White Man Falling (28 page)

“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.

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.

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.

“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.