The Hero's Walk Read online

  Nobody had called her back or come to get her. She was beginning to think that Aunty Kiran had decided to keep her here for ever and ever. Hadn’t she often said as much to her mother? “Maya, your daughter is such a cutie-pie, I think I shall keep her.” And her mother would laugh, “Ah, not so cute all the time, believe me. She can be a little pest.” Then she would stroke Nandana’s cheek and say, “But I wouldn’t give her away for a zillion dollars.”

  She wondered if her mother had changed her mind.

  2

  MORNING IN BIG HOUSE

  DOWNSTAIRS THE HOUSE bustled with activity. The maid, Koti, washed the dinner dishes from the previous day in the backyard under a sloping asbestos roof. The laundry soaked in buckets of soapy water beside her. After the dishes were done, the maid would turn on the brass tap that spewed forth only saline water and wash the clothes. The tap was chained firmly to the wall and had to be unlocked every morning; Sripathi had reluctantly installed the chain after several of their taps had been stolen.

  Koti scrubbed vigorously at the pots and pans with a piece of coconut fibre dipped in an ash and soap-powder mixture, and conducted a loud conversation with Putti over the sound of splashing water. Like her brother, Putti was tall and heavy. There was an air of apprehension about everything she did, as if she constantly expected to be scolded. Even her gait was timorous. Her dark hair hung in two long, oiled braids and made her look like an overgrown schoolgirl. She was sixteen years younger than Sripathi. At forty-two, she was still waiting for her mother to approve a bridegroom for her, even though her hope dimmed a little more with every passing year.

  “So many times the phone is ringing,” remarked the maid. “Who do you think it is, Akka?”

  Putti twirled the end of one braid and smiled vaguely. “I don’t know,” she said. She had been up since three in the morning as usual, woken by Gopala Munnuswamy knocking on the front door with the day’s supply of milk. He used to leave the aluminum can on the verandah, until a cat moved into the Big House compound and began to help itself to the contents.

  “What is wrong with you these days?” asked Koti, giving Putti a shrewd look. “In another world you are living, or what?”

  Without answering, Putti wandered away from the cemented wash area and into the messy garden. Dew still lingered on the grass in the shadow of the house and felt pleasantly cool under her feet. She glanced quickly at the large house to the left of Big House, freshly painted a bright blue absurdly out of place on this ruined street. It belonged to old Munnuswamy, the local member of the Legislative Assembly. He had started his career as a milkman with two cows to his name. People remembered him knocking on their doors early in the morning and milking his cows before their eyes, while his nine-year-old son, Gopala, ran up and down to the neighbouring homes delivering buckets of frothing, warm milk. That was thirty-four years ago. Now Munnuswamy owned Justice Raman Pillai’s ancestral home, and it was whispered about town that he also owned most of the property on Brahmin Street.

  Ammayya had been indignant when the rumour reached her. “This is no longer Brahmin Street. Cow-shit Street would be a better name for it,” she said bitterly. “If only we had known that the rogue was saving our money to drive us out of here, we would have drunk water instead of milk. Much safer for all of us it would have been!”

  Although he no longer needed to sell milk to make a living, Munnuswamy still maintained a dairy on the outskirts of Toturpuram. Old customers such as Sripathi continued to buy milk from Munnuswamy, even though it was cheaper to pick up a bottle from the Aavin Milk Booth a few blocks down the street. Tethered to the front verandah of his newly painted house was his favourite cow, Manjula, and her calf, Roja.

  Putti thought guiltily of Gopala’s dark eyes on her face. They made her breathless with excitement. And this morning when he gave her the can of milk, his hard hands had skimmed over her smooth round ones, soft from constant applications of sandal paste and cream. “Be careful you don’t let it slip, Putti Akka,” he had said gently.

  The touch of those warm hands had made Putti grow faint with pleasure, although she was annoyed that he had called her Akka or elder sister. Just her name would have been acceptable, but she would never be forward enough to say that to him. Miss Chintamani, the clerk at the Raghu Lending Library and her long-time friend and confidante, had informed her (backed by the authority of Eve magazine) that only loose women and silly film heroines allowed their innermost feelings to show, to say aloud to a man what churned in their hearts. So she had not replied to Gopala, merely nodded politely and, heart thudding, retreated to the safe womb of her home.

  “My darling, where are you?” called Ammayya from inside the house. “Come here and take a look at my eye, how red it is.”

  Putti sighed and went back into the dark, old house. If she did not respond to her mother right away, the old woman would start a scene, weeping and smacking her forehead with her palm and accusing her of being an unfeeling daughter.

  She entered the kitchen and smiled at Nirmala who was now busy chopping vegetables for the afternoon meal. “Do you need any help, Akka?” she asked.

  “No, you’d better go to Ammayya,” said Nirmala, grimacing at her sister-in-law.

  “Who was that on the phone earlier?”

  “I don’t know. You could have answered, no? You were doing nothing.”

  “Ayyo, I never know what to say.” Putti shuddered.

  Nirmala snorted. “What is this nonsense excuse? Are you a small baby, or what? Your brother sits up there like a god in heaven writing big-big things to this person and that, your nephew sleeps till ten o’clock, and you say you are afraid of a plastic dabba. I am the only one running here and there like a madwoman!”

  Putti looked guiltily at her. She was fond of Nirmala. “Okay, Akka, if it rings again, I promise I will pick it up. Do you think it was Maya?”

  “No, she would not call on water day.”

  “Putti! Are you building a house, or what? Come here quickly,” called Ammayya, her voice thinly edged with petulance.

  “Go, go,” whispered Nirmala, her bangles clinking vigorously as she diced a large eggplant, “otherwise she will say we are talking about her. I don’t want any trouble first thing in the morning.”

  When Putti entered the dimly lit room that she shared with her mother, she found Ammayya seated at the dressing table. As soon as her daughter’s reflection joined hers in the floor-length Belgian mirror, the old woman swallowed a spoonful of some dark liquid from one of the many bottles before her. “Unh!” she said, scrunching up her mouth. “Can you see it, my darling?” She leaned forward and examined her face, wrinkled as a crushed paper bag, as if expecting to see some miraculous change wrought by the medicine she had just swallowed.

  “See what?” asked Putti.

  Ammayya pulled down the skin beneath her right eye with her index finger and rolled her eyeballs around. “Chintamani told me that one should always watch the eyes. If they are yellow, then it is jaundice or some other liver trouble. If the skin inside the eyelid is pale, it is leukemia. Mine is too-too red. My blood pressure is high, that’s why. I can feel it going ghash-phash in my veins, my pet.”

  “I can’t see anything,” said Putti.

  “So I am telling lies, or what? Look properly.” Ammayya yanked her eyelid down again. “Any time now I could explode. Chintamani’s father died of high blood pressure. He had red eyes like mine, do you remember? But everybody just thought it was an infection. Conjunctivitis or some such thing. Poor man.” She allowed a few tears to gather in her eyes and sighed heavily. “Nobody cares for old people. Such is this modern world. My mother-in-law was blessed, truly. Because of me she stayed alive till she was ninety years old.”

  Putti didn’t remind her mother that she, too, was eighty and in fairly good health for her age.

  “You and I will go to Dr. Menon’s clinic today,” decided Ammayya. “Maybe the library also.”

  “Why do we have to go all the wa
y to that crazy old man?” grumbled Putti, her lips pouting over her twisted front teeth. “Why not Dr. Pandit’s son, where Sripathi used to take the children? At least he has all the latest devices to check heart and blood and everything.”

  “Pah, these modern doctors are shameless. They make you take off all your clothes, I have heard. Even your knickers. Why should I go to those perverts?” Putti refrained from reminding Ammayya that she wore no knickers at all.

  A door flew open in a second-floor apartment in Jyothi Flats, Block A, one of two unimaginative structures that stood back to back, like oversized boxes, to the right of Big House. The Burmese Wife had lived in that apartment for more than five years, and yet it seemed nobody knew her name. Some said she was from Burma, and others whispered that she was actually a Chinese prisoner of war held captive by the morose Lieutenant Colonel Hansraj, her husband. Sripathi had never discovered whether this was true or simply a story inspired by the woman’s slanting eyes, her slight body and the unrecognizable language in which she cursed her maidservant.

  The Burmese Wife was hugely superstitious and had a running feud with the family in the flat above her own because they hung their washing over the balcony rail.

  “Bad luck to have another woman’s wet sari touch my face,” she screamed, her shrill voice with its rounded Bengali-sounding accent startling a pair of crows away from a neighbouring balcony. “It will make me a widow!” The maidservant upstairs ignored her and continued to drape the washing over the railing. To Sripathi’s relief, the Burmese Wife stopped screaming and marched inside her flat. But in a few moments she came out again, brandishing a pair of gardening shears. “To teach them to respect other people’s feelings,” she said, catching sight of Sripathi. “Some people have to be taught everything, even when they are grey-haired.” With a grim smile, she chopped off the ends of all the saris and sheets that encroached on her space. There was a commotion in the flat upstairs as the maid realized what the bits of fabric were. She yelled for the mistress of the house, and moments later war broke out.

  Then, from the first-floor apartment directly below the Burmese Wife’s, there came an awful howl. It was Gopinath Nayak, the young civil servant, exercising his vocal chords. Sripathi winced as he launched discordantly into an old Tamil film song. One of these days he would tell the fellow exactly how he felt about that racket. “Gopinath Nayak,” he would say firmly, “you sound like a donkey in labour. If you don’t shut up, I am going to jam your throat with cement.”

  He gazed down, smiling at the sight of a group of college girls in pale cotton saris, their hair done up in fashionable styles, drifting towards the gates of the apartment compound. He spotted Mrs. Poorna peering eagerly out from her ground-floor patio.

  “Here darling, here,” she cooed in Tamil. “Your mother has made it for you, with lots of sugar, just as you like it.” A kissing sound followed.

  Sripathi sighed. The poor woman was talking to thin air as usual. As the day progressed she would babble on, her voice a small wave of sound unfurling gently beneath the turbulence around her. By noon she would start to wail. She would beat her breast, clutch her grey hair and beg God to return her darling child. Sometimes, if the neighbours complained, the poor relative who looked after her in exchange for board and lodging, would drag her roughly inside the apartment. Most of the time, however, Mrs. Poorna stayed on her patio until her husband came home and coaxed her inside. Years before, they had lost their only child, an eight-year-old girl who had disappeared as completely as a drop of dew from the front yard. Everybody had seen the child playing hopscotch in her oversized dress bought to last at least a year, her pigtails flying out like dark comets, her young voice mingling with all the others. But suddenly she was gone. The Gurkha who guarded the gates all day insisted that she could not have left the compound. But despite all of the time that had passed, Mrs. Poorna still waited for her daughter’s return. Every day she made sugar parathas, every day she waited on the patio and every day she continued to hope.

  “Water will be coming in ten minutes,” Nirmala called from the foot of the stairs. “Better come down. The rice-seller is here and I won’t have time.”

  Sripathi put away his writing material. He hated water day, an event that occurred four times a week on Brahmin Street between six-thirty and seven in the morning. Because of the town’s dire shortage of drinking water, the municipal corporation regulated the supply by releasing limited quantities on alternate days. Each area had its own scheduled water days, when every container in the house was frantically filled to the brim. Sripathi had contrived a complicated network of pipes all over the ground floor of the house, as potable water flowed from only the kitchen faucets. Long trails of green piping scrolled like garden snakes along the edges of the rooms downstairs, some leading into a large cement tank in Ammayya’s bathroom, and others into an assortment of drums, buckets and pots in the dining area. Nirmala used the fresh water only for cooking, drinking and rinsing the dishes. The clothes were washed by Koti, the maidservant, in the saline water that gushed generously from the taps all day long. As a result, their clothes developed a yellowish tint and seemed always unwashed, even though Koti vigorously thrashed the dirt out of them every day on the granite wash-stone in the backyard.

  Sripathi peered into his son’s room, which was almost as large as his own. Arun had shared the room with Maya until she turned sixteen. Then Nirmala had decided that it wasn’t right for an adolescent girl to have a male, even her younger brother, in the room, so Arun’s bed had been shifted to the landing until Maya left the household. One wall had a large window that looked out onto the road in front of the house and was partially shielded from the raging afternoon light by the feathery shade of an ancient neem tree. The other wall had a door that opened onto a balcony exactly like Sripathi’s. A few years ago, Koti had gone out there to dry some clothes and had nearly fallen down one storey when the railing gave way. Now nobody opened that door any more.

  After Maya had gone, Arun had moved his bed back into the room and pushed it against the locked door. Frugal even as a child, he had grown into a hermit-like adult. He owned three white shirts and two pairs of trousers. He wore each shirt twice a week and the trousers three times. Every evening when he removed his shirt and trousers, he draped them carefully on a hanger and hung them from a hook on the wall. He then wrapped one of two cotton lungi cloths around his narrow waist.

  The room was otherwise full of books and files and newspaper clippings. Even Maya’s bed, with its bare mattress and uncovered pillows, was layered with papers and notebooks. Arun had been working on a doctorate in social work for the past five years, in between his involvement with various activist organizations.

  Sripathi surveyed the chaos of paper with irritation. He had never pushed his children the way his father had pushed him. He had believed that if he left them alone, they would do well. Maya for a short time—had proven him right. But this son of his had only ever been a disappointment.

  Arun lay flat on his bed contemplating a lizard stalking a moth across the veined wall. He willed the moth to fly away. As soon as the lizard came close, it fluttered forward sluggishly and then lay flat against the peeling whitewash, the patterns on its wings like staring eyes. Was it daring the lizard to catch it? Arun stretched his arms above his head and smiled. Watch out, he said softly, that lizard is no fool. But perhaps the moth was aware of its own mortality and was playing one last game with fate. The lizard slid forward suddenly and with a flicker of its tongue seized the moth, drawing it quickly into its mouth.

  He turned his head at the sound of his father’s footsteps.

  “What are you doing?” Sripathi demanded. “Come down and help me with the water. Mutthal, sleeping like a labourer. If you did half the work those poor fellows do, you would have a right to sleep like them.”

  Arun sat up and slipped his feet into a pair of Hawaiian sandals that were at least as worn as his father’s. He was a short, compact man of twenty-eight wi
th a mild air about him. The only feature he had in common with Sripathi was a nose that leapt out from the centre of his face and made it look slightly out of balance. “I am not sleeping,” he said.

  “Oh? Then what are you doing, pray?”

  “I was thinking about—”

  Sripathi did not let him finish his sentence. “Thinking? About what? How to save the world? Like Lord Vishnu? Eh? Eh?”

  The phone rang again before he could continue, and he paused, walked over to the window and peered down. He couldn’t see the verandah directly below, but voices floated up to him.

  “Last month you sold this rice to me for five rupees a kilo, and suddenly it has gone up to seven-twenty? What nonsense! Cheating a loyal customer,” he heard Nirmala say. And the rice-seller’s voice, “Akka, how can you accuse me of cheating? You are like my sister. Would I cheat my own sister? Look at these grains of rice. Threads of gold they are. Aged for five years at the bottom of my granary. Better quality than last time. You cook half a cup and you will get such beautiful rice, so plump and light and fragrant, you will think that you are in the kitchen of the lord of the gods, King Indira himself.”

  “Last time you told me the very same story.” Nirmala was not to be swayed by the rice-man’s eloquence.

  “Impossible, Akka! I would. never say such things about any other strain of rice. How could I? This has been fed by water from the Godavari River herself.”

  “She won’t pick up the phone till she has finished her haggling.” He glared at Arun, who stood up hastily.

  “I’ll get it,” he offered, but his father threw him another irritated look and left the room.

  “It might be a wrong number, I think,” suggested Arun, following his father to the head of the stairs and leaning against the banister.

  “Think!” muttered Sripathi. “If you worked as hard as you thought we would be millionaires by now. Multi-millionaires!”