The Hero's Walk (31 page)

“Enh, why couldn't she get her own seed?” Ammayya wanted to know.

Koti shrugged. “Do you want to hear what happened next or not?”

“Okay, okay, go on with your silly stories.”

“Well, our big inspector-orey refused to give it to her. She tried to grab it and he ran out of the house holding the stupid thing. Can you imagine what a sight that must have been? All the people on Second Main saw it with their very own eyes. His wife raced after him screaming dirty-dirty words and waving a knife in one hand.”

“Ayyo! Why didn't anybody stop her?” Nirmala asked.

“Too hot it was,” said Koti. “Besides, that Gajapati-amma is like Kali Devi herself when she gets angry, and nobody wanted to get near her, especially since she had a knife. But it was the heat that saved her husband, finally. She fainted from all that running around. What a drama!”

Nirmala laughed at the thought of the income-tax inspector sprinting down the street with a mango seed in his hand and, settling Ammayya in a chair, gave her a cup of tea.

Putti entered the room just then. “Where were you, child?” demanded Ammayya. “I wanted to tell you about my blood pressure. See how red my eyes are? Jayanthi Ammal told me that that is a sign of high pressure.”

“Are you going out, Nirmala?” Putti asked, not looking at her mother.

“Yes, to the vegetable shop. I need chilies and tomatoes. The child eats nothing at all. I don't know what to give her, only. And since she won't talk, she can't tell me.”

“Putti, did you hear me?” whined Ammayya. “Nowadays you don't speak to me at all. I am sitting and sitting and waiting for you every single day, and God knows where you disappear.”

“I am always at home,” said Putti. “Where will I go, other than to the library or the temple? And if you are ill, why don't you visit Dr. Menon?”

“Tomorrow you can take me to him. Now you stay here with me, and tell me what and all Miss Chintamani said.”

“Not now, Ammayya. I want to go with Nirmala. Help her carry the vegetables.”

“Pah, no sense you have. That child won't eat vegetables and all. She had a foreign father. They eat meat. I am telling you. Shanti Kumar told me. She had a really bad time when her grandchildren came from foreign. They wanted cow and goat and pig and all. Every day she used to send the servant to the Military Hotel to get tiffin carriers of food for them. She said that she felt like vomiting from the smell and had to get the Acharye to do a special cleansing ceremony in the house after they had all gone back.”

“Meat?” said Nirmala uncertainly. “The child eats meat?”

“Enh, what did you think? Your daughter brought her up like a Brahmana? Once she went there she forgot everything—flushed all our rules down with the shit water.” Ammayya frowned at Nirmala. “But don't think I will allow you to bring meat into this house. I am not a fool like Shanti Kumar, giving in to the demands of children.”

Nirmala gathered up her shopping bags and purse and left with Putti.

“Putti, you will become black as a crow with all this running around in the sun,” shouted Ammayya. “And next week that fellow who is coming to see you will run away. Listen to me.”

There was not a sound other than the cawing of a crow from the lime tree in the backyard. Ammayya wriggled with excitement in her chair, waving her feet that, in their thick socks, looked like a pair of white mice. Despite the heat, Ammayya never felt warm enough. In addition to the socks on her feet, she wore a woollen blouse and a shawl.

She tried to plan out her time. Sripathi was still at work, the child was at school and would be back only at a quarter past four. Plenty of time to make her way up the stairs to her son's section of the house and check the cupboards, his desk, the drawers, under the pillows, for letters, cheques, wads of money. She would go through Nirmala's cupboards to see if she had bought any new saris without telling her. She would check the child's suitcases. Opportunities
like these were rare, and she cherished them. Ammayya sucked in her dentures and released them with a moist click. Nobody told her anything these days. They kept secrets from her, she knew that for sure. She could smell it in their voices, see it in the sly looks they traded with each other—Sripathi and Nirmala, and Putti and Arun. Even the servant knew more than she did about the goings-on in this house. Ammayya tapped her stick furiously on the floor. She should never have given Nirmala charge of the keys to the house. Daughters-in-law were crooks. They stole power from you before you knew what was happening.

She waddled back from the dining room to her bedroom where she settled down before the dressing table with its rows of medicine bottles, all containing Ayurvedic remedies obtained from Dr. Menon. She refused to visit a regular hospital or even young Dr. Pandit, whose father had taken care of Sripathi's children. She had a horror of being examined by a doctor, of having her dry private parts poked and prodded, of lying helpless on an examination table. Sripathi and Putti had been delivered here in her own home by a midwife. And she had read about the body-parts business that was rampant in hospitals.

“You know Sub-Inspector Krishnappa's son?” Miss Chintamani had asked. “Well, he went to that big new hospital on Nehru Road with a simple sore throat. Only that, see? And before he could say
aan
or
oon
those smart-suit doctors had him on an operating table. Took out his appendix, they said. But who knows what else they pulled out? The boy has been married six years and still his wife's belly is flat.”

“They can do things like that?” Ammayya had asked, wishing all the more that her own son was a doctor. Surely they wouldn't do bad things to a doctor's mother?

“Of course they can. Do they allow anyone inside the operating theatre? No. Worse than anything, I have heard, is the stuff they put
inside
you. I have heard that these America-trained doctors do all
sorts of inauspicious things, put monkey hearts in humans and what not!”

Ammayya came away from the library determined never to end up in a hospital. Besides, the sight of people in white coats with stethoscopes around their necks was a constant reminder of what her own son had tossed away. Her anger was evenly divided between all those arrogant, god-like creatures with the power to heal at their fingertips, and her son who could have had that same power. Dr. Menon, the Ayurved, was too old and poor to inspire anger or envy in Ammayya's heart, and more importantly, his advice was dispensed free of charge. He practiced ayurveda as a hobby, and anybody who went to him did so with the understanding that they were his guinea pigs and had forfeited the right to complain if his medicines did not work. His patients might not always get well after taking his powders and pellets, but at least they did not get any worse.

Ammayya swatted her stick against the edge of her bed and it hit her trunk. Her mood swung from cantankerous to contented at the heavy sound. Nice and full, she thought happily. The trunk itself was a camouflage for a smaller box, also locked with a Navtal lock, inside which there were other tins and boxes, each with its own lock. You could never be suspicious enough about people's motives, Ammayya knew that for a fact. Why, just the other day she had read in the papers about a woman (like her), old (again the similarity), helpless (there you go again), who had been beaten to death by her own son, all for a few gold chains around her neck. Not to mention the story that Miss Chintamani had told her and Putti about the decent, god-loving, charitable (she made fresh tea, even for the servants, if you please!), old Kaveriamma on Ganges Road, next to the Mother Mary Church.

“You know the servant boy, Vasu?” she had asked.

“The good-looking fellow?”

“Uh-huh! Handsome is as handsome does, that's what I say.” Miss Chintamani had pursed her lips censoriously.

“Why, what happened?” Ammayya wanted to know.

“Poor old Kaveriamma, she brought up the ingrate as if he was her own son. For twenty-five years. And he tried to kill her with a rolling pin!” Miss Chintamani had been indignant.

“Ayyo! Why did he do such a thing?”

“Who knows why villains do the things they do? He said it was because she wouldn't give him the money she owed him. Worked him like a slave, he said, for all those years. Where would he have been without Kaveriamma, tell me? In the gutter, that's where.”

“And what did the old lady say to that?” asked Ammayya. Why, she might have been Kaveriamma. Koti could easily attack her the same way.

“Poor thing, she could barely talk. But she told the judge that she had deposited all his money in a savings account and was planning to give it to him on his wedding day.”

“But didn't Vasu get married two years ago?” Putti had asked.

“Oho, one must learn to be patient. Kaveriamma would have given it to him if he had asked properly. But the idiot goes and hits her on the head. That's gratitude for you!” Miss Chintamani had ended her story.

Well, thought Ammayya, unlike Kaveriamma, she was certainly not foolish enough to trust a soul. She patted the keys that she had pinned to the inside of her blouse, then with one mighty heave she detached herself from the chair. Tap-tap-tap, she swayed slowly across the cold red-oxide floor of the living room. Past the rotting sofa, the ancient rosewood chairs and the brooding teak cupboards that still contained the yellowing stacks of legal books, journals, case notes and files once used by Narasimha Rao. Ammayya had no particular use for all that paper, but insisted on keeping it out of a sense of perversity. She was aware how it bothered Nirmala, who grumbled about the waste of good space. With a click of her teeth, the old woman pulled a small coffee table out into the centre of the room. Like all the other furniture, it had been pushed against the
wall to make space for Nirmala's students. Capering fools, sniffed Ammayya, her heart thundering as she made her way up the stairs. Dancing! She had seen better dancing from the monkeys at the temple. But she enjoyed the entertainment on Wednesdays and Saturdays, liked to sit in her chair and comment on the dancers. “Is she doing the elephant walk, that fat girl there?” she would demand. Or, “Nirmala, is this the dance of the demons you are teaching these children?” Then she would slap her thigh and cackle at her own wit.

She paused for breath on the landing, looking at the cracked floor with distaste. It was a while since she had had the opportunity to come up here, and she hadn't noticed how wretched the house had become. Perhaps Sripathi was right. It was time to sell it to the highest bidder and get some of those matchboxes in exchange. She would then rent out her flat and continue to stay with her son. Putti was entitled to an apartment as well, which could also be rented out.

In Sripathi's room, she made sure that all the windows and the balcony door were shut, so that none of their snooping neighbours would report her to Nirmala, and then she started to open the cupboards. To her disappointment, Nirmala had locked the steel almirah where she undoubtedly stored all her recent acquisitions. The wooden cupboard with everyday clothes was open, though, and Ammayya eagerly pawed through the neatly folded saris and petticoats, mumbling to herself about suspicious daughters-in-law. There was nothing there, not even money that she could pinch. Nor any secret letters for her to read. Only the sandalwood box full of Maya's letters. Ammayya was already familiar with the contents of those. The old woman cupped her palm and shook out some powder from a tall tin kept in the cupboard and that she had on her own dressing table as well. With one hand she held the front of her blouse out like a pouch and smeared the powder over her breasts with the other hand. Smelled good, smelled good. Why should only Nirmala use it? She decided to take the powder down to her room
for when she had exhausted her own supply. Let her daughter-in-law wonder where it had gone. Satisfied that there was nothing else in Sripathi's bedroom that was of interest, she shuffied over to the other room. Where the foreign brat slept. With a growing sense of excitement, Ammayya dragged out the suitcases from under the bed. Ever since Nandana's arrival, Ammayya had been longing to see what her great-granddaughter had brought from abroad. She imagined thick packs of chewing gum, for which she had developed an enormous craving. Boxes of soaps that smelled so different from the Lifebuoy bars that Nirmala bought in bulk for the entire household. Dozens of pens in assorted colours. The old lady wondered whether the child had brought back any of her parents' clothes. Those would fetch a good sum of money in China Bazaar; the shops did a roaring business in smuggled goods, second-hand foreign clothes and make-up, shoes and bags. She would have to think of some way to sneak the clothes out of the house and all the way to the bazaar, but—she sucked at her teeth delightedly—she would manage. To her intense disappointment, the suitcases held nothing other than photographs and assorted books that for some foolish reason Sripathi had lugged all the way back from that America-Canada place. As if there weren't any books in this country! Trust her son to pick all the wrong things to hang on to. He never did have any sense; from the moment he was born, he was an idiot. That was obvious to Ammayya as soon as she laid eyes on his sticking-out ears, his pasty face and his bulging navel fifty-seven years ago. Although at that time, her young eyes dimmed by love for her firstborn, she had thought that the elephantine ears were a sign of future greatness, in spite of the fact that they were folded down at the top like photo-corners and had to be tied back for a few months until they straightened out somewhat. She rifled through the photographs impatiently, pausing when she came across one of Maya, Alan and Nandana in front of a small blue house with a flowering bush beside it. All of a sudden, the old woman was filled with an
unaccustomed regret. She looked at the smiling young face in the picture and remembered that Maya had always indulged her. Like that time she had taken Ammayya to an ancient film starring Shivaji Ganeshan playing Robin Hood. The girl had saved her bus fare for weeks, leaving the house early to get to college on foot. And then she had surprised her grandmother with a trip to the theatre, even treated her to a bag of popcorn that the vendor assured them had been popped in vegetable oil. After she went away to the foreign country, she never failed to enclose a pack of chewing gum for Ammayya along with every letter, starting an addiction for the rubbery strips in the old lady. Yes, Maya had been a good grandchild. But then again, perhaps she had hoped that Ammayya would leave her some of her jewellery. Nobody did anything without an ulterior motive. The old woman stuffed all the photographs back in the envelope and shut the suitcase, and with it her momentary lapse into sentimentality. Ammayya had lost so much in life—children, illusions, dreams, trust—that one more loss no longer really mattered to her. Things came and things went. That was life. What she could hang on to, she did with the ferocity of an animal with its kill.