Gopala’s rich bass tones interrupted his thoughts. “You want my car to drive you to work?” he asked.
“No, it is okay,” said Sripathi hastily, unwilling to be the recipient of any more favours. “Thank you for clearing the gates for us. Very kind of you.”
“You only have to ask, Sripathi-orey, that’s all. I see that there is too much water collecting in your compound. If you want my Boys will fix that also. Simply have to break the wall at the back. What do you say?”
“I’ll ask my mother, Gopala,” said Sripathi, shuddering inwardly at the thought of how Ammayya would react to this offer of help. “She is very touchy about some things.”
“Oh yes, oh yes, mother comes first.” Gopala wagged his head and flashed another smile at Sripathi, who hurried away to the bus stop.
Clouds rolled in by three o’clock that afternoon and by evening it had started pouring again. Putti, unable to stand on the terrace that had become her refuge from Ammayya, was obliged to sit in the living room while her mother shot barbed comments at her from her veiled bed. To everybody’s surprise, she refused to eat lunch, claiming that Putti had driven her appetite away by her shameless behaviour.
“Is she all right?” Nirmala asked uneasily. “She never refuses food.”
“Ammayya has been feeding on anger,” said Putti bitterly. “One day without food won’t hurt her. Why can’t she be happy for me? She never wanted me to get married, I know. Why should I care how she is feeling now?”
But at night, when Ammayya skipped her dinner as well, Putti’s guilt overwhelmed her. “Why aren’t you eating anything?” she asked her mother, peering through the dirty mosquito net. “Did you drink the medicine that Arun brought for you?”
“What do you care?” muttered Ammayya and then retreated into complete silence. She didn’t respond when Putti offered to press her legs, as she did most nights before bed, or even to massage her head with warm oil. And when her daughter got into bed, she turned her back on her, refusing to gossip before drifting off to sleep as was her habit. Putti lay in the dark, miserably listening to the endless rain tapping on the window panes and against the verandah floor, and whooshing through the gutters. The fan creaked as it rotated. Light filtered in from outside through the stained-glass window panes and made the room glow eerily for a while. At about eleven o’clock, the power went off, plunging everything into a profound darkness. Putti heard Nirmala singing to the child, the kitten mewing in its closed basket in the dining room, and eventually the clock striking twelve upstairs. Finally, silence descended. The old house rocked gently on its heels and settled down to sleep.
At about three o’clock, a muffled thump woke Putti. She scrabbled around the bed sleepily, wondering what had made the sound. Another thump, like an explosion. She peered through the mosquito netting, but it was too dark to see anything. If Ammayya did not close those wretched windows so tightly, she might have had some light from the street. But then she remembered, the power had failed. With a sigh, Putti reached in the gap between the two mattresses and fished out the torch. She shone it around the room and saw nothing. Now she could hear a gurgling sound, as if there was water bubbling somewhere. Inside the house, not outside where the patter of rain was loud and constant. Had someone left a tap on in the bathroom? With the torch in one hand, Putti pulled on the edge of the mosquito netting, releasing it from under the mattress where it had been tucked securely. She prepared to slide out quickly, so that no mosquitos could get in. Her bare feet landed with a splash in cold, oily water. Putti screamed and drew them back inside the netting. She turned the torch towards the floor, and the light shimmered and danced on the black water that was lapping quietly against the walls, reaching up the legs of the bed. Putti couldn’t believe what she was seeing. For a few moments she wondered wildly whether the sea had somehow worked its way into Big House. She reached down cautiously and touched the surface of the water to assure herself that she was not dreaming. Something floating by brushed her hand, and when she shone the torch at it, she saw that it was a crescent of feces. Putti gagged in revulsion and wiped her hand frantically against the mosquito netting. She still couldn’t fathom what had happened, but knew that she didn’t want to drown in sewage. Soggy sheets of newspaper were slowly sinking into the water—all of Ammayya’s stolen newspapers from under the bed, realized Putti. The thought of her mother brought her up short. If the sea was flooding through the house, they would be the first to drown. They had better go to the uppermost floor, and fast.
“Sripathi! Arun!” she shouted, hoping that somebody upstairs would hear and come down to help. There was no response. Putti yelled a few more times, intermittently shaking her mother and prodding her in the plump rolls of flesh that seeped out from the sides of the loose, faded blouse she wore to bed. Her mother merely swatted her hand away and continued to snore. Exasperated, Putti seized a pouch of skin close to her mother’s belly and pinched it hard, feeling a definite pleasure in the violence of the action. All her anger against Ammayya and her strategies to keep Putti a spinster were expressed in that twisting, cruel pinch. She felt no guilt later on, assuring herself that she was only trying to get her mother out of bed and to safety. Ammayya responded with a squeal of pain and a flailing of her heavy arms.
“What?” she demanded blearily. “What?”
She screamed when she saw the dark shape hovering over her, the torchlight under her face turning her into a creature from nightmare. “Don’t touch me! I’ll give you everything,” she whimpered, holding her arms over her face.
“Ammayya, it’s me, Putti.”
The old woman sat up quickly and glared at her child. “Why you are waking me up in the middle of the night? What is wrong?” It was the first time that evening that she had spoken to her daughter.
“Ammayya, the sea is inside our house. Big mess it is. We have to climb upstairs immediately,” said Putti frantically.
“Henh?” said Ammayya baffled.
“Get out of bed. We have to go upstairs. Otherwise, we will drown,” she repeated slowly. “Look at that.”
She shone the torch at the floor, around the room, and a horrified Ammayya gazed at the water eddying around the legs of their bed and lapping at the rosewood dressing table. The lower edges of the Belgian mirror eerily reflected the net-shrouded bed like a white island marooned in the stinking, obsidian sea. For once she was bereft of words. She allowed Putti to rip the mosquito netting aside and push her off the bed. The stench assailed her as soon as they had begun to wade through the cold, disgusting mess.
“Why so bad it is smelling?” she whispered, clinging to Putti, who was gagging continuously now, the torch shaking in her hand.
“Ammayya, there’s kakka in the water and all kinds of other dirty things,” said Putti brutally, hating her mother for clinging to her, for having sucked her life away.
“I thought you said it was the sea,” wailed Ammayya. “Now you are telling me that I am walking in shit water?” Her skin crawled at the sly touch of the liquid. “Ayyo deva! Ayyo swami! Ayyo-ayyo-ayyo!” she howled. She was polluted for all eternity. She was soiled for ever. Nothing could wash away this stink, this putrefaction, this muck that only the toilet cleaner ought to touch. She felt bile gurgling up her throat and retched drily. “Oh Sathyanarayana!” she called to her favourite god. “What treachery is this? What have I done to you to deserve this? Putti, are you sure?” she begged.
“Can’t you smell it?” She shone her torch around and Ammayya moaned with disgust. She was walking in somebody’s excrement?
“Whose is that?” she asked faintly.
“What do you mean whose, Ammayya?” demanded Putti. Now her anger had been replaced by contempt for her mother. How could she have been scared of this pathetic creature for forty-two years? she wondered. “All the drains on this road are connected. So it could be our neighbour’s for all I know. Maybe Chocobar man’s. Maybe Munnuswamy’s. Does it have a name on it, you want me to check?”
�
��Why you are making fun of me, my beloved child?” asked her mother, trying to wade through the water without disturbing it. She shut her eyes tightly and allowed the tears to trickle out. Real tears. She imagined the foul liquid on the floor seeping up through her orifices into the sacred parts of her body, corrupting her from the inside out. She would never be able to clean herself. Never. She wailed once more and then fell silent, except for the violent retching sounds that burst out of her as they made their way to the staircase which, beyond the first three steps, was dry. Putti shook off her mother’s clutching hand, forcing her to hold on to the bannister and climb up slowly. She yelled again for Sripathi and Arun and Nirmala, her voice bouncing off the moist walls, startling against the silence. She could hear shufflings and whispers of wakefulness as her shouts filtered through deep sleep and dreaming eyes.
“Was that Putti?” she heard her sister-in-law ask. “I heard someone shouting.”
“Wake up, wake up!” screamed Putti. “We are all going to drown. The sea is here!”
“Sea? What sea?” That was Sripathi. “Is she dreaming or what?”
They all gathered sleepily on the first-floor landing. After a few minutes of what-ing and where-ing and why-ing, during which Arun ran down the stairs to make sure that his aunt was not hallucinating, Sripathi decided that the best thing to do was to call the Munnuswamys for help from the terrace. Ammayya wouldn’t go anywhere until she had washed her legs with soap and water.
“Rama, Sita, Rama, Sita,” she murmured, while she scrubbed her legs. She was trembling all over and had to be helped out of the bathroom by Nirmala, who wrapped her in a bedsheet. Nandana was roused, lifted out of bed by Arun, and the family climbed up to the terrace. She woke just as Sripathi finished his struggle with the bolts on the terrace door.
“Where are we going?” she wailed, rubbing her eyes.
“The sea has come inside the house,” said Ammayya tearfully. “We will all drown, yo-yo-yo Rama, yo-yo-yo Sita!”
“We are all going to die? Like my Mommy and Daddy?”
“No, we are not,” soothed Nirmala.
“Where is my kitten?”
They had all forgotten the little animal trapped in its basket. Nobody said anything and Nandana kicked her legs against Arun. “I want my kitten.”
“Not now, my raja,” said Nirmala, patting her legs. “Later on. He will be all right.”
Nandana gave her a suspicious look but allowed herself to be pacified. They went outside and were soaked by the rain almost immediately. Ammayya moaned that her chest hurt, that she was dying, that this was God’s way of showing his anger over Putti’s betrothal.
Why, thought Sripathi, was his life in such chaos all of a sudden? Like King Harishchandra, was he too being tested by the gods? He glanced at Nandana cowering under a plastic sheet that Nirmala had found in her cupboard. The umbrellas were all stranded in the living room, so they had to make do with whatever they had been able to find in the small storage cupboard near the terrace door.
“Nobody will hear us if we shout!” he said despondently over the gush of rain in the gutters.
“I can climb down easily,” suggested Arun. He had jumped from one compound to another often enough as a boy. “Best way. You all stay here till I come back.”
He balanced for a moment on the wall of the terrace and leapt across to the adjacent balcony. He shinnied down the drainpipe and was lost to the darkness. A few moments later, however, they heard him banging on their neighbour’s door, shouting for help. Doors opened, there were voices, and then a wide beam of light as Petromax lanterns flared whitely on Munnuswamy’s terrace.
Only a moment later, it seemed, Arun leapt back onto their terrace. “Appu! The flood is only in our house. Must be a burst septic tank or something. We will have to go to the Munnuswamys’ for the night.”
“I am not climbing walls and all,” declared Ammayya.
“No need,” said Arun. “If you use the bathroom stairs on the first floor till you are level with the wall, we can lift you over.”
“Bathroom stairs? Which the sweeper woman uses? Are you mad?” demanded Ammayya, her voice thick with rage. Wasn’t it bad enough that her insides were swilling with filth? Now she was supposed to lower herself even further by using the untouchable stairs? “I am not going anywhere,” she declared. “I will die in my own house, if necessary. My children will stay with me. Putti mari? Sripathi?”
They stared wordlessly at her. Again the pinch of pain in her chest that she had felt that morning. Everyone had let her down. All her life she had been betrayed and humiliated. By her whoring husband who stole her youth, her self-respect, even the fortune that should have sustained her in old age. By her son who had run away like a coward from medical school and robbed her of hope. By Putti, who was leaving her for a milkboy. And by God himself, who had sent this filthy flood into her room alone. Silently she followed the family to the bathroom. Silently she allowed them to hustle her down the curling wrought-iron staircase to the level of the wall, where Arun and Gopala waited to lift her over to the other side. Inside the blue Munnuswamy home, Ammayya lay on the divan, still unable to speak after the affronts suffered by her body and her heart that day. She could literally hear her stupid daughter simpering at that cowherd’s son. Disgusting, disgusting, disgusting, she thought. Somewhere in the room, she could also hear Nandana asking querulously whether they were all going to die, and Nirmala exclaiming over the multicoloured marvels of the room revealed to her by the bright light of the Petromax lamps. She choked with fury when she realized how little she mattered to these people gathered here in this room. Simply an old woman with odd ways, that’s how they thought of her. Even her beloved Putti, for whom she had saved and scrimped and stolen. And with that thought, Ammayya’s ancient heart gave one more heave, dragging a fiery path of pain through her left side, and she cried out loud, surprised at the intensity of it.
Sripathi heard the cry first and, to his shame, ignored it, thinking that his mother was performing, as usual. Then it came again, fainter now, almost a gurgle followed by silence. This time he rushed over to the sofa and found Ammayya straining for breath, her eyes dilated horribly as if they would force their way out from her face, and her lips turned back from her teeth in a blue-tinged snarl.
“She is sick!” he said frantically. “My mother is sick. We need to take her to the hospital.”
A hush fell over the room.
“Don’t want hospital,” whispered Ammayya, clutching at Sripathi’s shirt as he bent over her. He was surprised at the strength of that grip. “Want Putti.”
Putti hurried over to her mother and knelt on the floor, her protruding upper lip trembling with emotion. “Ammayya, I am sorry,” she wept. “Don’t be angry with me, please.”
Ammayya released Sripathi’s shirt and transferred her grip to Putti’s wrist. She pinched it so hard that Putti’s eyes began to tear. “I am dying,” she hissed through her ragged blue lips. “And you are the cause. Remember that! Remember that when you crawl into his bed.”
She panted and glared at Putti, who tried to wrench her arm out of her mother’s terrible grip. When she finally broke free she found fingermarks etched into her skin, marks that would later dry and scab but would never entirely disappear. They began to resemble three staring, cartoonish eyes, causing Putti to wear dozens of bangles retrieved from her mother’s trunk under the bed, all in an effort to hide the marks from her own guilt-ridden gaze. And after her wedding, when Gopala made love to her in their brand-new apartment—one of three that Sripathi had got in exchange for Big House—on a brand-new cot that had been purchased in Madras, Putti wrapped her wrist with a thick bandage to hide those ovals of jealous anger left on her by Ammayya.
“Get an ambulance,” said Nirmala weakly, wishing that someone would take charge. Even the efficient, bustling Munnuswamy seemed at a loss. “Shouldn’t we take her to the hospital? Call an ambulance?” she asked again.
“Phone isn’t working,”
said Munnuswamy briefly, “but don’t worry. We will take her in our milk van.” He gestured to Gopala, who nodded and left the room. There was the sound of a vehicle being started up, reversing into the driveway and stopping.
Arun lifted Ammayya off the sofa and carried her to the van, which was also a bright shade of blue, with Ambika Milk Co-op stencilled in flowery letters on the side. He put her down on one of the long seats and Nirmala arranged a blanket over her.
“Putti,” called Ammayya weakly. When her daughter’s anxious face swam into view she whispered, “You also come with me. I want you to make sure those doctors don’t take off my clothes and poke here and there with their instruments. If my own son were a doctor …”
Another wave of pain cut off all further speech, and then the van started up again. Putti clambered in beside Arun and Sripathi. Arun sat on the ridged floor of the van, which smelled of stale milk, and held Ammayya as they bumped and rattled through the pitted, flooded roads to Toturpuram’s Vanitha Hospital, a new institution with a dubious reputation. But Munnuswamy said that he knew many people there, and so that was where he took them.
The emergency ward at the hospital was busy, even at that early hour of the morning. A bus had collided with an overloaded truck, bringing in three dozen wounded passengers. A harried nurse told them that they would have to wait in the corridor until someone was free to examine Ammayya. She lay on the ground against the bleached wall of the hospital corridor, her nose full of the odour of dead and dying bodies, her bulging heart full of the rage she had accumulated over sixty of her eighty years of existence.
After a brief conversation with Munnuswamy, which Sripathi could not hear, the nurse paged a doctor.
“Not to worry,” said Munnuswamy with a satisfied air. “I told her who I was. You will get some good service. Now if you will excuse, I have to take my leave. The van will be back with my driver at seven o’clock. And I will get my Boys to clean up your house.”
The Hero's Walk Page 34