Going under and coming up

It’s understandable that a man fails to kill himself with a puncture repair outfit or drown himself in a bucket but rather miraculous if he can’t throw himself under a bus successfully. Yet this is the melancholy achievement of ex-Sub-Inspector Swaminathan, Swami, from Mullaipuram in the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India. A good man unjustly struck down by fate after cracking the rib of a Very Guilty Suspect during a routine inquiry, he suffers a cerebral haemorrhage leaving him barely able to walk or speak. Even when a white man throws himself out of a hotel window and lands in front of his wheelchair he’s silent and only feels a strange peacefulness as he shares the dying man’s last moments.  

White Man Falling has so many complicated and exhausting things happening to so many different people it seems it must spiral out of control yet never quite does. Mike Stock’s wonderfully cool and lucid prose may be too good for this mad story, but it is precisely because it is so compelling that the book’s many absurdities are easy to accept.

Actually Swami’s attempt to kill himself under a bus was a success of a kind because he was dead when he arrived at the hospital and having the time of his life. Eternity was sheer bliss. The wonder of nothing to do or to think about. Unfortunately the sweating staff and their fibrillators win the day and a very reluctant, different man returns. He now wears the strange, unearthly look of a man set apart, a saint who levitates himself from his bed to make it simpler for those who wash him. Swami becomes Swami-ji. Crowds form.

Crowds are important to Mr Rajendran, a rich and crooked businessman with political ambitions and he immediately sees how a guru sponsored by him would improve his dubious image and win votes.