“Where are you taking them?” he had asked a goat boy once, and the boy had replied, “To the palace of the King of Death.”
And in the afternoon he would see brawny men, their checked cotton lungis folded up to their knees, slowly wheeling bicycles back from the palace of the King of Death. Slung like dirty black-and-white washing over the back seats of the cycles were headless goats. Their necks still oozed blood and bubbled with shimmering, buzzing bluebottles intoxicated by the scent of raw flesh. Until finally someone started a written petition against the butchers who used the street as a short cut to the Saturday market, the place the goat boys drove their herds, and they stopped going past with their gory purchases. For several months after, Sripathi used to scream with fear every time his father offered to take him to the beach on a Saturday morning, down Brahmin Street and past the old banyan tree.
But until he was thirteen, Sripathi had never really lost anyone close to him. Death was as distant a possibility as Mars or Venus. He believed, in a vague sort of way, that the god Yama came swaying on his buffalo, dragging his lasso behind him, only to the very poor or the very old. The first time it touched him was when his grandmother Shantamma passed away. She had struggled long and hard to stay on in the world, and Sripathi couldn’t believe it when she was finally vanquished by time and age and ill-health.
When Shantamma was eighty-two, she had suffered a stroke in her sleep. But she had come out of it determined to fight Lord Yama tooth and nail because there were too many things that she had not done in her life. Such as smoking a cigar. Or colouring her hair like the women in foreign magazines. Or flying in a plane. Or eating an egg fried in a vegetarian pan and using the same pan for Brahmin food. Or gossiping with Rukku, who had been exiled by the people of Toturpuram for sleeping with three men since her husband’s death. Nobody had actually seen her with any of these men—nobody even knew who those men were—but it was obvious that she had done it, declared Ammayya, horrified by her mother-in-law’s desire to associate with the woman. Years of suppressing rage at her own husband’s philandering had made Sripathi’s mother righteous and judgmental from a young age.
“How can you know for sure?” Sripathi had asked. His father, the lawyer, had trained him to question everything.
“Have you seen her face?” Ammayya demanded. “She looks like she fell into a tin of powder. What respectable widow uses so much kohl and colours her lips? And wears flashy earrings and saris flaming with flowers? See how she slants her eyes and snares men. Innocent married ones even!”
Despite Ammayya’s poisonous rantings, Shantamma liked Rukku, although since the woman had become an outcast, a whore, a trollop, an unmentionable in decent homes, she had not had the courage to go near her or to even to smile at her. But after her stroke, she decided that she was too old to care about rules and manners and self-respect, and all her secret longings surfaced like lava erupting from a volcano. She developed a loud hectoring voice, gagged and choked over strong beedis that she forgot to extinguish and, on several occasions, nearly burnt down the house as a result. She sat with her legs spread indecently wide, she got the dhobi’s son to smuggle her a bottle of illicit liquor, which he brewed in the empty plot behind the house, and she summoned Rukku for a chat, driving Ammayya into such a froth of panic that she almost had a stroke herself. Shantamma refused to lie down any more because she didn’t want Death to catch her unawares while she slept. Having triumphed over him once, she wasn’t about to let him lasso her until she was good and ready.
“You see,” she told Sripathi, her voice like the crackle of butter-paper, “in our mythology, there is the story of Savitri. Do you remember? How she argued and bargained with Lord Yama for the life of her husband? Well, if a snivelling little thing like her could do it, why not me? Eh? Eh? Am I any less beautiful?”
She would, Shantamma said giggling, tweak the god’s enormous curled moustache and flirt with him a bit, but for all that she would have to be awake. So she sat in her favourite chair, the huge carved teak armchair with its faded yellow silk cushions that looked like her own spreading, liverspotted buttocks, and never went to sleep. When she finally did die, her eyes were wide open and challenging, and her bony, ridged fingers were curled around the arms of her chair so tightly that they couldn’t be pried loose. The chair had to be sawed away from her body, and—since rigor mortis had stiffened her so that she could not be straightened without cracking several bones—Shantamma was cremated sitting upright, two pieces of teak in her tightly closed fists, her face clenched in a grimace of triumph, as if she had actually confronted Lord Yama and bargained her way out of his clutches.
Sripathi was devastated by his grandmother’s death. She had been his buffer against his mother’s expectations for him to be the best son in the whole wide world, to be a renowned heart surgeon, the president of a company, the prime minister of India, a hero. She had protected him from his father’s increasingly tyrannical rages, loved him for what he was, and that unconditional affection had been his strength. Three years later, when Sripathi’s father, Narasimha Rao, B.A., M.A., LL.B., died, he was devastated again, not so much by the loss this time as from his sudden ascension from being the son of the house, with no responsibilities, to being the man of the family, with Ammayya and his unmarried sister, Putti, to look out for. He had barely figured out what he was going to do with his own life, and now he was in charge of two others as well.
Sripathi often thought that, if not for chance, fate, call it what you will, he might have been the seventh of eight children instead of the only son. Unfortunately for him, after six miscarriages, he was the first living child Ammayya produced.
The day of his birth was cautiously celebrated. He was deprived of the traditionally grand ceremonies that heralded the arrival of a first son because his parents were afraid of inviting the evil eye along with the other guests. One could not be too careful after the loss of so many infants.
Janardhana Acharye, the family priest, was summoned immediately, and he sat hunched over the infant’s birth charts, alternately consulting the panchanga (which he wrote himself and sold for fifty paise a copy), and doing complicated calculations on a piece of paper. He hated being dragged out of bed so late at night, especially as he had been engaged in foreplay with his coy but excited wife, who drove him wild with her mixture of reluctance and eagerness. But one did not refuse summons from old and respected clients like Narasimha Rao of Big House. Neither did he have the guts to tell the family that Sripathi had nothing extraordinary in his future: no fame, no name, not even a modest fortune. Why spoil things for them? This was their first living child after all, and a son at that. Why tell them that by his sixteenth birthday, the child would be fatherless, and that later in life he would see the death of his own child as well? Could anyone alter the future that Lord Brahma had written on the infant’s forehead the minute he emerged from his mother’s womb? Then what use to worry about it? It was a long time away, and Narasimha would be dead by then. No need to worry about it now and ruin his eyes looking for planetary loopholes through which to pull out threads of hope. Besides, if he made a bad horoscope, the family would ask him to perform rituals to counteract the mischief of the gods, and that would take all of the night and the next day as well, and Janardhana Acharye really wanted to return to his bed and to his waiting wife.
So he wiped his sweating bare chest with his shalya, used the same cloth to sponge out his underarms (which smelled as if someone had boiled onions there, a stench that always heralded his arrival), and said to Narasimha Rao, who paced impatiently as if he was in a courtroom debating a case, “The boy has favourable stars shining on him. He will always be one step ahead of life and one step behind death. So not to worry-murry. Other details not so important; I will inform you later. After one month, bring him to the temple for a special puja that will clear any lingering shani kata circling his future. Until then do not dress him in red clothes—not a good colour for this boy. That’s all.” Then the Ac
harye packed away his almanac, and with it disappeared his air of authority. He shuffled his feet and became ingratiating—a signal for his clients to pay him for his services. The priest found it demeaning to ask for money himself and even more humiliating to haggle for greater than the amount he had received. After all, he was a Brahmin, not a trader-caste fellow who had no shame asking for this and that.
Narasimha and Ammayya had high hopes for their first child. They gave him the grandest name they could think of, an entire orchestra of a name: Toturpuram Narasimha Thimmappa Sripathi Rao. Deep drum beats, airy flute notes, the high twang of a sitar. It was a name that carried the full weight of Sripathi’s village, his ancestors, his immediate family and all his parents’ ambitions. He, as first son of a first son of a first son, had a serious obligation to grow into his marvellous name. Ammayya fed him fat balls of fresh buffalo butter, basmati rice, almonds in milk. His grandmother told him gallant tales of heroism and cunning and wit and honour; of Arjuna the great archer; of King Harishchandra, whose honesty shook even the heavens; of Bhishma of the terrible oath; and of Bhageerathi, who persuaded wild and whimsical Ganga to flow down as a river and wash over the ashes of his thousand brothers. At the end of every story, she would gather him in her jowly arms, pinch his sharp little chin (which in adulthood would give him the look of a prim bird), and say creakily, “Now, you, my darling Sri, my raja, my beautiful boy, you will grow up and become like Prince Arjuna, won’t you? You will conquer every obstacle. You will come first in your class and become a great doctor, a heart doctor, and you will do big-big operations all over the world.”
While the young Sripathi adored his grandmother’s stories, richly trimmed with Sanskrit verses from the Mahabharata or the Ramayana, a dread grew within him that he would never be able to do the things that she seemed to expect of him. How could he learn archery, philosophy, music, art, politics, science—all the things that great heroes of yore seemed capable of excelling at simultaneously? As for utter, heaven-shaking honesty, like that of King Harishchandra, who sold his wife and child for the sake of truth—why, just the other day he had lied to Ammayya about eating everything she had packed in his lunch box. Not to mention the fib he had told Father Schmidt about his missing homework. (“I’m sorry, Father, my grandmother threw it away by mistake,” he had mumbled, knowing that if the grim-faced English teacher did indeed ask Shantamma, she would support his story.) But the thing Sripathi loved most about his grandmother was that she herself never followed any of the morals expounded in the tales she narrated to him. And when one day he confided his fears to her, she clutched him against her breasts, kissed him all over his face and said, “My raja, you will be my prince, even if you end up as a street sweeper.”
Narasimha Rao bought his son the complete Encyclopaedia Britannica on his fourth birthday and expected him to start absorbing every page immediately, even though the child could barely read. The volumes sat like plump potentates on the shelf in the drawing-room, dressed up in maroon and gold, a sign to everyone who visited that this was a house of learning.
“You read one page to him every day,” Narasimha commanded Ammayya. “Make sure he by-hearts it.” At dinner time he would quiz Sripathi on the page of the day, and if the boy failed to answer, he would explode.
“Idiot, idiot, you have given birth to an idiot!” he would shout at Ammayya, his heavy face flushed with emotion. Turning to his son, he would fix him with a look that paralyzed Sripathi and made him forget all that he did know. “Don’t think your father will be around for the rest of your life, mutthal,” he continued. “One of these days, when you are sweeping the streets, you will wish you had listened to me and studied harder.”
Sometimes, when Sripathi had looked numbly at him for more than three questions, Narasimha would rise ominously from his chair. He would fasten his fingers like a vice on the lobe of his son’s ear and pull him up until he, too, was standing. Wordlessly, he would drag Sripathi out through the living room, with its looming cupboards full of ancient books and its dark, brooding furniture, through the verandah and out of the gate. Down Brahmin Street they would go, Sripathi sobbing with pain and shame as pedestrians gazed curiously at them. A few of the old men who gathered daily at the gates of the Krishna Temple to gossip and bemoan the ways of the younger generation would shout encouragement; “That’s it, Narasimha-orey! Teach the young fellow right from wrong. Otherwise he will climb on your back like the vetaala and never get off!” Past Sanskrit College, the pressure of Narasimha’s fingers burning on Sripathi’s tender ear, and into the squatters’ colony, where the road grew narrow and huts made of rags and tins and stolen bricks crowded around open drains.
“There, you see, idiot—that’s where you will end up if you don’t learn the things I ask you to,” Narasimha Rao would say. The slum-dwellers were so accustomed to seeing the big, dark-skinned man hauling his thin son by the ear and pointing to them as examples of wasted lives that they did not even look up. Idlers clad in nothing other than striped and grimy underpants continued to lounge outside their huts, smoking beedis or gazing at the ground in despair. Women continued to scrub listlessly at aluminum vessels around the tube-well that had recently been installed by the Lions Club of Toturpuram, or to spread out ragged clothes to dry on flat stones beside the festering drain. Naked children played with tops and marbles on the dusty road. Some of them squatted near the drain, next to the women drying clean clothes, grunting with concentration, their bums hanging over piles of worm-ridden feces.
His father would make a sweeping gesture with the hand that wasn’t pinching Sripathi’s ear and say, “Do you see that loafer there? You want to end up like that?” And just when Sripathi thought that his ear was going to tear away, his father would release it and slap the side of his head hard. Once. Twice. So that it snapped backwards and forwards. Then, casting a look of disgust at his son, he would stalk back home. Sripathi would cross his thin arms over his head and, bawling loudly, run after his father.
Sripathi had never dared to ask his father how an intimate knowledge of the mating habits of kangaroos would help in the pursuit of a career—or how familiarity with the exact dimensions of the Hope diamond, which he was never likely to possess, would assure success in life. But by the time Narasimha died, both Ammayya and Sripathi had a stock of esoteric and wholly unnecessary information in their heads. The chemical composition of salt. The botanical name of every tree on Brahmin Street. Who invented the radio. Who invented fountain pens. Why leaves were green. When Brahms wrote his first symphony. The first person to cross the Karakoram ranges. The name of Queen Victoria’s dog.
Slow, heavy steps came up the stairs, across the landing, and into the bedroom behind Sripathi. He knew it was Nirmala by the sound of her toe rings on the floor.
“What are we going to do?” she asked, her voice still thick with tears. “Why you are sitting here by yourself? You can’t come down and be with the rest of us?”
“Oh, now I can’t even sit quietly and think, is that it?”
“Our child is dead, and you can’t share in the sorrow? What hard kind of person are you? I want to know every word you and that man spoke on the phone. You didn’t tell me what is happening to the baby. Our Nandana.”
“You didn’t even let me open my mouth. Hitting me like a crazy lunatic.” Sripathi turned around and glared at her.
Nirmala looked down and pleated her sari pallu between the fingers of her left hand. She sniffed, wiped her nose with the end of the sari and said, “Okay, but you also hit me, no?”
Sripathi did not reply and Nirmala continued. “What will you do about Nandana? What did that man say? Where is the child? Poor thing, how she must be feeling, God only knows.”
“I am her legal guardian,” Sripathi said. “The child will come to us. I will have to make arrangements to go to Vancouver, stay there for a few months, lots of things to do.”
“She is coming here? I will see my grandchild? Ah, what wickedness is this, that I have to
lose my own child to see my grandchild!” Nirmala started to weep again.
“It is all going to cost a lot.”
Nirmala gave Sripathi an angry look. “Cost. Always you think about unimportant things. Our daughter and her husband are dead, and this is all you can say to me? It will cost a lot?”
“Don’t talk to me like that. If I don’t think about cost, who will? Your dead grandfather? Henh? Maybe you should ask those stupid gods of yours to give me a pair of wings to carry me to Canada. Or better still, ask one of your rich cousins to buy me a private plane. They keep showing off about this and that. Ask them and see how much real help they will give.”
“Why do you always bring my family into everything? You can’t take care of us, and then you curse my relatives.” Nirmala replaced the sandalwood case full of Maya’s letters inside her cupboard.
Burn them, they are useless now, he wanted to say to her, but stopped himself in time. Nirmala gave him another wounded glance before she left the room, and Sripathi was alone once again.
The clock on the landing chimed the hour, and he looked at it as if at an old friend. Its benign ivory face framed in polished rosewood was as familiar to him as his own. Sripathi had received it as a gift for his Brahmin initiation ceremony forty-seven years ago from one of his father’s friends. Large and jolly, Varadarajan Judge-sahib, had patted the young Sripathi’s newly tonsured head, pinched his cheeks and given him the clock in its fancy box.
“Here, my boy,” he had said in his rotund voice that seemed to form in the depths of his stomach before emerging. “Now that you have received your sacred thread, now that you have entered the world of knowledge, you will appreciate this gift of time. A valuable gift that goes as soon as it arrives. So learn to use it wisely, and you will be content.”
The Hero's Walk Page 6