The Hero's Walk (41 page)

She frowned when there was no response from Nandana. “So quiet you have grown, child. Why don't you talk to me?” She tore off a piece of the paratha and tried to squeeze it between Nandana's tightly pursed lips. The girl burst into tears, and Mrs. Poorna hastily deposited the plate on the floor. “Don't cry, my pet. Don't be angry with your poor mother. I didn't mean to lose you. Please don't be so sad.” She collected Nandana in her arms, pressed her close, kissed her forehead and cheeks repeatedly, and rocked her back and forth, humming under her breath. “Think how surprised your Appa will be when he comes home! Think how surprised that wretched Shyamala will be. She tells me I am mad. Can you imagine? Is a mother mad to wait for her child?”

After a while, she released Nandana and leapt to her feet. With a happy smile, she picked up a comic book from the small white desk beside the bed and pushed it towards her. “See, here is your new comic. You never finished it. Sit quietly and read now. Amma will go and cook all your favourite things, okay?” She left the room, still humming gaily, and Nandana heard her lock the door from the outside. The plate remained on the floor beside the bed.

Earlier that evening, Meena had challenged Nandana to run through the tunnel between Blocks A and B again. “If you do it, I will let you come to my house and use my Sony PlayStation,” she promised.

Nandana had agreed. She was still afraid of the tunnel, but now the desire to play a video game in Meena's house had her firmly in its grip. It would feel just like being in Yee's house in Vancouver. So she had run through the dark passage full of slime and strange sounds and emerged on the other side, only to find that the three girls had disappeared.

She had stood there chewing her hair, mad at them. She did not notice Mrs. Poorna gliding out from her patio until the woman had caught her tenderly by the arm.

“Darling child, again you are playing outside,” she crooned. “I was wondering where you were. Come, let us go home. I will show you something nice I bought for you.” She pulled Nandana towards the terrace of her apartment, urging her to enter the small metal gate. The little girl had not resisted. Why should she obey her mother's warnings about strangers? she thought rebelliously. Especially when she had gone away and left her by herself. Mrs. Poorna had drawn her into the apartment, murmuring love to her as if she were a nervous foal. Once they were inside, she shut the patio door and double-bolted it.

“They said you wouldn't come back, but what do they know? My heart called and called, and you heard me,” she had said, stroking Nandana's face and hair.

Nandana glanced uneasily around the small room in which Mrs. Poorna had locked her. Now she regretted allowing herself to be led here. The room was crowded with toys, books and clothes neatly folded on shelves. A blue dress hung on a wooden hanger in a corner of the room. There was a window on one wall. Nandana climbed on the bed and struggled with the bolts, which were slightly rusty. When the window swung open she peered out through the bars. There was nothing there but another wall criss-crossed with drain pipes thick and thin. It looked familiar. With some surprise, Nandana realized that it was one of the walls of the tunnel. A little above her and slightly to the left was another lighted window, and if she stuck her head close against the bars, she could see more squares of light. Sounds of laughter and talk emerged from the window but were partially drowned out by the rain that pinged off the pipes and roared steadily in the two gutters that lined the tunnel. Other human sounds floated down from various flats, bumped against the walls and turned into ghostly noises.

Somewhere on the other side was the old house in which she lived. Through the locked door, she could hear the crazy woman
singing loudly, clattering pots and pans. There was the sound of a doorbell and Nandana heard Mrs. Poorna opening it. She waited, hopeful that it was somebody come to look for her. She pressed her face against the window bars and said quietly, “Mamma, I am here.” Then she raised her voice and shouted a little louder. Her voice ricocheted around the tunnel—“hereherehere”—and was washed away by the splash and gurgle of water. She remembered how many times her grandmother had asked her to call her Ajji. Perhaps that was why there was no response. So she shouted again. “Ajji!” It occurred to her that Sripathi often sat on his balcony right across the wall. Now she called for him too, the word strange in her mouth, “Ajja!”

When they took her back to Big House, she promised herself, she would never be naughty again. No
way
. And she would talk to everybody in the house, even to her Ajja. The door opened and Mrs. Poorna came in with a tray of food.

“What is this?” she asked in a peeved voice. “You haven't eaten your parathas. And now it is dinnertime. Come, I will feed you.” She shut the window. Again she began humming a song, and, pulling Nandana tight against her, inserted small quantities of food into her mouth. “I'll never lose you again, my chicken,” she murmured. “Never.” She kissed her over and over. “Can you imagine, another little girl is lost? They came just now to look for her. She was wearing a red shirt, they said.”

“They were looking for me,” said Nandana, struggling to get off the woman's lap.

“Why should they look for you in your own home, my chicken? Again you are teasing me, naughty thing. Now come here and finish this before I get angry.”

Nandana struggled against her. Home. This was not her home. She remembered the police at Uncle Sunny's door, and Aunty Kiran telling her that her parents were dead, and understood at last that they would not ever come to find her. That was why the Old
Man had brought her to Big House. So he and Mamma Lady could take care of her for ever and ever.

“No, I don't want to finish that,” she said. “I want to go to my home.” She screamed as loud as she could, refusing to be silenced by Mrs. Poorna until she clapped her hand over Nandana's mouth.

The school was silent and deserted when Sripathi reached it. The gate swung open easily, and he made his way first to the office, hoping that somebody would still be there. To his dismay, the doors were locked shut. He banged a fist against the thick wood and made his way slowly along the long corridor that wound its way around the main building, peering through shut windows into empty classrooms. He couldn't remember where Nandana's classroom was. That first day, when he had brought her here, one of the nuns had been waiting for them at the front office. She had taken Nandana's hand in hers and led her away down the thin, dark corridors to some unknown place. Sripathi remembered the sense of loss he had felt as he watched the tall figure in her floating black robes and the small girl trotting beside her. It was the same feeling he had had when he was a child, on the first day of every year when his father left him at the doors of his school; on the first day he had left Maya, and then Arun; and years later as he had watched his daughter's plane rise into the sky.

Nowhere. She was not on any of the verandahs or in the open corridors. Not on the playground, or the little asbestos-roofed square with its rows of tables and benches for those who didn't want to eat their lunch inside the school or under the trees. As he approached the convent, a little behind the main building, a young nun in a white sari appeared and stared questioningly at him.

“Yes? Do you need any help?” she asked.

“My granddaughter, Nandana Baker, didn't come back from playing today,” said Sripathi. “She is only seven years old. In Class Two. I thought that she might have wandered back to school for some reason.”

“I haven't seen any children in the school after last bell. But please come into the reception area and sit down. I will tell Mother Superior and we can get one of the peons to check all the rooms.”

The nun led Sripathi into a small bare office with two brown sofas pressed against opposite walls. On the table in the middle was a vase full of tuberoses that were going brown around the tips and letting off a funereal odour, and a pile of religious pamphlets with brilliantly coloured and intensely pious faces looking out solemnly from the covers. High up on one bare wall was a small wooden cross with the Christ figure draped wearily across it—a familiar icon, a part of his own boyhood at school where cassocked priests swished through the imposing corridors instead of nuns in their whispering robes. Was it a good idea putting Nandana in this school? he wondered belatedly. Would she have been more comfortable in a non-denominational place such as Vidya Bhavan? Father Joseph, the old priest who had taught Arun, was the one who had raised the question of schooling once the girl arrived in India. He had suggested St. Mary's and used his contacts to get the child a seat here. Like everything else, school seats came at a premium these days, and thanks to the priest's intervention, Sripathi had not been asked for the capitation fee or donation that was expected by most schools in the country. The better the institution, the higher the fee.

A tall, slender nun who looked barely forty, rustled in and smiled at Sripathi.

“Good evening, Mr. Rao,” she said. “You might not remember me, but I used to be your daughter Maya's history teacher many years ago. I was sorry to hear about her passing.”

She looked at Sripathi sympathetically and again he had to control a desire to weep. What was the matter with him, crying in front
of every person who gave him a kind look? Half an hour later, the peon returned and told them that all the rooms were empty. After another sympathetic look from the nun, Sripathi made his way back past the silent school with its glassy, shuttered eyes, its barren playground where childish feet had churned up dust all day and the whitewashed wall surrounding it all.

Two hours after Sripathi left to look for Nandana, Arun came home. His shirt was torn, he had several bruises on his face and arms, he was soaking wet and exhausted. The protest march against the large fishing trawlers that were depriving the fishermen of their daily catch had not had quite the effect he had hoped for. Instead, two of the women in the procession had been badly wounded and hospitalized. Thugs hired by the trawler owners had used crowbars and bricks to disperse the unarmed group. One of them had pulled Arun aside and threatened him. “You think you are Gandhi, do you?” the man had asked. His face was familiar, and later Arun realized that he was one of the Boys employed by Munnuswamy. “If you don't keep your long Brahmin nose out of things, you will find it broken into small pieces. And we won't stop there either.”

Arun had stared defiantly at him and said, “Do what you want, it doesn't matter to me. Break all my bones, we will see.”

The man had grinned in reply, his large teeth stained with betel juice gleaming orange. “There are other things that we can do, mister. We have heard that you have a small girl in your house. It is so easy for a child to get lost these days, eh? She is going to school and
phuss
, gone. Or playing outside one moment and nowhere the next. You will have to be very careful.” He slapped Arun hard. “Of course, if you behave yourself, we can make sure that nothing happens to the little chicken. What do you say, mister?”

As soon as he entered the gates of Big House, he was surprised to find Nirmala standing right there, water dripping down her face.

“Oh, it's you,” she said flatly. “At last you decided to come home?”

“What are you doing in the rain?” Arun wanted to know.

“The child is gone. We still haven't found her. Where were you?”

“There was a protest march …”

“I am sick of your protesting. Your father was right to be angry with you. Here we have so much trouble, and you are outside saving the world. I am sick of all of you. All these years I listened to your father and your grandmother and this person and that. I should have done what
I
thought was right. Then none of this would have happened. I was stupid. Stupid.” Nirmala was shouting now, her voice high and furious. “I waited and waited for my Maya to come home, and now I have lost her daughter too. I should have told her ten years ago to come home. Why did I wait? Why was I afraid?”

“Mamma, don't cry, please,” begged Arun. He tried to wipe the water running down his face on his wet sleeve. “It isn't your fault. And we'll find her, I am telling you. Have you called the police?”

“It is my fault. I shouldn't have sent her out to play. She didn't want to go,” wailed Nirmala.

Arun led his mother into the house, which was blazing with lights. He was surprised to see Gopala sitting on one of the straight-backed rosewood chairs, and Munnuswamy on another. “What are you doing here?” he demanded, the beating he had received at the hands of Munnuswamy's thugs still fresh in his memory and on his body.

“They are helping us to find Nandu,” said Nirmala. “So kind.”

“What do you mean kind? These two are crooks. Their goondas threatened to take Nandu away only hours ago. What help are they going to give us?” Arun advanced threateningly towards the two men. “Leave our house, please. You are not welcome here.”