The Hero's Walk (6 page)

The polite, reasonable voice went on and on. Wills. Financial papers. Death certificate. Cremation. The possibility of Alan's relatives surfacing and contesting the will—a distant chance as Alan likely did not have anyone who was close enough to him to want the responsibility of a child. Police check. Adoption. Sripathi put down the receiver gently, aware that the man was still speaking. Enough, he thought. He could not bear to hear another word.

A long distance away Sripathi could hear water running, cascading down the sides of the cement tank in Ammayya's bathroom. It occurred to him that Koti must have started filling it and that if he didn't move away from the phone and help her, there would be no drinking water for the day.

He heard his mother's querulous voice calling him. “Sripathi,
H
₂
O
started coming long ago, so I turned on the pipe. Now the tank is overflowing and I can't turn the pipe off. What are you doing? Come quickly, big mess it is becoming.” At any other time, Sripathi would have been mildly amused by Ammayya's habit of using chemical formulae, the occasional Latin term, or some other bit of information gathered during those days when her husband was alive, when he had forced them both to memorize the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. But today it barely registered. Instead he imagined water flooding the floor, snaking out from under the door, spreading silver into the bedroom.
Waste don't waste don't waste don't waste
. An alarm went off in his brain, the result of years of careful budgeting, of trying to make sure that there was always
enough money for decent schools and clothes and good food.

Ammayya called again, more urgently. “Ayyo! Look at this mess. I am all wet also. Sripathi!”

Sripathi sat motionless, unable to move. He stared at his hands, knotted with the weight of the years they had carried; the paper cut on his left hand, just below the thumb, which began to burn the moment he noticed it; and the three black moles on his palm, which he had believed for years would bring him untold wealth. These were the hands that had cradled a small body, stroked unruly curls off a sweaty forehead, swung a little girl—his first born—in the air above his head. The same hands that had written such hard, unforgiving words nine years ago. He glanced down at them, empty now, their palms seared by lines of time and fate.

In a daze he heard Nirmala climb the stairs.

“What is wrong? Why haven't you started filling water in the kitchen? Who was that on the phone? What happened?” she asked. Sripathi could feel her anxious gaze, even though he couldn't look her in the face.

“Ree-ree, why are you sitting like this without saying anything? Are you ill, or what? Tell me.”

Sripathi felt her hand on his shoulder. Felt her shake him and, when he did not respond, yell for their son. “Arun, come quickly! Something is wrong with your father! I don't know what. Must be that oily food he keeps eating at the office. How many times I have said, after a certain age you must be careful of your diet, otherwise all sorts of heart problems you will get.”

She shook him again, and this time Sripathi looked at her, afraid of what he would see in her eyes after she heard what he had to say.

“Our Maya,” he said. His voice came out in a croak, and he cleared his throat before continuing. “Bad news. That was a call from Vancouver.” He frowned. Had that call really come?

“What? What happened? Is she sick? Tell me no, why you are keeping things from me?” begged Nirmala.

“Maya is dead,” said Sripathi. He heard his own voice again, and now it seemed to be coming from somewhere else. “So is her husband. Car crash.” Again that clutch of panic in his chest—a sticky, dark tightness that caught his breath and refused to release it in the waves of grief that he craved.

Nirmala stared at him. “What are you saying? Who was on the phone? Some idiot playing the fool probably. You know how the phone idiots climb on the poles—”

“Didn't you hear me? Maya and her husband died yesterday in a car crash. Why are you babbling about phones and all? Is something wrong with your ears?” Sripathi asked savagely, willing himself to feel something other than numbness, to feel a rightful sorrow. He glared at Nirmala, hating her for making him repeat the awful news. Repeating it would make it real. Didn't the silly woman realize that?

Without any warning, Nirmala launched herself at him. She hit him on his chest and wailed in his face, “Your fault, your fault, your fault! You killed my daughter. You drove her away from me! You! You! You!”

Again and again she hammered her fists against his body, slapping and punching in a frenzy. Sripathi sat still, his head in his hands, like a penitent being flogged for his sins. For once he had no argument, no quick sarcastic remark to shut her up. He wanted to apologize, to say something, but perversely he found himself becoming angry with her. How dare she raise her hands to him, her husband?

“Stop it!” He tried to grab her flailing arms. “Stop making such a scene. Behave yourself!”

Nirmala's heavy, normally pleasant face was ugly. Her hair had worked free of its pins and fell across her face and down her back. “I am
tired
of behaving myself,” she panted. Sripathi noticed with faint disgust that mucus had dripped from her nose and was smeared across her left cheek. One of her hands landed hard on his
face, knocked his glasses away, caught his eye and made it water. Without thinking he slapped her back, and she stopped crying abruptly.

“You
hit
me?” she said, stunned. “You killed my child, and now you are hitting me also? Evil man.” Again she launched herself at him. Now her blows caught Sripathi deliberately on his nose, his cheeks, his mouth. He was enraged by her lack of restraint. He got to his feet so that he loomed over her, and she was obliged to swing upwards at him. He grabbed her arms and she struggled to release herself. “Let me go!” she screamed. “Let me go!”

“What are you doing? Mamma. Appu. Stop it!” Arun's voice brought Sripathi back to his senses. His son was running down the stairs, and at the foot of the stairs, staring up in horror, stood the rice-seller, Koti, the maidservant, and his sister Putti. In all these years, Sripathi had never touched his wife in violence, only with desire and affection. Now he had hit her in front of his whole family
and
the maidservant
and
the man who sold them rice.

“What happened?” Arun asked again. “Mamma, stop this nonsense and tell me.” He pulled Nirmala away from Sripathi, held her firmly against him and glared at his father. “Aren't you ashamed of yourself?”

Sripathi noticed that his son was wearing a faded green kurta that he himself had thrown away only days ago. The wretched boy had fished it out of the garbage bin! He looked so much like Maya, thought the father painfully, and then threw the thought away. Only the shape of his face. Only that. Nobody looked like Maya. Certainly not this shabby creature standing before him.

Nirmala raised her voice again. “I told him, begged him so many times. Let us forget the past, I told him and told him. But no, when has he ever listened to me? I am a fool, no? Can't use big-big words and say clever things.”

“
Calm down
and tell me what is going on. Who was that on the phone?”

Sripathi sat down again and held his trembling hands folded tightly on his lap. He was afraid of what they would do to him if he let them loose. He didn't think he could control them. Now his legs were beginning to shiver, so he crossed them as well, tucking the loose folds of his lungi in between—once at the knee and again at the ankles, until they looked like bright, twined snakes. There was a large purple bruise stretched across his ankle. He had missed the starter pedal on his scooter and hurt himself badly. Funny he had never noticed how purple it was. Like an aubergine. A roasted one. Did Maya have purple scars on her poor body? And her husband? His skin would surely bruise in different shades. He was so much fairer.

“Appu?” he heard his son ask.

“Her head used to fit into my palm,” Sripathi said, to no one in particular. “Do you remember?” Maya's baby breath had seemed like the touch of a feather on his neck as she slept on his shoulder, he thought—and he, too frightened to take a deep breath or move his head in case she woke up. Her face a bright portulaca flower, waiting for him, her Appu, to return from work. She always had her feet wrong in the tiny green Hawaiian slippers he had bought her from the Bata shop on the casino corner.

“This is your
left
foot,” he would tell her. “It goes into
this
slipper. And your
right
foot goes into that one.”

But of course she never listened, dancing around impatiently for him to take her for their ritual ride around the tulasi planter in the front yard, checking his pockets to see if he had hidden a treat for her. And as they rode round and round in slow, tight circles, she would bring him up to date on her day: “Appu, I saw an enormous spider. It wanted to eat me. It was green and yellow”; “Appu, I hurt my left toe on my right foot”; “Appu, I did susu in my pants by mistake because Ammayya would not come out of the toilet”; “I ate a
big
mango, and Mamma said I must drink milk to cool the mango in my stomach. But Appu, I waited for
you
to come home and give me the milk.”

She had never indulged in baby talk; the unformed words that sounded unbearably cute in other children had never appeared in his daughter's vocabulary. Always such a precise little creature. She had carried that fierce precision right through to her adult years, along with an ambition that Sripathi had never entirely understood to be the best at whatever she took on.

He turned a frozen face to Arun and said, “Your sister is dead. There was an accident. She and her husband are no more.”

In a detached sort of way, he watched the shock wash over Arun's face. Your sister, he said again mentally. The child who came six years before you. He looked away before he blurted out something unforgivable. Such as, “Why your sister and not you?” Arun flirted with danger every other day in his efforts to change the world, but here he stood healthy and breathing and shabby in faded green.

“Nandana too?” asked Arun.

The child.

“No, she wasn't there.”

“The child is okay? Where is she? Poor thing—what will happen to her?” Nirmala cried.

“How did it happen?” Arun asked.

Sripathi felt forced to reply. “An accident.”

“Who was driving?”

It hadn't occurred to Sripathi to find out, and now that Arun had brought it up, he was filled with an urgent desire to know. Was Alan Baker to blame? Was he drunk? Was he careless? Yes, most certainly it was that man's fault. The same fellow who had taken Maya away from her family, her duties, her home—that same bastard must have taken her life, too. He scrabbled for the tattered phone directory on which he had jotted Dr. Sunderraj's number. It was important to know right away who was behind the wheel. Who was to blame.

“What are you doing?” asked Nirmala. “Who are you phoning?”

“That doctor who called just now,” explained Sripathi. “To ask who was responsible.”

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it does. We have to punish the person who did it. The one who murdered our child,” said Sripathi calmly.

“What is this nonsense you are talking? Punish, how you can punish somebody all the way there from all the way here?” Nirmala demanded.

“Sue them, that's what I will do. Set our lawyers on them.”

“What lawyers? Why are you babbling like this?”

Sripathi ignored her, and with a trembling finger he dialed Dr. Sunderraj's number. I am not the one you should be blaming, he thought; it is somebody else. As soon as he heard it ringing, though, he lost heart and dropped the receiver. Nirmala was right. They had no lawyers, and even if they did, he had no money for legal fees. Besides, how could he, Sripathi Rao, a man of no consequence in this world, sue somebody thousands of miles away in another country? And so, to hide his lack of worth from his own cruel gaze, he turned on his wife, as usual.

“Why you always have to tell me what to do, what not to do?” he snarled at her. “Is this my house or not? Did I ask you for money to pay lawyers? Did I ask you for anything at all? You came like a pauper to this house, and you talk as if you are some maharani.”

Nirmala stumbled away from him, down the stairs, and he watched Putti and Koti lead her away into the familiar warmth of the kitchen. Arun pushed roughly past him and followed his mother down to the kitchen. Sripathi was left alone on the landing with the silent phone. He struggled to control his inchoate feelings—rage and despair, sorrow and guilt. He cursed himself for the way he had behaved with Nirmala. He had destroyed what should have been a moment of mourning together for their lost child. But then, he reminded himself, she was the one who had attacked him. From the bedroom downstairs, he could hear Ammayya's voice
again. “
H
₂
O
has stopped. Only my tank is full. No drinking water today. Oh-oh-oh, what to do?”

He heard her chair scrape and then the tap-tapping of her walking stick as she made her way to the living room.

“Henh? Why were you all shouting and screaming? I was trying to pray, and God himself could not hear me with all this galata.” She rapped her stick impatiently and, a moment later, Putti's voice reached Sripathi.

“Ammayya, some bad news.” His sister sounded very calm, thought Sripathi. Why wasn't she weeping like Nirmala? Wasn't she affected at all?

A shudder tore through him. He thought he might fall. He clung to the banister and shut his eyes. Control, he whispered to himself. If he could control himself, he could deal with anything in the world, including this. He forced himself to stand and climb down the stairs. His legs quivered with every step he took, and he felt very old and far away from everything that was happening around him. His mind seemed to have stopped working altogether. What was he supposed to do? How was he supposed to react to the death of his own child? My daughter is dead, he told himself. Devoid of life. The mechanical reduction of fact into words soothed him momentarily. He emerged into the unbearable light of the verandah and sat on the steps already baking in the sun. He barely felt the cement burning through his lungi to the skin of his thighs. The sky was a shining steel drum inside which the world was trapped. On the dusty ground before him was a rangoli pattern, made of white dots and swirls, drawn by Koti early that morning. A pattern made from rice-flour paste to keep evil away from the house. Koti had a whole array of designs in her memory—a certain order of dots laid out in strict, organized rows, all connected by sweeping lines. Without the dots the lines were meaningless, and when the dots left the design, there was only chaos. The rangoli had lost its perfection by now, smudged by a dozen feet, flung apart
by the wind, carried away by ants. But tomorrow, thought Sripathi, it would be there again, a new design laid down by Koti's patient fingers. But who was there to wipe out that phone call? To reorganize his life? To erase time like the rice-flour paste and set out a new pattern of dots and lines prettier than the last?