The Hero's Walk (2 page)

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 through the 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 the square 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 taller than all his friends and, because he hated to be different or conspicuous in any way, had developed a stoop. His thick grey hair was cut as short as possible by Shakespeare Kuppalloor, the barber on Tagore Street. An expression of permanent disappointment had settled on a face dominated by a beaky nose and large, moist eyes. After the softness of the eyes, the thin, austere line of his mouth came as a surprise. Once during an argument, his wife, Nirmala, had remarked that it looked 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 devoid of all imagination.

The thought crossed his mind that the call might be from Maya, his daughter in Vancouver, and he paused in his passage across the bedroom. If it was, he didn't want to answer it. His eyes fell on a photograph of Maya, with her foreign husband 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 he found an opportunity, he turned the picture face down on the sill and piled some books on it, feeling slightly childish, only to have it reinstated right-side-up by Nirmala. But Maya phoned on Sunday mornings, he reminded himself. At six-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, for several years now, Sripathi had avoided that moment by setting off for a walk at six-twenty.

His younger sister, Putti, who was also downstairs somewhere, was too scared to answer the phone.

“I don't know what to talk into that thing,” Putti had explained to Sripathi once, embarrassment writ large on her round, babyish face. “And anyway, it is never for me.” A sad thing for her to say, he
had thought then, feeling guilty that 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 a friend. Except perhaps that horrible librarian, Miss Chintamani.

Sripathi's mother claimed that she was too old to climb the stairs, but Nirmala insisted Ammayya was a fraud and that she came upstairs regularly to snoop around when she was alone in the house.

“She steals my saris,” Nirmala had grumbled. “And I found my comb under her mattress. 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 that had survived at least twenty years of ferocious sun and rain. He picked up
The Hindu
again and started to read it carefully, ticking off articles that he wanted to comment on.

He could hear soft music emanating from the apartments that loomed beside the house, the thin notes drowned almost immediately by the sound of the Krishna Temple bell—a clanging that competed for attention with the nasal call of the mullah from the Thousand Lights Mosque on a parallel street. The temple was straight up the road from Big House, which had been built eighty-two years ago by Sripathi's grandfather on what came to be called Brahmin Street for the number of people of that caste. However, when the ruling party won the state elections, it decreed that no street could have a name that indicated a particular caste; so Brahmin Street was now merely Street. As was Lingayat Street, Mudaliyar Street and half a dozen others in Toturpuram. This led to a lot of grumbling from visitors who typically spent half the day wandering the town trying to figure out which Street was which. In addition, Brahmin Street had changed so much in the past decade that people returning to it after several years could barely recognize it. Instead of the tender smell of fresh jasmine, incense sticks and virtue, instead of the chanting of sacred hymns, the street had become loud with the haggling of cloth merchants and vegetable vendors, the strident
strains of the latest film music from video parlours whose windows flaunted gaudy posters of busty, thick-thighed heroines, and beefy heroes with hair rising like puffs of smoke from their heads.

Older inhabitants of Toturpuram remembered how beautiful Big House used to be—its clean, strong walls washed pink every year before the Deepavali festival, 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 flowers floating on stylized waves. The gigantic door of carved teak had been custom-built for the house and, in the past, had been varnished annually. The windows had stained-glass panes that Sripathi's grandfather had bought from a British family that had smelled the winds of change several years before Independence and moved back to England. Since his father's death, the house itself had slid into a sort of careless disrepair and looked as if it was tired of 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 Rao had been solely and utterly responsible for their decline.

The paint had curled away from the decorative railings leaving them cratered by rust. The door had lost its gleam, and the beautiful carvings were now anonymous nubs of wood. Cracks ran across the tiled floors like varicose veins on an old woman's legs, and it was years since the walls had seen a fresh coat of whitewash or paint. Most of the windows could not be opened any more, so much had they swollen in the moist heat of the place, and the brilliance of the glass was dimmed by layers of grease and dirt. The jammed windows did cut out the constant din of traffic from the road outside, as well as the devotional music that was played late into the night from various local temples, so nobody attempted to pry them open. The tall iron gates, eternally blocked by heaps of granite or gravel dumped by construction truck drivers who
appeared to take a malicious pleasure in making the old home inaccessible, leaned inwards as if slowly yielding to pressure from the aggressive new world outside.

The temple bell continued its clamour and Sripathi rustled his newspaper with irritation. A few months ago, the sound of the bell had not bothered him at all. Recently, however, a devotee had paid for a pair of loud speakers, and the bell had become deafening. Sripathi had complained to the temple trustees, but nobody had done anything about it.

“What Sripathi-orey,” the head priest had said with his pious smile. “This is God's music. How can you object to it? Nobody else has complained. You should learn to be more tolerant. And may I remind you, your esteemed grandfather himself purchased this bell for our temple?”

“Yes, I know all that.” Sripathi was uncomfortably aware that the priest was insinuating that he was not as generous to the temple as his grandfather and even his father, had been. In fact, Sripathi avoided the temple whenever possible and refused to contribute more than fifty paise to the aarathi plate when, on special occasions, Nirmala forced him to go. “All I am saying is, why do you have to make it so loud? God is not deaf, is he?”

The priest had shrugged dismissively. “What to do? The mosque has megaphones. Also the Ganesha temple. So tell me, how will our Lord Krishna hear us with all this competition?”

The bell finally ceased its tintinnabulation. A fragile peace descended. All that Sripathi could hear now was the chittering of squirrels as they raced up and down the old lime tree directly below the balcony, and the fluid trill of the lory bird from the untended garden behind the house. Sripathi remembered how neat that garden used to be before his daughter had left for America. Maya and Nirmala together had lovingly tended the mango and guava trees, the banana plants and coconut palms, and had been rewarded with a steady supply of fruit.

He shook his head to dispel the memory, turned to the last page of the newspaper and scanned it quickly. The Indian cricket team had done miserably in the test match against the West Indies. Although he was not particularly interested in any sport, the cricket fever that swept through the country during the test matches infected him as well. Unlike his colleagues at work, however, he did not spend his lunch hour with the radio glued to his ear, cursing every time Indian batsmen were bowled out or missed a catch, or going into a state of ecstasy when someone hit a sixer. Sripathi read the sports section because he believed in keeping himself informed about every single thing that happened in the world around him. Besides, there might even be a potential letter to the editor buried in the sports page.

When he was a young man, Sripathi had discovered that writing letters to the editors of newspapers and magazines was the perfect way to vent his spleen and express his deepest thoughts—those blatant, embarrassing emotions that he was so reluctant to display in speech or action. He could write about anything under the sun and occasionally his views found their way into print. In the past few years, Sripathi felt that his writing had matured considerably, and to his delight, almost every letter he dashed off to
The Indian Express, The Hindu
or
The Toturpuram Chronicle
was published. So it was with a delicious sense of anticipation that he opened the paper each morning. And only after he had read the first page and the second and the third, postponing the moment as long as he could bear it, did he turn to the editorial section and feel a thrill when he spotted his byline—Pro Bono Publico—at the end of a missive. He would reread his piece, surprised at how different and removed from himself it looked in print. Then he'd scan the other letters, his long upper lip curling at a particularly weak piece of prose or an ill-argued point of view.

Sripathi was particularly pleased with his pseudonym. He had found it in an old American legal journal that his father had pinched from the public library on Moppaiyya Street. Pro Bono
Publico. On behalf of the people. Like his boyhood heroes—the Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro, Jhanda Singh the Invisible—he was a crusader, but one who tried to address the problems of the world with pen and ink instead of sword and gun and fist. He wrote every day on anything that caught his attention, from garbage strewn on the roads to corruption in the government, from lighthearted commentary on the latest blockbuster film to a tribute to some famous musician whose voice had filled his soul with pleasure.

Sripathi reached for a large wooden box on the table before him. Like almost everything else in Big House, the box had been in his family for as long as he could remember. He loved the smooth edges, the solid weight, the thick key that locked it. He opened the lid and removed the upper layer that held his collection of pens, a few unsharpened pencils, some erasers and a penknife. Below it was another compartment for paper. There was also a secret drawer that could be opened by sliding a rod out of the side of the box. There was nothing in that drawer. A long time ago, when Maya—or perhaps it was Arun—had asked him why he kept nothing in there, he had replied, “Because I am too ordinary to have secrets.” The box sat under his side of the bed and emerged every morning when he settled down on his balcony.

He contemplated the pens that jostled for space inside. Thirty-two of the finest, and growing. This was his one indulgence, although he added to the collection with diminishing frequency in these days of high cost and low affordability. He touched them one by one, lifted his favourites, and wondered which one he ought to use. The marbled blue Japanese Hero? Or the gold Parker? For letters about politics or government he always picked the Mhatre Writer—the maroon colour seemed authoritative. After dithering over the pens for a few more seconds, he settled for the Mhatre Writer again, unwilling to change his routine. It was pleasantly heavy between his fingers, the angled nib giving his writing a sharpness he relished. He wrote in his usual florid style learnt at the end
of Father Schmidt's bamboo cane at St. Dominic's Boys' School almost fifty years ago.

He added a few more lines and signed with a flourish. Yes, that was a good letter. Forceful, to the point, and with an edge of sarcasm to make it truly effective. He was about to go over it again when Nirmala rustled in, fresh in a crisp pink cotton sari, her black hair a sliding knot at the nape of her neck. She had a smooth, sweet-tempered face that belied her fifty-two years, and she looked much younger than Sripathi, even though there were only five years between them. On her broad forehead she had a round, red sticker-bindi. Sripathi remembered that in the past she had used powdered vermilion. She would lean over the sink in the bathroom after her ablutions, her body still warm and damp, her buttocks outlined heavily against the straight cotton of her petticoat, creating a stir of desire in Sripathi, and with the ball of her middle finger would apply a dot of Boroline cream to the centre of her forehead. Then, just as carefully, she would dip the same finger into a small silver pot of vermilion and press it against the creamy circle. But a few years ago she, too, had yielded to modernity and abandoned her ritual of cream and red powder for the packs of felt stickers that came in a huge variety of shapes, sizes and colours. Ever since, Sripathi had
had a running argument with her about the bindis that she left stuck to the bathroom mirror like chicken-pox marks on the glass.