Back in New York, I listened to my tapes and could not make out a single word. I wanted to strangle Carey with both my hands.
He agreed to talk to me on the phone, but he was too self-conscious and always too drunk to be of any use. Carey was in some ways the most fascinating of the three siblings. He never knew what fear felt like. He was utterly immune to corruption. But sadly he was the least articulate.
And many things he was unwilling to discuss. When I tried to ask about his famous sexual conquests, he would scold me: “Why are you doing this? Why are you writing this book? Why are you dredging up this ugly stuff?” I tried to tell him that in America sexuality is not something to be ashamed of. He couldn’t believe it.
I know it wasn’t easy for him to look back on many things. He would say, “Abba! What degrading poverty it was.” And he was bitter. Many times he criticized my mother and SM. He felt he was the only one who had lived up to the ideals of their youth.
I came up with an idea. I should try catching him early in the morning before he got too drunk. Because of the time difference, this meant I had to stay up late and go to work in the morning with little sleep.
But before I could get anywhere with him, Carey died. He may have been killed. No one in his family would tell my mother anything, probably because they didn’t want to have to deal with an investigation.
Compiling the material for this book has been a race against death. The people I needed to speak to were old, many of them also impoverished and in poor health. Getting everything I needed from them before it was too late became an obsession of mine. Nancharayya, David John, Rani, Graceamma, Manikya Rao, Lilly Flora, Carey—they all died before I had a chance to finish talking to them. Every time my mother would tell me the latest news, I was inconsolable.
My mother thinks I’ve developed an attachment to the people I am writing about. She thinks I am grieving their loss. But what I am really grieving is the material that is lost forever.
When these deaths come, they traumatize me. I cannot speak or eat or sleep. I cannot stand or sit up. When Nallamma, a peripheral figure in the story, died soon after I spoke to her, it nearly killed me. No one could understand. When friends, not knowing how I felt, tried to coax me out of bed, I turned violent.
Another time, when I heard Carey’s high school friend Pulla Reddy had had a stroke and lost his ability to speak, I was speechless. I sent a check for $200 so he could get physical therapy and some other care. I thought of all the things for him to lose the use of, why should it be his tongue, the one part that mattered most for my purposes. I didn’t need him to dance, I didn’t need him to lift anything. As I saw it, I had been cursed most cruelly. In the end he could speak a little, but I had no heart to hear him struggle. When he died, the news was kept from me.
And then my father’s aunt Dyva Vathi. She fell. Lost her memory. Her memory!
Finally I closed my ears to such news. My mother, out of concern for my feelings, has told all the relatives to never mention a word to me about death or illness.
I know SM had a stroke a couple of years ago, is blind in one eye, cannot move. I was relieved when my mother told me he had not lost his speech. I tried to call him. But the daughters who took over his care had cut off his phone privileges.
So I went to see him in person. He could speak, but I could not understand anything he said because all his teeth had fallen out.
The small stroke should not have incapacitated him so much. His daughters told me they had to wait three days to take him to a doctor. Three days? I didn’t understand. They explained they wanted to take him to the doctor who would see him for free, an admirer of his, who was out of town. So they waited.
Sure enough, his memory was affected. Nothing was left for me there. One of his daughters has removed the TV from his room and prohibited newspapers and visitors. In those conditions he won’t last long. I know I am never going to see him again.
I stopped inquiring about his health, his condition. I don’t want to know more. I avoid looking at Telugu news online for fear of coming upon an obituary.
As of this writing, I do not know if this book’s principal subject is alive or dead.
April 15, 2012
PRELUDE
WHEN I ASKED MY MOTHER and my uncle about our ancestors, they started with their grandparents’ generation, the earliest one they’d known.
Venkataswami and Atchamma, their grandfather and grandmother, were born in the late 1800s in Khammam district, within what later became the state of Andhra Pradesh, where they lived as part of a nomadic clan. Their clan did not practice agriculture. They subsisted on fruits, on roots, on honey, on whatever they could catch or snare. They were not Hindus. They worshipped their own tribal goddesses and had little to do with society outside the forest where they lived.
When the British cleared the forests for teak plantations, my great-grandparents’ clan was driven out onto the plains, where the civilized people, the settled ones, the ones who owned land and knew how to cultivate it—in a word, the Hindus—lived. The little clan, wandering outside the forest, found a great lake and settled around it. There was no sign of human life for miles and miles. They took up farming. The land around the lake was fertile and gave them more than they needed. They called their new settlement Sankarapadu, after one of their gods.
But soon the civilized people took notice of them. They were discovered by an agent of the local zamindar—the great landlord appointed by the British to collect revenue in that area—who saw the rice growing in their fields and levied taxes, keeping the bulk of what he extracted for himself.
But that was not enough for this agent. He and his family and his caste people moved nearby and set about stealing the land by force and by cunning. They loaned the clansmen trivial sums at usurious rates to buy small necessities such as salt, seeds, or new clothes for a wedding. Unable to pay off these debts, the villagers gave up their land acre by acre. My ancestors, who had cleared and settled the area, were reduced to working on their old fields as laborers.
This is what has happened to tribal peoples in India who try to settle down and cultivate land since time immemorial. It still happens to this day. What set Sankarapadu apart was that the Hindus who usurped all the fields around it did not settle there themselves. That’s because the village is surrounded by fetid swamps filled with poisonous snakes, scorpions, and thick swarms of mosquitoes. The landlords settled on safe and elevated ground several miles away in a village called Polukonda.
In the forest, my great-grandfather’s clan had had no caste. But in Hindu society everyone is assigned a place in the caste system. Certain castes traditionally own land, and others have to work for those who do. For those who must work, the caste you are born into determines the kind of work you do. There are priestly castes, carpenter castes, potter castes, barber castes. The more impure a caste’s traditional occupation in terms of ritual law, the lower its status.
When the people of Sankarapadu entered Hindu society with no caste of their own and the most impure occupation of all, that of landless laborers, there was no question where their place would be: at the bottom, as despised outcastes. Outcastes are also called untouchables because they are supposed to be so ritually unclean that the slightest contact with them will defile even low-caste Hindus. Untouchables cannot share meals with others, much less intermarry with them, and are made to live apart from the rest of the village in a segregated colony on its outskirts. Sankarapadu became the untouchable colony of Polukonda, albeit an unusually remote one.
But my great-grandfather and his fellow villagers were still new to the caste system. Their spirit was not yet broken.
When a young burglar of the outcaste Yanadi tribe was on the run from the police, the villagers gave him shelter. They knew it was the sacred duty of Yanadi clansmen to violate private property—a system with which the Yanadis had never made peace.
When police came looking for the young outlaw, the villagers, not knowing what police
were, beat them up and chased them away. The next day a hundred policemen descended on the village. They destroyed what little the villagers had, molested the women, and arrested the entire male population.
The villagers did not know what to do. They did not know about jails, bail, courts, or lawyers. By luck, some Canadian missionaries active in a nearby town learned what had happened. They sent a white lawyer to defend the villagers and win their release. In gratitude, the villagers started to give up their old goddesses and accept baptism. They began sending their children to attend the schools set up by the missionaries.
Untouchables had long been forbidden from learning to read and write. But when the missionaries arrived, they opened schools that, to the horror of the Hindus, welcomed even the untouchables. Although these schools were the only institutions offering modern education, caste Hindus often refused to send their children, unwilling to let them sit side by side with untouchable students.
The missionaries tried to accommodate these local customs. Sometimes they would make the untouchable students sit on the floor, reserving the benches for caste students, as they did in my school. They even opened what the missionaries themselves called “caste schools,” where no untouchable students were admitted. Even so, these godly people made hardly any converts among caste Hindus.
My great-grandfather had six sons. The youngest was my grandfather, Prasanna Rao Kambham. (The surname Kambham was taken by the clan from the Khammam region they had left behind.) When Prasanna Rao’s family converted to Christianity, his three eldest brothers were already too old to overcome their fear of reading and writing. They did not dare attempt something so far outside their place. They lived out their lives as coolies, while their three younger brothers, including Prasanna Rao, went to the mission school, where they were trained as teachers.
At this school the boys and girls were kept strictly separated. They never even saw each other except on Sundays, when they all went to church. Peering across the aisle, Prasanna Rao noticed a girl named Maryamma and fell in love by sight.
But he was not allowed to talk to her. To express his interest he first needed to speak to her parents. After a prolonged inquiry, Prasanna Rao learned that Maryamma’s mother lived in a village in the same district called Parnasa. Her name was Marthamma.
Marthamma was a poor untouchable widow. Some years before, she and a group of other women had been laboring in the fields and singing as they worked when a missionary woman overheard them. Impressed by Marthamma’s voice, the woman went up and asked her to accept Jesus and come and sing in the church. But Marthamma said no. She had too much work to do to feed her children.
To make ends meet after her husband died, Marthamma pounded rice for caste-Hindu women in her village and gleaned grain left behind in the fields. But still she and her children did not have enough to live on.
In desperation, Marthamma decided to ask for help from the missionaries. She was granted an audience with one Mary Selman. When they met, Marthamma recognized her as the same woman who had asked her to come and sing. Miss Selman offered her a job as a “Bible woman”—one who goes from village to village to preach the gospel. Her three remaining children were enrolled in the mission school. Marthamma accompanied her children in the classroom. There she learned to read as her children’s classmate.
When Prasanna Rao traveled to Parnasa to speak to her about Maryamma, Marthamma was delighted. He was tall, handsome, educated.
The young couple married and went off to work as teachers in a small mission school in a village called Adavi Kolanu. They were still poor, but despite this they were living a kind of life their parents could never have imagined. Maryamma and Prasanna Rao, unlike their parents, had been raised in the Christian faith and educated from childhood. Now they were teaching others. The parents of the children they taught looked up to them. All of this gave them a new outlook, a new feeling of hope. You could see it in the way they held themselves, in the way they dressed.
Untouchable men and women were traditionally forced to wear loincloths. The missionaries taught untouchables how to make themselves look respectable. Maryamma dressed in a sari and a blouse, and Prasanna Rao wore pants and a shirt in the Western style. They both took pride in their appearance.
Soon Prasanna Rao and Maryamma had a baby, a boy they named fondly G’nana Satyamurthy, which means “wise figure of truth.” As he grew up, he would be known as Satyam.
He was born in July. When December came, his parents started looking forward to Christmas. Their new son’s first Christmas.
On Christmas Day, Maryamma went into the village (where no untouchable was allowed to live) to buy spices for the holiday feast. She was wearing a new sari that the missionaries had given her as a Christmas present and a flower-print blouse she had stitched herself out of the fabric of a cast-off dress. Some uppercaste men standing outside the store, infuriated to see an untouchable daring to wear decent clothes, insulted her crudely.
Maryamma ran back home in tears. Prasanna Rao’s friend Samson, the village canoeman, went to the church, where the whole community was gathered, and told them what had happened.
When the untouchable Christians of Adavi Kolanu heard how their teacher had been treated, their Christmas was poisoned. They called off their celebrations and decided to demand an apology from the caste Hindus.
The caste Hindus were also determined. They intended to remind the untouchables of their place. The two groups gathered in the village square. Violence was in the offing.
Just then, a small brahmin, a disciple of Gandhi’s, intervened. “Kill me first before you kill each other,” he challenged them.
To kill a brahmin is the sin of sins. First the untouchables backed down, then the caste Hindus.
The nonviolent brahmin then counseled the untouchables to never again try anything that might provoke the caste Hindus. This was the way his idol, Gandhi, always resolved caste disputes.
Prasanna Rao and Maryamma could not stay in a village such as Adavi Kolanu, under the thumb of the caste Hindus. They decided to move two hundred miles away to Visakhapatnam (Vizag to the British), one of the few large cities in Andhra.
In Vizag the couple found jobs in Christian schools. Big, spacious schools surrounded by high compound walls. Though founded as caste schools by the missionaries, they had recently been opened to untouchable students under the influence of the freedom struggle, and already untouchables made up the majority of students and teachers. Prasanna Rao and Maryamma’s salaries were ten times their former ones.
As soon as they arrived in the new city, Prasanna Rao threw their luggage in a corner of their room, grabbed his five-year-old son’s hand, and ran out to show him the ocean. For a tiny boy who had spent his whole brief life inland, what a stunning sight it was! The lighthouse, the white dunes, the big ships and little boats. The waves!
Satyam by then had a little brother whom Prasanna Rao named William Carey (after the founder of the Baptist Mission to India). Soon he would have a sister, Mary Manjulabai, whom the family called Papa, meaning “baby.”
Not for nothing was Satyam named the wise one. He knew that his parents had only convinced the landlord to rent them a portion of his house by telling him they were among the few caste Hindus who’d converted to Christianity. To keep up that charade they stopped eating beef, which in India is eaten only by untouchables and Muslims. Satyam knew the landlord was suspicious of their story but also needed tenants with good jobs. Sometimes he was nice to Satyam and Carey and gave them papayas; other times he bellowed at them like a bull ready to charge.
Tuberculosis is a disease of the poor. When Prasanna Rao’s orphaned niece came down with it, he brought her home with him from her village and took her to King George’s Hospital. The girl responded well and recovered completely.
But Maryamma, who caught the girl’s infection, did not. On October 5, 1941, she died. Her death brought the family’s brief period of happiness to an end. Satyam was ten, Carey seven, and Papa onl
y four years old.
One afternoon not long after, their father bathed them and dressed them up in their best clothes. He had them sit on the steps of the school where their mother used to teach. “Just wait here, like good boys and good girl,” he told them.
Hours passed, night fell. Their father did not come back.
Overburdened by grief and by the debts he owed the moneylenders for his wife’s medical care, Prasanna Rao ran away, abandoning his children to the care of their aunt, who took the two boys, and their grandmother, who took Papa.
At school the teachers were telling stories of a villain named Hitler. The world was at war. Vizag, with its natural harbor, was a target for Japanese bombing. The beautiful beach where the children used to go to with their mother was now occupied by British soldiers. There were warships in the harbor.
On Easter Sunday 1942, their aunt took Satyam, Carey, and Papa to the burial ground to clean their mother’s grave and lay jasmine blossoms on it, singing sad Christian hymns.
The next day, at one o’clock in the afternoon, the children heard the sirens go off, followed by earsplitting blasts. They felt the city shake. The Japanese were dropping their first bombs on the harbor.
Their aunt gathered all the children and fled. The whole city seemed to be fleeing at once, transformed into one vast terror-stricken mob. Everyone was running toward the railway station.
The children were taken to stay with their uncle Nathaniel, who lived in the countryside in Marthamma’s home village of Parnasa. Nathaniel, unlike his sisters, had not had the good fortune to go to school. He lived outside the village and worked as a coolie for the railroad, carrying rocks in an iron basket on his head. None of his ten children went to school.
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