The Hero's Walk (42 page)

“That's it, give it to them, the usurpers,” Ammayya shouted, delighted to find somebody of the same opinion at last.

Nirmala caught at Arun's arm and dragged him back. “No, don't do anything. They are not involved, I am telling you,” she said. She smiled pleadingly at Munnuswamy who had risen to his feet. “Please, don't go. My son is worried, that's all. He doesn't know what he is saying.”

“Why couldn't you call the police?” Arun asked.

“Police? I phoned and phoned so many times, and nobody has come to help.”

“But these two are crooks, Mamma,” said Arun, lowering his voice a bit.

“Everybody in the world is a crook,” Nirmala replied. “I don't care if these two are shaitaans from hell. All I know is that they are helping me find Nandana.”

A stench of gutters rose and filled the room, mingling with the smells of stale cooking and the mouldy sofa. Although Munnuswamy had gone home shortly after Arun's arrival, Gopala had stayed. Putti fluttered around anxiously, plying everybody with coffee and insisting that they eat something. “We'll find her, don't worry,” Gopala assured Nirmala, pressing her hand. “Those Boys know this town like their own palms. They know everybody also. Because of this rain, it is taking a little time, that's all.”

Then, around eleven o'clock, just when Nirmala decided to go out to the gate again, there was a shuffling sound from the verandah. The dim light there shone on a man whom she didn't recognize right away. Beside him stood a small figure with long hair.

“Ayyo, ayyo, ammamma!” shouted Nirmala, running to the verandah and lifting Nandana off the ground. “She is back. Oh, thank you deva!” She plastered the child's face with kisses. “Where did you go, you bad child? Are you all right? Tell me, are you all right?”

Nandana dodged the kisses and nodded. “Yes, but I am sleepy,” she said shyly.

Nirmala stopped from sheer astonishment. “Did you hear? She spoke to me! Arun, Putti, did you hear her?” She gazed at Nandana. “Say something again, my chinna. Tell me where you went.”

“The mad lady took me away and made me eat food,” Nandana declared, now struggling to get down from her grandmother's arms.

Nirmala allowed her to slide down, but kept a tight hold on her hand. She looked around at the crowd on the verandah and noticed the man who had brought her grandchild home. Finally, she recognized him. Mr. Poorna, that poor, crazy creature's husband. “You found her? Thank you, thank you,” she cried.

The man looked embarrassed. “No, she was in our house all evening,” he said. “My wife had taken her inside. I am sorry, I didn't know. I was on tour. Just got back and found her. Please forgive. My wife isn't well. She didn't harm the little one. Please forgive.” The relative who looked after his wife had gone to attend a wedding, he explained. Had she come back as originally planned by seven o'clock, the child would have been found earlier. But the storm had disrupted bus services, and the relative had decided to stay over at her cousin's place.

“I am sorry for all the worry we have caused,” he said, backing off the verandah. “The child is unharmed.” He refused Nirmala's offer of coffee. “No, I had to lock my wife in the room. She is very upset. I have to go and explain.”

Long, swaying walls of rain slapped against Sripathi's body and soaked him despite the umbrella. The road had turned into a shallow river with debris hurtling in the flow. Sripathi had longed for this deluge, but it couldn't have arrived at a worse moment. All the people on the road, the pavement dwellers and roadside vendors who might have noticed a small girl with long hair, wide eyes and two missing front teeth, were gone, disappeared into abandoned buildings or under plastic sheeting held down by bricks on piles of old kerosene drums. Strings of electric lights flickered brightly
from the balconies of a few of the apartments lining the road. Far away, somebody had decided to celebrate Deepavali early, and Sripathi could hear the hiss and rattle of firecrackers. The smell of onions frying came to him from the cooking fires of the construction workers who lived in every building they made. How many different homes had they inhabited? Not one of them would have his own house to die in. At the thought of homes, Sripathi was reminded of the fact that very soon he, too, would have to find a way to pay his loans or sell Big House. A car rushed past and waves of dirty water washed over his legs. He grimaced and moved to the edge of the road hoping that he wouldn't fall into the gutter. No longer was it possible to know where the gutter ended and the road began. A memory came to him suddenly. He had taken Maya and Arun for a magic show at Technology Hall. Maya was eight and Arun barely two. He did not own a vehicle then, and so they had taken a bus, although it was a fair distance from the bus stop to the house. Arun was too young to appreciate the talents of the great P.C. Sorcar, World-Famous Wizard, but Maya was enthralled, screaming with wonder each time the magician pulled off another trick. When they emerged from the show it was dark and pouring rain just like this. All along the beach they had travelled on the empty bus, watching as lightning slashed the brooding, Cimmerian sky. The sea was a pulsing roll of green fire, hurling itself at the shore, reaching its eager fingers towards the road. A high wind tossed sand against the windows, and the bus seemed to rock with the force of it. By the time they got off and started their long hike home, the road was flooded. Although cyclone warnings were in effect, and Sripathi had been reluctant to leave the safety of his house, especially with the children, he had already purchased the tickets and wasn't going to let them go waste. Nirmala and Putti and Ammayya had gone to Tirupathi for the weekend.

Maya had trotted beside him, chattering excitedly about the magician, her hand clutched tightly in his. In his other arm he carried
Arun. A truck had roared by and almost drowned Maya under the wash of dirty water swooshing up under its wheels. She had coughed and spluttered, scared by the unexpectedness of the drenching, and refusing to walk another step, had begged to be carried instead.

Even today he shuddered at the memory of that night. How he had staggered slowly down the road that usually seemed so brief and now stretched on endlessly. The children grew heavier and heavier, Maya riding piggyback, her arms choking tight around his neck, her plump legs sliding and holding, next slipping and grasping at his waist.

“Hold on,” he had shouted every time she seemed about to fall off. “Hold on! We are almost home.”

His arms ached with the weight of Arun's body. Sripathi had waded through knee-deep water on the edge of the road, hoping that he wouldn't slide into the invisible drain that waited, malevolent and stinking, beneath the surface.

“Appu, are we going to drown?” Maya had wailed and he had soothed her. “No, my sweet. No raja, Appu will take care of you.”

“For ever and ever?” she had demanded, as always making use of the moment to get as much as she could out of him, trying to seal the small uncertainties in her mind with assurances from him, her father.

“For ever and ever,” he had promised rashly. How could he have dared the future, challenged the mischievous gods with a statement as arrogant as that?

He passed a pair of caesalpinia trees guarding a familiar scrolled ironwork gate. Raju's house. A light flickered in one of the front rooms. Those trees had provided many of the long, curving brown seed pods that Sripathi and Raju had used as swords in their boy-hood games, to re-enact ancient battles: Arjuna and the Kauravas, Lakshmana against a demon or two, Karna, Shivaji, Tipu Sultan. Kings and warriors and heroes, their boyish shouts rising into the dusty air and mingling with the memory of other voices, other children
before them who had imagined themselves in the same games. It had all seemed so simple then, all problems solved with the swipe of a long brown seed pod. Sripathi staggered as another truck surged past, creating a strong wave of dirty water around his legs. Suddenly, he felt disoriented and weightless, as if he were floating down the dark road. He couldn't remember where he was or what he was doing in the rain. He tried to compose a letter in his head to hold on to a fragment of consciousness. “Dear Editor,” he shouted, “dear, dear Editor.” He laughed wildly, unable to think of a single complaint to make against the small world that he inhabited. Two women passed him, and he caught at a soft, wet arm.

“Drunk fool,” she screamed, shaking off his hand and hitting him with her open umbrella. Her companion pulled her away and they hurried on, looking over their shoulders now and again.

“I am a fool,” agreed Sripathi, giggling helplessly. “But not drunk. No madam, I am a sober fool, and I am terribly, terribly sorry to have discombobulated you.”

He staggered and almost fell against a figure coming towards him.

“Appu?” said the figure, startling him. It was a short, thin man with glasses, carrying a torch and a bright yellow umbrella that leapt at the wind. He seemed familiar to Sripathi. “Appu, Nandana is home. She was in Mrs. Poorna's house. She is okay.”

“Okay?” Sripathi echoed foolishly. Somehow standing here in the rain, in the dark with this man in front of him whose face he could barely see, the whole day seemed to dissolve into a swirl. A child had got lost. He had not found her. In fact, he thought completely exhausted, he, Sripathi Rao had been responsible for losing her.

“Okay?” he repeated to the man who now took his arm gently and led him down the lightless road.

“Yes, Appu, everything is okay,” said the man, sounding more and more like somebody Sripathi thought he might know.

“Maya is back? I told Nirmala she would come back,” said Sripathi confidentially. “She never believed me.”

He retained no memory of that walk down the road, no memory of Arun, only recollections of endless rain, trees full of swinging swords waiting to fall on his head and a nun who had looked kindly at him through the stained-glass windows of a building he had never seen.

“She is talking,” said Nirmala, as soon as Sripathi and Arun reached home. She had put Nandana to bed and was now excitedly pacing the living room. Gopala had also left, insisting that they wake him if they needed anything, regardless of the hour. Sripathi sank down on the floor of the verandah and tried to remove his shoes. He caught his foot and tugged ineffectually. Finally he gave up and just sat there, his head bent, his legs stuck out straight before him. “She is all right,” said Nirmala, assuming that he was merely exhausted. “Did you hear me, ree?”

“Who?” Sripathi raised his head and whispered.

“The child, who else?”

Sripathi looked eagerly at her. “Our child is back?” he asked. “Is her husband with her? I hope you have made her favourite things for her. This is a happy event.” He beamed at Nirmala who gave him a baffled look.

“Why is he talking nonsense like this?” she asked Arun, who shrugged his shoulders. “I don't know,” he said, leading his father gently inside. “He was saying all sorts of things on the way back.”

In the living room, where the lights were considerably brighter than the one on the verandah, Nirmala saw how ghastly pale Sripathi was and how wild his eyes were. She touched his face and gasped. “He is burning with fever!” she exclaimed. “Oh God, what a day this has been.” She called Arun, who had just taken off his wet clothes, ordered him to go to the doctor's house and beg him on bended
knee to make a house call, pay him whatever he asked for. Then she led her husband upstairs to their room, stripped his wet clothes from his body as tenderly as she would a baby's, feeling pity at the sight of his trembling form, the grey whorls of hair that worked their way down from his chest to his crotch, the shrunken scrotum. Was this the same man who had once carried her to bed in jest, his teeth gleaming strong and white in laughter as she shrieked in protest?

“Let's pretend we are in a movie,” he had said, swinging her around, almost losing his balance in the process. “You are Vyjayanthimala and I am Sunil Dutt!”

So long ago that had been. Everything had turned topsy-turvy since then. Nirmala wiped him down with a dry towel, pushed him gently down on the bed and dressed him in pyjamas and kurta while he sat docile as a child.

She descended the stairs, slowly, slowly, to accommodate her reluctant knees that snapped and creaked as she moved, and waited for Arun to return with the doctor.
If
he agreed to make a house call in this weather. Nothing was certain these days, not even basic human goodness, she thought bitterly. The living room was dark. Putti was a huddled shadow on the same chair that had been occupied by Gopala an hour before, refusing to join her mother in bed until sleep had quietened her. She stared out of the open front door at the raindrops that briefly turned to gold when caught in the glow of the streetlights. Ammayya's door was shut tight. She had retreated there when Munnuswamy and Gopala arrived, and now she fulminated behind the thick wood, her stick rat-tatting meanly on the sticky, damp floor.