The Hero's Walk: A Novel

by Anita Rau Badami Narrated by Laara Sadiq

Overview

After the release of Anita Rau Badami's critically acclaimed first novel, Tamarind Mem, it was evident a promising new talent had joined the Canadian literary community. Her dazzling literary follow-up is The Hero's Walk, a novel teeming with the author's trademark tumble of the haphazard beauty, wreckage and folly of ordinary lives. Set in the dusty seaside town of Toturpuram on the Bay of Bengal, The Hero's Walk traces the terrain of family and forgiveness through the lives of an exuberant cast of characters bewildered by the rapid pace of change in today's India. Each member of the Rao family pits his or her chance at personal fulfillment against the conventions of a crumbling caste and class system.

Anita Rau Badami explains that "The Hero's Walk is a novel about so many things: loss, disappointment, choices and the importance of coming to terms with yourself and the circumstances of your life without losing the dignity embedded in all of us. At one level it is about heroism - not the hero of the classic epic, those enormous god-sized heroes - but my fascination with the day-to-day heroes and the heroism that's needed to survive all the unexpected disasters and pitfalls of life."

Editorial Reviews

Elle Magazine

The Hero's Walk is a novel of broad and lovely scope...

People

In a twisty tale of shifting perspectives and resonant prose, Hero makes old values seem new again.

Boston Herald

This compelling novel by Indian-born Canadian writers Badami is notable for its character studies and rich descriptions.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The flowering of young writers of Indian origin continues with Badami's deeply resonant debut novel, which places her in the ranks of writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Akhil Sharma and Manil Suri. The scion of a once wealthy, now down-at-the-heels Brahmin family, Sripathi Rao lives in the crumbling family manse in a small city on the Bay of Bengal. At 57, Sripathi is ill-tempered, emotionally constipated and a domestic tyrant a man riding for a fall. He struggles at a mediocre job to support his dragon of a mother, unmarried but lovelorn 44-year-old sister, subservient wife and layabout son. It's the perfect setup for a domestic comedy, until fate intervenes with the sudden deaths of his daughter, Maya, and her husband, in Vancouver. Guilt-ridden for having refused to communicate with Maya because she humiliated him by marrying out of her caste and race, Sripathi brings his seven-year-old orphaned granddaughter, Nandana, back to India. Badami's portrait of a bereft and bewildered child is both restrained and heartrending; Nandana has remained mute since her parents died, believing that they will someday return. In his own way, Sripathi is also mute, unable to express his grief and longing for his dead daughter. This poignant motif is perfectly balanced by Badami's eye for the ridiculous and her witty, pointed depiction of the contradictions of Indian society. She also writes candidly about the woes of underdevelopment the "stench of fish, human beings, diesel oil, food frying," poor drains, chaotic traffic and pervasive corruption. In the course of the narrative, everyone in Sripathi's family undergoes a life change, and in the moving denouement, reconciliation grows out of tragedy, and Sripathi understands "the chanciness of existence, and the hope and the loss that always accompanied life." A bestseller in Canada, where it was a Kiriyamaa Pacific Rim Book Award finalist, Badami's novel will delight those on the lookout for works by writers on the crest of the Indian wave. Author tour. (Apr. 27) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Life in the Big House on Brahmin Street is spiraling downward. When Sripathi is 16, his father dies, leaving him with a heavily mortgaged house, care of his mother and infant sister, and gambling debts. Sripathi struggles through, eventually adding a wife and two children of his own to the household. It's now four decades since his father's death. His mother complains incessantly, his son is involved in every social protest imaginable, and he's been unable to find a suitable husband for his sister. And then things get worse: his daughter, Maya (his pride and joy before she left home for a Canadian university and shamed the family by reneging on an arranged marriage), has been killed with her Canadian husband in an automobile accident. Their daughter, seven-year-old Nandana Baker, must now make her home in India with grandparents she has never met. Somehow, the young Nandana manages to thaw Sripathi's hardened heart and give the rest of the family the power to stand up to the tyrannical family matriarch. This touching story of a family under intense pressure is especially recommended for public libraries serving a large Asian community, but the universal themes will give this broad appeal. Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati State Technical & Community Coll., OH Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-An attractive jacket pulls readers into this well-told story of a struggling family in a small city in modern India. The Raos' glory days are over, epitomized by their large home that has begun to crumble and mildew, now surrounded by taller apartment buildings. Mr. Rao, the central character, is a self-centered man made unhappy by his reversal of fortune and by his resentful wife, a radical son, a shrewish mother, and an unmarried 40-ish sister, all of whom he barely supports as a small-time advertising copywriter. They all live together, with greater or lesser degrees of grace. Mr. Rao also has a daughter in Canada from whom he became estranged when she broke off an arranged marriage and instead married a white man she met while in graduate school. Her seven-year-old daughter comes to India to live with her grandparents when her parents die in an auto accident. Nandana has not said a word to anyone since the accident, and moving to a new country and living with these odd strangers is difficult for her. The plot revolves around the life of the family as part of Indian culture, and how Nandana and her grandfather both begin to adjust to their circumstances. Each chapter is written from the viewpoint of a different character, including little Nandana-possibly the best-drawn character in a novel filled with fine characterizations. The Rao family could be anyone's family, and they all find some peace and hope for the future at book's end.-Judy McAloon, Potomac Library, Prince William County, VA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

From the Publisher

Engrossing . . . Fascinating . . . This book demands to be read straight through.”
–The Washington Post Book World

“DEFT AND KNOWING . . . Badami’s prose is lovely, almost poetic, and her ear for dialogue and the idiosyncrasies of her characters’ speech rings true. . . . An intimate look into the hearts and minds of a complicated, quarrelsome, yet deeply loving family.”
–Richmond Times-Dispatch

“COMPELLING . . .[A] LUSH EVOCATION OF INDIAN LIFE . . . [with] often laugh-out-loud funny dialogue.”
–salon.com

“A WONDERFULLY TEXTURED TALE whose poignant events are imbued with truthfulness . . . Badami joins the ranks of such internationally celebrated authors as Michael Ondaaje.”
–The London Free Press

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169212389
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	03/26/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

It was dusk by the time they got a bus to the beach. They made their way to the same secluded spot at which they had scattered Maya's ashes. The tide was coming in, curling waves lapped against their feet, and seagulls swooped and pecked at drying seaweed left on the sand. Further down, pariah dogs leapt at an upturned boat, trying to get at something dangling from the high side. Sripathi walked across the wet, squelching sand until he reached the water. With a sense of déjà-vu, he emptied the ashes and watched as they mingled with the waves. Poor Ammayya, what a long, unresolved life she had lived, he thought regretfully.He went back to the cluster of mossy rocks where he had left Arun and sat down beside his son. They stayed there until the moon appeared, a silver semicircle ringed with concentric rainbow light. It would be sunny tomorrow. In the thick darkness the sea was luminous, a body of motion, living, mysterious, beautiful."You go home if you want to, Appu," said Arun, his arms locked around his raised knees on which he rested his chin. "I want to watch the turtles coming in.""How do you know that they will be here today?""A few arrived yesterday and usually the rest follow soon after.""I'll stay with you," said Sripathi after a moment's hesitation. He had lived all his life beside this same sea, and he had never spent an entire night watching it as it poured over the sand and sucked away, leaving a wavering lace of froth that it retrieved almost immediately.The moon rose higher in the sky, the beach emptied slowly, and one by one the last of the vendors turned off their Petromax lanterns and left. Now all they couldhear was the susurrating of the wind in the brief stand of palm trees behind them. Suddenly, out of the sea, a dark form detached itself and staggered slowly up the damp sand. And another and another. Dozens of them. No, scores. It seemed to Sripathi that the beach itself had risen up and was rippling away from the water."Can you see them?" whispered Arun. As if the turtles would be scared off by his voice when they carried the thunder of ancient waters in their small, swivelling heads.They poured across the sand, wobbling and swaying, a humpbacked, crawling army drawn by some distant call to the shore on which they were born fifty, one hundred, two hundred years ago, to give birth to another generation. Across the water line they surged, each an olive-green dune in slow motion, until they were well out of reach of the waves. They stopped one by one and began to dig cradles for their eggs-their thick stubby hind legs powerful pistons spraying sand into the air-grunting and murmuring, moaning and sighing as they squatted over the holes and dropped their precious cargo.Arun leaned over and whispered, "Each of them lays at least a hundred to two hundred eggs, Appu."Sripathi nodded, too moved to comment. How many millennia had this been going on? he wondered, humbled by the sight of something that had started long before humans had been imagined into creation by Brahma, and had survived the voracious appetite of those same humans. In the long continuum of turtle life, humans were merely dots.
Soon the turtles were done and began to churn up the sand again, covering the holes, tamping them down tight, with slow, deliberate movements. And then the swaying trudge back to the gleaming sea. Sweeping their hind legs to erase every trace of their arrival, as meticulous as spies in foreign lands."See how cunning they are," whispered Arun again. "They are making sure predators don't find their nests by following their footprints."The last of the turtles disappeared into the waters as silently as they had arrived. They would never see their babies hatch, would not return for one full year to lay another batch of eggs at the edge of the sea that had been there longer than even they had. Their young might live or die. The eggs they left with so much care might yield another generation of turtles-or not. Sripathi thought about the chanciness of existence, the beauty and the hope and the loss that always accompanied life, and felt a boulder roll slowly off his heart.

(c) 2000 by Anita Rau Badami


From the Trade Paperback edition.

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