The Hero's Walk (12 page)

She sat before the Belgian mirror inherited from her great-grandmother on her dead father's side and moodily worked the tangles from her damp hair with her fingers. The mirror had a bubbled silver surface, yellow in patches from long contact with the sea air, and returned only a faint reflection. It should have been discarded years ago, but Ammayya did not believe in spending a paisa more than necessary to keep body and soul alive. Narasimha Rao, the father whom Putti knew only through other people's memories, had stolen so much from Ammayya that she clung to everything he left behind. So the mirror stayed in the room, concealing in its mottled depths the tiny wrinkles matting the skin around Putti's mouth, the vertical line beginning to carve a channel on her forehead and the anxiety that filled her eyes a little more with every passing year. The dim 20-watt lightbulb, coated with oily vapours from the kitchen, did its bit to hide the truth from her and give the impression that she was still young and attractive, and deserved, as her mother kept assuring her, a prince among suitors, a Rishi Kapoor film star for a husband. The bulb was another of Ammayya's economy measures. A few years ago she had acquired a vast stock of them, at a quarter of the original price, from a small trader whose business went under. Until she ran through the entire stock, the whole house was obliged to use them. When Putti gazed at herself, she saw only her high, round cheeks perched on either side of a slender, sharp nose (which, Miss Chintamani told her, were the attributes of a perfect beauty according to her favourite fashion magazine), and her lips pouting over a pair of overlapping front teeth. Her hair was jet black and shone with perfumed hair oil, and her eyes, not quite as large as
she would have liked, looked dramatic as a Kathakali dancer's thanks to a lavish lining of kohl. They were not always the same size, though, for Putti could barely see her face in the dark, corroded mirror. Of course, she could have opened the shuttered windows—there were two large ones—but Ammayya had warned her about exposure to sunlight. “Puttamma, my darling, listen to me, I have lived years longer than you, so I know. Light will make your skin darken and dry up. And it will turn your hair completely white. Then who will marry you, tell me? Besides, you don't want all the loafers we have in this neighbourhood to peep at you!” Especially not people like Gopala next door, or the bunch of ruffians who distilled illicit liquor in the empty plot behind Big House, burying the wretched stuff in the dry, hot soil to ferment, where it filled the air with the fetid stench of rotting rice. You never knew what those rogues might do, the old woman said, even with the windows shut tight. Smash them down in a liquor-coloured haze? Anything was possible. Sometimes, late at night, when she lay awake beside her snoring mother, Putti could hear the muffled sounds of laughter and voices from beyond the windows, and she shuddered voluptuously at the thought of those rough-bodied men bursting through the wood and stained-glass panes to watch her turn in her bed.

Deep in the mirror, beyond her own image, Putti could see the enormous, carved rosewood bed that she shared with Ammayya. Its canopy of mosquito netting hovered like a grey cloud above it. They needed a new mosquito net; this one had been patched so many times it looked like a beggar's shroud. But her mother was obsessed with saving, with holding on. Everything was necessary to her: pieces of thread picked up from the street that she rolled into large balls of multicoloured twine; nails, nuts and bolts collected as she swayed her bulky way to the temple, Dr. Menon's dispensary or the lending library; scraps of cloth begged from the two tailors down the road, sorted by colour and stored in gunny sacks that had once held rice; discarded bicycle tubes, if she was lucky enough to
find them before Karim Mechanic's assistant-boy did. She refused to let Nirmala throw away Sripathi's or Arun's old singlets, cutting them into pieces for Koti to use as dusters or mops. If they were torn only near the bottom, Ammayya lopped off a couple of inches and wore them herself as brassieres. Frayed trousers turned into shopping bags, petticoats became tablecloths, and saris were potential curtains. Yes, Ammayya held on to everything, including—thought Putti bitterly—me.

From the outside, Putti looked as content as a well-milked cow, but within her seethed an ocean of desire that would have shocked her mother. She could feel frustration building inside her like heat in a pressure cooker. She had only recently realized—slowly, unwilling to believe it at first—that her mother meant never to let her marry. Every time Ammayya rejected another of Gowramma's suggested suitors, she insisted it was only because she wanted the best for her daughter, the very best. Five years ago, for instance, there was a college lecturer who taught political science at Madras University. Putti was thirty-seven then, and he was forty. Putti liked the thought of being a lecturer's wife, of having students worshipfully approach their door to clear doubts before exams. She was already half in love with his sad eyes trapped behind metal-rimmed glasses, with his narrow, earnest shoulders and his habit of sweeping an uncontrolled wave of hair off his forehead with the curve of his palm. But Ammayya had an awful premonition about him.

“I can see him lying there all bleeding and hurt. Because some of those students threw stones at the poor man. Tchah! Such violence in our world, Rama-Rama!”

“Ammayya, he is a nice man. So why should his students suddenly turn around and attack him?”

“Violence has taken over this country, what to do?” Ammayya had sighed. “Why, only last week I read about a boy who went to an examination class with a foot-long knife, I believe, and stabbed the invigilator who objected to his cheating.”

Then there was the smart young engineer from America, whom Ammayya turned down because she had heard rumours that men from abroad already had white wives and used their Indian ones as maidservants. A doctor from Bangalore was rejected because Ammayya suspected he would die of a disease caught from a patient, leaving Putti a widow. Business men were crooks destined to end up in prison for shady practices. “And the pathologist from Bombay,” Ammayya had said, squashing Putti's hopes of settling on the opposite coast of India, far from her mother, “that fellow has a harelip under his moustache. Why else would he hide the mouth that God gave him behind a hedge of hair? Do you want to be the mother of a brood of harelipped children?”

Putti's schooling had been acquired at home from an Anglo-Indian woman named Rose Hicks, the ex-principal of a school that did not exist any more. Private tuition, apart from the exclusive ring it had, was particularly attractive to Ammayya because it was much cheaper than school. No need for a uniform or a big parcel of books. Putti could acquire knowledge dressed in her underwear if she wished. School boards also had the bad habit of delving into parental pockets for replacement chairs and desks, for ceiling fans, for a new wing for the science laboratories—the list was endless. Not to mention the teachers who had to be placated with gifts during Deepavali and Christmas. When Putti did go out, to the neighbourhood Ayurvedic doctor—for the cough she developed every year after the rains, when the damp from the walls and the floors of the house settled into her lungs—or to the temple to send increasingly desperate prayers to Lord Krishna to grant her a husband soonsoonsoon, she was bewildered by the accelerated rate at which things occurred around her. Computers, cars, telephones—all to speed up life. Why did people need to hurry all the time? Where were they going so quickly except to the end of their lives, a destination that was common to all living things? And yet, and yet, there was something exciting about the this new, unstable, hi-tech
world swirling like a magical pool just beyond her reach, and she thought wistfully that she might like to dip her fingers in it. Once, frustrated by the constant newness of the world outside their gates and the knowledge that she was always out of step with it, Putti had timidly broached the idea of teaching at the small playschool that had opened two streets away. She had seen an advertisement for part-time personnel in the local paper. They did not ask for any qualifications other than an ability to deal gently with small children.

“No-no, my baby,” Ammayya said. “People will think you are an easy woman—only such types go out and work for a living. You are the daughter of a big man, dead though he is, and come from a respectable home. You do not leave the house to earn money. We will find a nice boy for you soon,
Deo volente
.”

Putti felt despairingly, sometimes, that she was drowning in her mother's hungry love, helpless as a fly in thick sugar syrup. And on those nights, for hours after Ammayya had fallen asleep, she would lie awake beside her and stare gloomily at the lumpy rise of the old woman's left hip, outlined by stray light from a streetlamp struggling through the tightly shut windows, at the wrinkled hand, heavy with rings, resting firmly on the hip as if to stop it from growing. She would wait until her mother's breathing evolved into snores. Then she would slide a hand down the waist of her petticoat, past her heaving stomach into the waiting thatch of pubic hair, and the smell of her longing would rise gently in the shuttered room where she was born and seemed likely to die.

She stood up abruptly, unable to stand the mirror and the musty room another minute, and ran out, past Ammayya, who called after her in alarm. She barely noticed Sripathi enter the house and almost pushed him aside to reach the stairs. These she took two at a time until she arrived, panting heavily, on the large terrace on top of the house. She leaned over the low parapet wall and gulped
the fresh air greedily. Below her lay the messy back garden, with its small forest of brownish-green bushes huddled together like shaggy dwarfs, trees weighed down by the burden of rotting fruit, and jasmine creepers clambering unchecked over everything, their flowers filling the day with a heady fragrance. That fragrance set loose a yearning in Putti. Her head buzzed with ideas and thoughts that she longed to shout aloud. She ached to add her voice to the noisy air.

Ammayya leaned back in the chair and fanned herself vigorously with the rolled up magazine that she had been reading. The power had failed, as it usually did by this time, and even inside the house it was clammy and unbearable. The old woman hitched up her sari as far as was decently possible and fanned between her legs. She had stopped wearing panties a long time ago, and while the newspaper created a pleasant draft in the area of her crotch, it also released a faint odour of urine. She was surprised and hurt by Putti's behaviour. What was wrong with the girl? she wondered uneasily. Was she so upset by Maya's death? True, Putti had been fond of her niece, treating her like a little sister, waiting eagerly for those letters that she wrote to Nirmala, full of details of a life so exotic in its foreignness. But no, there was something else that was affecting the girl. Ammayya was filled with a sudden fear. Putti was the one who sneaked little treats for her when she was overcome with a craving for something sweet, who sat and listened to her rambling stories of relatives dead and alive, who made Ammayya feel that she still existed.

“Oh Ammayya,” the girl would say patiently. “Tell me again about Kunjoor Mohana's stolen pearls. Or, “My darling mother, do you remember that story you used to tell about the ghost in Kashinatha's house? Can you tell me again? So funny it was!”

Toothless and ancient I may be, thought Ammayya grimly, but not yet a corpse. And as long as I have my wits about me, my
daughter will be mine. She rose out of her chair, her large hips squeezing up like dough from a tight tin, and roamed slowly around the bedroom, gazing up at the enormous photographs of her late husband that adorned all the walls.

“Have you noticed,” she murmured to her favourite one of Narasimha as a young man, dashing in a suit, “how she refuses to look me in the eye? Something she is hiding, I know. My mother's heart tells me.”

Ammayya chatted often with her husband's faded images. She talked more to him after his death than she had in the twenty-six years of their marriage. She asked him questions and answered them herself, arguing now and then to make it authentic. She complained to him about Sripathi and how disappointing he was as a son. She told him, gleefully, about Maya's betrayal. “Serves Sripathi right,” she remarked. “He spoilt her. That's what comes of giving your children too much freedom. Look at our Putti, what a nice child she is. My darling will always look after me, I know that.” She grumbled about Arun, who sneered at her caste rules and insisted on climbing the wrought-iron stairway that curled up the rear wall of the house to the upstairs bathroom and that was to be used only by the toilet cleaner, Rojamma. And she fretted about her own health, worrying that one day she might end up too helpless to raise herself off her bed.

“I have some bad news for you,” she said now to the photograph in which Narasimha Rao was shaking hands with Jawaharlal Nehru. “Maya is dead. It was an accident, I was told. Why these girls have to drive cars, God only knows. Her child is coming here. What will we do with a small child?” The old lady sat on the edge of her bed, exhausted by the effort of hobbling around the room.

Her eyes, still sharp in age, fell on a photograph of herself as a bride, standing behind Narasimha, who sat stiff and tall in a chair. The photographer had arranged them in the traditional pose against a background picture of a waterfall. The bride wore
her sari pallu, with its elaborate gold threadwork visible even in that yellowing picture, covering both shoulders. She had numerous chains around her thin neck, nose pins on both sides of a tiny nose, a wide gem-encrusted gold band around a narrow, virginal waist and jewels in her hair. Her eyes looked frightened. Ammayya remembered that she was only thirteen in that photograph. Narasimha had been twenty-three. She remembered the day he had come to her father's house in Coimbatore, and how she had thrown a tantrum at the thought of getting married instead of continuing school. Her father had laughed indulgently at her, his only child, and told her to get dressed. Her mother had wrapped her in a silk sari so heavy with gold that her sapling body had drooped under the weight. And when she saw the enormous, dark man whom she was to marry, she had refused to show herself to him. She had escaped from her exasperated mother and hidden behind one of the pillars on the verandah. Later, after their wedding, as Narasimha eagerly fumbled with her clothes, he told her that he had almost decided to refuse her, to say no to her father. Then he had noticed her foot peeping out from behind the pillar. A delicate, beautifully arched foot, pale as sandalwood, the ankle circled by a filigree of silver. Such a lovely foot, Narasimha Rao had told himself, must surely belong to an apsara—a heavenly nymph. And so, overcome with a feverish need to possess the owner of that foot, he had insisted on marrying her.