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Plight
And Prejudice
Mini
Kapoor
The
Hero’s Walk
By Anita Rau Badami
Bloomsbury
Price: Rs 370
Early in Anita Rau Badami’s new novel, the central character
compares his wife to a bar of Lifebuoy soap — ‘‘functional
but devoid of all imagination’’. It’s a description Sripathi
Rao, a 57-year-old copywriter in small town India, would perhaps
have summoned to sum up most aspects of his life till the
day his world comes tumbling down.
In
this book of loss and reclamation, death and rebirth, Badami
explores how the sudden exit of a single person — no matter
how far away, how estranged — changes the lives of all the
inhabitants of Big House in hot and humid Toturpuram. Sripathi
had disowned his daughter Maya nine years ago after she broke
her engagement with the suitable NRI boy he had picked for
her to marry Alan, a fellow student at an American university.
Nine years in which nothing really changed in Big House, an
ancestral property increasingly at odds with the apartment
blocks springing up around and with the Rao family’s dipping
fortunes.
Sripathi,
feeling more and more redundant in his job at a local ad firm,
now engages with the world by penning anonymous letters to
the editor. His wife Nirmala takes Bharatnatyam classes to
help make ends meet and maintains a furtive correspondence
with Maya. Their son, Arun, languishes over his doctoral thesis
while annoying his father with his activisim to save the turtles
and have mechanised fishing banned. Sripathi’s mother, rendered
a wicked caricature after her disappointments with a long-dead,
uncaring husband and a son who never became the doctor or
judge of her dreams, keeps sneaking around the house, finding
titbits to pinch. She holds on tight to her daughter, Putti,
who in turn despairs over a lonely life ahead.
Into this house enters Maya’s daughter Nandana, turned mute
after her death in a road accident in Canada. This quiet seven
year old, wide-eyed in a new country and a new family, changes
every life in mossy Big House by her very presence. Sripathi,
for ever denied the opportunity to forgive his daughter, must
break fresh barriers of silence to seek forgiveness himself.
Nirmala, with a new ward to fuss over, fast makes peace with
her fate, and goes about trying to better other, inertia-ed
lives.
Badami’s Toturpuram, with its changing seasons mirroring the
tumult in Big House, demands comparisons with Narayan’s Malgudi.
It is a town that reveals a changing, yet always enduring,
India during patient walkabouts, a town at once unique yet
representative of everywhere else. In fact, Badami applies
Narayan’s quiet humour as she chisels her cast to extract
interesting stories from Lifebuoy characters. It is a familiar
dignity that envelops the residents of Big House as they each
attempt to live in truth, to wash away Toturpuram’s daily
humiliations — at the hands of rude truck drivers, bosses
spinning in higher orbits, neighbours who have clambered up
the ladder after striking the right connections.
Yet, unlike Narayan, Badami appears to be looking back in
time while detailing contemporary life. It could immediately
invite the familiar charge of a writer ensconced abroad mining
her native land for stories. But that would be a petty accusation.
Instead, it could be a temporal dissonance accounted for by
the fact that she is seeking to reclaim relevance for folks
who fear their time may be long past.
Give her a chance, these tales soaked in sorrow, coated with
fortitude, announce a rare talent.
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