The Hero's Walk (13 page)

She, in her turn, was frightened of Narasimha, even though he flattered her with his frantic desire and spoiled her with saris and jewellery every day. She was filled with loathing when his furry body fell on her own delicate one and when the smell of their sex filled her fastidious nostrils. And after he had detached himself from her, leaving a sticky residue between her quivering thighs, she would curl up miserably, trying to ignore the deep pain that filled her. It took her a year to understand that this painful invasion was somehow responsible for making her body swell like a balloon; that
after several months of vomiting, sleeplessness and discomfort, when all her relatives made much of her—coyly pinching her chin and congratulating her on her fecundity—she would be delivered of a child. It happened to her six times, and each time a stillborn infant slipped out, or a sickly one that seemed to wither and die as soon as the air touched its wrinkled skin. People began to whisper that Yama-raja, the death lord, had set up an altar to himself in the echoing darkness of the girl's womb.

After the birth of her sixth child, Ammayya noticed that Narasimha did not come to her bed as often. She discovered he had taken a mistress. When she ran to her mother's house, weeping and furious, she was told that she ought to be proud that her husband could afford two women. “Why should I be proud?” she had begged her mother. “How can he abandon me like this?” And her mother had told her to grow up, to stop behaving like a child. “How has he abandoned you?” she had scolded. “You are treated like a queen. So many clothes, so much jewellery, a big house.”

Ammayya felt violated. Now, every Tuesday, the day he had allotted to lay his thick body on hers, she was nauseated at the thought that he had lain the same way with another woman. After he had rolled away, she would rush to the bathroom and strip away the old cotton sari and loose blouse that she wore to bed, and that her husband hadn't bothered to remove. She would pour mug after mug of cold water over her shivering self, scrub furiously between her legs with soap and a coarse dried gourd that scratched and tore her skin. But on the other six nights of the week, she thought miserably that if she was the perfect wife, Narasimha might decide never to go to his mistress. And to be the perfect wife, she would have to bear him a living child.

Ammayya began to pray unfailingly three times a day. She observed the many rituals prescribed by the Shastras for a good wife. She fasted twice a week and, after her sixth pregnancy, increased that to three times a week. No longer was she a flighty, playful
young girl but a fanatic who terrified the servants with her demands for cleanliness, for purity in the house where everything had started to smell of Narasimha's sex. Ammayya's virtue was tyrannical. Even Shantamma, who had lost all fear, was wary of her daughter-in-law's steely righteousness.

When Sripathi was born, Ammayya was only twenty-three. She waited for love to overcome her but found that she felt nothing in her heart for the tiny infant with the large nose and enormous ears. Amazed that he survived his first year, and then another, and another, she began to watch him like a hawk, followed him around to make sure that he was safe. She didn't want him to go to school, but Narasimha overrode her desires. A servant was appointed to accompany Sripathi everywhere, like a second shadow. Although she did not feel anything for him other than a fear that he would die, she dreamed elaborate dreams for him, for he would be the one to sustain her in her age. He would be a famous heart surgeon, a Supreme Court Justice, or a diplomat in the foreign service. She participated eagerly in Narasimha's efforts to make Sripathi swallow the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
whole, although she cringed every time he invited his father's wrath by not being able to answer a question. She feared for him not because she loved him but because she was afraid that Narasimha's hard slaps would hurt the boy's brain and turn him into a vegetable. Love was an extravagance that she could ill afford. If she spent it on the boy, she would have none left for herself, none to use as ointment on the wounds that Narasimha inflicted on her. Besides, the boy would grow into a man and feed on her emotions the way he had already sucked on her body and, when he was done would discard her like an orange peel. Men always took too much and gave too little in return.

After Sripathi's birth, when Ammayya watched her husband shift his silk shalya to his right shoulder before he departed for his mistress's home in the evening, she did not feel quite as wretched
and angry. as before. She did not, however, abandon her rigorous Brahminical ways. If anything, in order to make sure that the gods watched over Sripathi and kept him alive and well, she prayed more intensely and became more rigid about the rituals of purity.

A few months before Narasimha died, Ammayya found out from a relative who was a trustee of the Toturpuram Bank that the money he spent so lavishly was all borrowed. In addition to maintaining his whore, she learned that he visited the race course in Bangalore once a month, when she thought he was away on business. At about the same time, she discovered that she was pregnant again. She locked up all her jewellery and hid it in a trunk, deep beneath the enormous four-poster bed that she shared with her husband on rare occasions. Just four months before Putti was born, Narasimha Rao was killed by a mad bull that raged down Andaal Street and made straight for him. It shredded his liver and a kidney and left him bleeding in the gutter a few yards from his mistress's house.

A few months later, when her daughter arrived in the world, Ammayya marked the twin gifts of life and death that she had received by lighting a silver lamp at the Krishna Temple every month—her one indulgence in an otherwise miserly life.

Ammayya rocked to and fro on her bed and sucked in her toothless gums. Her granddaughter had died. The old woman did not feel very much about it either way. People lived and died. It was sad that Maya had been so young, but these things were part of life. She pondered the changes that were likely to take place in the house, and she was not sure if she would like it. Ammayya cocooned herself in the past, in traditions and rituals, and the prospect of change terrified her. She knew her son. He would bring Maya's child to India. She only hoped that she would not be directly affected by the girl's arrival. At my age, she thought petulantly, nobody has the right to upset my daily routine. She reached below the bed with her
walking stick and quickly touched the locked trunk underneath. Its solid presence was reassuring. That was her insurance plan—all the jewellery that she was not already wearing. More jewellery, she told Putti, than even the queen of England.

“That queen person's jewellery is stolen from other people anyway. Mine was given to me by your father,” Ammayya took pains to point out. “Also, mine is better quality. I am telling you, no one has such startling Burmese rubies, redder than blood and of the best water. And my blue jaguar diamonds come from the deepest, darkest part of the earth. They have hoarded light in them for so many millions of years that to look at them is to gaze at the heart of the sun.”

The trunk also contained gold coins and silver ingots, each one tied up in soft strips of cloth to prevent even the smallest smudge of gold from rubbing off. Ammayya had discovered that the borders of old silk saris were made of pure silver wire dipped in gold wash that could be melted off the saris into bars. Until that momentous discovery, she used to exchange her old saris with the raddhiwallah for stainless steel tins and bowls that joined the hoard in the cupboard in a corner of the room. She haggled long and furiously with the man, pretending, in the end, to be defeated by his canny bargaining.

“Okay, baba, okay,” she would sigh, secretly chortling at the number of tins and bowls she had wrested for her ragged saris. “You take everything. I have no strength to argue any more. And anyway, what will I do with so many dabbas and things? Nearly dead I am, can I take it all with me?” All the while, in her mind, she would grimly promise herself that yes, she would take everything with her. Whatever could be burnt on the funeral pyre would be destroyed along with her body. As for the rest, she would insist that her ashes be buried in the backyard of Big House, along with all of her valuables. She would put it in her will, and if her children did not follow it to the letter, she would return as a ghoul to haunt them.
There was no doubt in Ammayya's mind that she would be able to control her afterlife as effectively as she did her present one.

In the kitchen of the white house behind Safeway, Nandana heard Aunty Kiran tell Uncle Sunny that she was going to her house. “The child needs some more clothes. And Mary Carlson said that she would come over and pick up the house plants while I was there.”

I want to go home, thought Nandana eagerly, homehomehome. She scrambled out of the bed, where she was huddled with all her favourite toys, and raced down the stairs. She put on her shoes as fast as she could and waited impatiently near the front door.

Aunty Kiran came out of the kitchen and looked surprised to see her there. “Nandu, sweetie, do you want something?” she asked.

Nandana hugged Moona, the cloth cow, and waited for her to open the door.

“Do you want to go out to play with Anjali and her friends in the backyard?”

She shook her head. No.

“Oh, I see, you want to come with me?”

Yes.

Through the door and out to the driveway they went, to where Aunty Kiran's blue car was standing. Into the front seat—don't forget the seat belt—and then they were headed home. Her father would be wondering where Nandana had gone. For
sure
.

Her mother's snapdragons looked wild and horrible. The sunflower plant in the pot near the door had become a tree and was leaning over so far that it swept the ground. When Aunty Kiran
opened the door, Nandana ran inside eagerly. She thought that the house had a lonesome smell. She ran around, touching the table in the corridor, where the magazines and letters were kept when they arrived, and trailing her hand against the dining-room wall, where her mother had hung family pictures. She stroked the big fat chair, in the corner of the living room, that was her father's favourite. Nandana checked to see whether her video cassettes were still on the shelf below the television, that her father's computer was still locked up to his desk by a long wire in the small adjoining room.

She raced up the stairs to her own room, where she opened all the dresser drawers to make sure nothing had gone away. Her father had found the chest at a garage sale. He had brought it home in a friend's pickup, and her mother had been so annoyed with the battered old thing—the black paint flaking off the walnut wood beneath, the missing knobs, the scratches in the existing paint. Maya hated second-hand stuff—it reeked of other people.

“In India,” she said when Nandana's father teased her about her hoity-toity habits, “we never accept leftovers. Only beggars do.”

“Snob!” her father had said. “This isn't leftovers. It's a perfectly good piece of furniture that needs some TLC. When I'm done with it, you won't even know it's old.”

“I don't want it.”

And her father had replied, “It isn't for you. It's for my cherry pie here.”

For three weeks, he had abandoned his books and papers, and worked on the chest of drawers. First he sanded it down to remove the paint, and next he smoothed it with a finer sandpaper, and then he primed the wood to make it ready for paint, and he finally painted it white. Then he and Nandana stencilled onto it a pattern of daisies that she picked out. They used yellow paint for the flowers and green for the leaves. Even her mother had agreed that it looked almost new. She bought nice-smelling paper to line the drawers and gave Nandana a small picture of an Indian lady called
Lakshmi with four arms and a smiling white face, sitting on a lotus flower with two white elephants on either side of her.

“This is a goddess,” her mother had told Nandana. “She will always look after you and make sure you are okay.” She put the picture under the drawer paper. On a shelf in the corner of the room were Nandana's books—
The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs & Ham
and all her Little Critters, Berenstain Bears and Sesame Street books. Her father had told her that books must be treated with respect. She would have to ask Aunty Kiran to pack them very carefully, so they would not get damaged on the way to India.