White Man Falling (5 page)

Since this is the only place in India where Swami can weep, Swami weeps.

* * *

Of all the police personnel in the town of Mullaipuram, surely it is K.P. Murugesan who has the best moustache. Not that it is the biggest or the longest or the most
spectacularly sculpted, for any stupid fellow can break a record, but K.P. Murugesan’s moustache is generally believed to be naturally fuller and bushier and stiffer and better-shaped and
altogether more impressive than any other moustache one might encounter across the entire Indian Police Service of Tamil Nadu. The moustache of K.P. Murugesan has been photographed in IPS journals,
has featured in the nightmares of convicted criminals, and has even been mentioned in passing by an admiring member of the State Legislative Assembly. This moustache: it really is a god of
moustaches, women look at it and wobble their heads in awe – and who can wonder, when it juts from his face like wings from an aeroplane, like a mighty load of timber in a bull
elephant’s strong trunk?

Murugesan is Swami’s oldest colleague in the Police. The two of them attended the Police Training Academy together, more than twenty-five years ago, but they only got to know each other
very well some twelve years back, when Swami was posted to Mullaipuram. Murugesan had shown Swami the ropes. It has to be said that those ropes, in those days, were not the cleanest ropes around,
and since then they have only got grubbier. The policemen of Mullaipuram are not consistently renowned for being entirely incorruptible in all circumstances. For example, whenever there is a
crackdown on a vice den in Mullaipuram, the police and the gangsters negotiate in advance as to how many paid volunteers should be arrested during the raid, thus keeping the newspapers happy with
photogenic crime-busting operations, whilst safeguarding the kickbacks that flow from the den, through several tiers of the IPS’s finest, all the way up to the wife of the District Super, who
has expensive tastes in European crockery. Even so, amongst this formidable legion of law-enforcers, Murugesan and Swami have always prided themselves on being slightly less corrupt than some of
the others.

It is these superior ethical values that are informing Murugesan’s expression today, as he walks through Mullaipuram’s early-morning streets to visit Swami. The gaze above his hairy
outcrop has a slightly harassed aspect; the violent demise of a white man in a small South Indian town was always going to spell trouble for those unfortunate personnel assigned to the case, and
Murugesan is feeling anxious because he is one of the investigating officers.

Forces and pressures far above Murugesan’s sphere of control are pushing and pulling at the case. Aware of the potential damage to tourism that could spread across the entire state of
Tamil Nadu, various regional government agencies are overtly anxious to see the case concluded as quickly and as tidily as possible; it is known that the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu is hopping mad
and advocating a speedy low-profile resolution; and as for DDR – Doraisamy Devanamapettai Rajendran, the filthy-rich domineering Mr Mullaipuram of this town, who is also a State Legislature
political hopeful and an influential member of Mullaipuram District Police Board of Governors and the owner of five hotels and a score of other businesses, including Hotel Ambuli from which the
unfortunate white man is suspected to have fallen… well, he’s got half the town in his pocket. He’s already been telling Murugesan’s superiors that nothing could be worse
for the prosperity of Mullaipuram, nothing could be more detrimental to the operation of natural justice, nothing could be more contrary to the principles of effective police investigation,
“than if that bouncing white man is found to have been killed in
my hotel!
” In brief, anyone with a sliver of common sense is agreed that this case is a clear instance of
suicide by an unidentifiable foreign drifter of low worth and no importance.

But when did common sense hold unfettered sway over one second of time or one atom of matter? Several western consulates, anxious to know from where the victim hails, have been urging the Indian
authorities to investigate the nationality and identity of the dead man; central government officials in Delhi, under pressure from a concerned American Embassy, are also dissatisfied with the
response of the authorities in Tamil Nadu. So pressed this way and that way to do one thing or another thing, Murugesan’s bosses are trying to find responses which seem proactive and useful
while being the opposite. This is why it has been decided, at the highest levels of political futility, that Swami will be taken by Murugesan to a Madurai morgue, to confirm formally that the body
currently lying there is the same one that fell on him a week earlier.

Murugesan turns into Swami’s street, and starts thinking about Amma’s breakfast idlis, which are famous.

* * *

Jodhi, Kamala and Pushpa are standing outside the toilet waiting for Appa to come out. Kamala has a bar of soap, Jodhi holds a jug of water, and Pushpa bears a small towel. They
wait in a row, talking in very quiet voices against the background noise of traffic.

“Taking very long time,” Kamala hisses.

“Taking longer every day,” Jodhi whispers, sadly.

Everyone is feeling very sorry for Jodhi now that Appa has ruined her life. They marvel at her courage in the face of adversity.

At last Appa comes out and moves up and down this row of dutiful daughters. First he stares at the top of Jodhi’s head as she pours water over his hand. Then he looks at the top of
Kamala’s head as she dispenses and receives the soap which he jiggles around in one hand. Then he looks at the top of Jodhi’s head once more as she pours water again. Finally he looks
at the top of Pushpa’s head as she dries him with the towel. It is a solemn process.

The tops of my children’s heads are beautiful…
He would like to touch their cheeks lovingly, but daren’t. It would make him weep again.

“Appa,” says Leela, coming out of the kitchen in her school uniform as she hands Jodhi a stiffly ironed and starched shirt, “Mr Murugesan is come.”

Swami nods.

Jodhi hands the shirt to her father, who puts it on awkwardly. She itches to do the buttons up, but Swami does it by himself. He is halfway through when he reminds himself that she has lost her
happiness because of him;
let the girl put my shirt on me if she wants to.

“You girls,” Swami says, when she’s finished. “What,” he says, “what when,” he tries, “when what.”

“Appa?”

“College?”

“Yes Appa, going to college today.”

“Attending practicals,” Pushpa confides.

“Good girl,” says Swami.

“No college for me Appa,” Kamala says. “Staying here with you only, Appa.”

“Good girl. Hurry three,” he tells Pushpa. “To, through – over,” he tries. Hurry up is what he was aiming for.

Inside the bungalow, Amma is speaking on the phone. Something about the way she is saying “Okay” and “Very good” and “Very happy” and “I will do the
needful” and “Most kindly of you” and “Yes yes we will fix it without delay most certainly” is entering their minds as significant, and drawing them inside.

“Rest assured,” says Amma, smiling anxiously as she speaks, “we are most happy to hear this news, very happy.”

Inside, Appa greets Murugesan with a nod as everyone gathers around Amma.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” Amma trills, on the point of tears. “Such a good boy! Yes very soon. Goodboy! – I mean, Goodbye!” she says, laughing
girlishly.

She puts the receiver down, then picks it up again to polish it on the edge of her sari, trying not to cry as all the girls except Jodhi beg her to tell them the news. She replaces the receiver
back in its cradle, and gently drapes a little cloth over it.

“God is doing this for you, Jodhi,” she says at last. “Boy’s family want to visit again, even after everything that happened, even though a white man fell on
Appa.”

“
Didn’t—
” Appa blurts wearily, but no one takes the slightest bit of notice. Jodhi’s hand is clamped over her mouth in shock, and her three sisters are
exclaiming “Ayyo-yo-yooooooooooo!” over and over again.

“Boy is wanting this most particularly,” Amma says, “he is insistent, so Mother and Father have finally agreed, despite the descent of the snow-faced sky demon.”

“Very happy news,” Murugesan says, as Swami burns in shame to be the obstacle that has occasioned such a concession.

“God is all-powerful,” Amma says huskily, knowing that this development is an example of the all-encompassing protection, the legendary boons, for which Lord Murugan is famous.
“Go!” she barks at Leela, fiddling on a shelf for twenty rupees, “run to the market before school and buy three coconuts!” Later she will go to the temple and make an
offering of them.

That is all I am these days, a passenger escorted from this place to that place by people who have no interest in what I say or think…
From his passenger
window, Swami watches the fields giving way to fetid plots of wasteland, to hideous corporate company headquarters, to fields again, to a row of tottering roadside stalls, then more benighted
plots. The car is approaching the outskirts of Madurai, where the morgue is located, and Murugesan, driving, has not made a tactful job of explaining why Swami is being asked to confirm that the
body being held there is the white man’s corpse. It is clear to Swami that he is being used by Mullaipuram Police as a diversionary pawn in a game of political pressures.
Only because no
one is interested in what I do or say am I being asked to do something and say something
.

“Good news about this boy,” Murugesan offers in a conciliatory tone, after some hesitation, wobbling the steering wheel fractionally so that a small stray puppy in the road ahead
might – with a bit of luck – pass under the speeding car without being squashed. It’s the first thing either of them has said for ten minutes.

The car jolts slightly.

“What is he like, this boy?”

“Gnngow,” Swami answers.

“Oh-oh,” Murugesan says, nodding.

I don’t know, is what Swami had tried to say.
Don’t pretend to understand me, Murugesan…

As a driver, Murugesan is in a realm of his own. He is so superior to the slapdash norm as to be an impressive menace on an almost moment-by-moment basis, routinely forcing other road users to
give way or join him in death. This is the only aspect of the journey Swami takes any pleasure in. Each time a near-miss situation arises, he hankers after his life’s conclusion, where he
imagines sanctuary might lie. But no, when Murugesan overtakes a lorry on a blind side, then the oncoming drivers lurch to their side of the road in horror, and when Murugesan hurls the car here
and there to avoid being squeezed between two buses, he somehow always makes the gap.

Murugesan is feeling anxious about Swami’s silence. He doesn’t realize that Swami is feeling disempowered and offended. He thinks that his old friend is suspicious about something.
But why, he wonders? After all, Swami’s been around, he knows the score, he understands that in the application of law and order – especially as interpreted through the eyes of the
Mullaipuram police – justice can sometimes take a circuitous path… What is he up to, this old friend of mine, Murugesan asks himself – what’s going on in that old head of
his?

“So then,” he says emphatically, screeching the car into the hospital car park. He jumps out of the car and walks round to Swami’s side to help him out.

It is a while since Swami has been to the Johansson Memorial Post-Mortem Centre attached to a private hospital in Madurai – not since he was a serving police officer, clogged up in an
interminable case involving two vicious and vengeful family clans in an ever-simmering, fifty-year land dispute.

Inside, once they have passed from the 35°C heat of the corridor to the constant 4°C cold of Mortuary Two, Murugesan walks patiently beside the shuffling, shivering Swami, leading him
past shrouded bodies on slabs; here and there a foot or a hand pokes out from under the shrouds. A pair of mortuary attendants are playing cards on the floor; they leap up sharply and run to assist
– Dalits, wrapped up in their ragged mufflers and their mended woollen balaclavas. Murugesan waves them away, and they stand together, watching the police officer and his disabled companion.
No one has a kind word for these fellows, even though their responsibilities can be onerous. Sometimes they have to conduct post-mortems themselves, cutting the bodies open crudely, yanking the
organs out, and shouting what they discover to a doctor twenty metres away. That doctor, disdainful of some low fellow’s dirty old toddy-sozzled kicked-to-death carcass, will be hunched over
the post-mortem paperwork, filling it in briskly, not even looking up from his forms. It is the kind of thing that happens nearly every week, but only to the bodies of poor men and women. There is
no chance of the white fellow’s body being subjected to this system. Even after death, his whiteness grants him some privileges.

They pass through the door at the end of Mortuary Two, and wait in a shabby little antechamber outside the deep-freeze room until the technician inside is ready for them. Swami sits blank-faced
on the single chair. Murugesan stalks his own shadow under the harsh strip lights.

“You’re lucky you’re not a police officer these days,” Murugesan says. “D.D. Rajendran has gone completely crazy, he’s breathing fire on the backside of every
officer in Mullaipuram about the reputation of his damn hotel.”

Swami doesn’t answer.

“Every year it gets worse with that fellow, he’s got too many people in his pocket, he’s virtually running the police service in our town.” Murugesan looks across at
Swami, who is sulking. “So you see,” Murugesan continues, made uneasy by the silence – what is wrong with Swami today? – “so you see, about this case, they just want
me to take a deposition from you, that this is the same fellow and all.”

“Who him? Who is?” Swami asks, looking up – it’s the same question he’d asked in the car.