The Hero's Walk (10 page)

When the relative died, his wife had sent a letter around to the family, begging for money. They could not afford to buy a clean cotton shroud to wrap around the dead body; they had no money to
pay for mango wood for the funeral pyre; their abject poverty was not merely wretched, it was terrifying.

“Sell the house,” suggested a trustee at the Toturpuram Bank.

Both Sripathi and Ammayya had turned down that idea. The house was all they had to mark their former status. “We will manage,” Ammayya told everybody. “My son is already sixteen. He will finish school soon and become a doctor. He will take care of us.” She did, however, sell the house in which Narasimha Rao's mistress lived. Sripathi was taken aback by his mother's ruthlessness and even felt sorry for the woman, who disappeared from Toturpuram. But the money from the sale allowed them to repay some of the loans and to continue to live in Big House.

On the third Sunday of every month, Ammayya took Sripathi and Putti, dressed in their best clothes, to her uncle's house in the neighbouring town of Royapura. Hari Mama was a wealthy old bachelor who, people suspected, preferred young boys to women. Ammayya had always avoided the old man, but now she had a purpose in life.

“Two purposes,” she told Sripathi when he protested that, since they had never kept in touch with the old man, this sudden affection might look suspicious. “You and Putti are the two purposes in my life, and it doesn't matter what people think of me. The important thing is to take care of you two.”

Hari Mama lived in an enormous house with a swing on the verandah, which was reserved for unwanted visitors and hangerson. Inside the house, in the centre of a mirrored hall, was another swing made of sandalwood and ivory. Its decadence both repelled Sripathi and fascinated him. This was Hari Mama's favourite swing. Only specially chosen people were allowed on it. Sripathi was granted that privilege just once, and he couldn't even remember the reason. He did, however, recall the strangeness of the experience—seeing his reflection repeating endlessly in the mirrored walls of
that room, swinging towards himself and farther away all at the same moment.

“Don't forget to be polite to the old man,” Ammayya used to tell Sripathi, as they hurried in the raging heat of morning from the bus terminal to Hari Mama's house. “Always agree with him. He might decide to leave you something big,
Deo volente
—God willing. After all, we are his only living relatives.”

As soon as they arrived at the house, the old man would give Sripathi and Ammayya two bananas each, insisting that they eat them right away. “Good for health—vitamins, phosphorus, iron. Never say no to a banana.” And later, on their way home, Ammayya would grumble that if she collected the bananas in a basket and sold them, at least they would have one bus fare home. Instead she would pretend that they were going to catch a taxi, just to give Hari Mama the impression that they had come for purely altruistic reasons. Money, she took pains to remind the old man and the dozens of other people who always seemed to be in the house—money was no problem for her. Narasimha had left them well-off. She was here merely to ensure that her children were acquainted with their only great-uncle.

Sripathi always felt angry and humiliated in that opulent house. He despised himself for laughing uproariously over every one of Hari Mama's jokes, even when they were laboured and unfunny, and for leaping up to fetch a glass of water each time the old man coughed. Deep inside, he knew that the old man was not in the least deceived by this show of devotion.

“What, boy,” Hari Mama had teased him on one occasion, to the great amusement of the other sycophants in the room. “What, boy, if I asked you to lick my shoes clean, would you do it? I hear that spit is good for shoe leather!”

And Sripathi, too, had been obliged to chuckle and lower his head, when all he wanted was to drag his mother away from the kitchen where, with the help of several other women, she was making an endless supply of hot coffee.

When they left for home, Ammayya would lead them a mile past the nearest bus stop, pretending to look for a taxi, and they would catch the bus to Toturpuram at the next halt.

When Hari Mama died, he left all his property to a small theatre group.

Ammayya swallowed her disappointment over Hari Mama's lost fortune and set about pushing her son towards a career in medicine; she had found out that there was a code among doctors that obliged them to treat each other's families free of charge. When she was old and needed medical care, she calculated, her son would be able to ensure that she was looked after without incurring any expense.

Having decided Sripathi's future for him, Ammayya then concentrated on becoming the perfect widow. She was determined to erase all memory of the whore from people's minds, to show the world that
she
was Narasimha Rao's bereaved wife. To Sripathi's embarrassment, she insisted on having her head shaved like the widows of the previous generation and ordered Shakespeare Kuppalloor, the barber, to come to the house every month to remove the new stubble. It didn't matter when relatives pointed out that even her own mother-in-law, Shantamma, had maintained her snowy fall of hair and that there was no need for such old-fashioned observances. She wore only maroon cotton saris, even though she continued to wear her gold chains and bangles. She was afraid that her jewellery, the only thing of value that she owned, would be stolen by thieves. “If I keep them on me, they will have to cut my throat to remove my chains,” she told Sripathi. She swore off certain vegetables, like garlic and onions, that were believed to have aphrodisiac qualities and were therefore forbidden to widows. She dug up archaic fasts and rituals and became more rigidly Brahmanical than the temple's own priest. When Sripathi, in his hoarse adolescent voice, told her that she was being foolish, excessive in her zeal to be faithful to Narasimha's memory, she berated him for his lack of respect.

“You will have the right to order me around when you are earning a living. When you are a doctor,
then
you can tell your mother what to do and what not to do,” she told him fiercely. “Your job now is to concentrate on doing well in school and on getting into medicine. We have to show people that Narasimha Rao's son is as brilliant as he was.”

Even after all these years, Sripathi felt a sharp twinge of shame at the way he had abandoned medical school after barely a year. His admission to the school had been so hard. He remembered wistfully Ammayya's solicitous attentions as he stayed up all night mugging up volumes of information for the entrance exams. He had got in, but he hated it from the very beginning. He had struggled through the courses, the dozens of medical terms buzzing in his head, refusing to let him sink into sleep at night. The relentless pressure of learning every tiny detail of the human body—the things that make it work, the things that kill it or make it falter in its long walk through life—piled up on him and pressed him down until he felt that he would end up as one of those bodies in the morgue. The smell of corpses that reeked of formaldehyde seemed to stick to his skin for weeks. He found it impossible to look at food without imagining its journey through the glistening pink coils of his body, and he couldn't sleep for the thunder of his heart in his ears. He had never been so aware of the labouring machines of lung and kidney and brain that pulsed and pounded within his fretwork of bones, of the veins and arteries that shunted his blood up and down his body ceaselessly, of the cells that contained secret, ancient memories of growth and decay and death, and of the taut fragility of skin that contained it all. Medical school revealed the mysteries of his humming body and rendered it gross and ordinary. Finally, he had run away from the place, jumped into a third-class train compartment and arrived home at midnight. He had walked all the way from the station, carrying his bedroll and his tin trunk, their weight a penance for his failure.

He had lied when Ammayya asked what had happened. “I could not stand the smell of the dead,” he had told her. “They say that even the hostel food is polluted by human blood. They cook vegetarian meals in the same pots used for meat.” Any lie to hide his cowardice from the mother whose heart had burst with pride when he'd got into the school.

Ammayya had believed him for a long time, and when she did accidentally read the letter expelling him for prolonged and unexplained absence, it was too late. Sripathi was already married, in a job and about to become a father. She had never forgiven him for betraying her dreams and ambitions, for cheating her like her husband had done for so many years, for taking away the possibility of a comfortable old age. For a while after he had joined the tiny advertising agency, he wished that he had kept on somehow at medical school. Or listened to his father-in-law's advice and become a weather man with the meteorological department in Madras. “The weather is always with us,” the old man had told him. “Where it will go, tell me? As long as this earth exists, we will have wind and rain and storms and all. You will never be out of a job.”

When Sripathi started his career at the advertising agency, it was only a small business run by one of his father's old friends out of the ground floor of his home. In moments of self-doubt, he wondered whether Chandra Iyer had taken him on out of pity or because he was Narasimha Rao's son. The job involved nothing more demanding than dreaming up jingles for local products like tooth powder, hair oil and incense sticks. Their biggest customer was the government hand-loom factory that manufactured brightly checked bed-sheets and coarse cotton saris. The agency also printed invitations for weddings, christenings and upanayana ceremonies. The local branch of the Lions Club got its newsletter printed as well, and Sripathi had to write florid tributes to every member, to accompany blurred black-and-white photographs of them planting trees or inaugurating tube-wells in various parts of Toturpuram. Once in a
while, when Chandra's daughter visited, Sripathi was given the task of entertaining her three young children. He had to tell them stories, take them for ice cream to Iyengar Bakery, make origami fish out of scraps from the wastepaper baskets, and once even take them to the circus.

Soon after Sripathi's twenty-fourth birthday, a friend in Bangalore sent Ammayya a photograph of his niece, along with a copy of her horoscope. “Nirmala is a quiet, steady girl,” he wrote. “Wheatish complexion, slim and pretty. She is also an accomplished dancer. She will make a good wife for your son and a loving daughter-in-law.”

Sripathi liked the gentle eyes gazing at him out of the black-and-white photograph and agreed to marry Nirmala as soon as their horoscopes were matched and found to be compatible.

“What is the hurry?” Ammayya wanted to know. “Wait and see other girls. There will be a long line-up. After all, you are a big man's son.”

But Sripathi was adamant and a few months later the marriage took place.

Three years after his wedding, Sripathi, bored by the routine triviality of his work, applied for a job as a newspaper reporter in Delhi. He had even gone for the interview and was delighted when he was offered the job. The salary was not very much more, but the thought of having his own byline, of being recognized for his work, was thrilling. Nirmala was excited too, mostly because it would mean a house of her own and freedom from Ammayya. She would miss Putti, and so would two-year-old Maya, but they could always visit.

Ammayya would not hear of it. “What will I do here alone?” she asked Sripathi. “With a young daughter to look after?”

“Why don't you come with us to Delhi?”

“Ayyo! You want me to die of cold there, or what? And what will we do with our house? Sripathi, you are the son, it is your duty to
think about your mother and your sister.” She began to cry. “You want to abandon us like your father did. I knew this would happen some day. Oh God, why am I cursed with such sorrow?”

Eventually, Ammayya's tears persuaded Sripathi to refuse the Delhi offer. He never tried to change jobs after that, even when Chandra Iyer's son, Kashyap, returned from the Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia and took over the agency. Kashyap had big ambitions. Within a month, he had changed the name from Iyer & Son Printing and Advertising to Advisions Marketing. He moved the business out of his father's house, renting instead a small office on the first floor of a modern building on Mahatma Gandhi Road. He ordered new desks and chairs, hung pictures on the walls and even got a few potted plants to fill any empty corners. He hired a secretary and travelled frequently to Madras, Madurai and Chidambaram, energetically collecting clients. In the early years, the business grew rapidly, simply because advertising and marketing were new concepts. People were impressed with Kashyap's enthusiasm. They saw how the advertisements attracted more customers. Then Kashyap's father died, and he took over the business entirely. He hired two more copywriters and another artist. There was a receptionist now as well, who sat behind a desk near the entrance. She was constantly pressing buttons on the phone console and speaking in a low, rapid voice to callers. Sripathi realized that, apart from the accountant, Ramesh Iyengar, and the artist, Victor Coelho, he was the oldest person in the office. He also noticed that Kashyap had become very critical of his work. “Too trite,” he would say, flicking at the sheet of paper with a contemptuous finger. He made Sripathi stand like a peon before his desk. “You need a hook to grab your customer.” Or, “Your concepts are too old-fashioned. You should learn to use more modern terminology.”

The young owner gave him all the low-budget clients' advertisements. Minaret Beedis. Champak Hair Oil. Ranga's Shoe Store. And even when Sripathi wrote what he considered scintillating
copy for those cheap cigarettes and oils and shoes, Kashyap made him rewrite each a dozen times and frequently decided to use no copy at all. “A picture is worth a thousand words,” he would tell Sripathi, not even looking up from his glass-topped desk that was littered with paper. Then he would tell him to write something for a cement company that had just opened its business in Chintadripuram and needed some cheap publicity.