The Hero's Walk (32 page)

Arun's belongings in the same room did not rate so much as a cursory glance. He was an ascetic, nothing there worth taking. In fact, thought Ammayya, if she had had her purse with her she might even have been moved to leave a few coins for her unimpressive grandson. He, too, had proved to be a disappointment like his father. But that was how it was with men in this family. Arrived in the world with a lot of noise and did nothing to deserve all that initial attention. Fah!

But she knew she would find something interesting as soon as she opened the cupboard. There, in the dark hollow, Maya's red coat shone like a flame, begging to be stolen. Ammayya stroked the delicious, heavy, silky surface of the coat. She loved it immediately, passionately. Ammayya snatched it up, and like a bride with her wedding clothes, she shyly inserted one arm and then another into
its warm, glowing embrace. Her pouchy skin shrank with delicate pleasure at the touch of such luxury. It smelled wonderful too. Subtle and teasing, the aromas trapped in that red blaze of wool. She would never be able to wear it at home, but she could sell it for a good sum of money at the China Bazaar. Ammayya abandoned the powder tin on Arun's paper-ridden desk. Let Nirmala keep it, she thought magnanimously. This jacket more than made up for the sacrifice. The old woman cuddled it against her ancient body, remembered to open out the windows she had shut, pull the curtains she had drawn, and creaked down the stairs like a bandit queen, satisfied with her efforts. She shuffled across the gloomy living room and into her own chamber where she secreted the jacket in one of her cupboards, locking it carefully with a key from the bunch around her neck. Ah, what a good evening it had been! Thoroughly pleased with herself, she went onto the verandah and sat on the steps. Innocent as a leaf on a tree. An old woman waiting for her family to come home.

“Scissor sharpening! Knife polishing!” called a sing-song voice from the road outside, followed by the clash and scrape of knives against the sides of a bicycle. The knife man passed this way every single day, but no one called for his services. Last week, the fat brothers in her rickshaw had warned her that, if she was naughty, the knife man would cut her into small pieces with his sharpest pair of scissors, and feed the pieces to the sea monster that guarded Toturpuram from foreign pirates. So it was with a sense of relief that Nandana watched the man go by without stopping. As his voice faded down the road, another set of sounds started up across the compound wall, shrill voices screaming and fighting over the garbage bin. The gypsies who lived on the pavement had started
scavenging for the day and were quarrelling over the discarded cloth, old tins and bottles. Nandana recognized these two gypsies, with their dirty, deeply pleated skirts slung low over their hips so that their bellies spilled over. They fascinated her. The men had curly hair that they wore in knots and decorated with peacock feathers. They sang or simply lay on the ground, staring up at the sky split into blue bits by tree leaves. The children ran around naked and played all the time instead of going to school. And the women sat on the pavement and made bead jewellery or stitched the rags that they had collected into patchwork skirts. On her first day at school, Nirmala and Sripathi had taken Nandana by bus and that was when she had first seen the gypsies.

“Thieves,” Nirmala had muttered, pulling her closer. “Don't go near them. They will put a curse on you.” The gypsies stole anything they could find. They were like crows. They even stole children if they found them wandering around alone. “Don't ever go out by yourself, okay mari?” warned Nirmala, squeezing her hand tight.

But Nandana wasn't scared. All she wanted to do was get to the railway station and the airport and home.

B
Y THE TIME
Sripathi reached the street on which Dr. Menon had his clinic, his legs had stopped quivering. But to his dismay, he found the entrance to the street blocked by an enormous plywood cut-out of the chief minister of the state. It leaned against the wall of a building and was so large that it stretched right across to the other side of the street. A man was perched on scaffolding high above the ground, touching up the face of the cutout with a large flat brush. Along the scaffolding, he had hung a tray with cans of paint that he dipped into every few minutes.

Sripathi clucked his tongue in irritation and came to a stop. “What is going on here?” he asked. “How do you expect people to go through?”

“Other way,” shouted the sign painter, pausing to look down at Sripathi.

“What do you mean ‘other way'? I don't have time to circle the entire town to get to the other end of this street,” protested Sripathi.

“This is Madam Chief Minister's portrait. Urgently required. Cannot be moved without permission,” said the man, busily darkening the eyebrows on the enormous chief ministerial visage. He added a touch of neon pink to the lips and leaned back on the scaffold to survey the effect. “Madam likes my style. She personally
requested me, Chamraj Painter, to do this special portrait. I am too-too honoured.”

“How much is she paying you?” asked Sripathi, shielding his eyes from the sun as he stared up at the enormous cut-out that soared over the building against which it was propped.

“I don't know. The honour is what matters,” replied the painter.

“Who gave you money for the paints? At least that you could have got from the minister's office,” remarked Sripathi.

“Oh, Madam will make sure that I am paid,” said the painter, dabbing diamond earrings on the chief minister's ears. He used the same brush to add a kindly sparkle to her outsized eyes. “She knows that I am a poor man with a family to feed. Why she should cheat me of a few rupees?”

Why not? Sripathi wanted to ask—that's how these politician crooks become rich, by stealing from the poor and the helpless. But the poor fellow probably knew that he would not see any money, yet could do nothing. The chief minister's goons would have made chutney of him if he had refused the commission.

“Can I park my scooter here and walk across to Dr. Menon's clinic?” he asked instead. “I'll give you two rupees if you keep an eye on it for me.”

“No problem, saar,” said the painter cheerfully. “And you don't have to pay me. Anyway, I am here, so whyfor you need to give me money also?”

Sripathi stepped carefully across the bottom planks of the scaffolding and beneath the cut-out. The pungent smell of turpentine overrode the more subtle scent of wood and the inevitable stink of the open drain at the edge of the street. After he had walked a few furlongs, Sripathi turned around to make sure that his scooter was still where he had left it. It was there, minute beside the soaring cutout of the chief minister, her enormous cheeks a radiant pink, her eyes like planets bulging out of their broom-long fringe of eyelashes. She smiled coyly at the sky, her lips thick slabs of red meat still
ashimmer with fresh paint. Directly beneath her head were her breasts, painted twin mountains draped in a shawl strewn with what appeared to be sparkling gems. The shawl was the minister's trademark and was believed to hide a bullet-proof vest. Her hands were folded demurely in a namaskaram. During the night, probably, some loafer had clambered all the way up to those jutting breasts and painted a pair of black nipples surrounded by red aureoles. This, in combination with the pouting lips, the tragic eyes and the halo, made the minister look like a martyred slut. Sripathi hoped that the painter noticed the addition to his art before he presented it to the respected minister.

Dr. Menon ran his clinic from a hole in the wall of a dilapidated building on the street. The wall was plastered with film posters and political graffiti, so that the clinic seemed to be a part of the collage too. Women with beckoning eyes mooned at thick, muscled heroes on posters that announced in black letters:
Super-action-packed chiller-thriller! Romance! Comedy! Tragedy! Spectacular Spectacles!
And beside these flamboyant outbursts were the more sombre political messages:
Vote for VKR. He Cares for Your Cares. He Will Wipe the Sweat from Your Brow
.

People who weren't aware of the existence of the clinic were startled by what appeared to be characters stepping off the pictures. Dr. Menon, almost a segment of this whole unrealistic scene, was so ancient that he had to be hauled out of his chair by his patients and supported to a shadowed corner of the clinic where he shakily mixed pellets and powders, screwed them into tight little slips of paper and handed them to his patients with garbled instructions on dosage. It was difficult to make out if the old man actually listened to his patients, made diagnoses and then decided on the medicine, for he always coughed through the entire recitation of ills and staggered out of his chair before the patient was done. When Sripathi entered the dark hole, he found the doctor lying motionless with his head on his desk, eyes shut, surrounded by a welter of papers and
books. In one corner sat a small child, probably his grandson, reciting his times tables.

“One twoza two, two twoza four, three twoza six,” he droned, swinging forward and backward rhythmically to his own voice.

“Is he okay?” asked Sripathi anxiously, jerking his head in the doctor's direction.

“Hoonh,” said the boy. “Just shake him a little and he will get up.”

A tentative tap on the shoulder of the good doctor evoked no response. Sripathi glanced at the boy questioningly. The boy jumped to his feet and grabbed his grandfather's shoulder, pinching it a couple of times before putting his mouth against a ragged ear soft and crumpled as old velvet.

“Thatha!” roared the boy, still pinching the old man's shoulder energetically. “A patient has come. Get up. Thatha!”

The old man sprang to his feet and looked around wildly. “What? What?”

“A patient is waiting for you. Thatha!”

The doctor swivelled his milky eyes towards Sripathi. “Good morning sir, good morning. And what is your problem?”

“My legs are feeling funny,” bawled Sripathi who knew that Dr. Menon was hard of hearing. And I might not have a job at the end of this month, he felt like adding.

“Funny legs. Hmm. Could be a stroke or maybe filaria. Or malaria. In this pigsty of a town there are so many types of mosquitoes.” Doctor Menon leaned back in his rickety chair and shut his eyes. He was silent for so long that Sripathi thought he had fallen asleep. He was thinking of shaking him awake when the old man jerked up and feverishly scrabbled through the desk drawers. He opened and shut several drawers before excavating a little jar of translucent paste.

“My son brought this for me from Singapore. It says on the leaflet here that it is a malam good for everything. Many ancient herbs and berries have gone into it. Rub some on your legs and if
that doesn't work, swallow a teaspoon with a glass of warm milk. If it works it works, if not nothing bad will happen.”

Dr. Menon leaned back again, exhausted by the whole interlude, and fell asleep. Sripathi dropped a five-rupee note on the desk and slipped out quietly.

On the way back to his scooter, he spotted a tired-looking woman crouched beside the road, selling a few flowers. He was reminded of his long-forgotten ritual of buying flowers for Nirmala. And of the fact that it was Putti's birthday today. The flower-seller had just one withered string of jasmines in her basket and a few pink roses that had lost most of their petals.

“Seventy-five paise for all of them,” said the woman. Sripathi paid her without trying to bargain and she wrapped it in a piece of banana leaf for him.

The sign painter had stopped for a tea break when Sripathi returned to pick up his scooter. Once again he refused the money that Sripathi held out to him.

“Come on, take it, for your children. Buy them some toffees,” urged Sripathi.

“Okay, if you put it that way,” smiled the man, dropping the change into his shirt pocket.

“Have you finished the picture?” asked Sripathi. He shielded his eyes against the last rays of the sun and stared up at the huge cutout. The black nipples had been painted over, he noticed, and the chief minister merely looked coquettish now.