White Man Falling Read Free Page B

as they arrive I’m taking the flute, just this once – the boy’s family don’t want to listen to you and your
flute.”
    “Sister, what will you do if this boy is the ugliest boy in Tamil Nadu?”
    “Leela! Don’t bother your sister, you’ve seen his photo, you know he’s a nice-looking boy.”
    “Truly truly ugly, so ugly that we all scream and run away?”
    “Leela, enough! Leave your sister alone!”
    “Yes Amma – but what if we all faint from an inability to withstand his skin-puckering ugliness?”
    “LEELA!”
    “Where’s Appa?”
    “Shall I eat this?”
    “What time is it?”
    And then the panic, because “Amma, Amma, Amma they’re here!”
    “What? Don’t be silly, don’t, you, I… Oh my God they’re here, they’re so early, where’s Appa?! Jodhi go and sit, Sisters, Brother come with me, Kamala
take Granddaddy’s flute away – oh my God, why are they so early?! Oh my God –
where’s Appa?!
”
    While Amma and Pushpa and a dense crowd of uncles and aunties and a surge of minor hangers-on go out onto the verandah as an advance welcome party, and while Kamala wrestles decorously with
Granddaddy over possession of the flute, and while other aunties and uncles and sisters arrange Jodhi in the designated chair, Leela and Pushpa rush to the window and ogle in high excitement at
what is taking place outside. A small burgundy Maruti van is disgorging a village onto the roadside – boys, girls, women, men, middle-aged relatives, antique patriarchs, shifty
ne’er-do-wells, chortling householders, bespectacled intimates, incapacitated crones, complaining extras and a range of hungry freeloaders.
    “Ayyo-yo-yo it’s an army!”
    “I never saw so many people in one Maruti van.”
    “Which one is the hero?”
    “Where is he?”
    “Ayyo-yo-yo look at that fat lady! Who is that fat lady?”
    “Oh that is so fat!”
    “That is very fat!”
    “Did you ever see a lady so fat as that? Is that the Mummy?”
    “A lady as fat as that must sit in the middle of the van, or it will fall over, isn’t it?”
    “There he is – here is our Mohan! Here is our Sita’s Rama! He is coming!”
    “Don’t be so stupid.”
    “Jodhi, I think your boy is the very tallest person there! He is very handsome!”
    “But goodness what a very fat lady!” Leela repeats. “I can’t stop looking at her!”
    “Good afternoon,” says a deep and unfamiliar voice.
    Leela turns round to find that half her extended family, and a fair portion of the immediate neighbourhood, is staring at her, limp with dismay, while Mr P – a large, dark, hairy and not
entirely un-fat personage himself, who has slipped away from the throng outside and has just this moment entered the bungalow – is framed in the doorway of the room. He conducts a slow sweep
of all the mortified faces looking up at him, and settles his gaze on Leela. She screams.
    “Somebody give me my flute,” says Granddaddy, into the void.
    * * *
    Swami is looking at his watch every few seconds by the time Alexander gets him to within half a mile of home. “Push!” and “Faster!” he is saying to poor
little Alexander, who is doing his best, but whose skinny undernourished thirteen-year-old body is not best-suited to a task like this. Straining and sweating to keep a good pace going, Alexander
gives a high-pitched grunt as he forces Swami’s wheelchair over a hump of fetid rags. Swami lurches in his seat. “Watch it,” a woman in front of them says angrily, feeling the
chair’s footrest bang into her Achilles tendon.
    When it happens, it happens as these things ought to happen, in a manner appropriate to the clichés that witnesses will later attach to it – “suddenly”, “in a
flash”, “out of nowhere”.
    Suddenly, in a flash, out of nowhere, a white man falls out of the sky. He bounces on the hard dirt road, directly in front of Swami – somehow he lands in a gap between the swarming
pedestrians, although not without knocking a