The Hero's Walk (23 page)

There were other superstitions too—three crows were a portent of death, a coconut with four eyes meant a fatal illness, black cats and lumps of vermilion-stained mud were all ill omens. He snapped at Putti for asking him where he was going one morning. “Bad luck to ask such questions,” he said, coming back into the house in order to leave again. And Putti had said, “What is wrong with you, Sri? You sound just like Nirmala. Bad luck this, ill omen that.” When he clipped his nails, he flushed the parings carefully down the toilet instead of leaving them in the dustbin, and at the barber's he insisted that Shakespeare Kuppalloor sweep up all the hair and give it to him in a packet, so that he could burn it in his backyard. Any of these things, he had heard, could be used to cast spells on him and his family.

What terrified Sripathi even more, however, was the mysterious way his body had begun to behave. It had started a week ago. He had been sitting on the old cane chair on the verandah when he bent down to pull on his socks and couldn't see his feet. Simple as that. They had vanished. His legs continued to his ankles, and then, nothing! He shook his head and reached forward again. One foot slowly appeared out of a red mist, and finally, the other. Was he having a stroke? Was he going mad? Sripathi pulled on his socks and waited to see if the bloody mist that soaked his feet would stain the socks, and when nothing happened, he straightened up carefully. For the next few days he walked around the office and at home as if there were snakes underfoot that he could not see. He glanced down at his feet often and was relieved to find that they were still there within his aged, much-repaired shoes, taking him from one place to another.

One day, in the middle of lunch with his colleagues at work, it occurred to him that he couldn't really see
through
his shoes. A dreadful fear filled him. He pulled them off frantically and saw only his socks, hanging limp and empty from his ankles. With a moan of terror he gazed at them. He clutched his head and rocked to and
fro, whimpering softly, hardly aware of anything but those dreadful empty socks until Victor, the visualizer who had been with the company almost as long as Sripathi, touched his shoulder and said, “Hey, Sripathi, man, what is the matter with you? Not feeling well, or what?”

And somebody else suggested, “Get some water. Sri, do you need to lie down? Is it paining very much somewhere?”

Perhaps it was their voices, God only knew what, but suddenly his feet were back. Sripathi wriggled them cautiously. He laughed like a madman who had found his senses.

“What are you looking at me like that for?” he asked. “I am all right. Just my feet …” He stopped. They would not understand. Nobody would. Better to keep it to himself.

Sripathi became more and more preoccupied with his body. On the surface, he seemed quite normal. He went about his daily life, but out of the corner of his eye, he kept a sharp watch on his every movement. When he lifted his hand to place food in his mouth, for example, he fixed his eyes on that part of his anatomy, just in case it, too, vanished. He knew that he could never be sure of anything in the world again, not even his own body.

The clock on the landing struck the hour, reminding him that the child had to be sent downstairs for breakfast. He shuffled to her room, wishing that Nirmala hadn't asked him to do this simple deed. The room was empty. Had she gone down already? He peered into the bathroom. No one there.

“Ree, where is Nandana? Ask her to hurry up,” Nirmala called from the foot of the stairs. “I tell him to do one small thing and he can't even do that.”

Sripathi went down the stairs, deeply puzzled. Where on earth had the child gone? Out in the backyard, perhaps, to look at Munnuswamy's calf? She seemed fascinated by the creature. As soon as she came back from school each day, she raced over to the
wall and stood on some bricks that Koti had piled for her to gaze at the creature as it butted against its mother's belly.

From the gods' room came the sound of Ammayya's voice, chanting her prayers loudly. “Oh, Rama, Krishna, Jagannatha! Oh, Shiva, Parvati, Ganesha!” she sang in her parched old voice. She recited the names of as many divinities as she could remember, thus covering every aspect of life—health, wealth, beauty, luck, good weather, food, everything. She wound up by ringing a small brass bell loudly. In addition to signalling the end of her conversation with the deities, it was also her way of alerting Nirmala that she was ready for breakfast.

“Where is the child?” asked Nirmala, bustling out of the kitchen carrying a platter of steaming idlis.

Sripathi shrugged. “I don't know. She isn't in her room.”

“Well,
find
her then,” said Nirmala giving him an impatient look. “She takes so long to eat. You go look in the front, and I will ask Koti to see if she is playing in the backyard.”

He stepped out of the house, and the heat hit him like a blow. Sweat beaded his forehead almost immediately. He heard Mrs. Poorna in the apartment building next door, calling forlornly for her lost child: “Kanna, my darling, see what I have made for you today.” Sripathi remembered how her daughter had disappeared not so long ago and was suddenly seized by panic. He hailed the Gurkha who guarded the gates of the apartment blocks, and the man came running to the wall.

“Have you seen a small girl anywhere? In a white chemise? My granddaughter?” he asked.

“No, sahib, only uniformed children I have seen,” the Gurkha said. “But I will keep my eyes open.”

By eight o'clock there was still no sign of the child. “She isn't even dressed properly. It is so hot, her skin will get burned,” worried Nirmala. She sent Sripathi out again. He circled the house, wandering out into the backyard where he had often spotted the
child playing on the cemented area near the wash-stone. She never ventured out into the overgrown garden, but he looked there as well, feeling a prickle of nostalgia as he ducked beneath the heavy canopy of the mango tree that he used to climb as a child. A pair of grey partridges stopped pecking at the ground beneath the tree and creaked in unison like unoiled hinges before fluttering into the bushes. In the last few years, the water shortage in the town made it impossible to maintain the garden that Nirmala and Maya had once lovingly tended. The dry, unkempt tangle of vegetation had become a paradise for all kinds of birds.

“What are you doing there?” called Putti from the terrace, where she was drying her hair.

“Looking for the child. Have you seen her?”

“No. Maybe she has gone out with Arun.”

Sripathi didn't bother to contradict her. Arun had more sense than to take Nandana to school without breakfast. Putti was the one who was behaving witlessly these days, wandering around the house with a silly smile on her face, dreamy and vague. The garden yielded nothing, and Sripathi went back into the house faintly worried. He followed Nirmala up the stairs again and into his son's room.

“Where could that naughty child have gone?” muttered Nirmala. “I hope she hasn't foolishly decided to walk away again.”

Two weeks ago, on a Saturday morning, she had vanished in much the same way. Karim Mechanic, who sat in his makeshift autoparts workshop at the end of the street, had brought her back to Big House. He hadn't come inside. Like everybody in the area, he knew of Ammayya's rigid ways. He had refused Sripathi's invitation, saying with a chuckle, “Baap-re-baap, Ayya-orey, I don't want your Ammayya to throw a bucket of Ganga water on me to purify the house! Don't worry, I am fine here on the verandah. And anyway, my job was to bring this child home to you. God knows where she was going. And only God gave me the eyes to see her wandering
around. There are so many funny-funny people on the road, not safe for a young one on her own.”

Sripathi's heart had jumped with relief at the sight of his granddaughter, the shuttered little face, the hair that was now neatly oiled and braided by Nirmala, Koti or Putti every morning, the crumpled school uniform with its streak of yellow where she had probably dropped some food. He thanked God for Karim Mechanic and his sharp, kindly eyes.

But that time, Nandana had taken her backpack with her, a bright pink and purple thing that she refused to go without. She never left it behind. She even carried it to bed. He saw that the backpack was propped up on her bed, so perhaps she hadn't gone out of the gates after all.

“Look, her school uniform is still here on the bed,” exclaimed Nirmala, pointing at the neatly starched and ironed grey pinafore and white shirt, and the socks and handkerchief that she had put out for the child to wear after her bath. “She is still in her petticoat. That means she is in the house only. Tchah! Naughty child. That Sister Angie will get angry if she is late for assembly.”

Outside the front gate, the rickshaw driver pressed his rubber horn impatiently. He waited a while and then left with a clamour of wheels and bells and childish voices, the bright ribbons on his handlebars flapping in the hot wind.

Earlier that morning, after Mamma Lady had left her to get dressed, Nandana had stayed in her slip and panties, even knowing that breakfast was ready and that the rickshaw would soon follow. She hated the plump brothers from next door whose squishy thighs pressed against hers in the rickshaw. And the three girls also from the apartments—Meena and Nithya and Ayesha—she was sure that
they hated her. Nandana missed Molly and Yee and Anjali; and Mrs. Lipsky and the school janitor, Bobby Merrit, who made funny faces to entertain them and sometimes helped them with math sums during the lunch break; and even the principal Mrs. Denton, who stood at the corner of the library and made sure nobody ran too fast in the corridors.

She had glared at the starchy school uniform that Nirmala had laid on her bed. Why couldn't she wear whatever she felt like? Her favourite pair of shorts and her
WHY?
T-shirt?

“Tell that child to hurry up,” Mamma Lady had called from downstairs. The Old Man's steps had come across the floor towards her room—flip-flap, flip-flap—and she had jumped off her bed and crawled into the cupboard where her parents' jackets hung. It was her favourite spot. She had snuggled into the hot darkness of the cupboard, loving the faint smell of her mother still embedded in the soft, red coat.

She was not going to school today. She did not want to eat those fat white idlis the Mamma Lady made almost every day for breakfast and that tasted like barf. Why couldn't they have multicoloured cereal or waflles instead? The milk tasted funny, too, and came from the cow next door. She remembered how her father always put an
n
-shaped piece of cereal in her first spoonful of milk and guided it into her mouth. And her mother's smell of after-bath lotion as she ran past, half-dressed, frantically packing lunch boxes and calling instructions: “Don't forget your keys, I will be late home today, there's a meeting, pick up Nandu at two-forty-five, make sure she does her homework.” Everything in this Indian house was so slow and old.

Nandana had tried to find her way back to Vancouver two weeks ago, and a man who sat under a tent on the road with broken things all around him had brought her home, even though she had struggled to get away. She was angry with him. If she had walked another few minutes, she was sure she would have reached the railway
station where they had arrived long, long ago. And then she could catch a plane from the airport.

She did not want to live in this horrid house. She hated the cockroaches that came creeping out of the kitchen sink at midnight. Some nights when Nandana couldn't sleep, she thought that she could hear them rustle-rustle-rustle under her bed. She was glad that Arun Maama slept in the same room. He knew all about animals and bugs and birds, and sometimes he would tell her stories just like her parents used to. She liked Aunty Putti, too—even though she smiled too much, she always bought something neat for Nandana when she went to the market: a green ribbon, a comic book about a witty man called Birbal and sweet-smelling flowers for her hair. The only person she did not like was the Witch, who she had learnt was her great-grandmother, and who lived downstairs in a room that smelled and was crowded full of things.

Once, when Nandana came down to play in the kitchen, so as to be close to Mamma Lady—she was afraid of being alone in the room upstairs—the Witch had told her not to leave her toys all over the floor. She had tapped her stick hard against the floor when she said it. But Mamma Lady had hugged her hard against her chest, which was soft and damp, and rocked her as if she were a little baby. “Don't listen to Ammayya,” she told her. “She is old, that's all. Sometimes old people don't know this from that. This is
your
house, and you can do whatever you want.”

No
way
, Nandana had thought. This was
not
her house.

Nandana shifted in the cupboard, making herself more comfortable, her hand seeking out the soft, familiar shape of her stuffed tiger, Bosco, who waited for her in the dark.