The Hero's Walk

by Anita Rau Badami

  Sripathi entered the old brick building that housed the trust with hesitant steps. There was a long mirror in the entrance corridor, and in it he noticed how his belly pushed like a child’s bottom against the soft cotton of his ill-fitting old shirt and cratered gently around his navel. There were two dark semicircles of sweat staining the shirt under his arms, and he could feel it trickling down his back and into the waistband of his trousers. He wished that he had worn something nicer. He thought nervously about explaining the reasons for the loan to these people and wondered what he would do if they refused him. To his relief, once the trustees heard about Maya, they gave him the money without further ado. He sat there stunned for a few minutes, unable to believe that he had not had to grovel. And then he left quickly before the tears that prickled unexpectedly behind his eyes could fall on the wide, polished table that separated him from those solemn young men who led such neat lives.

  When he emerged into the late afternoon heat, the rush hour had started. Shoals of school children in limp uniforms, with loaded backpacks or satchels, waited at bus stops. There were maamis with heavy silk saris in rich magentas, emeralds and purples on their way to the temple, the market or to their music groups, and young college girls in crushed cotton saris or salwar-kameez suits. Sripathi whipped past Iyengar Bakery on his scooter, its familiar blue-and-green lettering partially masked by sheets of plastic. It looked like Iyengar had finally yielded to market pressures—exerted by the sudden proliferation of bakeries in the area serving exotic things like pizza buns and doughnuts—and was doing up his tiny shop. He had even inserted advertisements in the paper, Sripathi had noticed.

  A horn blasted insistently behind him. Sripathi peered into his mirror and saw a bus hot on his heels. It had a complicated licence number on its head—a series of letters followed by an illegible route number. The letters were the initials of the current chief minister of the state; an astrologer had said they were so powerfully good that they would ward off all accidents, but since the chief minister had several initials to her name, there was barely room for anything else. As a result, the number was sometimes omitted altogether or else painted on the side. The fact that nobody ever knew where they were going when they got into a bus became a regular excuse for lateness at offices around the town.

  “Why are you late again today, Raman?”

  “Very sorry, saar. Got into the wrong bus and it went off to the railway station, saar. Conductor himself did not know where the bus was going or what number it was.”

  It was true that not one bus had toppled over or crashed for some time. However, they were directly responsible for numerous other mishaps on the road, and on pavements where many a driver steered his vehicle when the road was too crowded for him to move as fast as he wanted, crushing vendors with their carts loaded with bananas, or a street astrologer who had neglected to foresee his own future, or a beggar who might have died in her sleep. But then the chief minister’s initials were supposed to protect only the bus and its occupants, not every single person and dog and cow on the streets of Toturpuram.

  Sripathi increased speed to get away from the bus, but the horn blasts followed close on his wheels. He glanced over his shoulder and caught sight of the driver grinning devilishly at him. Playing games, the stupid bastard. Sripathi edged into another lane and let the bus speed past. No use tangling with those bus buggers. They all thought themselves heroes, demi-gods immune to disaster. Ever since a local bus conductor had become a film star, the entire transport service had started acting smart, driving their buses like pumped-up cowboys, as if the roads were racetracks.

  “Yay saar, you want to die or what?” screamed an auto-rickshaw fellow puttering close to Sripathi’s scooter. In his anxiety to get away from the bus, Sripathi had veered into the path of the three-wheeler. He moved away and the auto took off, buzzing in and out of gaps in the frantic afternoon traffic like a crazy beetle. In the back of the tiny vehicle with its doorless openings on either side, the passengers, a pair of young women, held on to the canvas walls grimly, the movement of the auto turning their faces into vibrating jelly. One of them let go for a moment to grab a wing of her sari that was taking flight from the auto and, struggling to tuck it between her legs, nearly fell out.

  In between lanes, at the site of some repair work temporarily abandoned by the municipality for lack of funds or inclination to work, a beggar had constructed a house with gunny sacks, sewer covers stolen from around the city, empty boxes that had once contained television sets, and even a pilfered sign board that said: Private Property—Beware of Dog. The last bit of the message had been scratched out and replaced with “Mr. S.S. Ishwaran, M.A. History, University of Kupparigunda.”

  Mr. Ishwaran himself stood outside his home, a small man with a disdainful expression on his face, as if he had nothing to do with the shack behind him. Now and again he lost his aloofness and screamed spectacular abuse at one of several naked children playing calmly in the middle of all the traffic, dashing after marbles among the churning wheels. On the ground near his feet lay a large stainless-steel bowl holding a few rupee coins. Inside the precarious shack squatted a hollow-cheeked woman, blowing softly at a coal fire, trying to coax it to life. Sripathi passed the man every day on his way to work and wondered whether he really had a Master’s degree in History. If he did, look at where that degree had brought him! But such was life. Like those numberless buses, you never knew what you were getting into or where you were headed until the very end, and then it was too late to get off.

  There was a momentary lull at the traffic lights when hundreds of vehicles came to a stop and waited, chugging and revving and roaring like impatient beasts. The policeman had taken advantage of the fact that the lights were working for a change and had abandoned his elevated chowki in the centre of the intersection in favour of a quick break at the nearby coffee shop. An emaciated woman had taken his place, her scrawny body draped in a ragged sari that fluttered wispily in the thin breeze, sometimes exposing a long, dry breast, an underarm or a thigh as weathered as a piece of driftwood. She swayed and jerked like an animated scarecrow, high above the traffic.

  “She’s mad,” said a man on a scooter next to Sripathi’s. “There are rumours that that policeman raped her daughter.” The man had one child crouching between his feet on the front of the scooter and two more stacked like dishes on the pillion behind him.

  Some urchins started to dance below the police chowki, crowing derisively up at the woman.

  “Hutchee-hutchee, head full of hayseeds,” they called.

  The woman continued to sway, her body following the sad, disordered loops of her mind. A policeman emerged from the tea stall, his shirt gleaming white, his khaki trousers tight as drum skin against his crotch. He tapped his baton against the palm of his hand as he strolled through the pulsing traffic. He had an enormous moustache and a white Stetson hat. Until recently, traffic policemen wore turbans, but the latest chief minister had a passion for Hollywood westerns that she indulged by insisting on a change of uniform for the entire police force. She would have liked to replace the official jeeps with horses, but the municipal commissioner had objected.

  “As it is we spend our time cleaning cow dung and human dung from the roads of the town, now we will have to pick up horseshit too!” he was reported to have said. “Too much, too much, this nonsense is. We will organize a sweepers’ strike and then we will see about horses!”

  “Look, she is directing traffic while you drink coffee, saar,” shouted one of the urchins, dancing nimbly out of the way before the policeman could land a slap on his head.

  The man set his hat at a more dignified angle, rapped the baton against his thigh and glared up at the woman. “You there, get down,” he ordered.

  The woman stopped swaying and gazed emptily down at him.

  “Now itself, get down I say!” The baton pointed imperiously at the ground.

  “Downdowndown!” carolled the woman, and in one fluid movement she lifte
d her rags and thrust a scraggy pubic patch at the policeman.

  “Pappa, I saw her shame-shame-puppy-shame,” giggled the child on the scooter next to Sripathi. His father thumped him on the back and shoved his head down frantically with one hand, at the same time trying to shield the two little girls behind him by leaning sideways. The scooter teetered unsteadily, and all the children screamed.

  “What is this country coming to?” he remarked, smiling apologetically at Sripathi as if he were responsible for the whole absurd show.

  The lights changed and the traffic streamed forward, leaving the woman leaping around in the tight circle of the police chowki, butting her skeletal bottom out at the world.

  The sea breeze set in just as he entered Brahmin Street. For a happy moment he thought that the sudden drop in temperature heralded a burst of rain. He passed the egg stand—one of several set up all over town by the local government in an attempt to help the handicapped become self-supporting—and Viji, the legless woman who ran it, waved to him. She waved to everybody who passed, cheery as the bright yellow, egg-shaped stand that she ran. Recently Sripathi had discovered that the egg stand was actually leased out to Munnuswamy his neighbour, who with his usual political connections had cornered the market on egg stands. People like Viji were obliged to rent the stand from him at usurious rates.

  With the cooling drift of air came the stench of sewage from open drains, and Sripathi blanched. Why not just the breeze without the odour? It seemed to him that everything good in the world came with an edging of the not-so-good. He reached the Krishna Temple, and the stink of sewage was replaced by the sweet scent of a thousand jasmines from the row of flower stalls near the gates. The deep clang of bells filled the air, and this time, instead of irritating him, soothed his tired brain. He passed Balaji, who didn’t seem to have moved from his post outside the gates of his apartment building.

  “Hello, you are still here?” Sripathi asked.

  Balaji smiled back and pointed at the rubble in front of Sripathi’s gate. “Mess! Total mess!” he remarked with the air of an Archimedes saying “Eureka.”

  “I know,” said Sripathi gloomily. “Too much construction work. Maybe I should sell and live in an apartment like everybody.”

  “Oho? You are thinking of selling?”

  “Maybe. Then you will be happy? No more loans to sanction for me?” asked Sripathi with a slight smile.

  “Why for I should feel happy-sad for Sripathi-orey? I am simply an employee of the bank following bank rules and regulations. If I could, I would grant loans to everybody who came to me,” said Balaji. He looked gratified by his own magnanimous instincts. “But really speaking, are you selling?”

  Sripathi shrugged. “There are so many problems you know. Especially with the water. All these apartment buildings …”

  “Naturally,” nodded Balaji. “Hundreds of people flushing and bathing and brushing teeth and all. But you don’t have a well?”

  “Yes we do, but the water is brackish.”

  There was a pause while Balaji diligently scoured out his nose. He had apparently decided to clean all his orifices out in the open. A dry run before his bath thought Sripathi, disgusted.

  “How much?” demanded Balaji suddenly.

  “What?”

  “For how much are you wanting to sell?”

  “I don’t know. I will have to check the market rate,” said Sripathi stiffly.

  “My brother is looking for property in this area,” said Balaji. “He is in construction business. He will give you a good rate if you want. Straight cash, no problem.”

  Sripathi could feel his temper rising. Why should this obnoxious, nose-digging, supercilious bastard’s relatives stay in my house? he thought. Dirty crooks in my ancestral home! He controlled his rage and forced himself to smile.

  “I will inform you if I decide to sell it, Balaji,” he said.

  He squeezed through the blocked gate of his house, still simmering over Balaji’s suggestion. Jackals, he thought. Vultures. Feasting on other people’s troubles and sorrows.

  Over the low compound wall, he spotted his neighbour Munnuswamy stroking his cow and singing a song from an old film. The calf was lying on the ground. It looked sickly, thought Sripathi. But what did he know about animals, perhaps all calves looked like that. Munnuswamy heard him approaching his verandah and stopped him. “Sripathi Rao, I heard about your child,” he said. “So sorry. If there is anything I can do to help, don’t hesitate to ask. I remember your daughter from when she was this high.” He gestured towards his knees.

  Sripathi nodded and sat on the rickety old cane chair on the verandah to remove his shoes. How quickly Maya had become a memory in people’s minds. Such was the power of death—to strip away breath and transform a person into an airy abstraction.

  From inside the house came the tap-tapping sound of Nirmala’s baton and her fractured humming. He had forgotten that she had her dance class today. She must not have had time to cancel the class, and the students had arrived as usual at four o’clock.

  “Not that way,” he heard her say to one of the students. “You are Rama, the noble king, the hero. Walk with dignity. Walk with courage and humility. Lift your head high. And you are Ravana. He, too, is a great king, but his walk is that of a braggart. A man who is too proud and therefore not heroic.”

  The texture of her words surprised Sripathi. He had not known that she had such language within her homely head. He did not know either where she had summoned the strength to say anything to those children stamping the darkness of the room away with their sparkling, electric youth.

  Later that night, after a silent dinner during which even Ammayya was preoccupied and quiet, Sripathi went up to his bedroom and found that Nirmala had removed her pillow from their bed. He could hear her talking in low tones in Arun’s room and knew that she had made up the spare bed there for herself. Ganging up, he thought indignantly, mother and son ganging up against me—as if I care. Silly woman, she thought that he cared where she slept. Hah, it felt good to have the whole bed to himself. He flung his legs apart and stretched his arms wide. Deep within his heart a thick skein of anger unravelled against Nirmala and Arun and Putti and Ammayya, against his dead father and Maya. Especially Maya, for keeping him a stranger to his own grandchild, for disappearing from their lives as completely as she had. He had forced himself to forget his daughter’s betrayal, for that was how he regarded her marriage, the life she had chosen for herself. It was true that it was he who had told her never to come home, who had refused to reply to her letters or her phone calls, but by dying she had stolen from him the opportunity to forgive and be forgiven.

  Sripathi tossed and turned in his bed. His eyes felt dry and stretched, but when he tried to shut them he could not. Sleep, too, had abandoned him. There was a low murmur of voices from Arun’s room, and he jealously strained to hear what they said.

  But soon even those sounds died, and all he could hear was the insistent call of a nightingale from his ruined garden.

  Her window was open to let in the warm summer air. It was the twentieth of August. It was fifteen days since the Old Man had arrived and two since they had moved from Aunty Kiran’s house to Nandana’s. She was supposed to stay in Anjali’s house while the Old Man packed everything, but once again she had stood near the car when they were leaving, refusing to move until Aunty Kiran had said, “Oh well, let her go too. Poor baby, no need to upset her about little things like this.” Then she looked at Nandana and said, “All right, you can help your grandpa pack. Okay?”

  No way would Nandana allow the Old Man to touch her things, but she nodded because she was in a hurry to go home.

  Feet climbed the stairs. Nandana jumped into bed and pulled the sheets over her head. The Old Man was coming up and she did not want him to find her. He just stared with eyes big behind his glasses and did not say anything most of the time. Sometimes he opened his mouth when he looked at her, but not a word came out. He had brought her a pr
esent from India—three comic books with pictures of animals that talked to each other. They were folk tales from India, Aunty Kiran told her, and asked the Old Man if he would like to read one aloud to the kids, but Nandana had run out of the room. She did not want anyone to tell her stories but her own father.

  8

  SHADES OF BLUE

  FOR HIS TRIP, Sripathi had borrowed a suitcase from Raju as well as a coat, uncertain how cold it would be in that faraway country. Nirmala dropped her stiff veil of silence and helped him pack. She insisted he abandon his tired old sandals for a pair of black Bata shoes that he had bought for Maya’s engagement and had never worn since. She had also made him wear a pale blue shirt she had purchased from Beauteous Boutique.

  “Why are you dressing me up like a bridegroom?” He was annoyed that she had spent even more money on this trip.

  “You are going to meet our granddaughter for the first time,” Nirmala argued, “and you want to go in that wretched checked shirt of yours? Why you insist on keeping that shirt, I don’t know. Even our dhobi wears nicer clothes!”

  “Maybe I can ask him to lend me a fancy shirt for my foreign trip,” Sripathi grumbled. He was secretly pleased that Nirmala was back to normal.

  “Shameless! You will do it, I know. So crazy you behave sometimes! Now stop making such a big fuss for every little thing. What will those friends of Maya’s think if you land up looking like a chaprassi? Henh? And you have to meet all those Canadian government people also. They will say, Who is this crazy old beggar? and refuse to let you bring our Nandana back.”

  In his pocket Sripathi carried a bolo tie with an elaborate silver butterfly clinging to a fat blade of grass. He had worn it when he left Toturpuram just to please Ammayya, who had given it to him. “Be careful with it,” she had said. “This is pure argentum, not some cheap metal.” She was under the impression that all Americans wore bolo ties and cowboy boots and chewed gum, and her son had to fit in, even if it was only for a month and a half. She had also heard about black people getting shot and beaten up there, and although anyone could see that her Sripathi was as fair as the queen of England, there was no point taking a chance and standing out like a sore thumb. She didn’t know where to find cowboy boots, but the bolo tie had belonged to Narasimha and was genuinely American. Sripathi tried telling his mother that he was not going to the United States but to Canada, but it was quite useless. In Ammayya’s somewhat limited world, there were only three countries—England, America and India. Pakistan and Bangladesh (which she still called East Bengal) did not count as countries because, as far she was concerned, India’s Partition was a mistake that never happened, Jawaharlal Nehru was a womanizing fool like her own husband (God take care of his soul) and Gandhi was a traitor to decent Brahmin sentiments with his all-men-including-untouchables-are-equal nonsense. If Ammayya did not acknowledge Partition, it had not occurred.