The Hero's Walk (20 page)

Her window was open to let in the warm summer air. It was the twentieth of August. It was fifteen days since the Old Man had arrived and two since they had moved from Aunty Kiran's house to
Nandana's. She was supposed to stay in Anjali's house while the Old Man packed everything, but once again she had stood near the car when they were leaving, refusing to move until Aunty Kiran had said, “Oh well, let her go too. Poor baby, no need to upset her about little things like this.” Then she looked at Nandana and said, “All right, you can help your grandpa pack. Okay?”

No
way
would Nandana allow the Old Man to touch her things, but she nodded because she was in a hurry to go home.

Feet climbed the stairs. Nandana jumped into bed and pulled the sheets over her head. The Old Man was coming up and she did not want him to find her. He just stared with eyes big behind his glasses and did not say anything most of the time. Sometimes he opened his mouth when he looked at her, but not a word came out. He had brought her a present from India—three comic books with pictures of animals that talked to each other. They were folk tales from India, Aunty Kiran told her, and asked the Old Man if he would like to read one aloud to the kids, but Nandana had run out of the room. She did not want anyone to tell her stories but her own father.

F
OR HIS TRIP
, Sripathi had borrowed a suitcase from Raju as well as a coat, uncertain how cold it would be in that faraway country. Nirmala dropped her stiff veil of silence and helped him pack. She insisted he abandon his tired old sandals for a pair of black Bata shoes that he had bought for Maya's engagement and had never worn since. She had also made him wear a pale blue shirt she had purchased from Beauteous Boutique.

“Why are you dressing me up like a bridegroom?” He was annoyed that she had spent even more money on this trip.

“You are going to meet our granddaughter for the first time,” Nirmala argued, “and you want to go in that wretched checked shirt of yours? Why you insist on keeping that shirt, I don't know. Even our dhobi wears nicer clothes!”

“Maybe I can ask
him
to lend me a fancy shirt for my foreign trip,” Sripathi grumbled. He was secretly pleased that Nirmala was back to normal.

“Shameless! You will do it, I know. So crazy you behave sometimes! Now stop making such a big fuss for every little thing. What will those friends of Maya's think if you land up looking like a chaprassi? Henh? And you have to meet all those Canadian government people
also. They will say, Who is this crazy old beggar? and refuse to let you bring our Nandana back.”

In his pocket Sripathi carried a bolo tie with an elaborate silver butterfly clinging to a fat blade of grass. He had worn it when he left Toturpuram just to please Ammayya, who had given it to him. “Be careful with it,” she had said. “This is pure
argentum
, not some cheap metal.” She was under the impression that all Americans wore bolo ties and cowboy boots and chewed gum, and her son had to fit in, even if it was only for a month and a half. She had also heard about black people getting shot and beaten up there, and although anyone could see that her Sripathi was as fair as the queen of England, there was no point taking a chance and standing out like a sore thumb. She didn't know where to find cowboy boots, but the bolo tie had belonged to Narasimha and was genuinely American. Sripathi tried telling his mother that he was not going to the United States but to Canada, but it was quite useless. In Ammayya's somewhat limited world, there were only three countries—England, America and India. Pakistan and Bangladesh (which she still called East Bengal) did not count as countries because, as far she was concerned, India's Partition was a mistake that never happened, Jawaharlal Nehru was a womanizing fool like her own husband (God take care of his soul) and Gandhi was a traitor to decent Brahmin sentiments with his all-men-including-untouchables-are-equal nonsense. If Ammayya did not acknowledge Partition, it had not occurred.

Three weeks later, Sripathi had arrived in Vancouver dazed by the sensation of flying, of being unmoored from the earth after fifty-seven years of being tied to it. His back ached from sitting in the narrow seat for so long. His feet were blistered and exhausted from being enclosed in the new leather of his shoes. And he was afraid of what he would feel when he saw the child.

When Sripathi tried to think back on that trip, his first one abroad, he recollected very little. He had been received by Dr.
Sunderraj and stayed in his house for the first week. Then he had asked if he could move to Maya's home and to his surprise, the child had insisted on going with him. All day, though, except on weekends, she went to day camp, and he was left alone in the blue house. He was relieved when Kiran offered to stop by every evening and help with the packing and with clearing the house of clothes and furniture and utensils. She had also stocked the fridge with food for a week—orange-lidded boxes with curries and rice dishes that he merely needed to heat in the microwave. He was grateful for the food because he knew no cooking, had never even boiled a kettle of water.

During his month and a half in Vancouver, he had met no one, even though he might have at least got in touch with friends of Maya and Alan. He went nowhere, intimidated by the strangeness of the city, its silence and its towering beauty. He wanted no part of the place where his daughter had breathed her last. All that he carried back with him was a misty memory of rain and lush greenness, of things growing endlessly—enormous trees, brilliant flowers, leaves as large as dinner plates—a fecundity he found impossible to bear. He did remember, in painful detail, the blue house with polished wooden floors and large windows that Kiran Sunderraj had opened to let in the damp, clear air of the city. The air reeked of the life that coursed through the masses of plants outside, and the shrubs bowed down with the weight of their lacy, blue flowers. On his first day there, he had sat by the window and listened to a baby wail in the house next door. A young female voice had soothed it. A group of cyclists had gone by, laughing and chattering, their muscular legs encased in tight shorts, their arms bare and healthy. There were long periods when nobody passed, and all that he could hear was the sound of rain on the leaves. Sripathi had wanted to shut it all out, and as soon as Kiran left him and the child alone for the day, he had closed every single window, except for the ones in the girl's room. She had shut herself in and didn't answer when he knocked hesitantly.

The walls of the house were painted in different shades of blue. Whose favourite colour had it been, he wondered: Alan's or Maya's? As a young woman in Toturpuram, Maya had favoured bright colours—reds, pinks, yellows, greens. In most of the photographs that Maya sent home, though, she appeared to be wearing either black or white clothes, or occasionally a red T-shirt. But people were like trees, they grew and changed, put out new leaves that you forgot to count, and when you weren't watching, they even died.

There were framed prints on some of the walls, a mask of some sort, small shelves full of knick-knacks. And photographs—dozens of them—of Maya, Alan, Nandana. A record of their lives, special moments, joyous ones: at Nandana's school on her first day; on a long stretch of road graced by soaring mountains, Maya's hair whipped into chaos by the wind, her smile caught forever in happiness; Alan, tall and friendly-looking, with Nandana perched on his shoulders, her small hands clutching his fair hair. My son-in-law, thought Sripathi miserably. Curly-haired, laughing, a student of philosophy, the man who had married his daughter and made her happy.

This was the house where his daughter had once lived and that he had sold off to some stranger. The furniture was taken out by more strangers—the dining-table suite, desks, chairs, a computer, cupboards and a large chair that slid forward and backward like an opening drawer. The child had been upset when the chair left the house. She had sat on it, mute, and refused to get up. Dr. Sunderraj had lifted her off while Sripathi watched, helpless, not knowing the reason for her agitation. She had bawled, too—large tears rolling one after another down her face, her thin chest heaving violently, her fists clenched—when a buyer had carried a chest of drawers from her room. She was losing all that was familiar and beloved, thought Sripathi. He wished then that he could promise her that everything would be all right. He had even reached out to pat her shoulder, to tell her that she would be okay—he was going to take
her home to India—but the child had shrunk away from him. What was going on in that small head? he wondered, observing the rejection in those dark eyes. Her mother's eyes. Large, black, depthless. Did she hate him? She must have questions about him—a grandfather who had appeared out of the blue in a brand-new crumpled shirt, bought especially for the trip from Beauteous Boutique. Had she even heard of Toturpuram, a small town halfway across the world from Vancouver—a town particularly known for its spectacular sunrise—where her mother had been born, and several generations born before her? Did Maya ever speak about him, about Nirmala and Arun and Ammayya and Putti, and the ancient house on Brahmin Street?

His daughter's daughter. An orphan. What an ugly word that was. A child bereaved of parents. “Bereft of previous protection or advantages,” to quote
The Concise Oxford Dictionary
. Sripathi had looked up the word soon after Dr. Sunderraj's call in July.

“She has stopped talking,” Dr. Sunderraj had told him on the evening of his arrival. His soft Canadian voice retained no trace of India. He had yielded to a new citizenship, thought Sripathi. First you change the way you dress, then your hair, your manners, your accent. Abracadabra, zippo, zippa: a new person stands before you. Had Maya's accent changed as well, from Madrasi spice to Canadian ice? Sripathi cringed at his play with words. Long years as a copywriter could reduce even sorrow to a jingle.

“We think it is the shock and only a temporary thing,” continued Dr. Sunderraj.

“What?” Sripathi had been unable to remember where the conversation had begun. It seemed to be happening to him all the time, this distracted state, as if his mind had decided to stop listening altogether, to stop responding to any kind of stimulus.

“Nandana does not say a word, as you might have noticed,” repeated the doctor patiently. “She is normally a very talkative child, you know, so this silence is unusual. However, these things are to
be expected. Such a big shock. And one never knows how children may react.”

He stayed in the blue house for a week, packing the things he thought he should take back to India—Maya's books as keepsakes for the child, photographs, letters, papers, a pair of gold bangles and two pairs of earrings. Another pair of tiny gold bangles that he recognized immediately. They had been a gift from Ammayya to his daughter when she turned one. Nirmala must have sent them somehow for Nandana's first birthday. He discarded the clothes last of all, his heart breaking at the sight of the neat shelves and drawers full of shirts, trousers and underwear, the three saris with their matching blouses and petticoats in plastic covers. He remembered the dark green, Mysore-crêpe silk sari with the edging of gold mangos—he had gone with Nirmala to the big new emporium in Toturpuram to buy that for Maya's sixteenth birthday. How astonished he was when his daughter wore it for the first time, her slender figure suddenly taller and more grown-up in the softly draped material, her face shy and expectant. He had not known what to say, his throat suddenly blocked by a surfeit of emotion—joy at her youthful beauty, and sorrow that she was almost an adult. “Appu, how do I look?” she had asked, holding out her thin arms, and the illusion of maturity had disappeared. She had gone back to being a gawky teenager dressed up in a pretty sari.

“Your mother should have listened to me and bought the pink one,” he had said.

Her face had fallen, and she had dropped her arms. “I don't look nice?”

“Did I say that?”

And she had turned away and run down the stairs clumsily, lifting the sari high so that it bunched around her knees.

Later on Nirmala had scolded him. “What is wrong with you? She says that you told her she didn't look nice in that new sari. How beautiful she looked, why you told her things like that?”

“She is too young to wear saris. And that colour makes her look like Miss Chintamani,” he had said, feeling guilty.

“Rubbish.
You
are the one who is like that library miss—always finding fault with everything and everyone.” Nirmala had turned her back and refused to speak to him, and Maya had never worn that sari again.

Carefully, he removed the three saris from their plastic bags and placed them in the suitcase. Those were the only items of clothing that he would take back with him. He decided to wash a pile of clothes abandoned in a laundry basket, even though Kiran had told him she would do it on the weekend. He felt small enough taking so much from the Sunderraj family. Surely he could wash a pile of clothes himself before adding them to the bags meant for the Salvation Army? It took him a while to figure out the washing machine, and when he asked the child for help, she looked sullenly at him but did not reply. She also refused to let him give away two jackets belonging to her parents. She snatched them from him and raced up the stairs, dragging the heavy red and grey jackets behind her, tripping over them as she went. When Sripathi followed her, cautioning her to be careful, she turned around and glared, her eyes as wild as a cornered animal's, and he had backed down the stairs. She wouldn't let him pack her things either, stuffing them into garbage bags that she lined up against one wall of her empty room. In the end, Kiran Sunderraj had persuaded her to transfer all those toys and clothes and books into suitcases and boxes. But the child continued to regard Sripathi with suspicion, even hostility, and he gave up any attempts to make conversation with her. For the entirety of his stay, there was nothing between them but a deepening silence.