The Hero's Walk

by Anita Rau Badami

  She waddled back from the dining room to her bedroom where she settled down before the dressing table with its rows of medicine bottles, all containing Ayurvedic remedies obtained from Dr. Menon. She refused to visit a regular hospital or even young Dr. Pandit, whose father had taken care of Sripathi’s children. She had a horror of being examined by a doctor, of having her dry private parts poked and prodded, of lying helpless on an examination table. Sripathi and Putti had been delivered here in her own home by a midwife. And she had read about the body-parts business that was rampant in hospitals.

  “You know Sub-Inspector Krishnappa’s son?” Miss Chintamani had asked. “Well, he went to that big new hospital on Nehru Road with a simple sore throat. Only that, see? And before he could say aan or oon those smart-suit doctors had him on an operating table. Took out his appendix, they said. But who knows what else they pulled out? The boy has been married six years and still his wife’s belly is flat.”

  “They can do things like that?” Ammayya had asked, wishing all the more that her own son was a doctor. Surely they wouldn’t do bad things to a doctor’s mother?

  “Of course they can. Do they allow anyone inside the operating theatre? No. Worse than anything, I have heard, is the stuff they put inside you. I have heard that these America-trained doctors do all sorts of inauspicious things, put monkey hearts in humans and what not!”

  Ammayya came away from the library determined never to end up in a hospital. Besides, the sight of people in white coats with stethoscopes around their necks was a constant reminder of what her own son had tossed away. Her anger was evenly divided between all those arrogant, god-like creatures with the power to heal at their fingertips, and her son who could have had that same power. Dr. Menon, the Ayurved, was too old and poor to inspire anger or envy in Ammayya’s heart, and more importantly, his advice was dispensed free of charge. He practiced ayurveda as a hobby, and anybody who went to him did so with the understanding that they were his guinea pigs and had forfeited the right to complain if his medicines did not work. His patients might not always get well after taking his powders and pellets, but at least they did not get any worse.

  Ammayya swatted her stick against the edge of her bed and it hit her trunk. Her mood swung from cantankerous to contented at the heavy sound. Nice and full, she thought happily. The trunk itself was a camouflage for a smaller box, also locked with a Navtal lock, inside which there were other tins and boxes, each with its own lock. You could never be suspicious enough about people’s motives, Ammayya knew that for a fact. Why, just the other day she had read in the papers about a woman (like her), old (again the similarity), helpless (there you go again), who had been beaten to death by her own son, all for a few gold chains around her neck. Not to mention the story that Miss Chintamani had told her and Putti about the decent, god-loving, charitable (she made fresh tea, even for the servants, if you please!), old Kaveriamma on Ganges Road, next to the Mother Mary Church.

  “You know the servant boy, Vasu?” she had asked.

  “The good-looking fellow?”

  “Uh-huh! Handsome is as handsome does, that’s what I say.” Miss Chintamani had pursed her lips censoriously.

  “Why, what happened?” Ammayya wanted to know.

  “Poor old Kaveriamma, she brought up the ingrate as if he was her own son. For twenty-five years. And he tried to kill her with a rolling pin!” Miss Chintamani had been indignant.

  “Ayyo! Why did he do such a thing?”

  “Who knows why villains do the things they do? He said it was because she wouldn’t give him the money she owed him. Worked him like a slave, he said, for all those years. Where would he have been without Kaveriamma, tell me? In the gutter, that’s where.”

  “And what did the old lady say to that?” asked Ammayya. Why, she might have been Kaveriamma. Koti could easily attack her the same way.

  “Poor thing, she could barely talk. But she told the judge that she had deposited all his money in a savings account and was planning to give it to him on his wedding day.”

  “But didn’t Vasu get married two years ago?” Putti had asked.

  “Oho, one must learn to be patient. Kaveriamma would have given it to him if he had asked properly. But the idiot goes and hits her on the head. That’s gratitude for you!” Miss Chintamani had ended her story.

  Well, thought Ammayya, unlike Kaveriamma, she was certainly not foolish enough to trust a soul. She patted the keys that she had pinned to the inside of her blouse, then with one mighty heave she detached herself from the chair. Tap-tap-tap, she swayed slowly across the cold red-oxide floor of the living room. Past the rotting sofa, the ancient rosewood chairs and the brooding teak cupboards that still contained the yellowing stacks of legal books, journals, case notes and files once used by Narasimha Rao. Ammayya had no particular use for all that paper, but insisted on keeping it out of a sense of perversity. She was aware how it bothered Nirmala, who grumbled about the waste of good space. With a click of her teeth, the old woman pulled a small coffee table out into the centre of the room. Like all the other furniture, it had been pushed against the wall to make space for Nirmala’s students. Capering fools, sniffed Ammayya, her heart thundering as she made her way up the stairs. Dancing! She had seen better dancing from the monkeys at the temple. But she enjoyed the entertainment on Wednesdays and Saturdays, liked to sit in her chair and comment on the dancers. “Is she doing the elephant walk, that fat girl there?” she would demand. Or, “Nirmala, is this the dance of the demons you are teaching these children?” Then she would slap her thigh and cackle at her own wit.

  She paused for breath on the landing, looking at the cracked floor with distaste. It was a while since she had had the opportunity to come up here, and she hadn’t noticed how wretched the house had become. Perhaps Sripathi was right. It was time to sell it to the highest bidder and get some of those matchboxes in exchange. She would then rent out her flat and continue to stay with her son. Putti was entitled to an apartment as well, which could also be rented out.

  In Sripathi’s room, she made sure that all the windows and the balcony door were shut, so that none of their snooping neighbours would report her to Nirmala, and then she started to open the cupboards. To her disappointment, Nirmala had locked the steel almirah where she undoubtedly stored all her recent acquisitions. The wooden cupboard with everyday clothes was open, though, and Ammayya eagerly pawed through the neatly folded saris and petticoats, mumbling to herself about suspicious daughters-in-law. There was nothing there, not even money that she could pinch. Nor any secret letters for her to read. Only the sandalwood box full of Maya’s letters. Ammayya was already familiar with the contents of those. The old woman cupped her palm and shook out some powder from a tall tin kept in the cupboard and that she had on her own dressing table as well. With one hand she held the front of her blouse out like a pouch and smeared the powder over her breasts with the other hand. Smelled good, smelled good. Why should only Nirmala use it? She decided to take the powder down to her room for when she had exhausted her own supply. Let her daughter-in-law wonder where it had gone. Satisfied that there was nothing else in Sripathi’s bedroom that was of interest, she shuffied over to the other room. Where the foreign brat slept. With a growing sense of excitement, Ammayya dragged out the suitcases from under the bed. Ever since Nandana’s arrival, Ammayya had been longing to see what her great-granddaughter had brought from abroad. She imagined thick packs of chewing gum, for which she had developed an enormous craving. Boxes of soaps that smelled so different from the Lifebuoy bars that Nirmala bought in bulk for the entire household. Dozens of pens in assorted colours. The old lady wondered whether the child had brought back any of her parents’ clothes. Those would fetch a good sum of money in China Bazaar; the shops did a roaring business in smuggled goods, second-hand foreign clothes and make-up, shoes and bags. She would have to think of some way to sneak the clothes out of the house and all the way to the bazaar, but—she sucked at her teeth delightedly—she w
ould manage. To her intense disappointment, the suitcases held nothing other than photographs and assorted books that for some foolish reason Sripathi had lugged all the way back from that America-Canada place. As if there weren’t any books in this country! Trust her son to pick all the wrong things to hang on to. He never did have any sense; from the moment he was born, he was an idiot. That was obvious to Ammayya as soon as she laid eyes on his sticking-out ears, his pasty face and his bulging navel fifty-seven years ago. Although at that time, her young eyes dimmed by love for her firstborn, she had thought that the elephantine ears were a sign of future greatness, in spite of the fact that they were folded down at the top like photo-corners and had to be tied back for a few months until they straightened out somewhat. She rifled through the photographs impatiently, pausing when she came across one of Maya, Alan and Nandana in front of a small blue house with a flowering bush beside it. All of a sudden, the old woman was filled with an unaccustomed regret. She looked at the smiling young face in the picture and remembered that Maya had always indulged her. Like that time she had taken Ammayya to an ancient film starring Shivaji Ganeshan playing Robin Hood. The girl had saved her bus fare for weeks, leaving the house early to get to college on foot. And then she had surprised her grandmother with a trip to the theatre, even treated her to a bag of popcorn that the vendor assured them had been popped in vegetable oil. After she went away to the foreign country, she never failed to enclose a pack of chewing gum for Ammayya along with every letter, starting an addiction for the rubbery strips in the old lady. Yes, Maya had been a good grandchild. But then again, perhaps she had hoped that Ammayya would leave her some of her jewellery. Nobody did anything without an ulterior motive. The old woman stuffed all the photographs back in the envelope and shut the suitcase, and with it her momentary lapse into sentimentality. Ammayya had lost so much in life—children, illusions, dreams, trust—that one more loss no longer really mattered to her. Things came and things went. That was life. What she could hang on to, she did with the ferocity of an animal with its kill.

  Arun’s belongings in the same room did not rate so much as a cursory glance. He was an ascetic, nothing there worth taking. In fact, thought Ammayya, if she had had her purse with her she might even have been moved to leave a few coins for her unimpressive grandson. He, too, had proved to be a disappointment like his father. But that was how it was with men in this family. Arrived in the world with a lot of noise and did nothing to deserve all that initial attention. Fah!

  But she knew she would find something interesting as soon as she opened the cupboard. There, in the dark hollow, Maya’s red coat shone like a flame, begging to be stolen. Ammayya stroked the delicious, heavy, silky surface of the coat. She loved it immediately, passionately. Ammayya snatched it up, and like a bride with her wedding clothes, she shyly inserted one arm and then another into its warm, glowing embrace. Her pouchy skin shrank with delicate pleasure at the touch of such luxury. It smelled wonderful too. Subtle and teasing, the aromas trapped in that red blaze of wool. She would never be able to wear it at home, but she could sell it for a good sum of money at the China Bazaar. Ammayya abandoned the powder tin on Arun’s paper-ridden desk. Let Nirmala keep it, she thought magnanimously. This jacket more than made up for the sacrifice. The old woman cuddled it against her ancient body, remembered to open out the windows she had shut, pull the curtains she had drawn, and creaked down the stairs like a bandit queen, satisfied with her efforts. She shuffled across the gloomy living room and into her own chamber where she secreted the jacket in one of her cupboards, locking it carefully with a key from the bunch around her neck. Ah, what a good evening it had been! Thoroughly pleased with herself, she went onto the verandah and sat on the steps. Innocent as a leaf on a tree. An old woman waiting for her family to come home.

  “Scissor sharpening! Knife polishing!” called a sing-song voice from the road outside, followed by the clash and scrape of knives against the sides of a bicycle. The knife man passed this way every single day, but no one called for his services. Last week, the fat brothers in her rickshaw had warned her that, if she was naughty, the knife man would cut her into small pieces with his sharpest pair of scissors, and feed the pieces to the sea monster that guarded Toturpuram from foreign pirates. So it was with a sense of relief that Nandana watched the man go by without stopping. As his voice faded down the road, another set of sounds started up across the compound wall, shrill voices screaming and fighting over the garbage bin. The gypsies who lived on the pavement had started scavenging for the day and were quarrelling over the discarded cloth, old tins and bottles. Nandana recognized these two gypsies, with their dirty, deeply pleated skirts slung low over their hips so that their bellies spilled over. They fascinated her. The men had curly hair that they wore in knots and decorated with peacock feathers. They sang or simply lay on the ground, staring up at the sky split into blue bits by tree leaves. The children ran around naked and played all the time instead of going to school. And the women sat on the pavement and made bead jewellery or stitched the rags that they had collected into patchwork skirts. On her first day at school, Nirmala and Sripathi had taken Nandana by bus and that was when she had first seen the gypsies.

  “Thieves,” Nirmala had muttered, pulling her closer. “Don’t go near them. They will put a curse on you.” The gypsies stole anything they could find. They were like crows. They even stole children if they found them wandering around alone. “Don’t ever go out by yourself, okay mari?” warned Nirmala, squeezing her hand tight.

  But Nandana wasn’t scared. All she wanted to do was get to the railway station and the airport and home.

  14

  UNKNOWN ROADS

  BY THE TIME Sripathi reached the street on which Dr. Menon had his clinic, his legs had stopped quivering. But to his dismay, he found the entrance to the street blocked by an enormous plywood cut-out of the chief minister of the state. It leaned against the wall of a building and was so large that it stretched right across to the other side of the street. A man was perched on scaffolding high above the ground, touching up the face of the cutout with a large flat brush. Along the scaffolding, he had hung a tray with cans of paint that he dipped into every few minutes.

  Sripathi clucked his tongue in irritation and came to a stop. “What is going on here?” he asked. “How do you expect people to go through?”

  “Other way,” shouted the sign painter, pausing to look down at Sripathi.

  “What do you mean ‘other way’? I don’t have time to circle the entire town to get to the other end of this street,” protested Sripathi.

  “This is Madam Chief Minister’s portrait. Urgently required. Cannot be moved without permission,” said the man, busily darkening the eyebrows on the enormous chief ministerial visage. He added a touch of neon pink to the lips and leaned back on the scaffold to survey the effect. “Madam likes my style. She personally requested me, Chamraj Painter, to do this special portrait. I am too-too honoured.”

  “How much is she paying you?” asked Sripathi, shielding his eyes from the sun as he stared up at the enormous cut-out that soared over the building against which it was propped.

  “I don’t know. The honour is what matters,” replied the painter.

  “Who gave you money for the paints? At least that you could have got from the minister’s office,” remarked Sripathi.

  “Oh, Madam will make sure that I am paid,” said the painter, dabbing diamond earrings on the chief minister’s ears. He used the same brush to add a kindly sparkle to her outsized eyes. “She knows that I am a poor man with a family to feed. Why she should cheat me of a few rupees?”

  Why not? Sripathi wanted to ask—that’s how these politician crooks become rich, by stealing from the poor and the helpless. But the poor fellow probably knew that he would not see any money, yet could do nothing. The chief minister’s goons would have made chutney of him if he had refused the commission.

  “Can I park my scooter here and walk across to Dr. Menon�
�s clinic?” he asked instead. “I’ll give you two rupees if you keep an eye on it for me.”

  “No problem, saar,” said the painter cheerfully. “And you don’t have to pay me. Anyway, I am here, so whyfor you need to give me money also?”

  Sripathi stepped carefully across the bottom planks of the scaffolding and beneath the cut-out. The pungent smell of turpentine overrode the more subtle scent of wood and the inevitable stink of the open drain at the edge of the street. After he had walked a few furlongs, Sripathi turned around to make sure that his scooter was still where he had left it. It was there, minute beside the soaring cutout of the chief minister, her enormous cheeks a radiant pink, her eyes like planets bulging out of their broom-long fringe of eyelashes. She smiled coyly at the sky, her lips thick slabs of red meat still ashimmer with fresh paint. Directly beneath her head were her breasts, painted twin mountains draped in a shawl strewn with what appeared to be sparkling gems. The shawl was the minister’s trademark and was believed to hide a bullet-proof vest. Her hands were folded demurely in a namaskaram. During the night, probably, some loafer had clambered all the way up to those jutting breasts and painted a pair of black nipples surrounded by red aureoles. This, in combination with the pouting lips, the tragic eyes and the halo, made the minister look like a martyred slut. Sripathi hoped that the painter noticed the addition to his art before he presented it to the respected minister.