White Man Falling Read Free

is reaching for a large volume called the
Tirukkural
that is face up on a shelf, so that, some twenty-two years after creating her, she can chastise her eldest
daughter.
    “What is the number Appa is shouting at you?” she scolds.
    “Four Hundred, Amma.”
    “Why are you so naughty, provoking him all the time?” she asks, pursing her lips as she searches the pages.
    “But Amma, I don’t know anything about all this Classical Tamil that Appa reads.” Jodhi prefers Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh and E.M. Forster. Her dissertation is on English
novelists of the 1930s.
    The “Four Hundred” with which Swami had rebuked Jodhi refers to a couplet from the
Tirukkural
, otherwise known as
The Sacred Couplets
, by the ancient poet
Tiruvalluvar. There are 1,330 sacred couplets in
The Sacred Couplets
. And although no one has fully comprehended the scale of Swami’s achievement, nor its connotations, since losing
his employment he has memorized all of them by heart, like some kind of divinely blessed holy man.
    Jodhi, Kamala, Pushpa and Leela wait for Amma to find sacred couplet Four Hundred, suspended as always between sincere filial respect and dread hilarity. Amma mouths the page numbers with
exaggerated respect – she can read, but she hasn’t made a habit of it.
    “Sacred couplet Four Hundred is in section forty of Part One of
The Sacred Couplets
,” she begins. She always begins like that. And she always pauses before reciting the
words of wisdom:
    “The learning that you achieve in this birth
    Will benefit you in all seven births.”
    Silence from the girls.
    “Let us reflect on this thought-provoking nugget of wisdom,” she ventures, gamely.
    The girls try very hard not to giggle or to catch one another’s eye. Quite recently Leela, forgetting the number with which Appa had chastised her, had generated an entirely random Nine
Hundred and Thirteen to Amma.
    “Sacred couplet Nine Hundred and Thirteen is in section ninety-two of Part Three of
The Sacred Couplets
,” Amma had said:
    “
The false embrace of loose women is like
    That of a cursed corpse in the dark.”
    Her face! They had all collapsed with laughter. Pushpa and Leela had slumped to the ground helplessly and cried in pain from the general hysteria. Even Amma had joined in. It
was the tension, which had to find release somewhere in that unhappy bungalow. But Appa had reacted very badly, and in the evening he had tried to drown himself in a bucket of water.

 
2
    Mullaipuram is situated on the hot, flat plains of Tamil Nadu. An isolated goitre of rock protrudes from the face of the settlement. The rock is only seventy metres high, but
it is visible for many miles. Rival South Indian dynasties – the Cholas, the Pandyas and the Pallavas – fought for control of it for centuries. Then Tipu Sultan, the British and the
French fought over it for a further two hundred years, bequeathing ungraceful additions to the ancient and ruined fortifications. No one fights over it now. An employee of the Tamil Nadu Board of
Tourism climbs up it every day and sits in the cool of a dungeon to wait for tourists who do not come, tourists who will never come, tourists who will go to Madurai and Chennai and Pondicherry but
who will never come to Mullaipuram, not even with a pistol at their temple. This fellow has a pee, eats his tiffin, takes a nap, then climbs down some four hours early and goes back home to his
wife.
    The rock carries on regardless, like they do.
    Swami often goes on small trips into town. For short distances he limps, although a round trip to the nearest shop might take him twenty minutes. For longer trips he uses an antiquated
three-wheeled wheelchair purloined from an amputee beggar by police colleagues. Usually one of his daughters pushes him, but when none of the girls is available he employs a thirteen-year-old
Christian boy called Alexander – the son of a poor widowed flower-seller who lives in a shack built against the