White Man Falling

by Mike Stocks

  * * *

  The balance of power in the marriage of Swami and Amma has shifted. It’s hardly surprising; marriage guidance counsellors would be the first to concede that when a husband has walked with God and accessed the infinite pure essence that lies behind all experience and causation, there may be a few changes afoot domestically.

  Which is not to say that Amma doesn’t remain a very determined, resourceful operator. For example, she is still convinced that Jodhi’s best interests lie in a union with Mohan. Yes, she has set her heart on that boy, despite the fact that the computationally gifted whizz-kid is a social catastrophe, and despite the fact that Jodhi will neither confirm nor deny that she harbours the sweet feelings for another boy.

  It is 5.45 a.m. While her daughters are sleeping, Amma is in a puja room, improvising her darshan. Mariamman is not present in this place, but Lord Murugan is here – a metre tall, in cool grey stone, dressed in a luxurious embroidered silk cloak, with a real bronze lance slotted into his hand. She straightens his outfit and garlands him with petals, not at all overawed that he is far more resplendent in DDR’s house than in her own. She recites the mantras she has recited every morning of her married life, holding a lighted candle and circling it before the god. At the end of her ritual devotion, she informs the god that she is going to make one last-ditch attempt to mastermind a successful outcome for Jodhi and Mohan. She suggests that Lord Murugan, whom she knows must be on intimate terms with her husband’s godly essence, should help her to persuade her husband that Mohan is the boy for Jodhi – for no one will be able to prevent this marriage if Lord Murugan and her husband the guru provide their blessing… She bows to the god and with a last yearning glance at his handsome countenance she goes, rejuvenated, to wake up her daughters for breakfast. Despite the disappointment of D.D. Rajendran, who was hoping to eat with them so he could plan Swami’s day, Amma has made it clear that her family will eat their idlis and chutneys by themselves.

  In the room where they are served breakfast there is an old dining table surrounded by eight stately chairs – all fashioned out of a single slab of teak – that once belonged to a rich Chettiyar merchant. The table is set with all manner of valuable crockery and mysterious implements, such as the girls have never seen before, which has them umming and aahing dubiously. But Swami and his women sit on the floor with their plates of idlis and sambar, their dishes and pots of coconut chutney and coriander chutney and curds spread in the middle of them. The more exotic foodstuffs go untouched; Bobby, who amongst many eccentricities prefers highly spiced vegetables to meat, will be enjoying an unfettered luxury stuffing later on.

  Two bemused servants are standing tense and upright nearby. Only Swami seems unfazed by their presence.

  “Sister,” Jodhi whispers to Pushpa, “coconut chutney.”

  One of the servants swoops down on the silver dish just as Pushpa is about to pick it up; he gets there first, and wordlessly sets it down by Jodhi and serves a well-judged daub of it next to her idli. He returns the pot to the centre of the spread, then goes back to his sentry duty. Jodhi opens her mouth, nearly says thanks, closes it again. Meanwhile the other servant has knelt down besides Swami to flick away a fragment of food that has the temerity to be resting on his knee.

  “Ayyo-yo-yo,” Amma breathes. On the one hand she feels gratified by these ministrations, they make her feel like a maharani; and on the other hand she feels a surge of wifely indignation, almost as if these stiff-backed fellows are impugning her. But most of all, she is longing to talk, and her daughters are longing to talk – they are all looking at each other like children admonished into silence during an event of great excitement – but how can anyone talk when there are two gloomy fellows watching your every chew and grunt?

  “Kamala,” Amma says, nodding towards the water jug, but it’s no good – although Kamala goes for it with the speed of a striking cobra, the nearest servant is quicker, and within an instant he’s refilling Amma’s glass, calibrating the speed of the water’s flow in a manner designed to impart maximum deference.

  “Ayyo-yo-yo,” Amma blows at last, exasperated, “that’s enough, what are you doing, do you think my daughter doesn’t know how to pour a glass of water?!”

  “No Madam, sorry Madam,” the poor man says, standing up.

  “How can we eat our breakfast in peace if every time we blink there are two men jumping into the middle of our masala dosa?!”

  “Sorry Madam, yes Madam.”

  “Amma, there isn’t any masala dosa,” Leela says.

  “There is no masala dosa!” Amma complains.

  “Sorry Madam.”

  “If there was, you would be jumping all over it!” Amma accuses the servants. She fans herself with her hand, half exhilarated at the sudden power that has been invested in her – normally she only gets to shout at her children, and at beggars in the street.

  The daughters look at their mother aghast. Swami is unperturbed. He has his head down and is tucking into his breakfast with the single-minded application of a normal Tamil male.

  “Well, we are wanting the family talk, so please be leaving us.”

  The servants make small respectful bows, and with a last uncertain glance at the breakfast vista they troop out of the room. As soon as the door closes the girls erupt into life:

  “Amma you are embarrassing us, Amma!”

  “I thought I was going to explode!”

  “Every time I blinked the short one put another idli on my plate!”

  “I thought they were going to take hold of my jaws and move them up and down, to save me from the hard labour of chewing the food!”

  “This is the life of the rich people! Having the fellows like that to do everything!”

  Swami vaguely gestures to the coriander chutney, and a daughter leaps into action and serves him a dollop.

  Despite the novelty of Swami being amongst them once more, and despite the surprising new context of their family interactions, ordinary life must continue. After that breakfast of idle chat and affectionate squabbling and servant abuse, Pushpa and Leela must get ready for school. Meanwhile it is agreed that Kamala will go to Number 14/B with some of D.D. Rajendran’s staff to collect some essential possessions. In another ten minutes, only Swami and Amma and Jodhi remain. It is time for Amma and Lord Murugan to gang up on Swami and Jodhi.

  “Weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks,” Amma is saying, glaring at her eldest daughter indignantly, then turning back to her husband once more. She scratches an itch on her cheek aggressively, walks around Jodhi disapprovingly, all the while looking at Swami. “Weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks!” she emphasizes – it seems that four “weeks” is no where near enough, and even eight is barely adequate. Perhaps she should go for a round dozen.

  It is not always easy to guess what Amma is going to say – in fact at times it’s difficult to guess what she’s already said, never mind what might be coming up next – but at this particular time, as the ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth “weeks” are violently dispatched into the atmosphere, it seems reasonable to assume that the problem exercising her anxieties is the lack of progress in the marriage arrangements for her eldest daughter. She has held back long enough. More than twelve hours have passed since her husband came back from Thendraloor, and the obsession of the previous weeks must be resolved. The mother of six daughters and no sons cannot squander time and perfect boys willy-nilly.

  Swami is sitting in an armchair, looking straight at his wife as she rants and raves. He finds her inexpressibly beautiful this morning. Amma’s brisk, plump movements and gestures and expressions are selected from a repertoire of scolding that has been generated from pure love and that has been refined by years of practice. She performs the routine enthusiastically, and with the perfect trained instinct of a dancer. Adaa-daa-daa, Swami’s mind goes, as Amma charges up to him, wags her head and points a finger upwards with harsh philosophy, then wags that finger at Jodhi while still addressing Swami.

 
; “…best boy!… Superhighway Endowment Scholarship!… incredible prospects!…” she raps.

  No species of activity in Swami’s brain lasts for any length of time these days, certainly not long enough to outlast one of Amma’s rants. The empty blankness of his wisdom’s nothingness is soon taking over again.

  This expression of Swami’s – the almost blank one that trains itself on an agitated talker like a bank of lights – has facilitated grief-wrecked parents to cease sobbing and cling to half an hour’s soul-rest. It gives nothing and it takes nothing, and yet it is the face that has helped an alcoholic wife-beater to go home one evening and tell his children a bedtime story for the first time in three years. This is the face that has already inspired hundreds to get closer to their idea of God. This is the face that thousands glimpsed ecstatically at Mullaipuram Bus Station. And you won’t find a more fervent advocate than Amma as to the spiritual powers of her husband – but Amma, being married to him, is more immune than most.

  “…three lakhs of rupees annually!… very stubborn girl!… wilful ingratitude!…”

  Swami hears what she says and doesn’t hear what she says. It is as though he recognizes the general shape of her words and the weight of their meaning, without engaging with her real purpose.

  “And now look what is happening!” Amma bewails. “This marriage is almost definitely over before it has almost definitely started! Parents of the boy are almost pulling out of all arrangements! Parents of the boy seem to know more about my daughter than I do! Parents of the boy are saying our Jodhi is having the sweet feelings for somebody else!” It’s possible that the shocking nature of this notion requires some amplification. Fortunately amplification is one of Amma’s primary talents: “A somebody else who is not the somebody he is supposed to be! A boy who is not Mohan! The wrong boy!” she rounds off. “And our daughter here, she is not explaining to me anything, she is not denying there is a boy who is not Mohan!”

  While Swami is looking at his wife distantly, with a kind of abstract technical pleasure in the life animating her body and language – it courses through her like the timeless flow of the rivers that nourish Mother India’s body and spirit – Jodhi is sitting cross-legged on the floor, her shoulders hunched, her head down, examining the patterns that her ten fingers make when interlocked together in a variety of pointless ways.

  “Whatever Appa tells me to do, I will do,” she says now – in a small pause that Amma has accidentally produced.

  “Husband, tell your daughter – tell your daughter – tell your daughter to tell me if there is another boy she is having the sweet feelings for!”

  Jodhi and Amma stare at Swami in a new and full-blown really long silence.

  Swami is in love with his family. Now that he has broken free of the self-imposed shackles of misery, he could wallow in his family’s life for whole seconds at a time, the beauty of their half-conscious doings, the richness of their interlacing lives. Look at the heaving bosom of his agitated wife, her pursed lips and her gleaming eyes, she is every mother; and as for his daughter, look at her, this solemn and dignified young woman, who submits, but who, in her own way, will not be cowed. All, finally, is in balance, the small things and the large things and the everything – even if none of it means anything much.

  If he could think about anything for very long, Swami wouldn’t bother to consider the notion that Jodhi has another boy – he would find it too ridiculous and unlikely. Nevertheless, she does. Swami doesn’t know everything, you know – far better gurus than him have made much bigger mistakes than that. Jodhi is head over heels in love with another boy, she is besotted. But as far as Swami’s intermittent attention to this topic is concerned, Jodhi has done nothing wrong except to be unimpressed by Mohan – an outbreak of thundering good sense for which anyone but Amma would feel the utmost sympathy.

  “Husband, are you so busy with the gods that you don’t care if your daughter has secret love interest when she is supposed to be engaged to Mohan?… Ayyo-yo-yo!” Amma erupts. “What am I doing to deserve it all, someone tell me! Daughter is a beauty, boy is a wonder, husband is a god, and still the marriage is not taking place!”

  Beautiful, Swami thinks. But he has wafted in and out of this last fifteen minutes of existence like smoke blowing in and out of a room. He is about to shut down and roam around randomly in that mysterious place of the spirit where confronting problems with solutions is considered neither impressive nor effective, nor considered at all. Not that this will shut Amma up. At this moment in time, Swami could be visibly penetrating the starting point of the centre of the spiral of all knowledge – only death can stop Amma carrying on carrying on.

  “Everything I have to do!” Amma complains bitterly. “Nobody is helping me! Parents of the boy are not believing Jodhi any more, they are not believing me any more – but they will believe the guru! He, at least, they believe! Daughter, you listen to me, I have been to the parents of the boy, I have told them how your Appa is definitely agreeing that their son is marrying you! Understand? Answer me Jodhi!”

  “Yes Amma, I understand.” Jodhi pulls her hands apart, wiggles her fingers, locks them together again.

  “I have explained everything to them every which way, from upside down to flat on the face until I’m blue in it!” Amma declares; in terms of strict grammar, she is ceasing to make sense, and the semantics are becoming hazy too, but her general feeling seems to be coming through loud and clear.

  “I told you Amma,” Jodhi answers wearily, “I am doing what Appa is telling me to do.”

  “Appa is telling you to do what I am telling you to do,” Amma replies.

  Mother and daughter gaze at Swami, like claimants in a land dispute who are waiting on an arbiter’s enigmatic ruling. He doesn’t say anything. He rarely does.

  11

  It is ten days since the Guru Swamiji took up residence at Mullaipuram Mansions. If it’s true that he once walked with God, then today he will walk with God again. He will also walk into a baying mob of two or three thousand people, and he will discover that he has only twenty-four hours in which to determine Jodhi’s destiny. Even for a guru, it’s a demanding schedule.

  Despite the best efforts of Amma and D.D. Rajendran to manage Swami to their advantage, a routine of his own organic and unconscious making has been developing, just as in Thendraloor. Everyone must bend to it finally – though Amma does tend to dash her head against it instead, out of habit – and when they do, they find it is for the best. With each passing day, DDR in particular realizes more and more that Swami seems to have a hotline to a higher order of strategic planning than he can comprehend; for although his efforts to steer Swami towards various desirable objectives are continually thwarted, yet he finds that the end result always surpasses his hopes. So they do move in mysterious ways, the gods; either that, or they don’t exist. That is the only sensible thing that anyone can say about them.

  It is long before dawn, and the girls are still sleeping.

  “Tomato,” Leela mumbles from within a very unusual dream. It is a dream in which tomatoes play their part.

  Amma and Swami rise together. Amma helps Swami to perform his ablutions. She is not yet fully habituated to the luxurious nature of the bathroom – its hot and cold running water, emanating from configurations of spouts she has never seen before, into receptacles large and small whose purpose she is uncertain about. The only bidet in the whole district resides in this bathroom, and its function has exercised the imaginations of far more sophisticated guests than her. “Gold-plated tappings!” she murmurs, shaking her head. It’s not gold really, but she likes to think it is.

  After they have washed, she gets Swami dressed in a pure white ironed lungi and a pure white shirt, then heads off to the puja room to conduct her fastidious and emotionally charged interactions with Lord Murugan.

  It has become understood that the guru should be alone and undisturbed at this hour. Swami limps down the hallways and chambers of the house, not noticing
the servants and staff going about their business, who stop respectfully and grant him their silent namaskarams. A guard waiting at the front door lets him out silently, and the guru slips into the darkness of the pre-dawn day. The encampment of devotees situated outside the compound is yet to stir.

  It is very cool at this time, a mere thirty degrees centigrade. Most of the dogs are waiting for him – they’re sticklers for routine, dogs, given half a chance – but he ignores them as always. They walk companionably behind him and around him as he perambulates through the grounds for ten minutes, until he gets to the banyan tree.

  Maybe there is something, after all, in this three-times-round-the-tree-anti-clockwise malarkey. These days, the base of the tree is regularly hosed down to disperse the urine from the dogs, so there is no longer any pressing practical need to approach the tree tentatively, at an oblique angle to the stench. And yet Swami circles the tree three times before he settles down, as the sun comes up, threading himself between the branches that have rooted into the earth. The dogs appreciate this. They like to turn around three times too, before they settle down.

  A certain cleft of the trunk at the base affords a satisfying grip on Swami’s bottom. He eases himself into it, and exhales.

  He has visions when he sits here. Not every morning, and they aren’t very good. Really, your lowest class of fakir has better visions than these ones. Some of them are so enormously long and dull as to be mysteriously pointless. Yesterday, in this very spot, Swami had a vision lasting a full ninety minutes in real time. It involved living the entire experience of sitting on an unknown doorstep of an unknown building and watching two unknown men unload 10,000 cans of paint – of an unknown hue – from the back of one huge lorry into the back of another huge lorry. Swami experienced every aspect of the visionary transaction, saw each bead of sweat on the men’s foreheads as it emerged and grew and, at a certain point, became too big to maintain its purchase on the skin, rushing down in abrupt defeat; he noted the way in which the ridged base of each can slotted into the grooved lid of the can below it. The cans of paint were helpfully inscribed with the words Nerolac Paints in the first truck, but with something unreadable in the second truck. You see, the trucks were identical in all respects – the same bright yellow metalwork hand-painted with images of the gods and Sachin Tendulkar and Tamil film stars, the same scratches and dents and patches of dirt – except that they were mirror images of each other.