The Hero's Walk Read Online Free PDF

second-floor apartment in Jyothi Flats, Block A, one of two unimaginative structures that stood back to back, like oversized boxes, to the right of Big House. The Burmese Wife had lived in that apartment for more than five years, and yet it seemed nobody knew her name. Some said she was from Burma, and others whispered that she was actually a Chinese prisoner of war held captive by the morose Lieutenant Colonel Hansraj, her husband. Sripathi had never discovered whether this was true or simply a story inspired by the woman’s slanting eyes, her slight body and the unrecognizable language in which she cursed her maidservant.
    The Burmese Wife was hugely superstitious and had a running feud with the family in the flat above her own because they hung their washing over the balcony rail.
    â€œBad luck to have another woman’s wet sari touch my face,” she screamed, her shrill voice with its rounded Bengali-sounding accent startling a pair of crows away from a neighbouring balcony. “It will make me a widow!” The maidservant upstairs ignored her and continued to drape the washing over the railing. To Sripathi’s relief, the Burmese Wife stopped screaming and marched inside her flat. But in a few moments she came out again, brandishing a pair of gardening shears. “To teach them to respect other people’s feelings,” she said, catching sight of Sripathi. “Some people have to be taught everything, even when they are grey-haired.” With a grim smile, she chopped off the ends of all the saris and sheets that encroached on her space. There was a commotion in the flat upstairs as the maid realized what the bits of fabric were. She yelled for the mistress of the house, and moments later war broke out.
    Then, from the first-floor apartment directly below the Burmese Wife’s, there came an awful howl. It was Gopinath Nayak, the young civil servant, exercising his vocal chords. Sripathi winced as he launched discordantly into an old Tamil film song. One of these days he would tell the fellow exactly how he felt about that racket. “Gopinath Nayak,” he would say firmly, “you sound like a donkey in labour. If you don’t shut up, I am going to jam your throat with cement.”
    He gazed down, smiling at the sight of a group of college girls in pale cotton saris, their hair done up in fashionable styles, drifting towards the gates of the apartment compound. He spotted Mrs. Poorna peering eagerly out from her ground-floor patio.
    â€œHere darling, here,” she cooed in Tamil. “Your mother has made it for you, with lots of sugar, just as you like it.” A kissing sound followed.
    Sripathi sighed. The poor woman was talking to thin air as usual. As the day progressed she would babble on, her voice a smallwave of sound unfurling gently beneath the turbulence around her. By noon she would start to wail. She would beat her breast, clutch her grey hair and beg God to return her darling child. Sometimes, if the neighbours complained, the poor relative who looked after her in exchange for board and lodging, would drag her roughly inside the apartment. Most of the time, however, Mrs. Poorna stayed on her patio until her husband came home and coaxed her inside. Years before, they had lost their only child, an eight-year-old girl who had disappeared as completely as a drop of dew from the front yard. Everybody had seen the child playing hopscotch in her oversized dress bought to last at least a year, her pigtails flying out like dark comets, her young voice mingling with all the others. But suddenly she was gone. The Gurkha who guarded the gates all day insisted that she could not have left the compound. But despite all of the time that had passed, Mrs. Poorna still waited for her daughter’s return. Every day she made sugar parathas, every day she waited on the patio and every day she continued to hope.
    â€œWater will be coming in ten minutes,” Nirmala called