The Hero's Walk

by Anita Rau Badami

  “A goodhearted, gentle man,” said Gowramma, eager to be done with this family that kept surfacing in her search list every few months. “What this house needs is a wedding. That will drive away the sorrow that is filling it.” She glanced at Sripathi to see if he was going to react, but he did not say anything. “He will be perfect for you all, very nice person, knows how to deal with all sorts of difficult characters. You should hear some of his stories, especially the one about the lady who murdered her own children. Ate them up like a cat, I hear! Our therapist taught the poor thing to weave cane baskets to soothe her troubled mind.” She noticed Ammayya’s expression of deep horror and stopped abruptly before trying to salvage matters. “But he is a good, very talented man. Everybody likes him very, very much. Long lineup of girls waiting to see him, but I decided, no, our Putti should have the first chance, what with such a beautiful horoscope match and all.”

  “A man who has been exposed to so many peculiar people is bound to be peculiar himself,” commented Ammayya.

  Putti stared at her mother, seeing in that loving face yet another refusal. “I want to meet him but,” she said, mutiny in her tone.

  Her mother pressed the end of her sari pallu to her lips and looked mournfully at a large photograph of her late husband that hung prominently on the faded wall of the living room and had a garland of dusty sandalwood shavings around it. “We’ll let your brother decide,” she said. “He is the man of the house after all, and like your own father.”

  Sripathi avoided Putti’s beseeching gaze. He cleared his throat. “Nothing wrong with just meeting this man, is there?” he asked weakly. “Final decision is yours, of course.”

  “Yes-yes, that’s what I also feel,” agreed Gowramma, her eyes darting from one person to the other.

  Without any warning, Ammayya burst into noisy tears. “My poor child did not even know her own father. What karma!” she sobbed.

  Gowramma gave her an ironic look. “Come on, Ammayya, think of Maya’s child. That girl has neither father nor mother now.”

  Ammayya ignored the comment, clutched Gowramma’s hand in her own sharp-edged one and squeezed it like a lemon. “You know how difficult it is to bring up children without a father. But unlike me, you are an independent person, no need to live on the charity of your children.”

  Gowramma twisted in Ammayya’s tight grip and nodded briskly. She wasn’t in a mood for theatrics, especially not one in which she was merely the audience.

  “You don’t know what problems I have every day, Ammayya. I don’t like to tell, that’s why nobody is aware. Smile, smile and smile, that is my policy. But inside my heart is a big cloud.” She waved her free hand wide to indicate the celestial proportions. “To think that I would one day have to earn my living. Tchah! If I didn’t have to pay for food and all, I would never even ask for payment for these horoscopes. But what to do, I am obliged … deeply ashamed but obliged.” She tried to yank her still-captive hand away, but Ammayya was not about to relinquish it without completing her scene.

  “Obligations, obligations,” she sighed, a large tear clinging to her craggy cheek like a rock climber on a cliff face. “Cowramma, my old friend, nobody knows the weight of obligation better than me. All my life I have carried it on my shoulders. My back has become bent under it and still I stumble on.”

  Ammayya released Gowramma’s hand to wipe away the tear which had stalled on its journey and was beginning to tickle her cheek. The matchmaker swiftly moved away. She gathered up her plastic string bag, and her file folder full of horoscopes and photographs, and backed out of the room. Normally she would have hinted at a cup of tea and a hot snack, but she sensed a storm gathering in the house and preferred not to be present. Besides, the therapist-Putti match seemed quite unlikely, and so it might be a good idea to hurry over to the Shastris and give them the horoscope for their niece. At least I can make some little money over that match before the prospective groom dies of old age, thought the matchmaker sourly. Even though Ammayya was one of Gowramma’s oldest clients, her refusal to like any of the matches she suggested reflected badly on her abilities as a finder of grooms.

  “Now I have to go,” she said. “Many other houses to visit. Nirmala, give me leave, henh?”

  Nirmala, who had stood silently by, nodded and held out an open tin of vermilion powder in the traditional farewell ritual of women. Gowramma took a pinch of the powder and pressed it into the parting of her hair. She nodded vigorously, “I’ll go and come, then,” she said. Again she paused and added, “Oh, and I also wanted to inquire after your granddaughter. So sad, poor thing, must be missing her father and mother. Tchah! Tchah! Such a big tragedy. How you are all coping, I don’t know only!” Gowramma’s eyes shifted sharply from one person to another.

  “Oh, Gowramma! What can I say?” began Ammayya, ready to fill the matchmaker in on all the details of their lives since Nandana’s arrival. But Sripathi quelled his mother with a look so ferocious she subsided from sheer surprise.

  “We are fine, and we will manage by ourselves. This is a family matter,” he said.

  “Oho, and I am not part of this family? Why, I have seen you, Sripathi, since you were in half-pants,” Gowramma protested, increasing her age considerably in order to accommodate that falsehood. “So, if you need any help with that poor child, let me know. Surely you need some happy marriage music in this house!” She nipped Putti’s cheek, taking her by surprise, and chuckled.

  “Didn’t you say that you had other business to finish today?” Sripathi asked.

  Gowramma gave him a sharp look and stepped out of the house. She fanned her face with her hand. “Pah-pah-pah! It is burning hot outside. Why it cannot rain, I don’t know,” she complained, stopping on the verandah to slip into the worn black sandals that her nephew had brought back from Dubai five years ago and that she couldn’t bear to throw out because of their foreignness. And then, with another reminder that the match she had suggested was one of the best in her files, she was gone.

  “Hunh!” remarked Ammayya. “What cheek she has bringing such a proposal for my daughter.”

  Putti’s face fell. “You always find something wrong,” she cried. “I know you don’t want me to get married.”

  “Enh?” said Ammayya, taken aback by the outburst. “Why am I buying saris and jewellery for you whenever I have a little money then, tell me? Why am I living if not to see you happily married?”

  Her daughter stormed into their bedroom and emerged carrying her handbag and a pile of magazines. “You are going to the library, my darling?” asked Ammayya, following Putti onto the verandah. “I will also come with you. Wait for me, okay?” The old lady tap-tapped her way inside, almost tripping over her stick in her haste. But when she emerged five minutes later, Putti had gone.

  The lending library was round the corner from Dr. Menon, the Ayurvedic practitioner who took care of Ammayya’s ills with an assortment of herbal powders, pills and ointments. It was owned by a man named Shekhar, but his sister, Miss Chintamani, presided over it. When Putti entered the tiny box-like place, wedged in between a bakery and a jewellery store, Miss Chintamani was busy with a line of customers. As always, Putti was startled by the woman’s greenish complexion. For years the librarian had scrubbed her dark skin with turmeric paste that was supposed to make her more fair. The yellow of the turmeric had leached into her skin and given it a mossy tint, as if she had stayed submerged in water for too long. Her compelling eyebrows were drawn with a very dark pencil—her original eyebrows, she confided to Putti during one of their long, whispered conversations, had been plucked to extinction by the beautician-in-training down the road.

  “Little more, little more she kept pulling out, and then there was nothing left. She said not to worry, it will all grow back, and still I am waiting for my eyebrows to return,” she complained, as if her eyebrows had merely left her face for a short holiday in some unknown place. “I am thinking I will never get my eyebrows back. They were beautiful and thick like
yours.” And she would give Putti a cloying look.

  Her eyes darted about in her verdant face, constantly on the lookout for book thieves and filthy-minded teenagers, all of whom—she was convinced—lurked near the corner of the library that harboured pornographic books. Despite her vociferous objections, her brother insisted on carrying them. He had sound business instincts, even if his moral fibre was horribly frayed. But Miss Chintamani made sure that decency was observed. Teenagers and children who ventured near The Corner got a good tongue-lashing followed by threats to ban them from the library.

  Putti headed for the desk where Miss Chintamani was loudly humiliating a young man in a white polyester shirt.

  “Mr. Rajan,” she said. “You are sure that you wish to borrow this … this Nurse Cherry book? No mistake you are making, sir?” She waved a slim volume called Nurse Cherry Goes to School that had a voluptuous blonde woman in a transparent nurse’s uniform on the cover, her balloon-like breasts pressed into a patient’s face. Miss Chintamani examined the cover with disgust, sucked in her teeth and continued, “Sometimes people get mixed up about the contents of books in this shop. If you wish doctor-nurse books you will find good ones on that shelf there.” She pointed to the section dealing with health and natural cures, religion and philosophy, the section that carried the latest books by Deepak Chopra, Swami Chinmayananda or trusty Dr. Spock.

  “Not a good book, eh?” mumbled Mr. Rajan looking thoroughly miserable. “I thought this was about hospitals and all. I like educational books about the human body. You see, once upon a time, I wanted to be a doctor, but what to do? Admission is impossible—such high donations and all one has to pay to get into medical school.”

  “Yes-yes, Mr. Rajan, but this is not a medical book,” Miss Chintamani pointed out, her lips pursing after each sentence. She challenged the other customers, “Does this look like a medical book to anyone here?”

  Some of them tittered nervously. One or two slid out of line and furtively replaced their own copies of Nurse Cherry and Bunny the Virgin books.

  “Of course, it tells lots about the human body, very educational that way,” continued the librarian.” She paused for effect. “But sir, what will your mother think when she opens this and sees God knows what, henh?”

  A few of the men in line looked around, prim and straight-backed with mutual virtue. One of them exclaimed loud enough for Miss Chintamani to hear, “What rubbish these young fellows read, God only knows!”

  And another nodded and said, “I say it is too much foreign television with shameless women doing this and that. Spoiling our children, that’s what!”

  Miss Chintamani looked around triumphantly, noticed Putti hovering, and beamed at her. “Oh, Puttamma, so nice to see you. You wait a few minutes, I have special magazines reserved for you.”

  Lately Miss Chintamani had begun to greet her with a conspiratorial waggle of her pencilled eyebrows. It made Putti wonder uneasily whether the librarian knew about the way Gopala Munnuswamy made her feel.

  “You look very beautiful today,” remarked Miss Chintamani. She leaned on the desk and smiled admiringly at Putti. “Somebody special is making you look like that, or what?”

  Putti jumped. This woman knew everything. “Who is there to make me look special?” she protested.

  “Aha! I met Gowramma yesterday. She told me about this wonderful match she found for you. So excited she was, you don’t know only.”

  “Oh yes, him,” said Putti relieved. “Well, we will have to see.”

  “When is he coming to see you, but? That is the question.” Miss Chintamani liked talking about the grooms who had come and gone from Putti’s life, eagerly mining all the information about those men whose horoscopes had matched hers but had been unaccountably rejected by Ammayya.

  “Maybe next week, I don’t know.”

  “What will you wear? Very important to make the right impression, I am telling you,” she said. “See, it says so here in this article.” She licked her thumb and churned through the pages of a glossy women’s magazine until she arrived at her destination. “ ‘First impressions are important.’ ”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” said Putti.

  “Tell me what colour saris you have,” suggested the librarian. She didn’t seem to care that another queue had formed behind Putti. “And I know all about him. Nice mature fellow, I was told. Working in the mental hospital. Very sober and clean living.”

  Dark green made her look serious and pink was too frivolous, said Miss Chintamani. What would a man who worked as an occupational therapist at the local mental asylum appreciate? Brains or froth? Young and serious, or mature and balanced? “This time you can’t make a mistake,” she said finally. “Otherwise you will end up like me, obliged to my brother, no future of my own.” She leaned across her desk and Putti could smell her hair oil, the sweat that made damp circles under the arms of her tight blue blouse, and deep beneath it all, the noxious odour of regret. “Marrying anybody is better than living as a dependent sister, I am telling you.”

  It was still and airless outside. Putti winced as the heat hit her like a slap. Earlier that week when Shakespeare Kuppalloor had come to Big House to shave Ammayya’s head, he had sworn that it was the hottest summer in eighty years.

  “How you know that?” Ammayya had demanded, glad that she didn’t have any hair to add to the misery of the heat.

  “I remember everything that happened.”

  “Enh, how can you remember things from eighty years ago, you liar?” laughed Ammayya. She liked the gossipy barber.

  “You know my sister Regina Victoria? She dropped me on my head when I was a baby, and ever since I get flashes from the past,” declared Shakespeare, whose father had worked for a British theatre group and had named his oldest child after the Bard.

  The smell of bread and cakes baking wafted out from the shop next door, hanging motionless until being dispersed by a passing vehicle. The beggar who always sat in the corner, and had been identified as Gowramma’s husband by Miss Chintamani, lolled against the wall, his legs wide apart, his testicles spilling out of the loose shorts he wore. He noticed Putti and gave her a gap-toothed grin. She looked away quickly and hailed a passing rickshaw, abandoning all thought of catching the bus.

  Big House loomed like a misshapen creature against the stark afternoon sky, and Putti was filled with a reluctance to enter it. She paid off the rickshaw and stood silently before the inward-leaning gates, contemplating the house as if she were seeing it for the first time. She wished that she was like Maya, who had lived, studied, worked, been happy and sad, travelled, loved somebody, created a life out of her own body and died—all in the span of thirty-four years. It had been a brief but full life. And Putti, born eight years before her niece, had nothing to show for her own existence. A car drew up in front of Munnuswamy’s gate and Gopala stepped out from its air-conditioned interior. He noticed Putti standing at the gates of Big House and smiled at her. “You are going out, Putti Akka?” he asked. “My driver will take you, if you want.”

  For a wild moment, Putti was tempted to take him up on his offer. To drive away somewhere she had never been. But there was no place in Toturpuram that was new and marvellous for her. So she smiled shyly and said, “Oh no, I just came back. Very nice of you but.”

  “For you, Putti Akka, anything I will do,” said Gopala softly.

  She blushed and, without looking at him again, squeezed through the gates and walked hastily up to the door of Big House. Behind her, she could feel his eyes on her back. She did not know that Gopala was in love with her uneven eyes, her bucktoothed smile and the promise of her cushiony body still taut as a girl’s. That he jealously observed Gowramma hurrying into Big House with new marriage proposals and wondered why she remained unmarried. And that, with every passing year, his love for her swelled like the scent of raat-ki-rani flowers unfurling in the moist heat of the night. Putti had not considered Gopala for a husband. While he made her pulse race with his flagra
ntly erotic glances, and she was shocked and titillated by his flirting, the idea had never entered her head.

  Ammayya was waiting for her in the shadowy coolness of the living room. “I saw you,” she said. “I saw you talking to that no-good milkman. What was he saying? Enh?”

  “Nothing much, Ammayya,” said Putti. “Only wanted to know if we needed extra milk for the festival season.”

  “So long you were standing there, that is all he said?”

  “What else would he say?”

  “And you? Did you speak to him?”

  “I just told him that we are not celebrating Deepavali this year because of our tragedy. That’s all.” Putti turned away from her mother and went into the kitchen. Her heart was too full of unsettled feelings.

  Here they said class instead of grade. She was in Class Two, Section B, and she sat next to Radha Iyengar. Nandana thought it very odd that there were no boys in this school. The teachers mostly wore saris, and you had to call them Miss, even if they were married. Some of the teachers were nuns who wore black gowns and veils and were called Sister or Mother. Radha told Nandana that the nuns had no hair, which was why they wore veils, and that they had no hair because they were all married to a person called Jesus. There was a wooden figure of Jesus hanging from a cross on the wall above the blackboard. He looked sad, Nandana felt, and she wanted to know why he had to hang like that, all scrunched up on two sticks.

  Radha was best friends with somebody else. She allowed Nandana to eat lunch with her and her best friend, but they talked about secret things that she did not know at all, such as how to blow bubbles with congress grass juice and a safety pin; where to find the biggest gulmohur seed pods with which to make boats in the rainy season and swords for mock battles; the secret twist of the fingers that guaranteed a win when you played pistol fights with gulmohur flowers; and about sea shells and magic stones and seeds and fruit and movie stars and cigarette sweets and ghosts under the mango tree near the chapel at school. Nandana wanted to see her favourite Barney show on television and eat a double-chocolate doughnut. She had seen doughnuts in a bakery nearby, but Mamma Lady would not allow her to eat anything outside the house, not even an ice cream, because she said it would make her sick. Nandana really wanted to try some of the treats sold by the two men near the school gates, especially the bright green juice that Radha bought every day without ever falling ill. But she had no money, not even a dime. She wiggled her loose tooth with her tongue again. Perhaps if she gave the tooth to Mamma Lady when it fell out, she would find a coin under her pillow the next morning. Then she could buy green juice.