The Hero's Walk (21 page)

A month after his arrival, the Social Services Department gave him permission to take the child to India. Her visitors' visa had been acquired from the Indian High Commission on Homer Street in one miraculous week, thanks again to Dr. Sunderraj's innumerable contacts. He and Kiran had done more than most people
would have. They had taken over all the legal formalities concerning the deaths, or as many as they were allowed to deal with. Dr. Sunderraj had also completed most of the preliminary paperwork concerning the child.

“Nandana is officially a ward of the state in the absence of any close relatives,” the man had explained over the phone before Sripathi's trip. “However, I have some contacts in Immigration and Social Services. They have agreed to let us keep her, as we are longtime family friends and as Alan's parents are no longer alive. We placed an ad in the papers, but apparently he was an only child. Just an aunt in Idaho who doesn't want the responsibility. Some cousins also, but they thought that it was better for Nandu to be with us—we are familiar faces, you see. Your granddaughter is welcome to stay as long as necessary. But she needs her own people, and the sooner you arrive, the better.”

At the airport, where they waited to catch their flight back to India, the child continued to be taciturn and silent. In one hand Sripathi carried a small red suitcase. He had deliberately kept the other hand free, assuming that the child would hold it the way Maya used to when she was seven years old. She did not. He offered to take her backpack that bulged oddly and seemed heavy, but she ignored him. And she looked with deep suspicion at a Mars bar that Sripathi held out to her. Sripathi decided to humour her, although he could feel his temper rising at her intractability.

He glanced down as she trotted silently beside him, her arms folded out of reach behind her back. The child had drawn an unsteady line of kohl under her eyes and looked like a raccoon. She chewed steadily on something. Munchmunchmunchmunch. A bubble grew out of her mouth like a swollen membrane. She wore ragged jeans and a sagging black T-shirt with the word
WHY?
inscribed on it in hot pink. Kiran had laid out a different set of clothes for her, he remembered, but the child had decided to be
difficult, it seemed. Sripathi noticed that her knees, which protruded through holes in her ragged jeans, were scratched and dry, bony childlike hillocks absurdly at odds with her swaggering look. Earlier on, Sripathi had seen a drawing on one knee, a man with a wild moustache and a large mole on his forehead. Had the child done it herself, or was it a tattoo like the ones on the arms of those wandering, dirty Lambani women who lived on his street in Toturpuram? Sripathi had heard that tattooing was fashionable in these foreign countries. And her hair, what on earth had she done to it, for God's sake? A mass of fierce black curls surged out of her scalp, with beads strung in rows here and there. A few strands were inexpertly braided. She had not allowed Kiran to comb her hair either. It must have been something that Maya used to do for the child. Like Nirmala had done for her. Sripathi had a sudden memory of Nirmala seated on the verandah, Maya held firmly between her knees, grumbling and squirming as her mother braided her thick tresses—Nirmala with her mouth full of pins and ribbons, her muffled voice telling Maya to stop fidgeting, as her hands swiftly combed out the knots and snarls.

Sripathi found their gate and took a seat. Nandana drifted slowly away, looking once over her shoulder at him, and stopped near the far window of the lounge. She pressed her nose to the glass, her rucksack pulling her shoulders backwards and stretching out her thin neck like a chicken's. Too thin, thought Sripathi, her collarbones barely covered with flesh, her skin a pale translucent brown, like milk with a dash of honey. He was sure he could even see the faint tracery of blue veins beside her eyes. She didn't eat properly. Was she afraid of putting on weight? Did children care about those things? He couldn't remember how it had been with Maya. Had she been fussy about eating food because she thought she would get fat? He realized he had not known his daughter's inner life, the secret world of dreams and fears, the complexes and affectations that follow children through their youth, eventually
hardening into dead weights. How had she grown up in the same house for twenty years, right under his nose? She had turned from a beloved child—who held his little finger while crossing the road, who wept with worry if he did not come home at exactly six in the evening—into a person he did not know.

The intercom in the airport lounge came alive, and everybody sat up. The elderly and people with infants were invited to start boarding. Sripathi gathered his bags and glanced at the child, hoping that she had heard the announcement as well. She was still glued to the window, her nose pressed against the glass, her breath a damp halo around it.

Another announcement that sounded as if the speaker were inside a tin. This time Nandana reluctantly began to make her way back to Sripathi. What was Nirmala going to think of her? he wondered. How would they deal with her?

The child stooped to tie a shoelace that had come undone. She looked like a turtle under the weight of her backpack. In the face of her hostility, Sripathi was afraid even to ask what she had inside it.

“Don't rush her,” Kiran Sunderraj had advised. “Nandu will come to you when she is ready. Remember that she has lost all that is familiar and beloved to her. It is a shock, poor baby. You must be patient.”

Sripathi kept a wary eye on her as she performed a slow, ambling circuit of the lounge before drifting towards him. She was doing it deliberately, he was sure—pushing against his authority, his patience, testing it. All the way from Madras, through Frankfurt to Vancouver, he had imagined another little Maya whom he could easily love again, who would help him wipe out his guilt and anger. This child was too self-possessed, though, too unlovely and unwilling to be loved. She was not pretty or appealing. What had he expected? A sweet storybook creature in a neat little frock like the ones Nirmala used to make for Maya when she was a girl, hair braided and doubled up in ribbons?

The child reached his side and stood there silently, one hand fiddling with a strand of beaded hair.

“Do you need to use the bathroom?” asked Sripathi, feeling awkward.

Silence.

“Something to drink before we go into the plane? Have you been inside a plane before?”

She shrugged, inserted a finger and thumb into her mouth, and drew out a long, sticky length of pink chewing gum. She shot Sripathi a quick look to see the effect it had on him. He hoped that Nirmala would know better how to deal with her. Women always seemed to have the exact words for any situation. And yet
he
was the wordsmith, the man who persuaded strangers to buy beauty cream and Ayurvedic cough paste, coir mats and tooth powder, coconut hair oil and gingelly cooking oil.

He stooped with a grunt to pick up the small red suitcase bruised by time and covered with faded, peeling stickers. It had a new-looking leather strap holding it together. He would have known that suitcase anywhere. He and Nirmala had bought it for Maya from a warehouse on Second Line Beach Road two days before she left for a trip to Ooty with her undergraduate class. The entire family had caught the No. 16 bus because it took a scenic route. This was a special occasion. Maya would be away from home for five whole days—the first time in their lives that such a thing had happened. No daughter in Sripathi's family had ever left home on her own before her marriage. The suitcase was to be an acknowledgment of Maya's new status as a person in her own right, an almost-adult. It was also Sripathi's nervous first step into a modern world where daughters went away from home to study and worked to support themselves.

Ammayya couldn't understand the fuss or the need for a suitcase. “There are so many trunks in the house,” she had remarked, horrified as always at expense of any sort. “Haven't we managed all
our lives with trunks? Only ten rupees my father paid for them and they have lasted all these sixty-five years.”

“But Ammayya, what will all my friends think if I show up at the station with my granny's wedding petti?” teased Maya. “And who will carry them for me?”

“Pah, silly reasons you find to make your father spend. Spoiled, that's what you children are these days. Spoiled rotten!” retorted Ammayya, but did not carry the argument any further. She had subsided into a ball of discontentment instead and had filled the air with dire predictions about bankrupt parents and grasping children, ingrates and incompetents like her own son, and wound up praising her own immaculately virtuous childhood. Her disapproval hadn't stopped her from accompanying them, though, and one sunny Saturday they had all set off in a decrepit blue bus, driven by a man so short that he could barely see over the steering wheel. Every now and again he poked his arm out of the window and screamed abuse: “Mutthal, moron, donkey's arse!” People passing by jumped aside nervously and wondered whether the bus was driving itself, since they could see no driver at the wheel, only a waving arm.

They rattled past the row of flower stalls run by Mangamma and her daughters, past Judge Vishnu Iyengar's house with its tumbling waterfall of bougainvillea and the Kuchalamba Marriage Hall next to it, empty because this was a bad-luck period and no one wanted to risk blighting their wedded lives from the very beginning. They turned right at the Tagore Street intersection, where Shakespeare Kuppalloor had his barber shop, and where Jain's Beauteous Boutique stood with its incandescent display of saris, rows of brassieres padded with newspaper, and men's underwear with more newspaper stuffed strategically in the crotch. Jain's window dresser had been overenthusiastic with the newspaper; the rows of jockey shorts looked like they would fit men who had melons for balls. The bus veered past the long, battered Jesuit high school where Sripathi, and after him, Arun, had studied. At the
chapel next to it, old Father Frank McMordy stood at the gate, as usual, waiting bright-eyed to catch somebody for a chat. Finally, they turned left onto the wide, paved road that traced the beach, and the crisp air reached in through the windows, jammed open by rust, and blew away the smell of armpits and old socks.

The sky was curdled milk, with lumpy clouds like paneer floating on its translucent surface. Above the asthmatic sounds of the bus, Sripathi heard seagulls. He was happy that day. Maya had insisted on buying a bright red suitcase to match her langa-dhavani, even though Sripathi preferred the handsome black one with brass buckles and a matching name tag that vaguely resembled a pirate's trunk. Ammayya forgot to sulk and treated everyone to ice cream. Infected with the pervasive happiness of the trip, she even bought flowers for Putti, Nirmala and Maya. And for Sripathi and Arun, a ballpoint pen each from the smuggled-goods market. When they got back home, they found that the pens did not write. It did not spoil the perfection of the day, though, and the suitcase accompanied Maya everywhere she went for years after that, travel-weary, flung about in planes and trains and buses.

Sripathi didn't offer Nandana his hand as they wound their way to the boarding gate, and she continued to pretend that he wasn't there.

There was nobody to receive them at Madras airport, and soon after collecting their bags, the two of them caught a taxi to the railway station. This time the child did not protest when Sripathi took her backpack from her, and she dozed off wearily in the dark taxi that smelled of old sweat and cigarette smoke. She snapped awake as soon as they reached the station, though, and gazed around wide-eyed at the crowds that were boiling on the platforms, even at that late hour. It must be strange and disorienting for her, thought Sripathi, the steady roar of sounds—vendors, children wailing for their parents, coolies shouting for customers, beggars, musicians—the
entire circus of humanity under the high arching roof of Madras Central Station. With her small fingers, the child clipped her nostrils together to block out the stench of fish, human beings, diesel oil, food frying and pools of black water on the tracks. The crowd grew tighter as they neared their train, and Sripathi gripped the child's hand, prepared to hold on even if she tried to wriggle free. Again she made no protest, and he assumed that she was too dazed by the turmoil, the relentless assault on all her senses at the same time. To his relief, there was no confusion over the berths that the travel agent had reserved for them, and soon the movement of the train had rocked the child to sleep. Sripathi sat up all night with his window open to let in cool gusts of air as the train rushed past sleeping towns and villages, and the next morning, when they reached Toturpuram, he was heavy-eyed and irritable.

Through the window he spotted his family scanning the compartments eagerly. He shook Nandana awake. Minutes later they were on the platform, surrounded by all that was familiar to him and strange to the little girl swaying beside him.

It was hot in India. Like the Melfa Lane bathroom after she had had a bubble bath, thought Nandana. When she arrived at the station, there were zillions of people on the platform, and all of them were talking at the same time. She clapped her hands against her ears. She wanted to get back inside the train; she liked it in there. A small group of people separated themselves from the crowd and came straight towards her.