The Hero's Walk

by Anita Rau Badami

  Ammayya rocked to and fro on her bed and sucked in her toothless gums. Her granddaughter had died. The old woman did not feel very much about it either way. People lived and died. It was sad that Maya had been so young, but these things were part of life. She pondered the changes that were likely to take place in the house, and she was not sure if she would like it. Ammayya cocooned herself in the past, in traditions and rituals, and the prospect of change terrified her. She knew her son. He would bring Maya’s child to India. She only hoped that she would not be directly affected by the girl’s arrival. At my age, she thought petulantly, nobody has the right to upset my daily routine. She reached below the bed with her walking stick and quickly touched the locked trunk underneath. Its solid presence was reassuring. That was her insurance plan—all the jewellery that she was not already wearing. More jewellery, she told Putti, than even the queen of England.

  “That queen person’s jewellery is stolen from other people anyway. Mine was given to me by your father,” Ammayya took pains to point out. “Also, mine is better quality. I am telling you, no one has such startling Burmese rubies, redder than blood and of the best water. And my blue jaguar diamonds come from the deepest, darkest part of the earth. They have hoarded light in them for so many millions of years that to look at them is to gaze at the heart of the sun.”

  The trunk also contained gold coins and silver ingots, each one tied up in soft strips of cloth to prevent even the smallest smudge of gold from rubbing off. Ammayya had discovered that the borders of old silk saris were made of pure silver wire dipped in gold wash that could be melted off the saris into bars. Until that momentous discovery, she used to exchange her old saris with the raddhiwallah for stainless steel tins and bowls that joined the hoard in the cupboard in a corner of the room. She haggled long and furiously with the man, pretending, in the end, to be defeated by his canny bargaining.

  “Okay, baba, okay,” she would sigh, secretly chortling at the number of tins and bowls she had wrested for her ragged saris. “You take everything. I have no strength to argue any more. And anyway, what will I do with so many dabbas and things? Nearly dead I am, can I take it all with me?” All the while, in her mind, she would grimly promise herself that yes, she would take everything with her. Whatever could be burnt on the funeral pyre would be destroyed along with her body. As for the rest, she would insist that her ashes be buried in the backyard of Big House, along with all of her valuables. She would put it in her will, and if her children did not follow it to the letter, she would return as a ghoul to haunt them. There was no doubt in Ammayya’s mind that she would be able to control her afterlife as effectively as she did her present one.

  In the kitchen of the white house behind Safeway, Nandana heard Aunty Kiran tell Uncle Sunny that she was going to her house. “The child needs some more clothes. And Mary Carlson said that she would come over and pick up the house plants while I was there.”

  I want to go home, thought Nandana eagerly, homehomehome. She scrambled out of the bed, where she was huddled with all her favourite toys, and raced down the stairs. She put on her shoes as fast as she could and waited impatiently near the front door.

  Aunty Kiran came out of the kitchen and looked surprised to see her there. “Nandu, sweetie, do you want something?” she asked.

  Nandana hugged Moona, the cloth cow, and waited for her to open the door.

  “Do you want to go out to play with Anjali and her friends in the backyard?”

  She shook her head. No.

  “Oh, I see, you want to come with me?”

  Yes.

  Through the door and out to the driveway they went, to where Aunty Kiran’s blue car was standing. Into the front seat—don’t forget the seat belt—and then they were headed home. Her father would be wondering where Nandana had gone. For sure.

  Her mother’s snapdragons looked wild and horrible. The sunflower plant in the pot near the door had become a tree and was leaning over so far that it swept the ground. When Aunty Kiran opened the door, Nandana ran inside eagerly. She thought that the house had a lonesome smell. She ran around, touching the table in the corridor, where the magazines and letters were kept when they arrived, and trailing her hand against the dining-room wall, where her mother had hung family pictures. She stroked the big fat chair, in the corner of the living room, that was her father’s favourite. Nandana checked to see whether her video cassettes were still on the shelf below the television, that her father’s computer was still locked up to his desk by a long wire in the small adjoining room.

  She raced up the stairs to her own room, where she opened all the dresser drawers to make sure nothing had gone away. Her father had found the chest at a garage sale. He had brought it home in a friend’s pickup, and her mother had been so annoyed with the battered old thing—the black paint flaking off the walnut wood beneath, the missing knobs, the scratches in the existing paint. Maya hated second-hand stuff—it reeked of other people.

  “In India,” she said when Nandana’s father teased her about her hoity-toity habits, “we never accept leftovers. Only beggars do.”

  “Snob!” her father had said. “This isn’t leftovers. It’s a perfectly good piece of furniture that needs some TLC. When I’m done with it, you won’t even know it’s old.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  And her father had replied, “It isn’t for you. It’s for my cherry pie here.”

  For three weeks, he had abandoned his books and papers, and worked on the chest of drawers. First he sanded it down to remove the paint, and next he smoothed it with a finer sandpaper, and then he primed the wood to make it ready for paint, and he finally painted it white. Then he and Nandana stencilled onto it a pattern of daisies that she picked out. They used yellow paint for the flowers and green for the leaves. Even her mother had agreed that it looked almost new. She bought nice-smelling paper to line the drawers and gave Nandana a small picture of an Indian lady called Lakshmi with four arms and a smiling white face, sitting on a lotus flower with two white elephants on either side of her.

  “This is a goddess,” her mother had told Nandana. “She will always look after you and make sure you are okay.” She put the picture under the drawer paper. On a shelf in the corner of the room were Nandana’s books—The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs & Ham and all her Little Critters, Berenstain Bears and Sesame Street books. Her father had told her that books must be treated with respect. She would have to ask Aunty Kiran to pack them very carefully, so they would not get damaged on the way to India.

  6

  MAYA

  OUTSIDE THE GATES of Big House, the scooter got going as soon as Sripathi kicked the pedal, and he looked at it with some astonishment. The wretched thing had actually started properly for once.

  “Lucky today, or what? Mine is always giving me a headache. Every other day I have to pay fifty rupees for repair work to that thief of a mechanic,” remarked a complacent voice. It was Balaji, the Canara Bank manager who lived in the apartment block across the road. He wore nothing but a dirty lungi and a shrunken vest that he had rolled into a tire under his plump breasts. Sometimes, when the vest was unrolled, it looked tiny, as though it belonged to Balaji’s eight-year-old son. The boy wore big, loose clothes meant to last several years, so perhaps father and son shared their attire. Balaji’s belly, large and hairy, sat over the waist of his lungi like a contented cat, and through the fuzz peered his navel. Every now and then he dug an index finger into the navel and twirled it around diligently, as if winding his stomach up for the day.

  “You are late to work today?” he asked. His probing finger wandered from navel to nostril and then on to his left ear. He twisted the digit vigorously and examined his find with interest.

  “No, I had to take the day off.” Sripathi forced himself to reply politely. He disliked Balaji. The bank manager was a pompous fellow who derived enormous pleasure from making his customers wait outside his office, just to give them the impression that he was tremendously busy and ther
efore very important. But Sripathi would have to go to him for a loan soon enough, so he tried to hide his antagonism. “What about you? Why are you at home today?”

  “I am suffering from heatstroke,” said Balaji. “It is too hot these days. The monsoons should have come by now, but no sign yet. What a problem!”

  Sripathi mounted his scooter, waved to Balaji and rode off in the direction of Raju Mudaliar’s house. The motion of the vehicle ruffled the still, hot air and created a breeze that dried the sweat beading his forehead and upper lip. It was extremely muggy. He, too, wondered where the monsoons had disappeared this year. Around him on the narrow street grew the skeletons of more new apartment blocks. The builders had no sooner finished one construction than they went on to another, like a bunch of untidy crows. They left the road littered with chopped trees and building debris, so that it looked as cratered and shocked as a war zone. Overloaded trucks flanked the narrow street like pregnant camels, and their drivers raised the noise level several decibels by playing songs from the latest movies, sometimes through the night.

  When he was a child, Sripathi had thought the road enormously wide and grand. His childish imagination couldn’t begin to measure its length. What a wretched little alley it had become in less than ten years. Sripathi rode past piles of broken stone, their sharp edges jutting out threateningly. Small urchins and stray dogs rooted around in unused piles of sand. Here and there puddles of cement had hardened into strange shapes. Carcasses of old buildings waited for match-box towers to grow on them. And over those ruins, migrant labourers had built homes from what they salvaged out of garbage bins—cardboard boxes, plastic bags, flattened kerosene tins. The remains from other people’s lives created new landscapes on the edges of middle-class life.

  In spite of the chaos around him, Sripathi was glad to be out in the open, away from the oppressive closeness of his house. He felt his rage cool as he rode down the busy streets.

  It was nine years since Sripathi had heard Maya’s voice. She had phoned often, begging to speak to him, but he had refused. Her letters arrived regularly in the mail in thick aerogram envelopes with foreign stamps. Only Nirmala read them, though, over and over, storing them under her pillow so that she could examine the fine writing before she went to sleep. Often he was tempted to ask her what Maya had to say in those missives, but hurt, pride and anger intervened and silenced him. Later on, even that brief curiosity died, and with it he buried all memory of Maya. Sometimes, however, from force of habit, Nirmala would still read bits aloud to Sripathi. “She went skiing in the snow, she says. I hope it is not too dangerous. Why does she want to try such things?” Or, “Alan is teaching this year. They have to leave the child in day-care. Paapa. The poor little baby. I wish I was there, then no problem they would have.” And he would snap at her. “I don’t want to hear. If you want to keep babbling, go somewhere else and let me sleep.”

  He had chosen the name for her when she was born, for he could hardly believe that he had fathered this beautiful, perfectly formed creature. He had stayed awake all night in the small room where Nirmala and the baby lay, alert to the smallest whimper, certain that if he slept the child would slip away like a breath. Every time he peered into the cradle at the crumpled red face, the eyes squeezed shut, the curled hands like pale shells, he thought of yet another name for her. Latha. No, too ordinary. Sumitra? No, that was the youngest of King Dasharatha’s wives. His daughter would be second to none. At two in the morning he had had a brilliant idea. He would christen her Yuri after the Russian astronaut who had gone into space that year, the first human to leave the grip of earth’s gravity and wander among the stars. My daughter will be like him, she will reach for the skies, nothing less.

  When Nirmala heard the name, she had burst into tears. “Yuri, Yuri? What kind of nonsense name is that?” she sobbed, jerking her nipple out of the baby’s mouth and setting her bawling as well.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Sripathi demanded. She would probably want to give his daughter a name that every other child in India had, just to conform.

  “What’s wrong? It means nothing, that’s what. We can’t give her a meaningless name.”

  “How do you know it means nothing? Do you know Russian?”

  “Russian?”

  “It is the name of a Russian astronaut,” explained Sripathi in the patient voice of one talking to a child.

  “Are you crazy? We have a million Indian names, good Hindu ones with auspicious alphabets, and you go and choose a foreign one. And from a Communist country too!”

  “I believe in the Communist philosophy,” argued Sripathi aggrievedly. His first child, and he couldn’t even give her a name without an argument.

  “No, no, no! I don’t care if you are a Turk who believes in Buddhist philosophy,” declared Nirmala, “Yuri sounds horrible. Besides, when she goes to school other children are sure to call her urine. Poor thing. No child of mine is going to have such a ridiculous name. That is final. You call her whatever you want. I will call her something else.”

  Sripathi had to agree. Children could be cruel, and the last thing he wanted was to saddle his precious daughter with a name that would hurt her. And so he had eventually settled on Maya and Nirmala had agreed, insisting only on Lalitha as a second name after her own dead mother.

  Maya: illusion. The name was singularly appropriate for a daughter who had disappeared from their lives like foam from the shoulder of a wave. The last time he had seen her was at the international airport in Madras, where they had all travelled to bid her goodbye, their entire family as well as Mr. P.K. Bhat, Maya’s father-in-law-to-be. Nirmala couldn’t stop weeping, he recalled. It had embarrassed him, that wild outpouring of sorrow. Even in private he would never allow himself to break down like that. It showed a lack of dignity. So he stood there stoically while Nirmala sniffed and sobbed, until Ammayya, who hated being left out, had burst into tears as well, setting off Putti in turn. Sripathi patted Maya awkwardly on the back and told her stiffly to be careful, to study hard and to bring nothing but honour to their family. But underneath the calm exterior he so deliberately presented, Sripathi was a proud father. This was his daughter who had received a prestigious fellowship in faraway America. And she had done it on her own merit, without the help of influential relatives or friends. He who had heard, with a faint envy, other parents boast about their brilliant off-spring now joined their ranks. He, too, could talk knowledgably about student visas, entrance exams and scholarship applications, and bask in the sudden respect people showed him. That is Sripathi Rao, he imagined people whispering as he passed, the father of Maya Rao.

  Had he known that the admission and scholarship award letter that had made him burst with pride years ago would take their daughter so completely away from them, Sripathi would never have consented to her departure. When he allowed himself, he could remember every detail of that day perfectly. It was a bright, hot morning in March, much like this one. He had come home from work exhausted from trying to think of an interesting jingle for a new brand of tooth powder. Maya was waiting for him at the gate, waving the letter and laughing with excitement. How flattered Sripathi had been at the idea of Maya being selected for the scholarship. So many bright students all over the world and the university wanted their child. Not that they were getting anything less than the best, oh no! How many children were there who started to speak as clear as a bell at age one and a half? who came first in every subject, from baby class, right through high school? who went on to be the very top student in the entire Madras University—not just in studies mind you but also in sports and dancing and music? and who got flawless scores on the GRE and TOEFL exams?

  Nirmala hadn’t been quite as enthusiastic. Later that night, when they had turned off the lights and lay beside each other on the big double bed (the only item of furniture in the house that had not belonged to one of his ancestors and that Sripathi had bought with his own money), she voiced her misgivings.

  “The girl is already
twenty-two, time for her to get married. As it is, we have your sister still at home. Two-two unmarried women in the house is not good. Okay, we couldn’t fix anything for Putti, but for our Maya at least we had better start keeping our eyes and ears open for good boys. This scholarship and all is fine, but more important is marriage. I am telling you, these things take time, and before we know it she also will be sitting like Putti and counting holy beads.”

  “Oho, what is the hurry?” Sripathi said, still buoyant from the excitement of the letter. “Let her study, she has a good brain. She might even go in for medicine, who knows? Our Maya is smart, she can take care of herself.”

  If she went into medical research, he reflected to himself, at least she would be fulfilling a part of the destiny that Ammayya had envisioned for him. Sripathi hoped that the ancient disappointment he had inflicted on his mother would be lessened by his daughter’s achievements. He had sought to wipe out his father’s behaviour towards Ammayya by being as honourable and dutiful as he knew how and felt that he had failed when he abandoned medical school. Duty and honour, these were the twin hounds that dogged Sripathi’s footsteps, and their hungry mouths gaped up at him always. No, his Maya would have to be allowed the chance to become someone respected, and educating her would be the way to do it. Arun, too, Sripathi had hoped in that happy time, would follow his sister and make him proud. She would be there to guide him, to help with tips on studying for the entrance exams, to assist with applications.

  So he had turned to Nirmala and said firmly again, “Why should she get married so soon, like a villager? These days girls are doing well—we shouldn’t hold her back.”

  “Did I say marry her off tomorrow? I only said we should start looking. Maya may be smart, but it is difficult for a girl to survive on her own. Even if she is a big scholar, she needs somebody by her side. We will not be around for ever you know.”