by Mike Stocks
It seems that all megaphones in India – whether manufactured at home or imported from abroad – take whatever sound is fed into them, distort it until it is incomprehensible, and then amplify it to a volume at which it can distress mammals of all sizes. Nothing can be done about this. People are used to it, and they can’t understand a word unless the megaphone is seriously defective. It is a kind of homage to how megaphones in India have always been.
“Mr Rajendran,” the man is bellowing into his hissing instrument, “Mr Rajendran is respectfully imploring you to go home, go home while the guru and he devise best possible arrangements for fair and future visitings!”
“Herrriiinnnjjeee ferrrriiinnnnjjjeee merrriiinnnjjjeee!” shrieks the megaphone, in various permutations.
Everyone understands perfectly, and by way of reply to this abject failure to give them their guru and his spiritual peace and wisdom, they renew their pelting of the poor speaker with their stones, and shout at him that he is a stupid bastard.
“Kerrriiiinnnjjjeeee meliiiinnnjjjeeee baliiinnnjjjeee!” the megaphone man shouts back, unwisely – it is an action that he is in no position to execute – so that the missiles rain down twice as ferociously; the guards flinch and grunt as they take the impact, until one of them slumps to the ground with a moderate head wound.
It is into this unpromising scenario that Swami comes walking. Nobody notices him at first – hurling missiles at a man with a megaphone is an absorbing business, being both fun to undertake and yet harbouring an underlying seriousness of intent. The missiles are still raining down as he walks calmly past the injured man, straight up to the gate.
“Swamijjjiii!”
“Guruji Swamijjiiii!”
“The guru has come!”
The gates open, Swami walks through them, and in a series of muscled pulsing ripples, the crowds prostrate themselves. Swami walks into the middle of the people, finds a five-foot-tall tatty goat-gnawed bush, sits down next to it, and doesn’t speak. It is his very vulnerability that seems to keep him safe.
From now on Swami will come here every day, leaning on Kamala’s shoulder, sharing his serenity with the god-hungry desperados of far and near. The hour of silence has come to Mullaipuram.
13
Swami is not very good at doing anything, or remembering anything, or deciding anything. In fact Swami is not very good at anything – that might be the best way of putting it. He doesn’t mind this, or notice it – he’s not very good at minding things either, or noticing them. And anyway, although doing has its place, being is more important – that’s a little something he somehow understands since coming back from the other side. And how could anyone expect a man like Swami to do anything much? He barely engages in ordinary human consciousness for more than fifteen minutes in every hour, and those minutes are getting fewer every day; the rest of the time his mind is knocking about in accidental states of the most profound banality, while everyone around him and beyond him interprets the vacuum. And yet there are two persistent problems from the outside world that press against his minutes so relentlessly that they sometimes coincide with his more lucid human desires to do something about them… There is Jodhi’s marriage, of course – Amma’s obsessive interest in securing Mohan for her eldest daughter is still dominating family life. And there is the problem of whether to tell the world that he might not be part of the godhead – though during any lucid moments that he happens to stumble into he would be the first to admit that maybe he is not the best-qualified person to judge.
One day, after Swami has passed in and out of attentiveness during a morning session with VIP devotees who are fervently hoping that he’s going to promenade with a series of notable gods before their admiring eyes, this pressure about whether he is a god or not becomes keener. He finds that he is looking at D.D. Rajendran, Murugesan and Apu. The three of them are cross-legged before him, all wearing white clothes and expressions of sublime self-sacrifice. They have been waiting in front of him in silence for at least ten minutes, although Swami has only just noticed them. Today is the day that they are choosing to reveal to the guru (“He is already knowing anyway,” Apu insists) that they understand the sacrifices he requires of them. Swami’s comprehension of the details is pretty hazy, to be honest – he only catches a quarter of what is said, and only understands a quarter of what he catches – but even with just one sixteenth of the dialogue to go on, he has an awareness that these men are deluded.
“Swamiji,” Murugesan is saying at one point, “some twenty-five years I have known Swami, but Swamiji I am not knowing at all, I did not even recognize Swamiji when Swamiji arrived. Only with Swamiji’s incredible patience has everything become plain to me.”
“Swamiji,” Apu is saying at another point, weeping in soft ecstasy, “I know you know what I did! You have not told anyone! You have taught me what I must do! Let the Destroyer with the third eye in his forehead come, but I will do it! Thank you Swamiji!”
“Swamiji,” DDR is saying at a further point, “my life was empty of meaning, and you have filled it. I see my destiny ahead, entwined with yours, serving you – but in the past I did not listen to you, and I abused you,” he observes, in self-disgust.
What are they saying? Swami asks the white man, who appears to be lying on his side nearby, resting his head on his hand.
It doesn’t matter, comes the reply.
There is a hazy patch in the middle of all this, during which who knows what DDR and Murugesan and Apu have been revealing, and then Swami finds himself looking at all three men on their knees in front of him, prostrated. Curiously disembodied observations come to him – I didn’t realize Murugesan’s hair grew so far down the back of his neck, and I’ve seen this young man before, where was it?
This is the main bit. The white man says. He is sitting in a chair now, watching with some interest.
But what are they doing?
Weren’t you listening?
I don’t know, wasn’t I?
They think they killed me. You too.
Killed us?
One of them thinks he tortured me and forced me to jump from a window, another thinks he covered up the investigation into my death, the third one thinks he hushed everything up so his reputation wouldn’t suffer.
It isn’t true?
Yes yes, all true. It always is. And one of them threatened you when you were about to kill yourself – you had a heart attack instead. They did these deeds – but that’s just the detail. I had to jump, it was arranged like that. It was all so that you could become what you are becoming.
What am I becoming?
You don’t need to know. The part of you that cares about such things is dwindling. That is why you are becoming it.
Murugesan – whose moustache-twitching ended for good some weeks ago, when he submitted to the guru – is painfully reconstructing for Swami’s benefit the process which has been taking place:
“…supernaturally masterminding all my… spiritual development… struggled with… conscience… overriding love and wisdom… only now… understanding… by refusing to lead me… bless with the chance to take responsibility… ready for…”
What is he saying?
Some nonsense.
Which one thinks he killed me?
They all look the same to me.
Yes that is the problem, Swami agrees. The shapes of their thoughts, they’re all the same. I can’t tell them apart.
It’s because they’re alive.
Am I alive?
Oh, the white man comments, as though responding to an unwelcome summons, and he’s going – this time walking out of the room in an ordinary way as Swami looks on.
Can I come with you? Swami asks.
You are me, comes the answer – and then, more faintly, only greater.
“We are going to report ourselves, Swamiji,” Apu is mumbling into the rug half hysterically. “I will lose my job and go to prison for some years – oh, how my child will suffer!” he adds, with
a flash of pride. “Forgive me, Swamiji!”
Swami shakes his head with some vigour. “Don’t do it,” he wants to say. After all, why are these men opting for public disgrace when they could be doing something much more sensible instead, like getting away with it? But no sounds will come out of Swami’s mouth. What to do? At this moment, as Kamala looks at him a little anxiously, hoping he will stop this session soon – he is too tired, too much has happened today – Swami receives an image of himself standing up strongly, casting his arms out wide, trumpeting like an elephant just to prove his vigour, and then bellowing, “I am not a god!” If he could persuade these fools that he isn’t a god, perhaps they wouldn’t voluntarily choose to be so self-destructive.
But Swami cannot say “I am not a god”.
For a full hour DDR, Murugesan and Apu are prostrated before the absent guru. They are watched by a small group of distinguished devotees as they spill their guts out in every particular as to how they executed all manner of sins and colluded in covering them up. They are elated. They finish each other’s sentences, rephrase the worst aspects of their crimes, wallow in their guilt. They await the guru’s response in much excitement.
“Appa is tired,” Kamala says gently – suddenly there behind the guru, helping him up.
“But—”
“Yes but—”
“What—”
The deflated men and their bemused audience watch the guru walking out without a glance at them.
Idiots, Swami thinks.
* * *
It is the middle of the night in Mullaipuram. Murugesan stirs in his sleep, whimpers – he is dreaming that his moustache has started quivering again – and clobbers his wife with a hairy spare arm. D.D. Rajendran sits at a desk in an office, with a snoring Bobby, ogling a series of technical drawings in which Mullaipuram Mansions is extended, expanded, transformed into a vast ashram complex centred on the Guru Swamiji. In a much poorer part of town, in a one-and-a-half-room rented flat, Apu and his wife are sleeping on a bed mat with their child between them; all three of their faces are streaked with tears.
Swami has taken to getting up in the night and going for solitary walks, attended by a company of dogs and, at a respectful distance, two nightwatchmen. He limps around the unkempt gardens. He feels more human at night than at any other time. Perhaps he is. Perhaps it is because darkness and unconsciousness nudges everyone else closer to the gods, easing people into their subconscious topographies where they can cavort without bodies and consequences.
Sometimes he walks along the wall until he reaches the gate, then sneaks a look at the outside world – he sees a growing shanty town of devotees, he sees locked-up stalls selling everything from milk to mobile phones, the hawkers stretched on the ground next to their stalls, and he sees clusters of men sitting around fires in the dark, talking and playing cards. Just once, he’d like to be a man who could sit with other men at one of those fires, talking and playing cards. But that will never happen again.
It hasn’t been mentioned yet that sometimes Swami receives an overwhelming and convincing signal that he is going to die imminently – it could happen at any moment, such as this one now, as he spies on the world he has left behind him. When those signals come in, he immediately waits to be dead – not in despair or in pleasure, but with acceptance. But so far the feeling has always passed, in a confusing and trivial fashion, as though the death that is going to take him but doesn’t is on a par with a sneeze that nearly comes but won’t. Death only matters if life matters too, but maybe life doesn’t matter much to people at their highest levels of wisdom. Perhaps Swami doesn’t die because he isn’t wise enough yet. In any case, death doesn’t take him, and as he limps away from the no-show sneeze of it, head down, he thinks Poor Jodhi – in a sudden surge of feeling. Hasn’t Amma all but ruined her prospects by turning her into a laughing stock?
By the time he is standing on the verandah outside his family’s rooms, looking in through the window, he has largely forgotten the pity that has brought him here, but he stares at those recumbent forms anyway. It seems incredible to know that four of those lives would not be existing without his existence first. A vague image of happy times in a different era is still swimming about half-known in what’s left of his old mind, memories of sitting on the little verandah of Number 14/B, reading some books – what were they, those books? What did they say? – while his daughters attended to him.
Yes, I will renounce all this guru nonsense, he tells himself, go back to being the father of my girls. I don’t need – there is no need – I don’t…
Bats are zipping in and out of the gloom around him, and his glance latches onto an indistinct form, follows it flitting around, loses it in less than a second – and thought is over for Swami for the next hour. He sits down on the verandah, nothing more than a detached observer of the landscape unfolding in the constructions of the brain in his head. The half-glimpsed bats make strange patterns in the air around him, and Swami loses any sense of selfhood or identity as these patterns inhabit his mind, for seeing things is really being here.
The nightwatchmen later report that the guru, after checking on his family, stayed on the verandah for an hour and delved into the blackness.
* * *
Given Jodhi’s astonishing fortitude in contemplating the kind of betrothal that would inspire many women to make enquiries about government sterilization programmes, and taking into account her endurance in suffering so many private humiliations and public embarrassments not of her making, a dispassionate commentator might conclude that Swami and Amma’s eldest daughter has something almost superhuman about her. Maybe it’s in the genes? Her father seems to be no slouch in the spiritual-achievement stakes, and look at Granddaddy – although unheralded, his visions are ten times more impressive than the guru’s. Granddaddy is so superhuman that sometime he plays his flute even while asleep. But no, Jodhi is not of this bent. With Mr P’s manly deadline ticking down relentlessly, and with Amma insistent that the wedding will go ahead because Swami will endorse it, and with Swami failing to do anything to prevent it, Jodhi’s fortitude is disintegrating. Though she has made a good stab at trying to accept her fate with equanimity, behind her calm façade she is suffering more than anyone involved in this matrimonial saga – except for Mohan, of course. Nobody is suffering more than Mohan. A few hours ago he inexplicably cut up a new pair of trousers into very small pieces – only a genius of unsurpassed lovelorn misery can suffer more than that.
Pushpa wakes up in the night from a strange sense that something is dislocated or wrong. Amma is snoring like a dam burst not far away, so that’s okay; Leela is babbling about tyres, plinths and condensation, which seems largely normal; Appa is away on one of his nighttime ambles, which is not unprecedented; Kamala is silent and unmoving, which is absolutely typical; and Jodhi – Pushpa props herself up on an elbow, what are those noises? – Jodhi is crying. Jodhi is not weeping inconsolably or keening in despair – that would not be her way. But she is softly crying, she is issuing low-volume whimpers, discreet but distressing catches of the throat. Pushpa watches and listens, wondering what to do. After a while she feels a hand on her waist, and looks over in the gloom to see that Kamala has woken up and is also looking at Jodhi. The two of them shuffle over to their sister, and whisper, and stroke her hair.
Some minutes later, the three of them are sitting together by the far wall of the room, huddled in the dark. “I must do my duty,” Jodhi is saying in a tragic whisper, while Amma and Leela sleep on.
“He is a very handsome boy,” Kamala says valiantly.
“His prospects are excellent,” Pushpa confirms, uncomfortably, feeling that this is a very grown-up thing to say.
“A wife’s duty is to love her husband and support him in all his endeavours,” Jodhi instructs herself.
“You could do a lot worse than Mohan,” Pushpa points out, still with half an eye on how grown-up she is.
“That is true,” Jodhi says – but
then again, she could do a lot better – and she breaks down again, snivelling and snorting gently.
“Hush Sister, hush, don’t worry, everything will be all right, let us not wake Amma – imagine the commotion!” Kamala whispers, and she glances across at snoring Amma and babbling Leela – “Don’t step in the wet cement,” Leela is moaning.
“Don’t cry, Sister – you’ll get used to Mohan.”
“I am in love with Anand!” Jodhi splutters.
As she covers her face in her hands from shame and hopelessness, Pushpa and Kamala stare into each other’s chronic amazement through the gloom. Kamala glances across at Amma fearfully, but it’s all right, Amma is still snoring like a hibernating bear.
“Come,” Kamala hisses decisively, getting to her feet, pulling up her sisters after her, making for the safety of a locked bathroom and the kind of in-depth crisis conversation that can only be generated by three sisters, a disastrous would-be and a secret love interest.
“That’s not a bucket!” Leela nearly declares; but she decides against it.
* * *
“…All these crazy emails I was getting from Mohan,” Jodhi is explaining – they are perched on some of DDR’s most ostentatious bathroom fittings. “He is telling me you don’t know what rubbish, he is completely crazy, and then one day Anand sent me an email too, and we started writing, every day…”
“Ayyo-yo-yooooooo…” Pushpa breathes.
“…and we are enjoying it like anything, getting on like a burning house, talking about everything under the sun…”
“Oh my God,” Kamala breathes, the latent lover in her getting uncomfortably excited; she wonders what it would be like to know a boy like that, to get on like a burning house, to talk about everything under the sun.