Free The Hero's Walk by Anita Rau Badami Page A

gather him in her jowly arms, pinch his sharp little chin (which in adulthood would give him the look of a prim bird), and say creakily, “Now, you, my darling Sri, my raja, my beautiful boy, you will grow up and become like Prince Arjuna, won’t you? You will conquer every obstacle. You will come first in your class and become a great doctor, a heart doctor, and you will do big-big operations all over the world.”
    While the young Sripathi adored his grandmother’s stories, richly trimmed with Sanskrit verses from the Mahabharata or the Ramayana, a dread grew within him that he would never be able to do the things that she seemed to expect of him. How could he learn archery, philosophy, music, art, politics, science—all the things that great heroes of yore seemed capable of excelling at simultaneously? As for utter, heaven-shaking honesty, like that of King Harishchandra, who sold his wife and child for the sake of truth—why, just the other day he had lied to Ammayya about eating everything she had packed in his lunch box. Not to mention the fib he had told Father Schmidt about his missing homework. (“I’m sorry, Father, my grandmother threw it away by mistake,” he had mumbled, knowing that if the grim-faced English teacher did indeed ask Shantamma, she would support his story.) But the thing Sripathiloved most about his grandmother was that she herself never followed any of the morals expounded in the tales she narrated to him. And when one day he confided his fears to her, she clutched him against her breasts, kissed him all over his face and said, “My raja, you will be my prince, even if you end up as a street sweeper.”
    Narasimha Rao bought his son the complete
Encyclopaedia Britannica
on his fourth birthday and expected him to start absorbing every page immediately, even though the child could barely read. The volumes sat like plump potentates on the shelf in the drawing-room, dressed up in maroon and gold, a sign to everyone who visited that this was a house of learning.
    â€œYou read one page to him every day,” Narasimha commanded Ammayya. “Make sure he by-hearts it.” At dinner time he would quiz Sripathi on the page of the day, and if the boy failed to answer, he would explode.
    â€œIdiot, idiot, you have given birth to an idiot!” he would shout at Ammayya, his heavy face flushed with emotion. Turning to his son, he would fix him with a look that paralyzed Sripathi and made him forget all that he did know. “Don’t think your father will be around for the rest of your life, mutthal,” he continued. “One of these days, when you are sweeping the streets, you will wish you had listened to me and studied harder.”
    Sometimes, when Sripathi had looked numbly at him for more than three questions, Narasimha would rise ominously from his chair. He would fasten his fingers like a vice on the lobe of his son’s ear and pull him up until he, too, was standing. Wordlessly, he would drag Sripathi out through the living room, with its looming cupboards full of ancient books and its dark, brooding furniture, through the verandah and out of the gate. Down Brahmin Street they would go, Sripathi sobbing with pain and shame as pedestrians gazed curiously at them. A few of the old men who gathered daily at the gates of the Krishna Temple to gossip and bemoan the ways of the younger generation would shout encouragement;“That’s it, Narasimha-orey! Teach the young fellow right from wrong. Otherwise he will climb on your back like the vetaala and never get off!” Past Sanskrit College, the pressure of Narasimha’s fingers burning on Sripathi’s tender ear, and into the squatters’ colony, where the road grew narrow and huts made of rags and tins and stolen bricks crowded around open drains.
    â€œThere, you see, idiot—
that
’s where you will end up if you don’t learn the things I ask you to,”