The Hero's Walk Read online

  Sripathi was particularly pleased with his pseudonym. He had found it in an old American legal journal that his father had pinched from the public library on Moppaiyya Street. Pro Bono Publico. On behalf of the people. Like his boyhood heroes—the Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro, Jhanda Singh the Invisible—he was a crusader, but one who tried to address the problems of the world with pen and ink instead of sword and gun and fist. He wrote every day on anything that caught his attention, from garbage strewn on the roads to corruption in the government, from lighthearted commentary on the latest blockbuster film to a tribute to some famous musician whose voice had filled his soul with pleasure.

  Sripathi reached for a large wooden box on the table before him. Like almost everything else in Big House, the box had been in his family for as long as he could remember. He loved the smooth edges, the solid weight, the thick key that locked it. He opened the lid and removed the upper layer that held his collection of pens, a few unsharpened pencils, some erasers and a penknife. Below it was another compartment for paper. There was also a secret drawer that could be opened by sliding a rod out of the side of the box. There was nothing in that drawer. A long time ago, when Maya—or perhaps it was Arun—had asked him why he kept nothing in there, he had replied, “Because I am too ordinary to have secrets.” The box sat under his side of the bed and emerged every morning when he settled down on his balcony.

  He contemplated the pens that jostled for space inside. Thirty-two of the finest, and growing. This was his one indulgence, although he added to the collection with diminishing frequency in these days of high cost and low affordability. He touched them one by one, lifted his favourites, and wondered which one he ought to use. The marbled blue Japanese Hero? Or the gold Parker? For letters about politics or government he always picked the Mhatre Writer—the maroon colour seemed authoritative. After dithering over the pens for a few more seconds, he settled for the Mhatre Writer again, unwilling to change his routine. It was pleasantly heavy between his fingers, the angled nib giving his writing a sharpness he relished. He wrote in his usual florid style learnt at the end of Father Schmidt’s bamboo cane at St. Dominic’s Boys’ School almost fifty years ago.

  Dear Editor,

  The streets are suddenly full of verdant trees, the garbage has been picked up (after months of being ignored by the municipal powers that be), and our walls have been whitewashed overnight. A new government? A government that has suddenly realized that it is of the people, by the people and for the people and has decided to stop taking coffee breaks and holidays and get down to work? Ah, no! Unfortunately not. All this amazing work is in honour of the chief minister’s son’s wedding…

  He added a few more lines and signed with a flourish. Yes, that was a good letter. Forceful, to the point, and with an edge of sarcasm to make it truly effective. He was about to go over it again when Nirmala rustled in, fresh in a crisp pink cotton sari, her black hair a sliding knot at the nape of her neck. She had a smooth, sweet-tempered face that belied her fifty-two years, and she looked much younger than Sripathi, even though there were only five years between them. On her broad forehead she had a round, red sticker-bindi. Sripathi remembered that in the past she had used powdered vermilion. She would lean over the sink in the bathroom after her ablutions, her body still warm and damp, her buttocks outlined heavily against the straight cotton of her petticoat, creating a stir of desire in Sripathi, and with the ball of her middle finger would apply a dot of Boroline cream to the centre of her forehead. Then, just as carefully, she would dip the same finger into a small silver pot of vermilion and press it against the creamy circle. But a few years ago she, too, had yielded to modernity and abandoned her ritual of cream and red powder for the packs of felt stickers that came in a huge variety of shapes, sizes and colours. Ever since, Sripathi had had a running argument with her about the bindis that she left stuck to the bathroom mirror like chicken-pox marks on the glass.

  She handed him a stainless-steel tumbler of steaming coffee. “Why didn’t you answer the phone?” she wanted to know.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I was busy emptying out the vessels in the kitchen. Today is water day, remember? In between I was trying to make breakfast before your mother started shouting that she was hungry. And you want me to run up to get the phone also? Enh? What were you doing that couldn’t be stopped for one moment?”

  She began to remove the towels from the balcony wall, where they had been spread out to dry the previous night. Sripathi caught a glimpse of her bare waist as she leaned forward and the sari pallu fell away. There were extra folds of soft flesh there now, although he remembered how, when Nirmala was young, that waist used to arch deeply inwards before joining her hips. He couldn’t resist pinching a fold of her waist gently, and she jumped, startled, before slapping his hand away.

  “Chhee! Old man, doing such nonsense first thing in the morning!” she exclaimed.

  “What nonsense? I was just administering the pinch test.” He had read in the Thursday health section about a test that fitness instructors used to determine the amount of fat their clients had to shed.

  “I forgot to tell you,” Nirmala said, ignoring his teasing, “yesterday evening at the temple I saw Prakash Bhat and his wife. So uncomfortable it felt. They pretended not to see me. Can you imagine?”

  Tilting his tumbler, Sripathi poured a stream of milky coffee into a small bowl on the table, stopping just before it frothed out. Then he poured it back into the tumbler. To and fro he went, expertly, until he had created a hillock of foam over his coffee.

  “Maybe they really didn’t see you,” he told Nirmala. “You imagine all sorts of things.”

  “I don’t imagine. I know they ignored me. I’m not a fool, even though I don’t have big-big degrees in this and that. That Prakash used to call me Mamma, do you remember? He was almost married to our Maya and now see how little respect he shows me. And I thought that he was a decent boy!”

  “Okay, so they saw you. Now leave me alone. I have work to do.” He didn’t want to be reminded of old troubles. And why should she expect Prakash to show any interest in the mother of the woman who had discarded him like a used banana leaf? Why did Nirmala persist in bringing up these memories? The unpleasantness of the incident would stay with him like the bitter taste of kashaya.

  Nirmala carried the towels into the bedroom but continued to talk to him. “Prakash’s wife is very plain-looking,” she said. “A potato nose and tiny eyes. Lots of jewellery, but. As if shining stones can blind one to her face. She was wearing the diamond necklace. Do you remember how lovely it looked on our Maya? And now that lumpy creature has it. Tchah!”

  Sripathi scowled at Nirmala’s back. She was bent over the bed now, straightening out the wrinkled sheets. “I told you, stop going on and on about forgotten things. I don’t want to hear them.”

  She patted the pillows briskly and stretched, her palm pressed into the small of her back, rubbing the tension away. “Yes-yes, it is all right for me to listen to your boring office stories every day,” she protested. “But the minute I open my mouth, you tell me to keep quiet. Anyway, what I wanted to say was that the girl is pregnant, and they were talking to Krishna Acharye about performing the bangle ceremony.”

  “Why do you have to listen to other people’s private conversations? Eavesdroppers never hear anything good.”

  Nirmala came back to the balcony to take Sripathi’s empty tumbler and looked indignantly at him. “I didn’t listen. Krishna Acharye himself told me. How bad I felt, you can’t imagine.”

  “Why should you feel bad about some stranger’s bangle ceremony?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t understand. That girl could well have been Maya, and I would have been the one talking to Krishna Acharye about buying green bangles and saris and all. What an unfortunate woman I am!” She waited for him to say something in response. But Sripathi had decided to put an end to the conversation, so she peered at the letter on the table.

&nbs
p; “Who are you writing to?” she asked.

  Sripathi quickly covered the letter with a blank sheet of paper, making sure that it was thoroughly concealed from Nirmala’s prying eyes. “None of your business,” he said. He saw the hurt look she gave him and added, “Just some office work that I have to finish. Now stop disturbing me.”

  Nirmala hid a smile and turned away, but not before Sripathi spotted it.

  “What? What? It makes you laugh to see me work? Henh? I will take retirement today itself, and let us see if you will smile then. Maybe you can support us with your dance classes.”

  A year after Maya had left for the United States, Nirmala had agreed to teach a friend’s daughters Bharat Natyam two evenings a week after school. She herself had studied this traditional dance form until she got married. “It will be good for me to pass on what I know,” she told Sripathi obstinately when he teased her about capering around the house with her bulk. Soon the number of students swelled to six, and the living room resounded with the slap of bare feet and the tap-tap of her baton as she beat out a rhythm on the floor. Two of Nirmala’s students were granted entry scholarships to a Bharat Natyam school that a famous dancer from Madras had started, and that was attended by people from all over India and abroad. Word spread in Toturpuram that Nirmala was a good person to get basic lessons from before trying for the school. When more parents arrived at her doorstep, she decided to charge a small fee. She was glad to be making the extra money, although she never told Sripathi that his income was not enough any more. A good Hindu wife had to maintain the pretense that her husband was supporting the family.

  The telephone started to ring again. This time Sripathi slapped his letter pad down and hurried across the room, his heels touching the cold floor over the worn ends of his rubber slippers.

  “As if we cannot even afford a twenty rupee pair of slippers,” Nirmala remarked. “You might as well not wear anything on your feet!”

  “Why should I waste money? These are okay for the house for another year or two. If I am comfortable, why should you be bothered?” Sripathi argued over his shoulder.

  He went down the stairs to the landing and picked up the receiver. “Yes? Sripathi Rao here,” he said.

  In the bedroom Nirmala shook out a sheet. Snap! Snap! So hard that the sound travelled outwards as sharp as a bullet. She spread the sheet out on the bed, collected an armful of clean shirts, trousers and saris piled on a trunk that doubled as a table, and heaped them in the centre of the sheet. Then she drew the four ends together and tied them into a loose knot. The dhobi’s boy would be here any minute to collect the clothes that needed to be ironed, and she didn’t want him to run away before she had given him instructions on how to press her silk saris. Not too hot, she would have to remind him. The last time the dhobi had scorched a dark patch on one of her favourite saris.

  She smiled again. She knew all about Sripathi’s letters-to-the-editor business, had discovered his secret quite by accident while searching the waste baskets for a receipt for a piece of material that had shrunk horribly in the wash. Jain, the owner of Beauteous Boutique, would never acknowledge that she had purchased the fabric from his shop without proof of purchase, even though she was a regular customer. She had rummaged through the shreds of paper, annoyed by Sripathi’s habit of tearing everything into quarters. A sheaf of neatly penned, whole sheets stapled together caught her eye. Had Sripathi thrown away something important by mistake? To her surprise, it was a letter to the editor of The Hindu about the heavy-water plant that had opened on the outskirts of Toturpuram and was dumping its waste directly into the sea. Now she realized what he wrote so busily every morning on the balcony. She had placed the letter on the table and waited for him to tell her about his pen-and-ink crusades. When he said nothing, she decided not to mention it either.

  Slip-slap, slip-slap. Nirmala turned at the sound of Sripathi’s footsteps entering the room. “Who was it?”

  “God knows. Nobody answered,” replied her husband. He went back to the balcony, flapping an irate hand at a crow that had landed on the table and was inspecting his shining pens.

  “You should have waited for a few minutes. Sometimes the line is bad, and it takes time for those repair fellows to let the voice come through.” Nirmala harboured the vague notion that phones were regulated by the telecom maintenance men who spent all day perched atop the lines along the road.

  “I did, madam, I did. Waited five minutes. I happen to know how to use a phone.”

  “Why do you have to talk to me that way, enh?” demanded Nirmala. “Simply-simply you lose your temper.” She picked up the sheet full of clothes. “Don’t forget, today is water day,” she reminded him. Her voice came out slightly muffled from behind her bundle, and Sripathi couldn’t see her face at all. She had turned into a large, blue cloth turnip. He laughed aloud and she peered around the bundle at him, surprised at the unexpected sound. For a moment Nirmala looked to Sripathi like the young girl he had met thirty-five years before in her father’s house. He had eaten six bondas that evening, he remembered, simply because he had been too shy to refuse another helping and another and another. After their wedding, Nirmala had told him how amazed her father had been by his appetite, and for years after, every time she made bondas they had a good laugh. But somehow the laughter had run away from their lives. They were like a pair of bullock yoked together, endlessly turning the water wheel round and round and round, eyes bent to the earth. Not even a note of eccentricity to set them apart from other couples. Even that pleasure they had denied themselves.

  He waited until Nirmala left the room, her toe rings ringing against the cool tiles. Then he skimmed over the letter again and folded it meticulously in thirds. In addition to dinning the rules of grammar into their heads, Father Schmidt had also taught his terrified students letter-folding etiquette. Sripathi placed the letter in an envelope and slid it into his briefcase to mail on his way to work later in the day. Twelve years ago he would have had two letters nestling against the dark, old leather of the case. The thicker one to Maya, full of snippets of information about the family and even the political situation in the country, newspaper clippings, recipes from Nirmala, gossip from Putti, adolescent secrets from Arun. Sripathi suppressed the memory angrily. Had he not banished his daughter from their lives?

  Since everybody had forgotten to take her home, she would just have to get there by herself, decided Nandana. She had never done it before, but her father had often said it was only a hop, a skip and a jump away. She knew her address—her parents had made her repeat it nearly every day—250 Melfa Lane, Vancouver, BC, Canada, North America, The World. Her father had always added the last two, and it made her mother laugh and say, “Don’t confuse the child, Alan.”

  “How many sleeps before my parents come home?” Nandana had asked Kiran Sunderraj a day ago. And she had replied, “Just one, sweetheart.” But it was already one and a half. Her friend Anjali had gone to day camp and come back, while Nandana was still here in Uncle Sunny’s house. Anjali, also going into Grade Two, was Nandana’s best friend number three, after Molly McNaughton and Yee Loh. It was fun to sleep over, despite Anjali’s tendency to sulk when she did not get her way.

  Yesterday evening—that was Sunday—two policemen had come to the door and then Aunty Kiran had started to cry. Uncle Sunny had run out of the house and still hadn’t come home when she and Anjali went to bed.

  Nandana was scared. Her parents had never left her anywhere for longer than they said they would. She wanted to go home.

  This morning she had asked Aunty Kiran if she could call her parents. “I want to ask my daddy if he can get me some Fuji apples.” She didn’t want to hurt Aunty Kiran’s feelings by asking to go home, so she’d made up the story about the Fuji apples. She knew that Anjali and her family always ate red McIntoshes. “I need Fuji apples for my eyesight,” she had explained. But Aunty Kiran had only said that she would buy her some when she went for groceries in the afternoon.


  “You don’t have to buy them. I can get them at my house,” Nandana had reminded her, but Aunty Kiran did not seem to have heard her.

  Nandana hugged her cloth cow and peered out of the window. It was drizzling slightly. She picked up the pink-and-purple backpack that her father had bought for her seventh birthday, two months ago. He had filled it with lots of small surprises, such as a matching comb set, a bottle of sparkly purple nail polish, two books by Roald Dahl. It was now her favourite bag. Right at the bottom she had packed her baby blanket, even though she was too big to want it any more. Her father had told her to take it, just in case she felt like being a baby again. She had only recently started going for sleepovers and sometimes wanted to go home right away. The blanket would help if she felt homesick, her father had said. “You don’t need to take it out. Just knowing it is there will make you feel good.”

  Earlier today she had tried calling home when Aunty Kiran had gone for her bath. She got the answering machine. “Mummy, Daddy, please come and take me home,” she said to the machine. Then she added, in case they had forgotten where she was sleeping over, “I am at Anjali’s house. It’s the white one with the maple tree, behind Safeway.”