The Hero's Walk

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Sripathi Rao is a 57-year-old middle-class Indian man whose past is
suddenly closing in on him from all sides. He suspects that he is about
to be fired from his advertising agency job because he is too
old-fashioned. If that happens, he will lose the only home he has ever
known, a crumbling family mansion he inherited that is saddled with
debts run up on it by his wastrel father. Ruling the house like a
demented despot is Sripathi’s mother, a bitter octogenarian who still
has not forgiven Sripathi for not finishing medical school 30 years ago.
Sharing the house with them is Putti, Sripathi’s spinster sister whom
he was supposed to find a husband for more than 20 years ago.

But of all of the spectres from the past that haunt Sripathi’s life,
the most powerful is a little girl. She is Nandana, his granddaughter,
who dogs his footsteps but will not talk to him. Sripathi and Nandana
are strangers because he disowned her mother, Maya, nearly a decade ago.
Once Maya was the centre of Sripathi’s universe, but when she broke
her prearranged engagement to a local boy and married a foreigner in
Canada, Sripathi cut her out of his life completely. Now Maya is dead
and this strange, mixed-race child has come home to prick Sripathi’s
cherished bubble of self-righteous anger.

This is Anita Rau Badami’s second novel. Unlike the first, Tamarind
Mem (1996), which explored the relationship between two characters in
minute detail, this story embraces a much wider cast of individuals and
weaves several subplots through the main theme. Badami’s wry sense of
humor allows the reader to see the worst side of each member of the
household without condemning any of them. The result is a wonderful
tapestry of modern Indian life in which four generations of richly
defined characters collide with each other under one leaky roof. If you
like a good story beautifully told, this book should be on your reading
shortlist.