Free White Man Falling by Mike Stocks Page B

the verandah every few minutes,
peering down the road anxiously, and clicking her tongue in frustration before going back inside?
    Swami takes no notice of her comings and goings, and Amma takes no notice of Swami. Amma has stopped speaking to Swami. If this seems rather harsh of Amma, given Swami’s lamentable
psychological condition at present, and the extensive indignities to which he has been subjected, it should perhaps be pointed out in her defence that Swami has decided to stop speaking at all.
    Amma comes out onto the verandah again and at last sees what she’s been waiting for – Jodhi and Pushpa returning from college, threading their way up the obstacle course of the
senses that is this street.
    “Hurry up!” Amma mouths, watching her two pretty daughters walking back home – rather reluctantly, it seems – arm in arm in their dark-green
chudidhars
.
“Well?” she demands as Jodhi gets within hearing range. “Did you send it?”
    “Oh no Amma, not again, I can’t stand it, please let me get into the house and—”
    “Never mind all this and all that and all those other things too, I am wanting to know, did you send it?”
    “Yes Amma.”
    “And?”
    “Yes Amma?”
    “And did the boy reply?!” Amma splutters in frustration.
    “Yes Amma.”
    “I knew it!” Amma crows.
    The parents of Mohan might have given up on the union of Jodhi and their boy, on the grounds that such a match would be straightforward utter lunacy, but Amma is not convinced that
straightforward utter lunacy is an insurmountable bar to marriage. What she is convinced of is that Mohan is smitten with Jodhi, smitten beyond the furthest creaking strains of logic and reason.
She knows a thing or two, does Amma. Her husband might have been flattened by a flying white man and held to ridicule by the entire town and then subsequently abducted in the back of a Mercedes by
two enormous goondas under the unobstructed gaze of the parents of Jodhi’s boy during the pre-engagement meeting – but it will take worse than that to force Amma into giving up.
    “You come with me,” she instructs Jodhi, ominously.
    “Hello Appa,” Jodhi says, with something like longing.
    “Hello Appa,” Pushpa tries too.
    Swami looks up from his book, gazes at both girls in turn and smiles for some seconds wistfully – but only with his mouth, a forced smile of apology and submission. Then he disappears back
into himself like an alcoholic turning to the bottle.
    “I want to sit with Appa,” Jodhi complains, as Amma mutters in disbelief at what her husband has come to.
    “Does a bird sing to a stone?” Amma says brutally, and pulls her inside the bungalow, into the bedroom, where they both sit down cross-legged on the floor.
    There would be a kind of wisdom
, Swami realizes, very, very slowly,
in being a stone…
and his mind strays far, far away, playing in the shadow of this little idea.
    “Give me that, that, that thing, that
email
thing,” Amma is demanding of Jodhi in the bedroom, as Leela and Pushpa and Kamala eavesdrop in the living area without a giggle,
or a sound, or a smile – somehow, with Appa being silent as a stone and Amma being obsessed with Jodhi’s boy, nothing in life is funny or fun at the moment.
    Sighing, Jodhi takes a printout of an email from her bag and hands it to her mother.
    Amma unfolds it and scans the English words. “Well? What does it say?” she asks with an anxious look.
    “It’s all nonsense,” Jodhi says sullenly. “It’s too embarrassing to read it Amma, please don’t make me!”
    “
Read!
” Amma orders, thrusting it at her.
    “‘Dear Jodhi, I am thousand times grateful to you that you are replying to my unworthy humble email,’” Jodhi translates in a sheepish monotone, as a look of beatific
satisfaction settles on Amma’s face, “‘I am more than thousand times grateful to you, I am thousand times a thousand times a thousand times grateful to you. That is one billion