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

suppressing rage at her own husband’s philandering had made Sripathi’s mother righteous and judgmental from a young age.
    â€œHow can you know for sure?” Sripathi had asked. His father, the lawyer, had trained him to question everything.
    â€œHave you seen her face?” Ammayya demanded. “She looks like she fell into a tin of powder. What respectable widow uses so much kohl and colours her lips? And wears flashy earrings and saris flaming with flowers? See how she slants her eyes and snares men. Innocent married ones even!”
    Despite Ammayya’s poisonous rantings, Shantamma liked Rukku, although since the woman had become an outcast, a whore, a trollop, an unmentionable in decent homes, she had not had the courage to go near her or to even to smile at her. But after her stroke,she decided that she was too old to care about rules and manners and self-respect, and all her secret longings surfaced like lava erupting from a volcano. She developed a loud hectoring voice, gagged and choked over strong beedis that she forgot to extinguish and, on several occasions, nearly burnt down the house as a result. She sat with her legs spread indecently wide, she got the dhobi’s son to smuggle her a bottle of illicit liquor, which he brewed in the empty plot behind the house, and she summoned Rukku for a chat, driving Ammayya into such a froth of panic that she almost had a stroke herself. Shantamma refused to lie down any more because she didn’t want Death to catch her unawares while she slept. Having triumphed over him once, she wasn’t about to let him lasso her until she was good and ready.
    â€œYou see,” she told Sripathi, her voice like the crackle of butter-paper, “in our mythology, there is the story of Savitri. Do you remember? How she argued and bargained with Lord Yama for the life of her husband? Well, if a snivelling little thing like her could do it, why not me? Eh? Eh? Am I any less beautiful?”
    She would, Shantamma said giggling, tweak the god’s enormous curled moustache and flirt with him a bit, but for all that she would have to be awake. So she sat in her favourite chair, the huge carved teak armchair with its faded yellow silk cushions that looked like her own spreading, liverspotted buttocks, and never went to sleep. When she finally did die, her eyes were wide open and challenging, and her bony, ridged fingers were curled around the arms of her chair so tightly that they couldn’t be pried loose. The chair had to be sawed away from her body, and—since rigor mortis had stiffened her so that she could not be straightened without cracking several bones—Shantamma was cremated sitting upright, two pieces of teak in her tightly closed fists, her face clenched in a grimace of triumph, as if she had actually confronted Lord Yama and bargained her way out of his clutches.
    Sripathi was devastated by his grandmother’s death. She had been his buffer against his mother’s expectations for him to be thebest son in the whole wide world, to be a renowned heart surgeon, the president of a company, the prime minister of India, a hero. She had protected him from his father’s increasingly tyrannical rages, loved him for what he was, and that unconditional affection had been his strength. Three years later, when Sripathi’s father, Narasimha Rao, B.A., M.A., LL.B., died, he was devastated again, not so much by the loss this time as from his sudden ascension from being the son of the house, with no responsibilities, to being the man of the family, with Ammayya and his unmarried sister, Putti, to look out for. He had barely figured out what he was going to do with his own life, and now he was in charge of two others as well.
    Sripathi often thought that, if not for chance, fate, call it what you will, he might have been the seventh of eight children instead of the only son. Unfortunately for him, after six miscarriages, he was the first