the mountains. Trying to keep low profile, but everyone and all is coming to him for spiritual bliss!”
“When he comes back to Mullaipuram, everyone will be going mad,” Devan predicts.
“DDR is having very big plans for husband,” Amma boasts, “DDR says he is going to—”
“Amma!” Jodhi pleads, embarrassed at these boasts. It is an open secret that DDR is funding the family now, from Swami’s stay in Thendraloor to the girls’ educations, but there is no need to crow about it.
“Yes yes Daughter, be quiet, just for a moment I am stopping by, stop worrying. What a very beautiful coffee house!” Amma is wearing a sari, and has no scarf to pull closer around her neck. She is already shivering. “How are we liking the movie?” She asks Mohan hopefully.
“Not very best quality,” Mohan admits, still crestfallen at his failure to locate Jodhi’s laughter button and pump it till she had begged him to stop.
Amma glares at Jodhi; it must be her fault.
“Please be choosing refreshments,” Devan says, in a faint voice, passing Amma a menu – this is proving more expensive than in his worst nightmares.
Amma’s eyes lock onto the menu. A vein starts throbbing on her goose-pimpled neck. At home she could supply some of these drinks at twice the quality and a fiftieth of the price.
“Nothing for us,” she says, on the back of a repressed choking gulp, “just stopping by.”
“Pushpa,” Leela whispers, “I am very very cold.”
“Shush,” Pushpa whispers.
“Cold?” Amma says, approaching deep-fr
ozen, her teeth just about chattering. “Not cold at all. Very refreshingly cool,” she claims. “Well then…” and she directs a piercing gaze at Jodhi, and threatens her: “…having very wonderful time?”
Everyone looks at Jodhi, who fakes a grisly smile and implements two and a half nods.
“Pushpa,” Leela hisses, “Jodhi is liking some other boy, isn’t she?!”
She says it a little bit too loudly; she says it during an unfortunate gap in the western muzak; she says it with horrifying conviction and revelatory relish, even though she has made it up. Before anyone can fully comprehend, Jodhi – already embarrassed beyond endurance by every wince-rich detail of this date – lands a stinging slap across her little sister’s face. They stare into each other’s eyes and share a second of intense mutual shock, then Leela splits the airwaves with inconsolable howls, and Jodhi throws her head into her hands, sobbing.
Devan and his wife sit limply agog at yet another pre-engagement meltdown, a monstrous marriage implosion. Even Mohan – instinctively exploiting the unexpected, narrow window of opportunity that is Jodhi’s high neckline by glancing down her chudidhar as she hunches forwards – can’t help wondering, as he strains for a glimpse of that thrilling bra, what it is about this family…
2
Two thousand metres up the jungle-cloaked Vadapradesam Hills of the Western Ghats – a mountain range that snakes down the southern states of India – lies the hill station of Thendraloor. Founded in the early nineteenth century by hot-tormented American missionaries and British administrators, its temperate climate gave them relief from the scorched dust bowl of the plains. Every April, during the first seventy years of the settlement, a sweating army of coolies and packhorses would guide, tow, push and carry colonials and the Indian élite up the winding, perilous mountain tracks. An even bigger army was entrusted with lugging up the essential bits and pieces which this privileged band couldn’t possibly do without: Persian rugs, mahogany davenports, fruit trees in vast urns, looted stone artefacts from village temples, silver tea sets, marble busts of Charles Dickens, iron baths, formal wear for every style of occasion from balls to pig-sticking parties, harmoniums, three-cylinder mangles and other essential little knick-knacks. After a meagre four months’ rest and recreation, the privileged interloping indolents and all their multifarious paraphernalia had to be transported back to Madurai, Madras, Tiruchirapalli, Cuddalore.
The town’s appeal and facilities grew rapidly. By 1916, British civil engineers had designed and built a fifty-mile road from Thendraloor to the railway junction at Kodai Road – although a pedant might be minded to challenge the description “designed and built”, given that the British ingeniously utilized legions of bonded labourers to do all the work. The settlement developed into a full-blown English town from the Home Counties, complete with boating lake, golf course, churches of three denominations and a Rotary Club, as well as its own tally-hoing hunt, which rode out to hounds three times a week – through the pastures and dolmens and centuries-old middens of the surrounding stone-age tribal peoples – to harry astonished wild dogs and hyenas. After Independence in 1947 the Indians embraced Thendraloor enthusiastically, even the fox hunt, which is still going strong. These days tens of thousands of holidaymakers descend on the town every year by car and bus and luxury coach, overtaking one another on blind hairpin bends just because they can. It’s true that the town itself is not very relaxing any more, given the Indian genius for enhancing any quiet unspoilt beauty spot with vast concrete viewing platforms, immense heaps of stinking refuse and speakers blaring out distorted film songs, but anyone who chooses to can still find a sort of quiet in the outlying villages, and a peace in the nearby dense jungle, and awe on the mountainsides.
It is just after dawn in the Vadapradesam Hills; the sky is mostly clear and the temperature is slightly chilly, but not uncomfortably so. A man is watching the sun rise in the present tense, which is to say, with much attention and not much thought. He squats on a wide ledge on the hillside, one hand clutching a sapling that grows from a cleft in the rock, the other hanging limply by his side. He is looking out over a great valley to a series of verdant peaks. Thin strips of cloud below the peaks are changing in hue, from orange-edged black to bruised purple to – as the sun outstrips them – translucent wisps of white. Swami grunts involuntarily. He has started coming here most mornings, without really knowing why. He was never much of a nature lover, but since his death and rebirth he no longer feels much interest in the consolations of books.
Kamala accompanies him. She is waiting in an autorickshaw parked a hundred metres away, at the end of an intermittently navigable track. The driver of the auto, a well-meaning but overeager fellow with a streak of impertinence, is struggling to contain his curiosity about her father. He sits in the front of his vehicle, imploring her to tell him all about Swamiji’s enlightenment in Mullaipuram, when it is said that no less than seven curd-faced devils bearing evil talking giant rudraksha beads flew into the town spreading malice and misfortune, but were repulsed by Swamiji’s innate and burgeoning saintliness – Swami’s story gets a different mangling in different parts of Tamil Nadu. Kamala is not in the mood for this kind of thing, and she gets out of the auto. She is interested in looking after her father’s material needs – cooking his food and washing his clothes and facilitating his day and being his human walking stick. She walks some of the way towards him, then stops next to a bleached, lightning-blasted tree trunk, and squats, and waits.
Swami finds it easy to attend to the rising of the red sun and nothing else; only when the sun crests the highest peak might any strong thoughts kick in. He is sometimes aware of that feeling of transition between the two states of not-thinking and thinking. When he is not thinking, he cannot think about not-thinking; and when he is thinking, he can think too much about thinking. But when he is moving from one condition to the other, he can not only understand intellectually that thought is the source of all fear; he can for a few brief moments feel its truth, with all the heft and texture of a rough stone weighed in the palm of the hand. And then there is a trick he has learnt – to let it go, that undiluted experience. Trying to hang on to the feeling it grants is to submit to the fear of losing it.
There is the sun, moving higher, becoming too bright to look at as it abandons the mountains below it, and now here are Swami’s thoughts kicking in.
Many people have firm ideas about what Swami should think about. Amma thinks he should think about Jodhi’s marriage. D.D. Rajendran thinks he should think about certain ambitious plans that are being formulated on his behalf. Jodhi thinks he should think about saving her from Mohan. Pushpa thinks he should think about his health. Leela thinks he should think about going home and cuddling her. The least fortunate people of Thendraloor and its environs think he should think about their diseased limbs, their sick children, their dirty wells, their crippling debts and their miraculous hopes. The spiritually excitable think he should think about explaining his enlightenment. Only Kamala and Granddaddy hold few views on what Swami should think about. Kamala is fulfilled by serving him, and Granddaddy is not big on thinking.
Swami will never attain Granddaddy’s purchase on the present tense, but sometimes he comes close.
I want my breakfast, Swami thinks.
A serpent eagle soars easily in the distance. Some jungle beast – a common langur – is screeching in the canopy. Without warning Swami briefly slides into the dream world that comes to him on occasion – the one with the white man. Sometimes the white man can just appear next to him, like an imaginary friend conjured up by a small child, but at the moment the white man is more of a warmth, communicating elementally in units of acceptance. So the two of them just hang around together for a few moments, and then the white man is gone.
Whether Sub-Inspector (retired) R.M. Swaminathan has inadvertently accessed some spiritual plane beyond ordinary human experience is an excellent question. Don’t ask – that is the best advice. Isn’t it enough that
he’s at peace with himself in a way he has never known before? This is the way of it for many people who have died and come back. Now that Swami possesses the power of being at peace, he is wielding a force that is irresistibly attractive to people near and far. They crave it, that peacefulness of his. Because they do not have it, because they know they cannot buy it, because they rarely encounter it, their souls would suck it out of him, if they could.
He gets up from his haunches, laboriously – the shooting pains down one side are far less intense than they used to be – looking at Kamala as she starts walking towards him up the rocky path. When they meet he rests his hand on her shoulder and allows her to guide him back to the auto. With his new beard streaked with bars of white, his crisp green kurta, his confident way of inhabiting the fettered motion of his own body, and his silent devoted handmaiden at his side, he looks every inch the living saint that some say he is.
The auto driver sits up straight as his passenger approaches. His starving, junk-fed inner life longs to sink its teeth into Swami, but the man is too shy to put his questions to him directly. Eager to please, he wrenches the starter cord of the auto’s cacophonous two-stroke, proud of his youth and his strength, proud of his passenger. The engine ignites on his first attempt.
“Ready Saar,” he says.
Kamala helps her father into the back seat and gets in besides him. The auto swings round, and the driver makes a slow and careful zigzag along the uneven, rock-studded track. He expresses his respect for the guru with a series of blindingly obvious one-word commentaries on their journey.
“Rocky Saar.”
They drive for half a mile, veering and lurching up and down and left and right, the jungle thick on both sides, until they reach a junction with a minor road.
“Junction Saar.”
The auto heads off left up the skinny strip of tarmac. They crest a hill. The driver cuts the engine – “Cutting Saar” – and they free-wheel down the other side, accelerating to a flat-out rattling full-whack speed that couldn’t be improved upon even if the engine were running. They are making for Highlands, an isolated stone cottage overlooking a hillside break in the jungle, some five miles out of Thendraloor. DDR has rented the place for Swami’s recuperation, after the doctors advised that Swami shouldn’t stay in the baking plains at the peak of the hot. The cottage was built – in much the same manner as the Thendraloor road was built – by a long-dead tax collector from Madurai, a Scotsman who derived enormous satisfaction during his retirement years from studying the abundant and fascinating fauna of the Indian jungle from the comfort of his own verandah, and then shooting it.