White Man Falling Read Online Free PDF Page B

virile. Sometimes Swami is envious of Lord Murugan, particularly on
special occasions when Amma bathes him in coconut milk and dresses him and feeds him devotedly.
    Behind Swami, the other three girls are stirring on their mats, under their thin blankets.
    “Get up,” Swami says in a kindly way, once Amma and Kamala are done.
    “Don’t snap at them for nothing,” Amma snaps, for nothing, brushing past him and into the kitchen to steam some idlis for breakfast. Since the catastrophe, she has barely
spoken to him except like this. She is still in maternal despair about what happened. For the first time in her married life, she is ashamed of her husband. Swami doesn’t blame her, he knows
she only wants what is best for Jodhi…
But is it my fault that people think a white man fell on me? Or is it my fate?
That second thought is worse than the first. But maybe it is
his fate.
    Poor Swami, he is a laughing stock. On the day after the incident, he was the lead story in the local newspaper. F LYING F OREIGNER L ANDS ON R ETIRED W HEELCHAIR C OP , was the headline. He is famous. When he goes into town, young men scream
“Keep back!” and point at the sky theatrically, as though more foreigners might plummet down at any moment. Jokers follow his painful progress down the streets, arching their necks and
looking up as they rap out their outlandish predictions:
    “Mr George Bush!”
    “Michael Jackson!”
    “Bernard Matthews!”
    Nobody knows who Bernard Matthews is except the wit who first said it, a fellow who happens to know a thing or two about European turkey-farming, but everyone thinks Bernard Matthews is a
wonderful name, one that can bear much repeating. And yesterday, as Pushpa was wheeling Swami to the second-hand booksellers who lay their wares out on cloths near the spice market, a plastic
baby-doll came hurtling down from a second-storey window and bounced off his knee, to the helpless hilarity of a bunch of rowdies.
    There is, Swami now knows, no worse feeling than being roundly ridiculed in front of your own daughter.
And is a man a man…
he had thought to himself at that time, stony-faced,
almost crying.
    Swami trails past Amma in the kitchen and out into the little yard behind the bungalow.
    I’ve lost all my dignity outside this small compound, and most of it within.
    He steps into the toilet, closes the makeshift door and squats down slowly and awkwardly over the hole, with his lungi hitched up over his knees. He winces as burning sensations shoot up his
left arm; acutely painful, they nearly always occur when he squats down, ever since the stroke dumped one half of his body outside the control of his brain. There is nothing to be done about this,
the doctor says.
    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