Anita Rau Badami: The Hero's Walk

Reviewed by JENNY JONES

One of the newest authors in the post-colonial immigrant school that began with Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Anita Rau Badami's second novel shows a masterly ability to convey theme through character. Originally from southern India, Badami now lives and writes in Canada, reflecting in her fiction essential elements of her own dual-culture experience.

In The Hero's Walk she celebrates the heroism common to all who greet each new day with hope, regardless of circumstances. Some of her characters are capable of greater self-insight and change than others, but all deserve respect for not yielding to despair.

As with Badami's first novel, Tamarind Woman, The Hero's Walk explores conflict between modernisation and traditional values, the misunderstanding this can cause between generations, and changing possibilities for women in India. It also explores bereavement and the process of healing the corrosive effect of guilt.

That's a busy programme for a second novel, but overall a successful one.

The novel's main protagonist, Sripathi, gets a lucky break among male characters portrayed by South Asian women writers, in that he is sympathetically and richly portrayed.

The circumstances of this Brahmin who has fallen on hard times are not auspicious. He is a failed doctor with a treadmill job in advertising, his decaying house is no match for the surprise cyclone or the encroaching sea, and his relationships with his wife Nirmala, his mother and both his children are in a state of severe disrepair.

When his clever and loving daughter Maya is killed in a traffic accident in her adopted home in Canada, Sripathi is doubly stricken. When she married a Canadian, flouting the traditions of her caste, religion and race, he had cut off all contact. He has never seen his granddaughter, Nandana.

The tragedy does nothing for his marriage either, since Nirmala has her own reasons for feeling she failed her daughter. It irks Sripathi even more that his remaining child, Arun, won't get a proper job but spends his time protesting the shortcomings of the world.

The orphaned grandchild comes to live in a country she does not know, with people she has never seen, and who have apparently caused her mother nothing but sorrow. She stops speaking.

The car crash is a trigger that leaves the family members in turmoil, loosening their rigid acceptance of caste values and the traditionally subservient role of women. Nirmala, who had accepted her husband's wish to reject their daughter, begins to question the wisdom of traditional ways.

There are beautiful comic touches that are also metaphorically loaded. For instance, Brahmin St, where the family lives, was named for the predominant caste of its inhabitants. When that was declared politically incorrect, the name, along with many other offenders, was reduced to Street. The word has gone, but the state of mind persists and confusion reigns.

We are invited to see events mainly through Sripathi's eyes, with occasional excursions through the viewpoints of Nirmala and Nandana. There was a sense of contrivance in the attempt to present Nandana's viewpoint, which made me wonder if she would have been more effectively portrayed from the outside.

But Sripathi's sense of failure and helplessness is beautifully conveyed. How he and Nirmala gradually adapt to new values is convincingly handled, as the household's matriarch, Ammayya, stands by the old values to her bitter end.

Allen & Unwin, $26.95

* Anita Rau Badami will be appearing at the Auckland Writers' and Readers' Festival next month.

* Jenny Jones is an Auckland writer.