| Description: |
|
Product Description
Sripathi Rao's life is as arid as the summers of Toturpuram, the dusty South Indian town where he lives. All he has wanted was an ordinary life with a solid job and a happy family. But Sripathi has never been a lucky man. Now aging and disenchanted, struggling to keep his job, Sripathi lives in his crumbling ancestral house with his lonely spinster sister, bitter manipulative mother, and a wife and son he hardly knows anymore. The only thing in his life that Sripathi Rao has been proud of is his talented, vibrant daughter Maya. But when Maya marries Alan, a fellow student at her American university, Sripathi angrily cuts off all his ties with her. Then he receives a phone call from Vancouver informing him that his daughter and her husband have been killed in a car crash. All Sripathi is left with are his regrets and Maya's seven-year-old daughter Nandana who he has never seen. Confused, resentful, and scared Nandana has to adjust to a strange new family she has never met and to Toturpuram, a far cry from Vancouver. Warm, witty and wise, this is a beautifully written novel from the acclaimed author of "Tamarind Mem."
Amazon.com Review
The Hero's Walk, the second novel by Anita Rau Badami, is a big, intimate book, the kind that seldom strays beyond the doors of a single residence. Set in the sweltering streets of Toturpuram, a small city on the Bay of Bengal, The Hero's Walk, which won the 2001 Commonwealth Writers Prize for best book in Canada and the Caribbean, explores the troubled life of Sripathi Rao, an unremarkable, middle-aged family man and advertising copywriter.
As The Hero's Walk opens, Sripathi's life is already in a state of thorough disrepair. His mother, a domineering, half-senile octogenarian, sits like a tyrant at the top of his household, frightening off his sister's suitors, chastising him for not having become a doctor, and brandishing her hypochondria and paranoia with sinister abandon. It is Sripathi's children, however, who pose the biggest problems: Arun, his son, is becoming dangerously involved in political activism, and Maya, his daughter, broke off her arranged engagement to a local man in order to wed a white Canadian. Sripathi's troubles come to a head when Maya and her husband are killed in an automobile accident, leaving their 7- year-old daughter, Nandana, without Canadian kin. Sripathi travels to Canada and brings his granddaughter home, while his family is shaken by a series of calamities that may, eventually, bring peace to their lives. --Jack Illingworth
|
