The Hero's Walk by Anita Rau Badami

Author:Anita Rau Badami [Badami, Anita Rau]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary
ISBN: 9780747557968
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Published: 2000-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

At around four o’clock the next morning, a loud rumble travelled like a tsunami through the moist, heavy air and sent him scrambling out of bed, heart thudding wildly. Thunder, he thought, reaching for his glasses on the windowsill. Thunder at last! But when he looked out at the grey, pre-dawn sky, in which a pale moon still lingered, there was not a cloud to be seen. He waited for another rumble, wondering whether his yearning for rain had translated itself into imaginary sound. If only his longing could touch the still sky and turn it into a churning sea of charcoal cloud. Could one’s will, strong and unwavering, touch the hearts of the gods, of nature herself?

Years ago, Sripathi had gone with Shantamma to a music concert. He had been reluctant to accompany her, bored by the thought of sitting through three hours of singing in the dark theatre with its thatched roof and humming mosquitoes. But his grandmother had told him that it was important for his soul. Music, she had said, had the power to rouse Varuna and Vayu, the gods of the ocean and of the wind, and compel them to fill the clouds with rain. “And some ragaas,” the old lady had assured him—nodding her head and ecstatically keeping time with the flat of her hand on her thigh—“have such heat and passion that when they are sung, a thousand oil lamps will ignite spontaneously. But only when an ustaad, a master of music, produces them.” That certainly eliminated that donkey Gopinath Nayak.

He stretched his arms wide and knocked over a pile of books and papers that had been balanced on the windowsill beside the bed. He tutted impatiently and scrabbled in the narrow gap between cot and wall, pulling out old newspaper clippings, sheets of paper (on which Nirmala had briefly tried to account for all the money they spent each month), a magazine with a sexy film star on the cover and a slim book of poetry by Pablo Neruda—a gift from Maya for his forty-sixth birthday, just a year before her departure for the States. Once in a while Koti went on a cleaning spree and piled everything neatly, according to size. But the order she imposed was only temporary. Like a number of things on the windowsill, the volume of poems, too, had gathered dust all these years, waiting to be put away, read or organized. But Sripathi had not picked it up, even to glance at it. Last week, on an impulse, he had started it, his curiosity aroused after a documentary on the poet had aired unexpectedly on television, in between the Kannada song-and-dance sequences and soap operas that Ammayya and Putti watched avidly. Sripathi liked to think that he was the only person in his family who had any taste at all, but he was also shy about this opinion and felt a delicate, hidden pleasure in keeping it to himself. He had found himself fascinated by the poems, even though he couldn’t fathom the poet’s meaning at times.

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