The Hero's Walk, Anita Rau Badami

Lalu Prasad Shaw, Babu Resting, 2012/13

(August 15) I heard about this on the CBC one night driving back from the hospital after visiting Mom. It was one of the books in the Canada Reads “competition,” during which the proponents of different books as the year’s “best book” advocate for their choice in a debate format.

As I was listening for that hour one night (rainy and cold) it was down to The Hero’s Walk and The Illegal by Lawrence Hill. I had read neither nor even heard of either, but the advocates for the two books (low-level celebrities of various kinds) made me want The Hero’s Walk to “win.”

It didn’t -- in the end the audience voted The Illegal the winner by a narrow margin. I wonder now (not yet having read The Illegal) if that was possibly because The Hero’s Walk was only glancingly about Canada (I don’t know if the books that make it to the competition have to be set in Canada or only just be written by a Canadian or only just be published by a Canadian publisher or what). The Hero’s Walk takes place mostly in India; the role played by Vancouver could have been played by any North American city, the point being to contrast the two cultures clashing for wee Nandana. Maybe the The Illegal seemed to the audience more “Canadian” although none of the celebrities said that in their comments?

I can’t remember now if the Hamilton Library had The Hero’s Walk or not, but it was easily obtainable from Mills. The Illegal, on the other hand, was not available through Mills and there was a long waiting list for it at HPL.

I liked The Hero’s Walk from the start -- it had all the elements of the Indian novels I have read and loved in the past, like by V.S. Naipaul, Vikram Seth, Rohinton Mistry, Kipling: the endearing charming Indians, the crazy crowded spectacle of Indian life, the heart-breaking contrasts between tragedy and comedy.

For a long time while reading it I was wondering why it was called The Hero’s Walk… there were mentions of Hindu tales and myths referencing the Indian hero, and of course Indian movies, but it was all very subtle for the longest time. Eventually it’s clear that the title highlights Nirmala’s dancing school above all the other traditional stuff, and that Nirmala is really the hero the men wish to be -- steady, loving, positive. So that is a nice feature, because when we are introduced to her through Sripathi’s point of view at the beginning, when he is still mean and pinched and haughty, she comes off as silly and cowlike, another mistake he made in his youth.

But eventually you realize that that was just a bad point of view.

Sripathi transforms -- and at a late stage of life, too!! Yay for the late 50s! -- and does become a hero, or more of one.

Anyway, it’s a nice little book, with, as I say, that affectionate capture of Indian psychology whereby everything is ironically or sarcastically loving.

Thank heavens not so searing as Mistry’s A Fine Balance, which made me decide never to read another Indian novel since they were too harrowing. But here there is a lot of loss and sorrow and floating in shit water, too, as always.