The Hero's Walk
by Anita Rau Badami
List Price: $14.00
Pages: 384
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0345450922
Publisher: Ballantine
Anita Rau Badami was born 1964 in the town of Rourkela in the eastern state of Orissa.
Her father, who worked as a mechanical engineer and designed trains, was transferred every
two or three years, so that she had a mobile childhood. She grew up in a household where
English was the primary language spoken, and where her extended family was fond of telling
stories about its own members. She has always loved writing, and sold her first short
story for Rs. 75 when she was 18. She earned a bachelor's degree in English from the
University of Madras, and studied journalism in Sophia College, Bombay. She worked as a
copywriter for advertising agencies in Bombay, Bangalore and Madras, and wrote stories for
children's magazines. She married in 1984, had a son in 1987, and moved to Calgary in
1991.
Her first book, Tamarind Mem, is a novel about the relationship between a
mother, Saroja, and her daughter, Kamini, who have very different perceptions of a past
they both shared. The title of the book, which is set in the railway colonies of India,
refers to Saroja, who has been nicknamed after the sour fruit for her acid tongue. Her
second book is The Hero's Walk.
Anita Rau Badami lives in Vancouver with her family.
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A Conversation with Anita Rau Badami
Eliza McCarthy has written for Elle, New York, The Washington Post, and other
publications. She lives in Westchester County, New York.
Eliza McCarthy: In the book, you mention a dance-step called the hero's walk. And,
of course, the book is called that...
Anita Rau Badami: This book is my interpretation of a dance-step. The step I'm
talking about is in a classical Indian dance-form called Bharat Natyam, a pretty common
dance-form in India. When I was young, I noticed that the hero in dance-dramas always came
in with this strutting gait. When the demons came on they used the same kind of walk,
except that there were some embellishments. The demon, or the bad guy, or the
villain--call him what you want to--would twirl his moustache, thump his chest, flex his
muscles. And that immediately set him apart from the hero, who had a certain humility to
his gait. The clown in the piece would stumble and fall and trip, so it seemed to me a
fine metaphor to use for the way each of us lives his or her life. I don't think anybody
in the world is perfect. I don't think anybody is absolutely good or bad or stupid.
[laughs] Each one of us combines all those qualities in our daily lives, I think. So
that's the metaphor.
EM: Was each of your characters walking--or at least trying to walk--the hero's
walk?
Anita Rau Badami: I think so.
EM: By my count, you have seven important characters in the book--Sripathi, Nirmala,
Ammayya, Nandana, Putti, Arun, and, of course, Maya. In your imagination, which of these
characters did you begin with? Or did they come to you all at once, as a family?
Anita Rau Badami: Curiously enough, the book began with Ammayya and Putti. I had written a
short story with these two characters years ago, and somehow the short story kept growing
a little bit each year. It never seemed to end--and I didn't know how to make it end. So
it was just sitting there in my notebook, and I'd look at it and think, "Well, I've
got to do something about this!" So when this book started, I thought that I was
actually going to be writing a book about these two women. But they didn't seem to have
enough going for them for a whole novel.
At about that same time, I was reading Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand
Faces, and I was just thinking that we always connect the hero with the large, big,
wonderful character who plunges into all kinds of adventures and comes back with a trophy
of some sort. There's no doubt that the hero is going to come back triumphant, and I was
just thinking, "Well, what about ordinary people just leading their everyday
lives?" I find just ordinary people very heroic--just the whole business of living, I
think, is an act of heroism. Just to carry that hope through, you know? You try to realize
those hopes, and there are all kinds of pitfalls along the way. If you make it to the end
of your life relatively sane and relatively happy, then I think it's heroic.
EM: Can you give examples of everyday heroism that any one of your characters
embodies?
Anita Rau Badami: Well, there's Sripathi's wife, Nirmala. I think she is a timid woman, who
has spent most of her life observing what she considers are the Rules--rules set down by
family, or society, or whatever. It's heroic that she has the courage to look at herself
in the mirror, as it were, and realize that heroism isn't simply about following rules.
Sometimes it's about doing what you think is right, at the cost of displeasing people
around you. The fact that she comes to this realization, and the fact that she holds on to
those principles of goodness--I think she is the only character in the book who is really
a decent sort, no matter what life throws at her. She is just a good soul. And I find her
heroic in a sort of daily, ordinary kind of way.
EM: What about her husband? Was one of your ideas with Sripathi's character
that it's all too easy to get lost in the details of everyday life?
Anita Rau Badami: Well, actually Sripathi, more than anything else, was a man who was too
taken up with the whole notion of duty, and what people in the world around thought about
him. Of the characters-- other than his mother, Ammayya--he was the most self-absorbed,
and everything revolved around his notion of duty. As a result he made a lot of
mistakes--he became this kind of unforgiving, obdurrate character. Even though he thought
he was doing the right thing all the time, unlike Nirmala, he wasn't doing it for anyone
else. He was doing it for himself.
EM: Why was he that way?
Anita Rau Badami: He suffered humiliation when he was ten years old. His father embarrassed
him and his mother by walking out with his mistress. Sripathi is trying all his life to
get over that humiliation.
EM: Speaking of his mother, Ammayya, I know that she was a rather hateful character,
but at the same time, I felt that the narrative came even more to life when she was
around. Did you feel that way about her?
Anita Rau Badami: Oh, I was really fond of Ammayya! I took a great deal of pleasure working
on Ammayya. She was sort of tragic--even though she was a nasty character. She had been
dealt a bad hand. And I'm one of those optimists who believes that nobody is completely
rotten. There is something that makes them do things that are rotten. And Ammayya was one
of those. She's been dealt nothing but disappointment and unhappiness and betrayal, so
it's not surprising that her whole nature curdled. I did enjoy working on her, because she
was the one character that just let loose, did what she wanted, and said what she wanted
to say.
EM: Did you ever write a draft in which Maya spoke? In the book, she doesn't.
Anita Rau Badami: Yes. Actually, there was. I had a chapter in which Maya interacted with her
father. I dropped it, because it just became too much. There were too many characters, and
I thought, "Well, I'll focus on this family that's here, that's alive." Maya can
be a memory, and by her silence, I thought she'd be more powerful than if I had her
actually doing things and talking.
EM: It seems like a lot of the women and girls in the story measure themselves
against Maya--Putti, Maya's daughter, and even her mother.
Anita Rau Badami: Right, because she was the one who got away. And she was successful by
anyone's standards. In the book, Putti thinks about it, and she thinks that Maya, even
though she died young, had lived as full a life as most people who live to old age.
EM: In the book, most of your main characters are women. Were you consciously
interested in exploring women's roles in India?
Anita Rau Badami: Not consciously, really. But in most homes, from what I know of them, even
though the woman's place in that particular home might be in the home, still, she is queen
of her house. So I like exploring the many different incarnations of women in that
country, actually. You find quite a range of these women in this book--each one of them
embodies a completely different personality type. And how can you write a book that's only
full of men, anyway? I mean, half the population of this world is women.
In the last fifty years, since India got its independence, you find women in every
sphere of life. Whether they're at home, or going out to work, they work as doctors, as
nurses, as women who come in to clean your house, so to not include this range would be to
do them a deep injustice.
EM: Speaking of writing about India, did you feel that you were writing for an
Indian or a non-Indian audience? Or both?
Anita Rau Badami: Actually, when I was writing the book, I was just writing for the sheer
pleasure of writing. Because I had a story that I wanted to explore, I had a bunch of
characters I wanted to play with, and that's why I wrote the book. I wasn't thinking about
an audience. It's only after a book is done that I start wondering about who is likely to
read it. Because you're right, an audience here in North America is going to react to the
book differently. And an audience in India will look at it differently.
EM: It's a very textured book. There are so many details included about Toturpuram,
the imaginary town, so it made me wonder: Did you do any research about Indian life, or is
it all from your imagination?
Anita Rau Badami: This is a life that has always fascinated me. There are these narrow
streets in Madras, a south Indian city, and we have some relatives who live in those
little alleys and streets.
And these are people who had lots of money. They were very well-educated, but they
still lived in these tiny, ugly, filthy houses on these messy streets. And they were so
crazy--the whole lot of them! They lead these bizarre lives full of ritual and cling to
the most peculiar old-fashioned conventions and rituals, and at the same time, they all
had the latest in technology in their homes. They'd have the latest computers, the latest
televisions, but that's it--they'd be sitting on the floor, and watching these TVs and
working on the computers. It was the most peculiar kind of lifestyle and it used to
fascinate me. So this whole book is a recreation of those little roads and alleys, the
little communities that were so different--I just loved it. It's almost completely
imagined or reconstructed from what I remember of those roads.
When I used to visit, I didn't mind going there and sitting for hours, absorbing all
the little nuances and details and things, because they were so peculiar.
EM: The Raos are Hindu, but they seem to be surrounded by a wild mixture of
religions. Can you talk about the mix that you were trying to get across?
ARB: It's something that exists on a daily basis on practically every street in
India. You have people who are Hindus, Muslims, Christians--not just Catholics, but
Protestants, you name it, all kinds of Christians--a hundred other religions, living side
by side. And the kind of personal religion that people end up practicing is a bizarre
concoction of ritual drawn from each other. So everybody ends up celebrating everyone
else's festivals. Unless, of course, someone is a real stickler, like Ammayya. There are
people like her, who sort of hate everybody else around them. They are convinced that
their way of life is superior or more relevant than anybody else's.
So, on the one hand, you have that easy integration-- especially people like Sripathi,
who was brought up in a generation that was preoccupied with other things, such as getting
over the British occupation, so religion and caste hardly mattered. Then you have younger
people who just don't care. For them, it's more important to go out there, find a job,
make a living, build a flat. Finally, there are people like Ammayya who really care about
preserving the traditions, and they make a big fuss. That's all part of the landscape, and
it's bewildering! It's also very interesting for a writer.
EM: Do people care about caste in India today? Ammayya seemed to care about it,
but for others, everything seemed more integrated.
Anita Rau Badami: Especially in urban areas, nobody cares so much, because you are forced to
live in the same buildings. There is so, so little space. You can't be thinking about
whether you are living in a street that has only Brahmins, or in a building that has been
touched only by Muslims or Christians. You just live there, because that's the only place
that you can find. So such distinctions just crumble away. There are people who maintain
them, at all costs. But for the most part, it doesn't matter.
Having said that, though, it would be totally incorrect for me to say the caste system
doesn't exist, because I think it exists in lots of villages. You find lots of atrocities
committed in the name of caste. But the kind of milieu I grew up in, which was largely
urban, largely middle-class, there wasn't any space for those distinctions, really.
EM: When did you last travel to India, and what is your relationship with India?
Anita Rau Badami: My relationship is still very, very affectionate. That's the country that
made me what I am, it gave me a wonderful education, it gave me a lot of stories, a lot of
characters. Five years ago, I was still teetering between whether to stay here [in Canada]
or to go back. I was totally torn. I'd sit over here and long for all that chaos, and
contradiction, and the challenges that that country represents, and I'd want to go back.
But then I go back and start yearning for the silence of this place.
EM: You think of North America as silent?
Anita Rau Badami: Yes, I do, actually. When I say silent, I mean there seems to be a singular
lack of people-noise. In India, you have people coming out of every hole you can imagine.
It's a whole different setup. People love talking to each other. You know everything about
your neighbor, and the whole street in fact. So there's a kind of sense of community that
you don't always find here. Here, you can smile at your neighbor, but you know nothing
about the neighbor! And it's bad form to be curious.
EM: Do you find your neighborhoods in Canada as fascinating as the ones in Madras,
on which you based Toturpuram?
Anita Rau Badami: Well, the neighborhoods may not be as diverse or interesting here in
Canada; they are more orderly. Where you have order, there's not much interest! Where
every tree is clipped neatly, and every hedge is perfect, the roads are always covered
over, there's little chance that anything strange could happen-- as a result of the
landscape, that is.
But people add color to any street, anywhere in the world. I mean, you can't chain
people down: They are who they are, and they do what they want to do. In the new book I'm
working on now, which is set in Canada, I am focusing on the people, and letting them
color the landscape.
Excerpted from The Hero's Walk © Copyright 2008 by Anita Rau Badami. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine. All rights reserved.
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