The Hero's Walk

by Anita Rau Badami

  Putti shrugged. “Maybe, if Ammayya allows me to.” She twisted the end of her sari into a tight cord of blue and white cotton.

  “Why worry about Ammayya? We are here to take care of her.”

  “That’s what you say every time, but it is all big talk, nothing else,” said Putti. “So many times grooms have come to see me. Why you never said anything when Ammayya refused them all? Henh? Tell me? Because you are also afraid that she will start wheezing and coughing and threatening to die!”

  She gathered up the milk bags and got to her feet, leaving Sripathi to stare after her retreating back. In trying to keep his mother happy, he thought, he was neglecting his duty to his sister. He sat for a while longer on the verandah, brooding over the dilemma he was in. Absently he noticed that the pile of debris blocking his gate had grown higher; the noise of thunder that morning had been a truck dumping more broken concrete. He tried to summon up the anger that had fuelled his quarrel with one of those truckers months ago, but found that he could not do so. There was no feeling left for anything. It was as if he was standing outside of his body, dispassionately watching himself bumble through his daily routines.

  As the sun came up, Koti entered the gates, green plastic basket in hand, her hair neatly oiled and gathered in a bunch at the back of her head. A cluster of white flowers sat on top of the bunch like a fragrant crown. She gave Sripathi a gap-toothed smile, her skin stretched in a million wrinkles around her eyes and mouth. From a corner of the verandah, she took up the ancient, threadbare broom with which she swept out the yard. The dust rose in plumes all around her and settled back slowly. When she was satisfied with the reorganization of the dust, she picked up a decrepit aluminum bucket half-full of water, dipped a hand in it and moistened the ground with a sharp sprinkling motion. Her fingers jerked out a little dance, throwing silver arcs that shimmered briefly in the sunlight. Putting the dust to sleep, she called it. Then she bent over abruptly, straight from the waist, her substantial buttocks in a shiny green nylon sari sticking up into the air, and rapidly peppered the calmed earth with rice-flour paste from an old Bournvita tin until there was a vast expanse of dots like stars on a dusty sky. She sat back on her haunches and allowed her imagination to swim in. The random dots became a pattern and Koti leaned forward again, her face intent as she drew fine lines. Swirling, curling, frothing, furling. The lines swept from dot to dot, a fluid creation. Thought transformed to art, reflected Sripathi, oddly moved by this ritual that Koti had performed for so many years. The lines on the ground came alive—became swans, mangoes, wispy jasmine creepers, peacocks dancing, elephants thundering, signs and symbols for happiness and prosperity.

  A memory came to him of Maya skipping down the steps to the yard. Asking Koti if she could please-please try a pattern. Of Koti guiding Maya’s impatient little hands through the intricacies of the pattern. “What is this for, Koti?” the child had asked, after she had managed to dribble out a shaky line between two dots. “To keep the evil eye away,” Koti had replied, standing up and stretching her aching muscles. “When I put rangoli in front of a house, no evil spirits dare enter.”

  And yet nothing could keep bad luck away from Koti’s own life. She married a drunk when she was eighteen, and every morning she arrived with her face swollen and discoloured, burns on her arms sometimes as large as the lid of a Bournvita tin, missing teeth and blackened eyes. Sripathi remembered seeing a child as well, a boy who often accompanied Koti on her daily rounds, a silent child who sat on a corner of the verandah scribbling endlessly on a slate. When his mother was inside the house, he followed her around, searching for the gap-toothed smiles she sent him as she worked, peering timidly inside rooms if she disappeared even for a moment, and then, satisfied that she had not, running back to the verandah, to his slate and chalk. Once she had come in with her lip split open, crying openly, furiously.

  “The son of a whore took my money,” she wailed, beating her head against the wall while Ammayya and Nirmala and Putti crowded around, patted her shoulder and soothed her. They ignored Sripathi, glared at him when he asked what had happened as if he was responsible for Koti’s sorrow. “My money the son of a diseased cunt drank up. I had saved it up to buy a white shirt for my Kannan, for his school. Next week he goes to school for the first time, Amma, and the bastard of a father of his stole my money.”

  Another time she came in with her left eye swollen half-shut. Sripathi was horrified. “We should tell the police,” he said to Nirmala. “One of these days her husband will kill her.”

  “Police, hunh!” remarked Nirmala, giving Koti ice wrapped in a towel for her eye. “They will only take down a complaint and send her home. Tell her that she must be provoking her husband. You know how people’s minds work.”

  When Koti arrived for the umpteenth time with her hair uncombed and smelling of old sweat and oil—dragging her child behind her and weeping silently because she did not have the energy to feed him or bathe him for school once again—Nirmala gave her a towel and oil and some soap and told her that she could use the toilet on the terrace to clean herself. “Give the boy some hot breakfast also,” Sripathi had urged.

  This licence had outraged Ammayya. How could a servant bathe in the same place as the mistress of the house? Unthinkable! And eat the same food! Obviously Nirmala was losing her mind. What would the neighbours think when they heard about this? But Nirmala was adamant.

  The years had passed, Koti’s husband had left her and never returned, and her son was now almost thirty. He had a job as a doorman in a five-star hotel in Madras and lived there with his family.

  “What Ayya-orey? No work today, or what?” asked Koti, her sharp voice cutting into his memories.

  He smiled back and said, “If I don’t go to work, my boss will tell me to stay at home for ever, then how will we pay you, tell me?”

  The maid giggled like a young girl and slid past him into the house, leaving a trail of smells—jasmine, coconut oil, betel nut.

  School again. Mamma Lady had finished giving Nandana a bath and left her to get into her uniform. “No fuss-muss this time,” she had warned. “No getting into cupboards and nonsense like that, okay?”

  Nandana stuck her tongue against her front tooth and wiggled it. The feeling was pleasant. Soon the tooth would fall out, and then the tooth fairy would leave a quarter under her pillow. She shook the tooth again, with her fingers this time, but stopped when she heard a rustling sound from the tree outside her window. She clambered onto her bed to see what it was, leaning her face against the grill. The smell of the warm dust that layered the grill’s metal flowers filled her nostrils. This used to be her mother’s room, Mamma Lady had told her, and Nandana had seen the tears in her eyes. She wondered whether the tree had been there when her mother lived in this room. She loved that tree—something interesting always seemed to be happening in it. There were ants—small red ones and large black ones—that marched ceaselessly along the branches all day long, dodging each other, sometimes coming to a dead halt for a few seconds as if exchanging gossip. Did ants sleep? she wondered. To and fro they went, like lines of the red powder that Mamma Lady kept in a box in the gods’ room downstairs, twined with black on the gnarled branches of the tree.

  Koti, the person who swept the floors every day, and who had shown her how to make pictures with a white powder in the front yard, had wagged a finger at her and pointed to the red ants. “Bite,” she said, pinching Nandana’s arm gently. “Paining bite.” Then she added something in another language and moved the pillow, which was on the side of the bed nearest the window, to the other side. “Wheeen,” she added nasally. She drilled a finger into her ear, screwed up her face as if in pain, and then pointed at the red ants again. Nandana finally figured out that Koti was warning her that the red ants could get into her ears and bite her inside her brain. She had smiled shyly and nodded her head, and Koti had stroked her cheek and cried a little.

  The branches of the tree shuddered as two squirrels raced up an
d down, chittering angrily at each other. Unlike the squirrels in Vancouver, the big black ones that dug up all of her mother’s precious bulbs and nasturtium seeds, these were small with grey fur and two stripes down their backs. Arun Maama, who talked to her a lot, even though she did not reply, had told her a story about those squirrels. He said that Lord Rama, a god who was born as a human being, had blessed the squirrel. Nandana had nodded. She knew about Lord Rama. Her mother had bought some books from the Indian store on Main Street and told her stories about him and his wife, Seetha, and his brother Lakshmana, and a monkey god called Hanuman who could lift mountains. She wanted to cry when she thought of her parents and their voices coming out of the darkness, warm and comfortable, reading one story after another until she was fast asleep.

  “When Rama was building a bridge across the mighty ocean, to reach a kingdom called Lanka where another mighty king called Ravana lived,” Arun Maama had said in a sing-song story voice that sounded like her mother’s and still rang in her ears clear as a bell, “he needed all the help he could get. The bridge was built of stones, millions and millions of them. First came the bears of the forest to lend a hand, and then the monkeys and the elephants and all the other big-big animals. The king of the squirrels also came and offered a paw. In gratitude, Rama stroked two of his fingers down its back and left those stripes there. So every new generation of squirrel carries that blessing marked on its back.”

  Another time her uncle had told her the entire story of Rama and his war with the ten-headed Ravana, and she had sat and listened, even though she already knew it. And at the end of the story, he had said, “Some people believe that Rama was the hero and Ravana, the villain.”

  11

  A MATCH FOR PUTTI

  AT ABOUT EIGHT O’CLOCK, soon after Nandana had left for school, Nirmala came puffing up the stairs. “Gowramma is here with another prospective groom for Putti,” she told Sripathi, out of breath. “Ammayya wants you to come down.”

  “Why does that woman always come on a weekday?” grumbled Sripathi, combing his hair briskly. “I will be late for work again.”

  “Just for a few minutes you show your face and she will be happy.”

  Halfway down the stairs Sripathi realized that he only had his vest on and returned to his room to find a clean shirt. He stood in front of the long narrow mirror in the passage and pulled at his jaanwaara—the sacred thread that was looped over his left shoulder, across his belly and up his back, girdling his body in a diagonal. It made a fine back scratcher and he tugged it to and fro, so that it rubbed satisfyingly against his skin.

  “Sripathi, what are you doing? Hurry up, Gowramma is waiting,” shouted Ammayya from the living room. He hurriedly buttoned his shirt and smoothed the thick, curly hair that had a tendency to spring up above his head like a grey fog, before running down the stairs. He wondered who the matchmaker had dragged out of hiding for his sister this time. Poor Putti.

  “Namaskara, namaskara!” Sripathi folded his hands together and touched them to his forehead.

  Gowramma nodded at him. The matchmaker was seated on a coir mat that Nirmala had spread out for her on the ground. There was a sofa against one wall, beside a looming teak cupboard full of ancient case files, newspaper clippings and books with mouldy leather covers. It was soft and smelled like decomposing mushrooms, its ivory silk tinged green with the long exposure to the humid air. In a desperate effort to preserve it, Nirmala had covered the fabric with sheets of plastic stapled together around the edges like an envelope. Too late, though, for the mould had already taken root and now thrived inside the warm plastic. Nobody sat on the sofa except on state occasions when Putti’s suitors showed up. The plastic was then covered with gay Rajasthani bedspreads that highlighted the shabbiness of the rest of the room. At all other times—like the two other heavily carved mahogany chairs and the coffee table inlaid with ivory—it was pushed against the wall to make space for Nirmala’s dance students. Close friends or visitors like Gowramma either sat on the wooden chairs or on the coir charpai that Nirmala unrolled on the floor.

  As usual, the matchmaker had with her a woven plastic basket containing sheaves of horoscopes, letters and photographs of prospective grooms and brides. She also had her notebook and a thin handloom cotton towel that she used to wipe away the perspiration from the back of her neck and the crooks of her arms. When Sripathi entered the room, she was jotting down details of a prospective bride, suggested by Ammayya, in her book.

  “Is she fair?” she asked briskly.

  Ammayya wrinkled her nose and thought for a bit. “So-so,” she said finally. “A little darker than our Putti. Very good features but.”

  “Education?”

  “B.Sc. Computer Science.”

  “Very good, that is very good indeed. Nowadays these boys only want bank or computer girls.” Gowramma nodded. “Height and general behaviour? Good family?”

  Only when she had finished with the business at hand did she give Sripathi her full attention. She beamed at him now, making up for her cursory acknowledgment of his greeting. Sripathi could never get used to her sudden appearances, as if she were a part of some magic show. She lived with her youngest son. Her husband had walked out of her life one morning leaving only a brief note as explanation. “I am renouncing the world,” he wrote. “I will pray for all of you.”

  Gowramma was left with three teenaged children. In her fury, she told everyone that she was a widow, thus wiping her husband off the slate of her memory. She forbade her children to ever mention him again. There were rumours that a year later, when he returned to his home, disillusioned by the ascetic existence, Gowramma had chased him away with a knife in her hand, threatening to cut off his balls. Nobody had seen him since, although Miss Chintamani, who ran the lending library at the corner of Pilkington Road and Andaal Street, insisted that the beggar outside her library was the runaway husband. The suspicion was confirmed in her mind by the man’s habit of cuddling his privates—a protective gesture inspired by Gowramma’s threat.

  Oddly enough, or perhaps because her own marriage had ended so disastrously, Gowramma had turned her energies to matchmaking, casting horoscopes, numerology, and Vastu-Shastra, an ancient science that dealt with the auspicious positioning of objects in a given space. Her business had expanded so much that she now used the first floor of her home as an office. She had hired two assistants and acquired a temperamental computer from a relative in Bangalore to handle correspondence from all over India and abroad. She also published a weekly paper, Jataka, in Kannada, Tamil and Telugu, and an English version called In Your Stars for her American and British audience. Sripathi called it “In Your Arse” and said that the contents were as useless as the bodily wastes ejected from that orifice, a comment that found its way back to the matchmaker and gave her one more reason to dislike him.

  Gowramma visited Big House at least once a month, not just to catch up on the gossip with Ammayya, whose nose for a nasty rumour was as well developed as her elephantine hips, but because she regarded Putti as her special project. Her most challenging project. She had suggested at least a hundred boys, but not one had met with Ammayya’s approval, although the old woman always put the blame on Sripathi.

  “Tchah!” Ammayya would exclaim each time she turned down a horoscope. “What and all I should do, you only tell me, Gowramma. My son, he is too-too fussy about the person who marries his sister. Not this one, he says, not that one. Oh, my hair has all gone grey and still the fellow is saying no, no, no.”

  Now the matchmaker turned again to Sripathi. As usual, he was struck by her bindi glowing like a red third eye in the middle of her forehead—she, like Nirmala, had shifted to the sticker bindis. There was talk in town about that pugnacious red dot: surely a woman whose husband had left her had no right to wear such a sacred sign of marriage. It wasn’t decent, was it?

  “Ammayya told me about the terrible, terrible news, Sripathi-orey,” she said. “What a tragedy! And you haven’t seen Maya s
ince she left this country, no? Or her husband?” She looked inquiringly at Sripathi and when he did not reply continued, “Tchah! Tchah! Tchah! My heart is breaking for you all. Nirmala come here, my dear, sit beside me. I cannot bear to see your tears.”

  Sripathi pursed his lips so that they became even thinner. “I believe you have come here with a proposal for my sister,” he said curtly.

  Gowramma gave Nirmala a sympathetic look. But she did not ask him about Maya again. “Thanks to the computer, I found a wonderful, perfect boy for our Putti,” she said instead. “Everybody who knows him, and even those who have only heard about him, say that he is a veritable prince, a paragon of all virtue. Very shy and well behaved, and of course in a permanent job, so also secure.” She wagged her head several times as if confirming and reconfirming her own statements. “Not very good-looking, but a healthy and decent man he is. I always say that a girl must be better looking than her husband, otherwise he will spend his time admiring himself in the mirror instead of her!”

  Which meant that the prospective husband looked like the backside of a camel, thought Sripathi.

  “But a little too old. Fifty, didn’t you say? With a cataract in one eye?” said Ammayya doubtfully, her hands drumming a soft tattoo on the arms of her chair.

  “What can you expect for a girl who is no longer in the spring of her life?” demanded Gowramma, allowing herself to display some irritation. “You don’t like this one because he is too old, and that one because he is too young. I don’t understand any more what kind of jewel you are looking for, so next time find some other matchmaker. I have no more suggestions for you.”

  “I don’t think he is too old,” said Putti petulantly. “I want to meet him.”

  Ammayya smiled soothingly at her daughter and turned to Gowramma. “The poor child is tense, and who can blame her? Choosing a husband is not easy,” she remarked. Then she patted Putti on her bottom, as if she was indeed a small child about to throw a tantrum and not a woman in her forties, and continued, “Yes, my pearl, don’t you worry about anything. Your mother will decide what is best for you. And of course you shall meet this man. Although, I must say that his career choice is very strange. What kind of man likes to work with mentals and maniacs, henh?”