Read Online The Hero's Walk by Anita Rau Badami - Free Book Online Page A

things died.
    â€œBut will you die too? And me and Daddy?” she had asked, after she’d thought it over.
    To which her mother had replied, “Yes, but only when we are all a hundred years old.”
    Her mother was only thirty-four and her father thirty-six, so they couldn’t be dead. No
way
! She pursed her lips. Aunty andUncle were lying to her. She knew that for sure. Her parents had gone to a wedding in Squamish. Aunty Kiran was an old witch, she could see that now. She wanted to keep her here for ever, just like she had said, and so she was making up stories. She decided she had better not say another word.
    â€œWe spoke to your grandfather in India, Nandu,” continued Uncle Sunny. “He’ll be coming here. That will be nice, right?”
    How would she know? She had never met her grandfather. She wondered if he counted as a stranger, even though Nandana had seen his photographs in her mother’s album.
    â€œYou will be going to India with him. You’ll meet your grandma, your uncle, lots of nice people.”
    To India? No
way
. How would her parents find her when they came home?
    She heard Aunty Kiran’s voice above her head. “Sunny, I think the child is in shock or something. She hasn’t said a word.”

4

HISTORIES

    A LONG TIME AGO , when he was about seven or eight years old, Sripathi had believed that death was something that happened to people who reached the end of Brahmin Street, the end that curved around the two-hundred-year-old banyan tree and meandered like a dull black river for a few more yards until it reached the beach. On Saturday mornings, he used to swing on the gate of Big House and wait for the goat boys to pass with their noisy, skittish herds.
    â€œWhere are you taking them?” he had asked a goat boy once, and the boy had replied, “To the palace of the King of Death.”
    And in the afternoon he would see brawny men, their checked cotton lungis folded up to their knees, slowly wheeling bicycles back from the palace of the King of Death. Slung like dirty black-and-white washing over the back seats of the cycles were headless goats. Their necks still oozed blood and bubbled with shimmering, buzzing bluebottles intoxicated by the scent of raw flesh. Until finally someone started a written petition against the butchers who used the street as a short cut to the Saturday market, the place the goat boys drove their herds, and they stopped going past with their gory purchases. For several months after, Sripathi used to scream with fear every time his father offered to take him to the beach on a Saturday morning, down Brahmin Street and past the old banyan tree.
    But until he was thirteen, Sripathi had never really lost anyone close to him. Death was as distant a possibility as Mars or Venus. He believed, in a vague sort of way, that the god Yama came swaying on his buffalo, dragging his lasso behind him, only to the very poor or the very old. The first time it touched him was when his grandmother Shantamma passed away. She had struggled long and hard to stay on in the world, and Sripathi couldn’t believe it when she was finally vanquished by time and age and ill-health.
    When Shantamma was eighty-two, she had suffered a stroke in her sleep. But she had come out of it determined to fight Lord Yama tooth and nail because there were too many things that she had not done in her life. Such as smoking a cigar. Or colouring her hair like the women in foreign magazines. Or flying in a plane. Or eating an egg fried in a vegetarian pan and using the same pan for Brahmin food. Or gossiping with Rukku, who had been exiled by the people of Toturpuram for sleeping with three men since her husband’s death. Nobody had actually
seen
her with any of these men—nobody even knew who those men were—but it was obvious that she had done it, declared Ammayya, horrified by her mother-in-law’s desire to associate with the woman. Years of