The Hero's Walk (28 page)

“Oh yes, him,” said Putti relieved. “Well, we will have to see.”

“When is he coming to see you, but?
That
is the question.” Miss Chintamani liked talking about the grooms who had come and gone from Putti's life, eagerly mining all the information about those men whose horoscopes had matched hers but had been unaccountably rejected by Ammayya.

“Maybe next week, I don't know.”

“What will you wear? Very important to make the right impression, I am telling you,” she said. “See, it says so here in this article.” She licked her thumb and churned through the pages of a glossy women's magazine until she arrived at her destination. “ ‘First impressions are important.' ”

“I haven't decided yet,” said Putti.

“Tell me what colour saris you have,” suggested the librarian. She didn't seem to care that another queue had formed behind Putti. “And I know all about
him
. Nice mature fellow, I was told. Working in the mental hospital. Very sober and clean living.”

Dark green made her look serious and pink was too frivolous, said Miss Chintamani. What would a man who worked as an occupational therapist at the local mental asylum appreciate? Brains or froth? Young and serious, or mature and balanced? “This time you can't make a mistake,” she said finally. “Otherwise you will end up like me, obliged to my brother, no future of my own.” She leaned across her desk and Putti could smell her hair oil, the sweat that made damp circles under the arms of her tight blue blouse, and deep beneath it all, the noxious odour of regret. “Marrying
anybody
is better than living as a dependent sister, I am telling you.”

It was still and airless outside. Putti winced as the heat hit her like a slap. Earlier that week when Shakespeare Kuppalloor had come to Big House to shave Ammayya's head, he had sworn that it was the hottest summer in eighty years.

“How you know that?” Ammayya had demanded, glad that she didn't have any hair to add to the misery of the heat.

“I remember everything that happened.”

“Enh, how can you remember things from eighty years ago, you liar?” laughed Ammayya. She liked the gossipy barber.

“You know my sister Regina Victoria? She dropped me on my head when I was a baby, and ever since I get flashes from the past,” declared Shakespeare, whose father had worked for a British theatre group and had named his oldest child after the Bard.

The smell of bread and cakes baking wafted out from the shop next door, hanging motionless until being dispersed by a passing vehicle. The beggar who always sat in the corner, and had been identified as Gowramma's husband by Miss Chintamani, lolled against the wall, his legs wide apart, his testicles spilling out of the loose shorts he wore. He noticed Putti and gave her a gap-toothed grin. She looked away quickly and hailed a passing rickshaw, abandoning all thought of catching the bus.

Big House loomed like a misshapen creature against the stark afternoon sky, and Putti was filled with a reluctance to enter it. She paid off the rickshaw and stood silently before the inward-leaning gates, contemplating the house as if she were seeing it for the first time. She wished that she was like Maya, who had lived, studied, worked, been happy and sad, travelled, loved somebody, created a life out of her own body and died—all in the span of thirty-four years. It had been a brief but full life. And Putti, born eight years before her niece, had nothing to show for her own existence. A car drew up in front of Munnuswamy's gate and Gopala stepped out from its air-conditioned interior. He noticed Putti standing at the gates of Big House and smiled at her. “You are going out, Putti Akka?” he asked. “My driver will take you, if you want.”

For a wild moment, Putti was tempted to take him up on his offer. To drive away somewhere she had never been. But there was no place in Toturpuram that was new and marvellous for her. So she smiled shyly and said, “Oh no, I just came back. Very nice of you but.”

“For you, Putti Akka, anything I will do,” said Gopala softly.

She blushed and, without looking at him again, squeezed through the gates and walked hastily up to the door of Big House. Behind her, she could feel his eyes on her back. She did not know that Gopala was in love with her uneven eyes, her bucktoothed smile and the promise of her cushiony body still taut as a girl's. That he jealously observed Gowramma hurrying into Big House with new marriage proposals and wondered why she remained unmarried. And that, with every passing year, his love for her swelled like the scent of raat-ki-rani flowers unfurling in the moist heat of the night. Putti had not considered Gopala for a husband. While he made her pulse race with his flagrantly erotic glances, and she was shocked and titillated by his flirting, the idea had never entered her head.

Ammayya was waiting for her in the shadowy coolness of the living room. “I saw you,” she said. “I saw you talking to that no-good milkman. What was he saying? Enh?”

“Nothing much, Ammayya,” said Putti. “Only wanted to know if we needed extra milk for the festival season.”

“So long you were standing there, that is all he said?”

“What else would he say?”

“And you? Did you speak to him?”

“I just told him that we are not celebrating Deepavali this year because of our tragedy. That's all.” Putti turned away from her mother and went into the kitchen. Her heart was too full of unsettled feelings.

Here they said
class
instead of
grade
. She was in Class Two, Section B, and she sat next to Radha Iyengar. Nandana thought it very odd that there were no boys in this school. The teachers mostly wore
saris, and you had to call them Miss, even if they were married. Some of the teachers were nuns who wore black gowns and veils and were called Sister or Mother. Radha told Nandana that the nuns had no hair, which was why they wore veils, and that they had no hair because they were all married to a person called Jesus. There was a wooden figure of Jesus hanging from a cross on the wall above the blackboard. He looked sad, Nandana felt, and she wanted to know why he had to hang like that, all scrunched up on two sticks.

Radha was best friends with somebody else. She allowed Nandana to eat lunch with her and her best friend, but they talked about secret things that she did not know at all, such as how to blow bubbles with congress grass juice and a safety pin; where to find the biggest gulmohur seed pods with which to make boats in the rainy season and swords for mock battles; the secret twist of the fingers that guaranteed a win when you played pistol fights with gulmohur flowers; and about sea shells and magic stones and seeds and fruit and movie stars and cigarette sweets and ghosts under the mango tree near the chapel at school. Nandana wanted to see her favourite
Barney
show on television and eat a double-chocolate doughnut. She had seen doughnuts in a bakery nearby, but Mamma Lady would not allow her to eat anything outside the house, not even an ice cream, because she said it would make her sick. Nandana really wanted to try some of the treats sold by the two men near the school gates, especially the bright green juice that Radha bought every day without ever falling ill. But she had no money, not even a dime. She wiggled her loose tooth with her tongue again. Perhaps if she gave the tooth to Mamma Lady when it fell out, she would find a coin under her pillow the next morning. Then she could buy green juice.

The school bell rang every hour. There were two teachers and fifty-two students in the class, and sometimes it became so hot that
Nandana wanted to pull her uniform off and sit in her underwear. Asha Miss was old and kind, and never tried to make Nandana say anything. But the other one, Neena Miss, would keep asking her questions and sighing loudly when she did not answer.

“But this is ridiculous,” she would exclaim, every single day. “This can't go on for ever. I am finding it impossible to teach you anything, child!” Then she would ask Nandana to draw pictures and write whatever came into her mind.

And most of the time nothing came into her mind, or at least nothing that she wanted to draw. But this morning she remembered an exciting day long ago in Vancouver. Mrs. Lipsky had got some butterflies for the class. Their very own butterflies, she told them. There was a white one with dark brown circles on its wings and a pale green one that was Nandana's favourite. She had wanted to take it home, but Mrs. Lipsky had said that the butterflies belonged to the class and would have to be let loose at the end of the day. The green butterfly sat on Nandana's hand. It felt like a snowflake. And then it started to rain and, one by one, the butterflies flew away. How sad she had felt watching them go, but Mrs. Lipsky had said that it was not fair to keep them because they were free spirits. Nandana remembered those words. Free. Spirits. She tried to draw herself standing in front of her old school with the butterflies on her hand, but it didn't come out the way she remembered, so she tore up the paper and put her head down on the desk, refusing to look up when Neena Miss asked if she was done.

B
Y THE TIME
Sripathi reached his office that morning, it was already half past nine. He found a parking spot almost immediately, narrowly beating a red Maruti to the space. He hurried towards the building entrance that had recently been painted a bilious green. Assorted odours of frying—vadais, dosas, spices, and boiling milk—emerged from the small restaurant to the right of the stairwell. In the window was a sign saying,
Café Exquisitt. Continental, Chinees, Indian availebbel—Burger, chowmeen, masala-dosa, vadai
. And below the menu, in crisp black letters,
Outside Eatables not Eatable inside plees
.

He spotted his reflection in the mirrored wall of the café, a feature installed by the owner to make the place look bigger than it was. He patted his hair, which had frothed up with the static energy generated by his helmet, the wiry curls standing straight like the cartoonish pictures drawn by small children. Was he really that fat? When did he develop such a paunch? No wonder Nirmala kept on about heart attacks. I am a man with no air of dignity, he told himself, watching his face as if it belonged to somebody else. His father's face swam into his mind. So lean and handsome he was, his thick hair always neatly parted on the left, his moustache clipped over his firm mouth. Narasimha Rao, the famous criminal lawyer.
Nobody knows who I am, thought Sripathi. A deep gloom settled on him as he stared at himself, the crushed shirt, the pants that bagged at the knees, the moustache that he had grown in an attempt to look more like his father.

There came a shuffling sound, and Sripathi found another reflection beside his in the mirror. A man, middle-aged, with an expression of deep curiosity on his face. They were joined by two young women, giggling and chattering, flicking their sari pallus flirtatiously, their hair redolent with the aroma of oil and flowers. About to rush up the stairs to work, they paused to peer through the glass, their slim figures joining the growing crowd of reflections in the distant café mirror. I don't look all that bad, thought Sripathi, comparing himself covertly to the fellow next to him. The crowd began to grow as people stopped to see what was happening in the restaurant—obviously something was going on to attract such a crowd.

“What happened?” demanded a smart young fellow in a suit. “Somebody is not well, or what?”

“I don't know,” replied another fellow, jumping up and down to see over the heads of the two young women who were beginning to look perplexed.

“Someone is not well? Food poisoning? Heart attack? Did anyone call an ambulance?” demanded an officious man without any hair, whose dome head bobbed behind the others in the mirror. What on earth was he talking about? Sripathi thought as he swivelled away from the glass and edged to the rear of the crowd. He didn't want to get mixed up in anything involving ambulances and policemen; it would take too much time, and he would have Kashyap after him with a hatchet.