The Hero's Walk (11 page)

The fear of poverty haunted Sripathi. He thought of his pauper relative often. He remembered how, when he was twenty, he had tried to find out what had happened to the relative's daughters who would have been about his age. Nobody in his family knew. Nobody wanted to know about the failures, only the successes.

Sripathi plodded on doggedly through the years, wondering when Kashyap would find an excuse to sack him. Then Maya had got her letter of admission from the American university. Soon after came an offer of marriage, and Sripathi's life began to acquire a glow.

Her grandfather was coming to get her on the first of September. How many tomorrows was that? They said he wanted to take her to live with him, but she wasn't going to leave Vancouver. No
way
. She had become used to Aunty Kiran's house, and she did not really mind living in the upper bunk in Anjali's room. Her friend had told her that she would adopt Nandana, if she wanted, because now she was an orphan and orphans got adopted.

India. That's where she was supposed to go with the Old Man. Many times her mother had shown her pictures of the house in India, and she hadn't ever thought much of it. “Are there ghosts inside?” she'd wanted to know. Her mother had laughed and told her that there was a mango tree in the backyard, a snake in a hole at the
foot of the tree and a big fat frog near the well, but not a single ghost. “Soon we will all go there—you and me and Daddy,” she had added. And Nandana had asked, “How soon is soon?”

Once she had heard her mother crying, and her father had said to her, “Why do you torture yourself like this? If the Old Man doesn't want to see you, to hell with him. You have us, don't you?” The Old Man was the grandfather who was coming to take her away, and he had always made her mother cry. Once a week, in the evening, her mother would make a long-distance call to India and talk to her own mother, whom she called Mamma. Sometimes she spoke in English and at others in a language called Kannada that Nandana could follow in bits and pieces. Her father didn't understand it at all and said he felt left out when she and her mother spoke it. Nandana had seen a picture of her mother's Mamma in an Indian dress called a sari. One time her mother had visited school in a sari because Mrs. Lipsky was having an International Day, and everybody was supposed to bring their parents in their special dresses. She had cut up one of her old saris and made a long skirt with pleats for Nandana. She had also cut up Nandana's blue tube top, so that her belly button showed, and made her wear it with the long skirt. That was the kind of outfit, she said, that she had worn when she was a small girl in India. Nandana felt silly in the dress, especially since she'd had to braid her hair and wear some flowers in the braid, and put a small round sticker on her forehead like the one her mother wore with a sari. But afterwards, when her friends and Mrs. Lipsky told her that she looked cool, she felt better. They all wanted to wear the stickers on their foreheads, and the next time her mother went to the Indian store on Main Street, she bought a pack full of multicoloured felt dots for Nandana and her friends.

As for her grandfather, Nandana did not like him. He made her mother cry.

P
UTTI SAT ON THE VERANDAH
, silently watching her brother as he wheeled his scooter to the blocked gates of Big House. She wondered whether she ought to go back inside and sit with Nirmala. She thought of Maya, and a sadness settled over her. What had got into Sripathi to make him cut the girl out of his life like that? Granted, she had disgraced the family, but people had done things far worse.

In Munnuswamy's house next door, the cow Manjula, tethered to one of the pillars in the portico, lowed and flicked its tail to keep away the flies. Its newborn calf tottered weakly around, butting its head against the mother's swollen udder. The cow stopped chewing cud and licked the calf gently. There was a law against keeping livestock in residential areas, but Munnuswamy had somehow got around it.

When Putti was a child, Munnuswamy used to come over with a scythe once a week to hack the long grass in their back garden for fodder for his cows. In return, he would tie up the jasmine, prune the roses and weed out the parthenium from the vegetable beds. He was always accompanied by his son, Gopala, a bold, noisy boy clad in ragged shorts donated by one of his father's customers. A year or two older than Putti, Gopala climbed the trees and helped himself
to their fruit. When she threatened to complain to Ammayya, he made hideous faces at her through the leafy branches. He whistled tunes from films and imitated bird calls. Once, she had caught him pissing against the far wall of the compound, and she had watched wide-eyed and silent as the golden fluid arced from between his fingers and splashed into the grass stubble at the foot of the wall.

She had never imagined that one day Munnuswamy and Gopala would live in the house next door. That in addition to being a successful businessman, Munnuswamy would become a member of the Legislative Assembly. From an obsequious milkman who had carved deep, bleeding crevasses into his heels by trudging barefoot from house to house with his cows, he had turned himself into an imperious, powerful character, with two gleaming cars parked outside his house all day. He still walked barefoot, though. “The earth is my mother,” he would tell his voters. “How can a humble cowherd like me insult her by wearing shoes?” Sometimes he would make a dig against a young minister who was in the opposition party and say, “Appapa, I don't have the money to wear Gucci loafers and fancy clothes like our young prince. When my fellow countrymen have nothing to eat, can I spend on useless things like shoes?”

Munnuswamy's dairy business was also known for its trouble-making services, offered to any and all political parties at rates as reasonable as the milk that he continued to sell to his old customers. Munnuswamy's “Boys”—a euphemism for his horde of hard-eyed thugs—specialized in religious unrest, fasts-unto-death (or at least until the newspapers arrived on the scene) and suicide squads. Its services were most in demand during elections, when political parties were ready to try extreme tactics to garner votes. If, for instance, a party needed Muslim votes, the Boys spread rumours among Toturpuram's Muslim population about violence being planned by an opposing Hindu party, churning up rage and rioting as easily as they did butter. And if it was the Hindus who needed a stir, the Boys ran over a cow or two and blamed a Muslim truck-owner for
the outrage. Munnuswamy's suicide teams threatened to detonate themselves at busy bus stops, and his rally masters gathered groups of discontented youth to hold up traffic and generate chaos. Some of the Boys lived with the Munnuswamy family and ran errands or helped around the house. Putti was fascinated by one of them, a young, tense-looking fellow named Ishwara with a look of controlled violence about him who was famous for his dreams. One morning, after a complaint about livestock in residential areas had been registered against his employer, he had woken up and rushed out to Manjula, the cow, kissed her on the forehead, decorated her with hibiscus blossom and vermilion powder, and declared that she was Munnuswamy's saintly sister who had died twenty years before of typhoid. It was he who, on behalf of the Hindu Mahashakti Dal, a fanatically religious organization, dreamt that a stone on a local mosque's valuable property contained Lord Shiva's toenail. And to balance the scales, he discovered a hair from the head of a famous Muslim saint inside the trunk of an ancient tree that grew in a rich Hindu farmer's field.

The Boys' latest accomplishment was the International Beauty Parade incident in Madras, organized to push Munnuswamy onto the front page of every national newspaper. He had already gone on a hunger strike to protest the display of female bodies clad only in bathing suits, but the strike had attracted one sole reporter from
The Toturpuram Chronicle
. The national press was on the beaches of Goa, where the pre-parade photo shoots were taking place, holding out tape recorders to bikini-clad beauties from around the world who charmingly offered their impressions of India. Munnuswamy sent a group of earnest young women, dressed in long-waisted blouses and sober saris to lie down on the stage built for the Beauty Parade at the cost of a million rupees. They threatened to set themselves on fire after swallowing a double dose of cyanide, to detonate bombs in the audience, and to hold the contestants hostage until their demands were met. These demands were
never really articulated, but nobody noticed this omission, and the press arrived like a flock of crows, eager to capture the rivetting combination of violence, beauty and politics. Munnuswamy was photographed several times standing self-righteously beside a hysterical young woman holding a grenade. She clutched a megaphone in her other hand and yelled tearfully that everybody in the country appeared to have abandoned Indian values for American ones, except the honourable MLA beside her, who clung to all things good and proper. The creative genius behind these acts of disruption and vandalism was widely believed to be Gopala, who had grown into a handsome man with passionate eyes. He had been married once. His wife had died in childbirth and he had stayed resolutely single. Since he had become a widower, his mother had paraded troops of women before him. She had begged him to provide her with grandchildren, with heirs to inherit Munnuswamy's fortune.

Now the milkman's son appeared suddenly on his verandah, clad only in the loose, striped cotton shorts commonly worn by labourers. Putti blushed at the sight of his dark, taut body, burnt and robust as strong Mysore coffee. He stood straight. His arms grew out of his wide shoulders like sinewy branches and his sturdy legs were planted firmly apart. He spoke in a soft murmur to the calf. With his right hand he absently rubbed the mat of greying curls on his broad chest. Putti gazed at him for a few minutes, and then, ashamed of herself, hurried inside before Gopala caught her watching.

When Putti entered the house, Ammayya was still in her chair at the entrance to the bedroom. “My darling, were you standing in the sun?” she asked, looking up from the newspaper she'd been scanning. She read Sripathi's copy of
The Hindu
every day, as well as the local newspapers that she borrowed weekly from a young couple who lived in the apartment building across the road. They were both busy lawyers, the new breed of well-to-do, upwardly mobile Indians who bewildered Putti (and whom she inarticulately
envied) with their confidence, their careless aflluence and their amazing ability to throw things out after a single use. They did not seem to care that Ammayya never returned their papers. The old lady pored over them, her nose a few inches away from the thin sheets. She stored them under her bed—the Tamil ones on Putti's side, the English ones on hers—before selling them to the rubbish man, triumphant at having made money out of somebody else's property.

“Not good for your skin, how many times have I told you?” She peered at her daughter. “What is wrong? You are looking very funny. Are you falling ill? Maybe we should go to Dr. Menon for some medicine. Let us go now itself, before it becomes too hot. On the way back, we can stop at the lending library. Miss Chintamani told me that the new book by K. Sarojamma will be in today.”

“I was on the verandah,” Putti replied, squeezing past her mother's chair and into the dark bedroom they shared. “Nothing is wrong with me, and I don't want to go anywhere. How can you think of going out when we have had such a tragedy in the family?”

“Tchah-tchah-tchah!” Ammayya exclaimed. “I was only thinking of you, my darling. Inside my heart is breaking, my grandchild is dead and I am alive. Why can't Yama-raja take
me
away from this world?”

Putti hoped that her mother would not launch into one of her weeping, dramatic acts. Ammayya could cry any time: at weddings, funerals and birth ceremonies; when she didn't get her way; when she was bored or in need of attention or sympathy; and when she wanted to play the bereaved, long-suffering widow. She had a whole repertoire of scenes. After living with her for so many decades, Putti thought she knew them all, but Ammayya could still surprise her at times. Her martyr act was the one that annoyed everyone the most, although the tragedy-queen role was the one she performed with the greatest aplomb. Both were lubricated with copious tears and eloquent pauses between dialogue that was guiltlessly lifted from
the torrid Kannada romances that Miss Chintamani had introduced into her life. Putti dimly understood her mother's need for attention, her growing fear and loneliness. But today, her mind in a curious tumult, she ignored Ammayya instead of offering to massage her sparse white hair with warm oil or to look at old photographs with her or to take her to the library.