The Hero's Walk (48 page)

It was Nirmala who finally washed Ammayya's corpse and dressed her in a length of unbleached cotton. And it was she who discovered the large vertical incision down her right side, extending from one withered breast to her pelvic bone, a curving greyish-pink slash, the edges held together with black stitches like ants marching. She wondered why that cut had been made. True, Sripathi had said something about an operation, but even she knew that the heart was on the left side of the chest. Had they removed something from Ammayya's body? She remembered the old woman's dislike of hospitals, her fear that the doctors farmed out body parts, and thought about telling Sripathi of her suspicions. For a long while she looked at her mother-in-law lying on the sheet, the dry old body, the white shoots of hair emerging from her scalp, the peaceful face, the sweet smell of putrefaction beginning to waft up from her, and finally made up her mind.

“What is gone is gone,” she whispered. “No point creating unnecessary problems.”

T
HE RITUALS HAD BEEN OBSERVED
; dozens of friends and relatives had come to pay their last respects to Ammayya. They couldn't seem to believe that the feisty old woman was truly gone. Krishnamurthy Acharye had said the ancient prayers for the dead in his whispery old voice. Nirmala and Putti wept quietly in a corner of the room while Nandana looked on wide-eyed. Earlier she had asked Sripathi whether all dead people looked like Ammayya, and Sripathi had not known what to say. Was it right to let the child see all this so soon? He didn't know what was right any more.

“No,” he whispered finally, over the solemn chanting of prayers. “No, everybody does not look like Ammayya. She was very old.” And my daughter was young, he wanted to add. Too young to die.

Late that evening, after the cremation was over, Sripathi told Arun that he could go back home.

“Where are you going?”

“To the beach with Ammayya's ashes,” Sripathi replied.

“I'll come with you,” offered Arun, unexpectedly.

It was dusk by the time they got a bus to the beach. They made their way to the same secluded spot at which they had scattered Maya's
ashes. The tide was coming in, curling waves lapped against their feet, and seagulls swooped and pecked at drying seaweed left on the sand. Further down, pariah dogs leapt at an upturned boat, trying to get at something dangling from the high side. Sripathi walked across the wet, squelching sand until he reached the water. With a sense of déjà-vu, he emptied the ashes and watched as they mingled with the waves. Poor Ammayya, what a long, unresolved life she had lived, he thought regretfully.

He went back to the cluster of mossy rocks where he had left Arun and sat down beside his son. They stayed there until the moon appeared, a silver semicircle ringed with concentric rainbow light. It would be sunny tomorrow. In the thick darkness the sea was luminous, a body of motion, living, mysterious, beautiful.

“You go home if you want to, Appu,” said Arun, his arms locked around his raised knees on which he rested his chin. “I want to watch the turtles coming in.”

“How do you know that they will be here today?”

“A few arrived yesterday and usually the rest follow soon after.”

“I'll stay with you,” said Sripathi after a moment's hesitation. He had lived all his life beside this same sea, and he had never spent an entire night watching it as it poured over the sand and sucked away, leaving a wavering lace of froth that it retrieved almost immediately.

The moon rose higher in the sky, the beach emptied slowly, and one by one the last of the vendors turned off their Petromax lanterns and left. Now all they could hear was the susurrating of the wind in the brief stand of palm trees behind them. Suddenly, out of the sea, a dark form detached itself and staggered slowly up the damp sand. And another and another. Dozens of them. No, scores. It seemed to Sripathi that the beach itself had risen up and was rippling away from the water.

“Can you see them?” whispered Arun. As if the turtles would be scared off by his voice when they carried the thunder of ancient waters in their small, swivelling heads.

They poured across the sand, wobbling and swaying, a humpbacked, crawling army drawn by some distant call to the shore on which they were born fifty, one hundred, two hundred years ago, to give birth to another generation. Across the water line they surged, each an olive-green dune in slow motion, until they were well out of reach of the waves. They stopped one by one and began to dig cradles for their eggs—their thick stubby hind legs powerful pistons spraying sand into the air—grunting and murmuring, moaning and sighing as they squatted over the holes and dropped their precious cargo.

Arun leaned over and whispered, “Each of them lays at least a hundred to two hundred eggs, Appu.”

Sripathi nodded, too moved to comment. How many millennia had this been going on? he wondered, humbled by the sight of something that had started long before humans had been imagined into creation by Brahma, and had survived the voracious appetite of those same humans. In the long continuum of turtle life, humans were merely dots.

Soon the turtles were done and began to churn up the sand again, covering the holes, tamping them down tight, with slow, deliberate movements. And then the swaying trudge back to the gleaming sea. Sweeping their hind legs to erase every trace of their arrival, as meticulous as spies in foreign lands.

“See how cunning they are,” whispered Arun again. “They are making sure predators don't find their nests by following their footprints.”

The last of the turtles disappeared into the waters as silently as they had arrived. They would never see their babies hatch, would not return for one full year to lay another batch of eggs at the edge of the sea that had been there longer than even they had. Their young might live or die. The eggs they left with so much care might yield another generation of turtles—or not. Sripathi thought about the chanciness of existence, the beauty and the hope and the loss that always accompanied life, and felt a boulder roll slowly off his heart.
Perhaps in their long, unknown journey from one sea to another, across oceans and past shifting continents, a turtle might meet one of her offspring and glide by without knowing it. And half a century later, those baby turtles would return to this same shore, drawn by a desire that had been etched into their memories. Who understood the ways of those silent creatures who had claimed this planet aeons before we did? reflected Sripathi, stretching his stiff limbs. But he had caught a glimmer of the reason his son came to the beach at this time every year, when the clouds hung pregnant in the sky and the night was darker than a crow's wing. It had annoyed him, this annual ritual, when Arun disappeared at ten in the night and came home only after dawn—collecting the eggs, he had said elusively, so sure of Sripathi's disapproval that he had ventured no further explanation.

He looked down at his son, who was still seated, staring at the sea as if communing with the ancient creatures that it rocked in its depths. What a strange man he had fathered. Arun had slipped through twenty-eight years of existence gently, rewarded for it by Sripathi's irritation, his disappointment, even his contempt.

They sat until the tide started to recede and the fishing boats could be seen—dark, bobbing shapes against the lightening sky.

“Shall we go now?” he asked Arun in a gentler tone than he had ever used to his son.

Big House smelled of phenyl and bleach. The Boys had cleaned it as well as they could, but all along the wall, two feet off the ground, ran a brown line marking the height that the water had reached. The sofa in the living room had all but dissolved, and Nirmala had left it in the backyard for the Boys to take away. She seemed to harbour none of the reservations that Sripathi did about taking Munnuswamy's help. The windows in Ammayya's room had been forced open, and the stained glass washed clean except for pockets of black dirt that soap solution couldn't remove. All of the saris that Ammayya had stored in trunks were ruined. The jewellery was
fine, if a bit odorous, although later, much later, when Nirmala and Putti took it all to the goldsmith on Krishnaiah Chetty Road to have it polished for the wedding, they would discover that it was fake—made of silver or brass dipped in gold water. Every single piece of it, the jeweller would tell them regretfully, except for the diamond earrings and the necklaces that she had given Sripathi in the hospital. All else that remained was a few gold coins and the bars of silver that she had hoarded in the years after Narasimha's death by selling newspapers and old saris.

“He cheated her,” Putti would say on their way back. “My father gave her rubbish jewellery. My poor Ammayya. Good thing she didn't know.”

“How do you know that she didn't?” Nirmala would ask. “Your mother was not a fool.”

On the balcony, Sripathi sat in his old chair, surrounded by his writing paraphernalia. He had just finished the newspaper, which had a news item that he thought would have pleased Ammayya. The cyclone had struck Madras as well and flooded the chief minister out of her house. According to the report, she had been bailed out in a boat.

Now he opened the sandalwood box that he had removed from Nirmala's cupboard. He took out a stack of aerograms and envelopes thick with letters from Maya. He opened one of them carefully. She began, “
My dear Appu, Mamma, Arun
 …” Always in descending order, according to age. He looked at the neat, slanting writing, and finally the tears spilled forth unchecked.

There was a small sound near the door of his room and he knew, without looking, that it was Nandana. “Are you crying because your mother died?” she asked.

“Yes, partly that,” he replied. He wiped his face with one of the towels hanging on the railing.

“My mother also died.”

“Yes, she was my daughter.”

There was no response, but when Sripathi turned he saw that the little girl was still there, leaning against the door jamb, chewing on a strand of hair.

“What is in that big box on the table?” she asked pointing a finger at the unopened writing case.

“Come here, I'll show you. If you want,” invited Sripathi.

She came slowly to him, sliding one foot after another, ever ready to turn and run. He opened the box and ran a hand over the pens arranged against the warm, reddish-brown wood.

“Pens!” she exclaimed. “So many! Are they all yours?”

“Yes, but you can choose one.”

“To keep for ever?”

“Yes, for ever,” Sripathi agreed. “How about this one?” He picked up the silver Hero, unscrewed the cap, and wrote
Nandana
with a flourish on a sheet of paper.

She frowned thoughtfully and leaned closer to see what else was in the box. He could smell her hair, the smell of sweetness and youth, he imagined.

“May I have
that
one instead?” she asked finally, pointing to a small red pen that he had bought for fifty paise from a roadside vendor when he was in college. It was the cheapest one in his collection.

“If you wish,” he said, the beginning of a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. Just like her mother, he thought. She liked to make her own choices. “What will you do with it?”

“I want to write a letter to Molly and Yee,” she said importantly, settling down on the floor near him. “May I have a sheet of paper too?”

The temple bell that had been ringing ever since he had come home from the beach at dawn finally stopped. Sripathi waited for the lory bird to start singing, but instead the air was filled with an awful racket. It was Gopinath Nayak, the donkey, waking the
world with his voice. Moments later, the sound was drowned out by a loud, sliding roar. From where he sat, Sripathi saw the lorry emptying its load of broken granite slabs in front of the gates of Jyoti Flats.

“Oy!” shouted the Gurkha, dancing out of the gates and waving his baton. “Is this your father-in-law's house, or what?”

And the lorry driver leaned out of his cab high above the ground and shouted back, “Is it your father-in-law's
road
?”

Sripathi drew his tablet of paper forward and selected a pen. He thought about his daughter and her husband, about Ammayya and his father, and about all that he had lost and found. How was he to put it all into words?

“
Dear Editor
,” he wrote finally. “
Early this morning, at the Toturpuram beach, I saw the most amazing sight …”