Chapter One
It was only five o'clock on a July morning in Toturpuram, and already everytrace of night had disappeared. The sun swelled, molten, from the far edge ofthe sea. Waves shuddered against the sand and left curving lines of golden froththat dried almost instantly. All along the beach, fishermen towed their boatsashore and emptied their nets of the night's catch. Their mothers and wives,daughters and sisters, piled the prawn and the crab, the lobster and the fish,into large, damp baskets still redolent of the previous day's load, and then,leaving the shimmering scales and cracked shells for the crows to fight over,they caught the first bus to the market, laughing as other passengers hastilymoved to the front and made way for them and their odorous wares.
In a few hours the heat would hang over the town in long, wet sheets, puddlebehind people's knees, in their armpits and in the hollows of their necks, anddrip down their foreheads. Sweaty thighs would stick to chairs and make rudesucking sounds when contact was broken. Only idiots ventured out to work and,once there, sat stunned and idle at their desks because the power had gone offand the ceiling fans were still. It was impossible to bat an eyelash withoutfeeling faint. The more sensible folk stayed at home, clad only in underwear,with moist cloths draped over their heads and chests, drinking coconut water bythe litre and fanning themselves with folded newspapers.
Even though it was the middle of July in this small town that crouched on theshores of the Bay of Bengal about three hours by bus from Madras, the southwestmonsoons that provided a minor interlude between periods of heat had notappeared. So all ofToturpuram longed for December when the northeast monsoonswould roar in. The memory of those cool, wet mornings was so appealing thateveryone forgot that December was also the beginning of the cyclone season whenwinds blew at 150 kilometres per hour, smashing everything that stood in theirway. They did not remember the torrential rains that knocked out the power linesand plunged the town into stinking, liquid darkness. And they utterly forgot howthe sea became a towering green wall of water that dissolved the beach andflooded the streets, turning roadways into drains and bringing dysentery anddiarrhea in its wake. There was so much rain that septic tanks exploded all overtown, and people woke suddenly in the night to find their belongings floating insewage.
Today the morning light touched the squalid little town with a tenuous beauty.Even the dozens of angular apartment blocks that marched stolidly from the beachup to Big House on Brahmin Street were softened by the early glow. Sheaves oftelevision antennae bristled up from the roofs of those apartments and caughtfire as the sun rose. Big House was the only building on the street that did notflaunt one. Sripathi Rao, the owner, had reluctantly bought a television set afew years ago, but it was an old model that only had an internal antenna. Hismother, Ammayya, had been disappointed.
"Nobody will even know we have a television," she protested. "What is the use ofhaving something if nobody knows about it?"
Sripathi would not be swayed. "So long as you get your programs, why does itmatter who knows what we have? Besides, this is all I can afford."
"If you had listened to me and become a big doctor you wouldn't have beentalking about affording and not affording at all," grumbled his mother. Shenever missed an opportunity to remind him how much of a disappointment he was toher.
"Even if I was one of the Birlas, I would have bought only this television,"Sripathi had argued. Or the Tatas or the Ambanis or, for that matter, any ofIndia's mighty business tycoons. He did not believe in ostentatious displays—ofpossessions or of emotions.
When the phone rang for the first time that day, Sripathi was on the balcony ofhis house. As usual, he had woken at four in the morning and was now reading thenewspaper, ticking off interesting items with a red marker. He stopped when heheard the high, fractured trill, but made no move to go down to the landinghalfway between the first and ground floors to the phone. He waited for someoneelse to get it. There were enough people around, including—he thought with someannoyance—his son, Arun, asleep in the room across the corridor from his own.
Afterwards Sripathi wondered why he had felt no twinge of premonition. Heremembered other times when tragedy had occurred: how uneasy he had been the daybefore his father's lifeless body was discovered on Andaal Street, and howstrange the coincidence that had taken him there the next morning where he hadjoined the curious crowd gathered around it. And before his beloved grandmother,Shantamma, was finally claimed by the Lord of Death, his nights had been full ofrestless dreams. Weren't disasters always heralded by a moment of immenseclarity or a nightmare that rocked you, weeping, out of sleep? This time,however, he experienced nothing.
The phone continued to ring, grating on Sripathi's nerves. "Arun!" he shouted,leaning back in his chair so that he could see the length of his bedroom throughthe balcony door. "Get the phone! Can't you hear it?" There was no reply."Idiot, sleeps all his life," he muttered. He pushed the chair away from thesquare iron table on which he had arranged his writing material, and stood up,flexing his rounded shoulders. As a youth, Sripathi had found that he was tallerthan all his friends and, because he hated to be different or conspicuous in anyway, had developed a stoop. His thick grey hair was cut as short as possible byShakespeare Kuppalloor, the barber on Tagore Street. An expression of permanentdisappointment had settled on a face dominated by a beaky nose and large, moisteyes. After the softness of the eyes, the thin, austere line of his mouth cameas a surprise. Once during an argument, his wife, Nirmala, had remarked that itlooked like a zippered purse. He remembered being taken aback by the comparison.He had always found her to be like a bar of Lifebuoy soap—functional but devoidof all imagination.
The thought crossed his mind that the call might be from Maya, his daughter inVancouver, and he paused in his passage across the bedroom. If it was, he didn'twant to answer it. His eyes fell on a photograph of Maya, with her foreignhusband and their child, on the windowsill next to Nirmala's side of the bed,and immediately his mood became tinged with bitterness. Every day, whenever hefound an opportunity, he turned the picture face down on the sill and piled somebooks on it, feeling slightly childish, only to have it reinstated right-side-upby Nirmala. But Maya phoned on Sunday mornings, he reminded himself. Atsix-thirty when, as she knew, her mother would be waiting, sitting on the cold,tiled floor of the landing, right beside the phone. And every Sunday, forseveral years now, Sripathi had avoided that moment by setting off for a walk atsix-twenty.
His younger sister, Putti, who was also downstairs somewhere, was too scared toanswer the phone.
"I don't know what to talk into that thing," Putti had explained to Sripathionce, embarrassment writ large on her round, babyish face. "And anyway, it isnever for me." A sad thing for her to say, he had thought then, feeling guiltythat he had not done his duty as her older brother and found a husband for her.After living in Toturpuram for forty-two years, Putti had nobody to call afriend. Except perhaps that horrible librarian, Miss Chintamani.
Sripathi's mother claimed that she was too old to climb the stairs, but Nirmalainsisted Ammayya was a fraud and that she came upstairs regularly to snooparound when she was alone in the house.
"She steals my saris," Nirmala had grumbled. "And I found my comb under hermattress. Did it walk there by itself, or what?"
The phone stopped ringing, and silence draped itself around the house once more.Sripathi went back to the balcony and settled down in the faded cane chair thathad survived at least twenty years of ferocious sun and rain. He picked up TheHindu again and started to read it carefully, ticking off articles that hewanted to comment on.
He could hear soft music emanating from the apartments that loomed beside thehouse, the thin notes drowned almost immediately by the sound of the KrishnaTemple bell—a clanging that competed for attention with the nasal call of themullah from the Thousand Lights Mosque on a parallel street. The temple wasstraight up the road from Big House, which had been built eighty-two years agoby Sripathi's grandfather on what came to be called Brahmin Street for thenumber of people of that caste. However, when the ruling party won the stateelections, it decreed that no street could have a name that indicated aparticular caste; so Brahmin Street was now merely Street. As was LingayatStreet, Mudaliyar Street and half a dozen others in Toturpuram. This led to alot of grumbling from visitors, who typically spent half the day wandering thetown trying to figure out which Street was which. In addition, Brahmin Streethad changed so much in the past decade that people returning to it after severalyears could barely recognize it. Instead of the tender smell of fresh jasmine,incense sticks and virtue, instead of the chanting of sacred hymns, the streethad become loud with the haggling of cloth merchants and vegetable vendors, thestrident strains of the latest film music from video parlours whose windowsflaunted gaudy posters of busty, thick-thighed heroines, and beefy heroes withhair rising like puffs of smoke from their heads.
Older inhabitants of Toturpuram remembered how beautiful Big House used tobe—its clean, strong walls washed pink every year before the Deepavalifestival, its wide verandah and several balconies in front and along the sides,all held back by painted iron railings cast to look like fish and lotus flowersfloating on stylized waves. The gigantic door of carved teak had beencustom-built for the house and, in the past, had been varnished annually. Thewindows had stained-glass panes that Sripathi's grandfather had bought from aBritish family that had smelled the winds of change several years beforeIndependence and moved back to England. Since his father's death, the houseitself had slid into a sort of careless disrepair and looked as if it was tiredof the life within its belly and on the seething, restless street outside.
"If my husband was still alive, we wouldn't have descended to this state,"Ammayya complained to her cronies, conveniently forgetting that Narasimha Raohad been solely and utterly responsible for their decline.
The paint had curled away from the decorative railings leaving them cratered byrust. The door had lost its gleam, and the beautiful carvings were now anonymousnubs of wood. Cracks ran across the tiled floors like varicose veins on an oldwoman's legs, and it was years since the walls had seen a fresh coat ofwhitewash or paint. Most of the windows could not be opened any more, so muchhad they swollen in the moist heat of the place, and the brilliance of the glasswas dimmed by layers of grease and dirt. The jammed windows did cut out theconstant din of traffic from the road outside, as well as the devotional musicthat was played late into the night from various local temples, so nobodyattempted to pry them open. The tall iron gates, eternally blocked by heaps ofgranite or gravel dumped by construction truck drivers who appeared to take amalicious pleasure in making the old home inaccessible, leaned inwards as ifslowly yielding to pressure from the aggressive new world outside.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Hero's Walkby Anita Rau Badami Copyright © 2002 by Anita Rau Badami. Excerpted by permission.
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