Narasimha found frequent occasion to repeat this wisdom to his son. Sometimes Sripathi had to be dragged back from a cricket game in the alley behind their house to study his text books. And at other times, when the boy brought home low marks from school or did not have an answer to some question from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Narasimha would first thrash him with a rolled up magazine, and then remind him of the time he had frittered away. “A valuable gift, did you hear? Not to be wasted the way you are wasting it, mutthal. Time and tide, time and tide wait for no man. Today you are merrily playing with loafers like the cricket in that Aesop fellow’s story, but tomorrow, while industrious ants are living like rajas, you will be sweeping the streets. And why? Because they used time properly, and you, mutthal, did not.”
Sripathi remembered his initiation ceremony as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. He was the centre of attention, up there on the small wooden platform where he sat between Ammayya, who was dressed like a new bride in all her finery, and his father, whose silk dhoti fell in graceful folds from his waist. The priest chanted prayers that floated around them as frail as the smoke from the sandalwood fire in the middle of the platform. The ritual shaving of Sripathi’s hair; the solemnity of the moment when he disappeared under a sheet of unbleached cotton with his father to receive the secret mantra that initiated him into Brahminhood; the sacred thread that was looped over his shoulder and across his chest; and later, the tenderness with which Ammayya fed him delicacies from a silver plate—he remembered them all. He had stepped out of his mother’s shadow and into his father’s, no longer a child but a man.
Varadarajan Judge-sahib had teased him about the thread. “See, now you have only three strands in this thread. Your responsibilities are small—only to yourself and to your parents. But when you get married, ah, then you will have six strands. A wife means twice the responsibility! Eh? What do you say, Narasimha Rao?”
The two men had laughed, and Sripathi, too, had chuckled, a little frightened at the thought of being responsible for any one at all.
He couldn’t remember precisely when the woman in the green-and-gold sari had entered the large hall crowded with people, but it seemed to him now that a whisper had moved like a hot wind through the room, marking her arrival. Sripathi could still feel the burning sensation on his wrist where his mother had clutched him, her nails digging painfully into the tender skin. In her shame and rage, she did not realize the force of her grip.
“Why is she here?” she had whispered angrily, glaring at Narasimha, who didn’t seem to have noticed the woman. He had his arm around Sripathi’s shoulders, and he nodded and smiled as people streamed past, congratulating them on this auspicious occasion.
“Who?” Narasimha had asked.
“Your whore. Don’t pretend you haven’t seen her,” said Ammayya.
The memory unwound before Sripathi, a film in slow motion. The woman dressed in green and gold, making her way through the crowd towards them, the pallu draped carefully over her shoulder, her eyes slightly anxious, the nervous movement of her left hand as it smoothed the pleats of her sari. His father’s whore? At ten years of age, Sripathi wasn’t sure what exactly that word meant, and why it made his mother so furious that she was tearing off his wrist with her fingernails.
The woman reached them and pressed an envelope into Sripathi’s hands, not looking at his parents or at anybody else but him. “Blessings,” she said in a low voice. She reached out, stroked his head and was just turning away when Ammayya grabbed the envelope, ripped it into small pieces and flung it at the woman.
A hush descended on the hall, and it seemed to Sripathi as if all five hundred guests had chosen that very moment to stop talking and stare at the scene in the centre of the room.
“Don’t come near my son,” hissed Ammayya. “Whore!”
Then followed the greater horror, when Sripathi’s father moved away from him, towards the woman, and led her carefully out of the hall, his hand hovering just above the small of her back, as if she were one of Ammayya’s precious Japanese teacups that allowed sunlight to filter through their eggshell fragility. A feeling of great abandonment swept through Sripathi as he watched his father’s stiff back, the rigid body carving a path through the crowd of friends, relatives and well-wishers. He and Ammayya stood there, becalmed like two small dinghies, linked by their shared humiliation. Never would he allow this to happen to himself again, Sripathi had sworn bitterly. Never would he fail in his duty to his family or subject them to such shame. He did not want either his father’s fame or stature because the higher one was, the greater the fall. No, he would be only an ordinary man, but one with good standing in the eyes of the world. He would be a simple man, respected for nothing other than his qualities as a father and a husband. He, unlike his father, would always remain dutiful to the mother who had brought him into this world, to the woman he married, to the children he had—first and above everything else. This the young boy vowed to himself, as he stood there feeling the fierce pain of Ammayya’s grip on his thin wrist, as he willed the tears not to fall and shame him in front of this gathering who had come to witness him crossing the threshold of innocence.
Sripathi hated his father completely at that moment, and the feeling grew stronger with time. No longer did that tall, stately figure fill him with pride and awe, or even fear. No longer did he care about his father’s opinion of him or his wrath when he brought home bad marks on his school exams. He watched scornfully when his father went to the temple for morning worship, his cotton towel draped severely over his left shoulder. And in the evening, after dinner, Sripathi watched him leave for his mistress’s home, with that same shalya now slung rakishly over his other shoulder.
When he was sixteen, he was horrified and disgusted to see his mother swelling with child again. How, he wondered, enraged, could she allow that man to lay a finger on her? The hate had built up and coagulated in him so violently that when he first gazed at Narasimha’s bleeding, lifeless body abandoned on the road, he had felt nothing but a remote sense of contempt. For all his grand ways, his mighty father had died like a pariah dog, his passing noticed by none but other dogs. But with a jolt of anger, he realized that the street was the very one on which his father’s mistress lived. It was on her door that people had knocked first, not on his own mother’s. Sripathi had seen the woman in the crowd that gathered around his father’s body, her eyes liquid with tears, her sari bunched tight in her hand and pressed to her mouth, as if to prevent her agony from spilling forth. He had wondered what his father had found in this illiterate, plain, crude-looking woman.
Narasimha’s death brought with it penury and the sharp fear that always accompanies a lack of money. Sripathi discovered that his father had not saved a single paisa. There was a tiny pension, but there were also loans to be repaid—to friends, relatives, even to the bank. The sixteen-year-old had remembered the fate of a distant relative who had died a pauper. Narasimha had taken his family to visit the relative when Sripathi was eight years old. He had never really known the reason behind that visit. Perhaps his father had been a kinder man than he remembered. The relative lived in a single room at the back of somebody’s house. He had two scrawny, wide-eyed daughters and a sullen wife. He had been absurdly pleased to see Narasimha, Ammayya and Sripathi, treating them as if they were royalty and ordering hard vadais from a restaurant nearby for them to eat with the sugarless tea his wife made. Sripathi remembered with shame the hunger in the eyes of the two young girls. He had not even thought to offer them some of the oversalted lentil rings that tasted as though they’d been fried in rancid oil, and which he eventually left half-eaten on his plate.
When the relative died, his wife had sent a letter around to the family, begging for money. They could not afford to buy a clean cotton shroud to wrap around the dead body; they had no money to pay for mango wood for the funeral pyre; their abject poverty was not merely wretched, it was terrifying.
“Sell the house,” suggested a
trustee at the Toturpuram Bank.
Both Sripathi and Ammayya had turned down that idea. The house was all they had to mark their former status. “We will manage,” Ammayya told everybody. “My son is already sixteen. He will finish school soon and become a doctor. He will take care of us.” She did, however, sell the house in which Narasimha Rao’s mistress lived. Sripathi was taken aback by his mother’s ruthlessness and even felt sorry for the woman, who disappeared from Toturpuram. But the money from the sale allowed them to repay some of the loans and to continue to live in Big House.
On the third Sunday of every month, Ammayya took Sripathi and Putti, dressed in their best clothes, to her uncle’s house in the neighbouring town of Royapura. Hari Mama was a wealthy old bachelor who, people suspected, preferred young boys to women. Ammayya had always avoided the old man, but now she had a purpose in life.
“Two purposes,” she told Sripathi when he protested that, since they had never kept in touch with the old man, this sudden affection might look suspicious. “You and Putti are the two purposes in my life, and it doesn’t matter what people think of me. The important thing is to take care of you two.”
Hari Mama lived in an enormous house with a swing on the verandah, which was reserved for unwanted visitors and hangerson. Inside the house, in the centre of a mirrored hall, was another swing made of sandalwood and ivory. Its decadence both repelled Sripathi and fascinated him. This was Hari Mama’s favourite swing. Only specially chosen people were allowed on it. Sripathi was granted that privilege just once, and he couldn’t even remember the reason. He did, however, recall the strangeness of the experience—seeing his reflection repeating endlessly in the mirrored walls of that room, swinging towards himself and farther away all at the same moment.
“Don’t forget to be polite to the old man,” Ammayya used to tell Sripathi, as they hurried in the raging heat of morning from the bus terminal to Hari Mama’s house. “Always agree with him. He might decide to leave you something big, Deo volente—God willing. After all, we are his only living relatives.”
As soon as they arrived at the house, the old man would give Sripathi and Ammayya two bananas each, insisting that they eat them right away. “Good for health—vitamins, phosphorus, iron. Never say no to a banana.” And later, on their way home, Ammayya would grumble that if she collected the bananas in a basket and sold them, at least they would have one bus fare home. Instead she would pretend that they were going to catch a taxi, just to give Hari Mama the impression that they had come for purely altruistic reasons. Money, she took pains to remind the old man and the dozens of other people who always seemed to be in the house—money was no problem for her. Narasimha had left them well-off. She was here merely to ensure that her children were acquainted with their only great-uncle.
Sripathi always felt angry and humiliated in that opulent house. He despised himself for laughing uproariously over every one of Hari Mama’s jokes, even when they were laboured and unfunny, and for leaping up to fetch a glass of water each time the old man coughed. Deep inside, he knew that the old man was not in the least deceived by this show of devotion.
“What, boy,” Hari Mama had teased him on one occasion, to the great amusement of the other sycophants in the room. “What, boy, if I asked you to lick my shoes clean, would you do it? I hear that spit is good for shoe leather!”
And Sripathi, too, had been obliged to chuckle and lower his head, when all he wanted was to drag his mother away from the kitchen where, with the help of several other women, she was making an endless supply of hot coffee.
When they left for home, Ammayya would lead them a mile past the nearest bus stop, pretending to look for a taxi, and they would catch the bus to Toturpuram at the next halt.
When Hari Mama died, he left all his property to a small theatre group.
Ammayya swallowed her disappointment over Hari Mama’s lost fortune and set about pushing her son towards a career in medicine; she had found out that there was a code among doctors that obliged them to treat each other’s families free of charge. When she was old and needed medical care, she calculated, her son would be able to ensure that she was looked after without incurring any expense.
Having decided Sripathi’s future for him, Ammayya then concentrated on becoming the perfect widow. She was determined to erase all memory of the whore from people’s minds, to show the world that she was Narasimha Rao’s bereaved wife. To Sripathi’s embarrassment, she insisted on having her head shaved like the widows of the previous generation and ordered Shakespeare Kuppalloor, the barber, to come to the house every month to remove the new stubble. It didn’t matter when relatives pointed out that even her own mother-in-law, Shantamma, had maintained her snowy fall of hair and that there was no need for such old-fashioned observances. She wore only maroon cotton saris, even though she continued to wear her gold chains and bangles. She was afraid that her jewellery, the only thing of value that she owned, would be stolen by thieves. “If I keep them on me, they will have to cut my throat to remove my chains,” she told Sripathi. She swore off certain vegetables, like garlic and onions, that were believed to have aphrodisiac qualities and were therefore forbidden to widows. She dug up archaic fasts and rituals and became more rigidly Brahmanical than the temple’s own priest. When Sripathi, in his hoarse adolescent voice, told her that she was being foolish, excessive in her zeal to be faithful to Narasimha’s memory, she berated him for his lack of respect.
“You will have the right to order me around when you are earning a living. When you are a doctor, then you can tell your mother what to do and what not to do,” she told him fiercely. “Your job now is to concentrate on doing well in school and on getting into medicine. We have to show people that Narasimha Rao’s son is as brilliant as he was.”
Even after all these years, Sripathi felt a sharp twinge of shame at the way he had abandoned medical school after barely a year. His admission to the school had been so hard. He remembered wistfully Ammayya’s solicitous attentions as he stayed up all night mugging up volumes of information for the entrance exams. He had got in, but he hated it from the very beginning. He had struggled through the courses, the dozens of medical terms buzzing in his head, refusing to let him sink into sleep at night. The relentless pressure of learning every tiny detail of the human body—the things that make it work, the things that kill it or make it falter in its long walk through life—piled up on him and pressed him down until he felt that he would end up as one of those bodies in the morgue. The smell of corpses that reeked of formaldehyde seemed to stick to his skin for weeks. He found it impossible to look at food without imagining its journey through the glistening pink coils of his body, and he couldn’t sleep for the thunder of his heart in his ears. He had never been so aware of the labouring machines of lung and kidney and brain that pulsed and pounded within his fretwork of bones, of the veins and arteries that shunted his blood up and down his body ceaselessly, of the cells that contained secret, ancient memories of growth and decay and death, and of the taut fragility of skin that contained it all. Medical school revealed the mysteries of his humming body and rendered it gross and ordinary. Finally, he had run away from the place, jumped into a third-class train compartment and arrived home at midnight. He had walked all the way from the station, carrying his bedroll and his tin trunk, their weight a penance for his failure.
He had lied when Ammayya asked what had happened. “I could not stand the smell of the dead,” he had told her. “They say that even the hostel food is polluted by human blood. They cook vegetarian meals in the same pots used for meat.” Any lie to hide his cowardice from the mother whose heart had burst with pride when he’d got into the school.
Ammayya had believed him for a long time, and when she did accidentally read the letter expelling him for prolonged and unexplained absence, it was too late. Sripathi was already married, in a job and about to become a father. She had never forgiven him for betraying her dreams and ambitions, for cheating her like her husband had done
for so many years, for taking away the possibility of a comfortable old age. For a while after he had joined the tiny advertising agency, he wished that he had kept on somehow at medical school. Or listened to his father-in-law’s advice and become a weather man with the meteorological department in Madras. “The weather is always with us,” the old man had told him. “Where it will go, tell me? As long as this earth exists, we will have wind and rain and storms and all. You will never be out of a job.”
When Sripathi started his career at the advertising agency, it was only a small business run by one of his father’s old friends out of the ground floor of his home. In moments of self-doubt, he wondered whether Chandra Iyer had taken him on out of pity or because he was Narasimha Rao’s son. The job involved nothing more demanding than dreaming up jingles for local products like tooth powder, hair oil and incense sticks. Their biggest customer was the government hand-loom factory that manufactured brightly checked bed-sheets and coarse cotton saris. The agency also printed invitations for weddings, christenings and upanayana ceremonies. The local branch of the Lions Club got its newsletter printed as well, and Sripathi had to write florid tributes to every member, to accompany blurred black-and-white photographs of them planting trees or inaugurating tube-wells in various parts of Toturpuram. Once in a while, when Chandra’s daughter visited, Sripathi was given the task of entertaining her three young children. He had to tell them stories, take them for ice cream to Iyengar Bakery, make origami fish out of scraps from the wastepaper baskets, and once even take them to the circus.
Soon after Sripathi’s twenty-fourth birthday, a friend in Bangalore sent Ammayya a photograph of his niece, along with a copy of her horoscope. “Nirmala is a quiet, steady girl,” he wrote. “Wheatish complexion, slim and pretty. She is also an accomplished dancer. She will make a good wife for your son and a loving daughter-in-law.”
The Hero's Walk Page 7
