Anita Rau Badami Knihy

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

While living in Calgary and feeling homesick, Kamini recalls her childhood in India and her relationship with her mother, Saroja.

If it is true that happy families are all alike, the Dharma family seems no exception. At least until the winter morning when a lifeless body is found in their yard. The corpse of Anu Krishnan, the writer who rented the back cottage. Anu had been enchanted by that remote corner of Canada among the forests, and by that family that preserved the traditions of native India, from Suman's spicy cooking, married to the authoritarian Vikram, to the stories of grandmother Akka, which the children listened to with rapt attention. Yet, perhaps it was Anu's presence in that seemingly idyllic picture that had rippled the surface of things, bringing half-secrets and half-truths to the surface. A sort of ineffable tension that even the children seemed to sense. But now it is too late for Anu to investigate. In fact, now that her corpse lies in the snow, it is precisely the moment when the tension reaches its peak, and secrets and truths press to come to light. Each member of the Dharma family will tell their version of the story. To cover for each other? Or to reveal how things really are? Was Anu's death truly just an accident, as Vikram claims? The only thing certain is that in some families there are secrets better left unspoken. Or perhaps, as they say in fairy tales, secrets better told to the trees.