The Hero's Walk (9 page)

“You read one page to him every day,” Narasimha commanded Ammayya. “Make sure he by-hearts it.” At dinner time he would quiz Sripathi on the page of the day, and if the boy failed to answer, he would explode.

“Idiot, idiot, you have given birth to an idiot!” he would shout at Ammayya, his heavy face flushed with emotion. Turning to his son, he would fix him with a look that paralyzed Sripathi and made him forget all that he did know. “Don't think your father will be around for the rest of your life, mutthal,” he continued. “One of these days, when you are sweeping the streets, you will wish you had listened to me and studied harder.”

Sometimes, when Sripathi had looked numbly at him for more than three questions, Narasimha would rise ominously from his chair. He would fasten his fingers like a vice on the lobe of his son's ear and pull him up until he, too, was standing. Wordlessly, he would drag Sripathi out through the living room, with its looming cupboards full of ancient books and its dark, brooding furniture, through the verandah and out of the gate. Down Brahmin Street they would go, Sripathi sobbing with pain and shame as pedestrians gazed curiously at them. A few of the old men who gathered daily at the gates of the Krishna Temple to gossip and bemoan the ways of the younger generation would shout encouragement;
“That's it, Narasimha-orey! Teach the young fellow right from wrong. Otherwise he will climb on your back like the vetaala and never get off!” Past Sanskrit College, the pressure of Narasimha's fingers burning on Sripathi's tender ear, and into the squatters' colony, where the road grew narrow and huts made of rags and tins and stolen bricks crowded around open drains.

“There, you see, idiot—
that
's where you will end up if you don't learn the things I ask you to,” Narasimha Rao would say. The slum-dwellers were so accustomed to seeing the big, dark-skinned man hauling his thin son by the ear and pointing to them as examples of wasted lives that they did not even look up. Idlers clad in nothing other than striped and grimy underpants continued to lounge outside their huts, smoking beedis or gazing at the ground in despair. Women continued to scrub listlessly at aluminum vessels around the tube-well that had recently been installed by the Lions Club of Toturpuram, or to spread out ragged clothes to dry on flat stones beside the festering drain. Naked children played with tops and marbles on the dusty road. Some of them squatted near the drain, next to the women drying clean clothes, grunting with concentration, their bums hanging over piles of worm-ridden feces.

His father would make a sweeping gesture with the hand that wasn't pinching Sripathi's ear and say, “Do you see that loafer there? You want to end up like that?” And just when Sripathi thought that his ear was going to tear away, his father would release it and slap the side of his head hard. Once. Twice. So that it snapped backwards and forwards. Then, casting a look of disgust at his son, he would stalk back home. Sripathi would cross his thin arms over his head and, bawling loudly, run after his father.

Sripathi had never dared to ask his father how an intimate knowledge of the mating habits of kangaroos would help in the pursuit of a career—or how familiarity with the exact dimensions of the Hope diamond, which he was never likely to possess, would assure success in life. But by the time Narasimha died, both Ammayya and
Sripathi had a stock of esoteric and wholly unnecessary information in their heads. The chemical composition of salt. The botanical name of every tree on Brahmin Street. Who invented the radio. Who invented fountain pens. Why leaves were green. When Brahms wrote his first symphony. The first person to cross the Karakoram ranges. The name of Queen Victoria's dog.

Slow, heavy steps came up the stairs, across the landing, and into the bedroom behind Sripathi. He knew it was Nirmala by the sound of her toe rings on the floor.

“What are we going to do?” she asked, her voice still thick with tears. “Why you are sitting here by yourself? You can't come down and be with the rest of us?”

“Oh, now I can't even sit quietly and think, is that it?”

“Our child is dead, and you can't share in the sorrow? What hard kind of person are you? I want to know every word you and that man spoke on the phone. You didn't tell me what is happening to the baby. Our Nandana.”

“You didn't even let me open my mouth. Hitting me like a crazy lunatic.” Sripathi turned around and glared at her.

Nirmala looked down and pleated her sari pallu between the fingers of her left hand. She sniffed, wiped her nose with the end of the sari and said, “Okay, but you also hit me, no?”

Sripathi did not reply and Nirmala continued. “What will you do about Nandana? What did that man say? Where is the child? Poor thing, how she must be feeling, God only knows.”

“I am her legal guardian,” Sripathi said. “The child will come to us. I will have to make arrangements to go to Vancouver, stay there for a few months, lots of things to do.”

“She is coming
here
? I will see my grandchild? Ah, what wickedness is this, that I have to lose my own child to see my grandchild!” Nirmala started to weep again.

“It is all going to cost a lot.”

Nirmala gave Sripathi an angry look. “Cost. Always you think about unimportant things. Our daughter and her husband are dead, and this is all you can say to me? It will cost a lot?”

“Don't talk to me like that. If I don't think about cost, who will? Your dead grandfather? Henh? Maybe you should ask those stupid gods of yours to give me a pair of wings to carry me to Canada. Or better still, ask one of your rich cousins to buy me a private plane. They keep showing off about this and that. Ask them and see how much real help they will give.”

“Why do you always bring my family into everything? You can't take care of us, and then you curse my relatives.” Nirmala replaced the sandalwood case full of Maya's letters inside her cupboard.

Burn them, they are useless now, he wanted to say to her, but stopped himself in time. Nirmala gave him another wounded glance before she left the room, and Sripathi was alone once again.

The clock on the landing chimed the hour, and he looked at it as if at an old friend. Its benign ivory face framed in polished rosewood was as familiar to him as his own. Sripathi had received it as a gift for his Brahmin initiation ceremony forty-seven years ago from one of his father's friends. Large and jolly, Varadarajan Judge-sahib, had patted the young Sripathi's newly tonsured head, pinched his cheeks and given him the clock in its fancy box.

“Here, my boy,” he had said in his rotund voice that seemed to form in the depths of his stomach before emerging. “Now that you have received your sacred thread, now that you have entered the world of knowledge, you will appreciate this gift of time. A valuable gift that goes as soon as it arrives. So learn to use it wisely, and you will be content.”

Narasimha found frequent occasion to repeat this wisdom to his son. Sometimes Sripathi had to be dragged back from a cricket game in the alley behind their house to study his text books. And at other times, when the boy brought home low marks from school or
did not have an answer to some question from the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, Narasimha would first thrash him with a rolled up magazine, and then remind him of the time he had frittered away. “A valuable gift, did you hear? Not to be wasted the way you are wasting it, mutthal. Time and tide, time and tide wait for no man. Today you are merrily playing with loafers like the cricket in that Aesop fellow's story, but tomorrow, while industrious ants are living like rajas, you will be sweeping the streets. And
why
? Because
they
used time properly, and
you
, mutthal, did not.”

Sripathi remembered his initiation ceremony as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. He was the centre of attention, up there on the small wooden platform where he sat between Ammayya, who was dressed like a new bride in all her finery, and his father, whose silk dhoti fell in graceful folds from his waist. The priest chanted prayers that floated around them as frail as the smoke from the sandalwood fire in the middle of the platform. The ritual shaving of Sripathi's hair; the solemnity of the moment when he disappeared under a sheet of unbleached cotton with his father to receive the secret mantra that initiated him into Brahminhood; the sacred thread that was looped over his shoulder and across his chest; and later, the tenderness with which Ammayya fed him delicacies from a silver plate—he remembered them all. He had stepped out of his mother's shadow and into his father's, no longer a child but a man.

Varadarajan Judge-sahib had teased him about the thread. “See, now you have only three strands in this thread. Your responsibilities are small—only to yourself and to your parents. But when you get married, ah, then you will have six strands. A wife means twice the responsibility! Eh? What do you say, Narasimha Rao?”

The two men had laughed, and Sripathi, too, had chuckled, a little frightened at the thought of being responsible for any one at all.

He couldn't remember precisely when the woman in the green-and-gold sari had entered the large hall crowded with people, but it
seemed to him now that a whisper had moved like a hot wind through the room, marking her arrival. Sripathi could still feel the burning sensation on his wrist where his mother had clutched him, her nails digging painfully into the tender skin. In her shame and rage, she did not realize the force of her grip.

“Why is
she
here?” she had whispered angrily, glaring at Narasimha, who didn't seem to have noticed the woman. He had his arm around Sripathi's shoulders, and he nodded and smiled as people streamed past, congratulating them on this auspicious occasion.

“Who?” Narasimha had asked.

“Your whore. Don't pretend you haven't seen her,” said Ammayya.

The memory unwound before Sripathi, a film in slow motion. The woman dressed in green and gold, making her way through the crowd towards them, the pallu draped carefully over her shoulder, her eyes slightly anxious, the nervous movement of her left hand as it smoothed the pleats of her sari. His father's whore? At ten years of age, Sripathi wasn't sure what exactly that word meant, and why it made his mother so furious that she was tearing off his wrist with her fingernails.

The woman reached them and pressed an envelope into Sripathi's hands, not looking at his parents or at anybody else but him. “Blessings,” she said in a low voice. She reached out, stroked his head and was just turning away when Ammayya grabbed the envelope, ripped it into small pieces and flung it at the woman.

A hush descended on the hall, and it seemed to Sripathi as if all five hundred guests had chosen that very moment to stop talking and stare at the scene in the centre of the room.

“Don't come near my son,” hissed Ammayya. “Whore!”

Then followed the greater horror, when Sripathi's father moved away from him, towards the woman, and led her carefully out of the hall, his hand hovering just above the small of her back, as if she
were one of Ammayya's precious Japanese teacups that allowed sunlight to filter through their eggshell fragility. A feeling of great abandonment swept through Sripathi as he watched his father's stiff back, the rigid body carving a path through the crowd of friends, relatives and well-wishers. He and Ammayya stood there, becalmed like two small dinghies, linked by their shared humiliation.
Never
would he allow this to happen to himself again, Sripathi had sworn bitterly.
Never
would he fail in his duty to his family or subject them to such shame. He did not want either his father's fame or stature because the higher one was, the greater the fall. No, he would be only an ordinary man, but one with good standing in the eyes of the world. He would be a simple man, respected for nothing other than his qualities as a father and a husband. He, unlike his father, would always remain dutiful to the mother who had brought him into this world, to the woman he married, to the children he had—first and above everything else. This the young boy vowed to himself, as he stood there feeling the fierce pain of Ammayya's grip on his thin wrist, as he willed the tears not to fall and shame him in front of this gathering who had come to witness him crossing the threshold of innocence.

Sripathi hated his father completely at that moment, and the feeling grew stronger with time. No longer did that tall, stately figure fill him with pride and awe, or even fear. No longer did he care about his father's opinion of him or his wrath when he brought home bad marks on his school exams. He watched scornfully when his father went to the temple for morning worship, his cotton towel draped severely over his left shoulder. And in the evening, after dinner, Sripathi watched him leave for his mistress's home, with that same shalya now slung rakishly over his other shoulder.

When he was sixteen, he was horrified and disgusted to see his mother swelling with child again. How, he wondered, enraged, could she allow that man to lay a finger on her? The hate had built up and coagulated in him so violently that when he first gazed at
Narasimha's bleeding, lifeless body abandoned on the road, he had felt nothing but a remote sense of contempt. For all his grand ways, his mighty father had died like a pariah dog, his passing noticed by none but other dogs. But with a jolt of anger, he realized that the street was the very one on which his father's mistress lived. It was on her door that people had knocked first, not on his own mother's. Sripathi had seen the woman in the crowd that gathered around his father's body, her eyes liquid with tears, her sari bunched tight in her hand and pressed to her mouth, as if to prevent her agony from spilling forth. He had wondered what his father had found in this illiterate, plain, crude-looking woman.

Narasimha's death brought with it penury and the sharp fear that always accompanies a lack of money. Sripathi discovered that his father had not saved a single paisa. There was a tiny pension, but there were also loans to be repaid—to friends, relatives, even to the bank. The sixteen-year-old had remembered the fate of a distant relative who had died a pauper. Narasimha had taken his family to visit the relative when Sripathi was eight years old. He had never really known the reason behind that visit. Perhaps his father had been a kinder man than he remembered. The relative lived in a single room at the back of somebody's house. He had two scrawny, wide-eyed daughters and a sullen wife. He had been absurdly pleased to see Narasimha, Ammayya and Sripathi, treating them as if they were royalty and ordering hard vadais from a restaurant nearby for them to eat with the sugarless tea his wife made. Sripathi remembered with shame the hunger in the eyes of the two young girls. He had not even thought to offer them some of the oversalted lentil rings that tasted as though they'd been fried in rancid oil, and which he eventually left half-eaten on his plate.