Ants Among Elephants

by Sujatha Gidla

  For the first issue, Satyam badly wanted to write a poem, but he couldn’t come up with anything he liked. So he stole a poem by the revolutionary poet Narayana Babu, changed a few words, and printed the poem under his own name. But when everyone congratulated him on how good it was, he couldn’t bear to deceive them and confessed.

  The inaugural issue was fairly well received, though some complained about the design and Hanumayya’s editorials. So for the second issue Satyam improved the design and wrote the editorials himself. He even wrote his own poem this time.

  For his first article, Satyam decided to write about the black American boxer Joe Louis, who had just retired after an unprecedented twelve-year reign as heavyweight champion. Only in A.C. College, through his friendship with Hanumayya, had Satyam started to learn about the world outside India. When he read somewhere about Joe Louis, Satyam was surprised because he hadn’t known that there were people in America who weren’t white. Hanumayya explained that black people in America were kept in poverty and ignorance and fear.

  So Satyam was inspired to write the essay that became the centerpiece of the second issue. It began in pompous high-Telugu style with the line “Durbhara jeevitha vidhanam lo nundi pravirbhavinchina maha mahudu Joe Louis” (Rising like a brilliant comet from the wretched depths of life came the greatest of the great men, Joe Louis).

  Satyam didn’t know any of the details of Joe Louis’s career or what he had done that was great. All Satyam knew was that Louis had wrestled or something and won the first prize. What mattered was that he was a black man who had overcome his oppression and achieved great things.

  For the second article Manikya Rao suggested that Satyam write something criticizing the corruption of the new native leaders of the Christian missions in Andhra. When the Canadian missionaries left India after independence, leadership passed into the hands of their native favorites (who were in some cases their own illicit children). While the foreign missionaries had built and fostered a Christian community in Andhra, their successors looked only after themselves.

  Satyam loved the idea. He chiseled away at his article like a sculptor of fine figurines. He gave it a nice alliterative title: “Gudlavalleru Kalava Pakkana Gudlagooba” (The Owl by the Side of the Gudlavalleru). Owls are not associated with wisdom in India. They’re thought of as nighttime predators, symbols of darkness and evil. The Gudlavalleru was the canal that passed through the village where the Canadian Baptist mission was based, and the “owl by the side of the Gudlavalleru” was none other than the new head of the mission—Flora’s father, Isaac.

  *

  THE EXAM RESULTS CAME OUT. Satyam had of course failed hopelessly. But it didn’t bother him too much: Flora was back on the campus. One of Satyam’s friends from Slatter Peta was Flora’s roommate in the ladies’ hostel. She told him Flora had come back to pick up her certificates so she could apply to a medical college. She would be leaving in a couple of days.

  One morning Flora was out walking. A car came out of nowhere and struck her. She was thrown forward and lay on the ground in a puddle of blood. Satyam saw the accident and came running. He took Flora into his arms. She was still breathing but just barely; only if she got to a hospital in time would she have a chance. Satyam rushed her there himself. The doctors saved her life. Satyam didn’t leave her side. Day and night, he nursed her back to health. Flora couldn’t help but fall hopelessly in love with him …

  In Satyam’s fantasies, Flora nearly died hundreds of times.

  He decided to write her a letter. It was all about the moon and the stars and the cool breeze. Nothing about his feelings for her in so many words, but she would know what he meant. He waited for her along her route. When she came by, he called out to her and handed her the letter. She took it and walked on without a word. Satyam had not expected her to stop and speak to him. Modesty prevented that. The important thing was that she had accepted his letter.

  Now he waited to hear from her. But no word came. The hurt was unbearable.

  At last he heard from his friend that Flora was taking a train the next day to try for a seat in a medical school in some other town. That evening he put on his slippers and went to the railway station with a copy of the second issue of Scream to show her the article he had written on her father. It was his last chance to see her.

  He saw Flora standing on the platform with her friends. When she saw him approach, she stepped forward to meet him. Softly but firmly she told him, “Look, Satyamurthy. Your caste and my caste are not one. You are Christians.” She meant mala Christians, untouchables. “We are brahmins. You are have-nots, we are haves. You are a Communist. My father is for Congress. How in the world can there be anything between us?”

  Just like that. How clear her thinking was, how plainly she let him know how things stood!

  She added one more thing: “One day I’m afraid you, as a poor man and a Communist, will burn down our bungalow.” Satyam then realized that Flora must already have read his article on her father’s embezzling of mission funds.

  The train arrived. Flora departed. Satyam went home in a daze.

  He understood, finally, that Flora had never had any romantic plans for him. She had all along seen that such a match was impossible. She had only wanted to meet the actor whom everyone admired onstage and tell her friends she knew him personally.

  Satyam saw Flora again. She was walking in front of him—so healthy, so upright, so confident. No, it wasn’t a girl at all. It was a lion. Maybe it had strayed from the simhadwaram of the house where Flora lived. What a magnificent creature it was, how elegantly it moved! What grace! Its hind parts, the part the tail grows out of, the part the shit drops down from, moved along with the rest of its body. Wherever the lion moved, its ass moved, too. No, that was Satyam: he was the lion’s ass.

  In reality, he never saw Flora again. Only in his nightmares.

  *

  AFTER FLORA LEFT CAME ANOTHER crushing blow. Scream had to be shut down.

  Hanumayya saw what was going on. The families, friends, and even acquaintances of known Communists were getting fired or even jailed. Hanumayya, who came from a poor family, did not want to risk his job. He quit as manager and disassociated himself from Scream. The ladies’ tailor also stopped funding the magazine. With no funds and no manager, Scream died out.

  The folding of the magazine affected Satyam more than Flora’s rejection. A great chance to prove himself, to make use of his talents, and to show his worth to the party had slipped out of his hand.

  Just as Satyam began thinking of going home to his family, Moses, the student who had asked for Satyam’s help with the magazine, unexpectedly invited Satyam to meet an underground party leader.

  The first meeting was at a tea stall. The man, Turumella Govindayya, was in his early twenties and neither as tall nor as muscular nor as dark as the underground leaders of Satyam’s imagination. He didn’t even carry a rifle. But he was a real underground leader, not merely a student organizer. Satyam never learned the man’s exact position in the party, but he seemed to have some standing, perhaps on a district level.

  Govindayya was a mala, but no ordinary mala. He was a mala dasari—a member of the priestly subcaste. Since brahmins won’t defile themselves by offering their services to untouchables, untouchables need hereditary priests of their own, their own untouchable brahmins, and these are the mala dasaris. Govindayya bought Satyam a cup of tea and gave him a report on Telangana. He told him of a few spectacular victories the people’s army had won in attacking police stations and making off with stores of weapons. Then he told of the repression, how many people had been lost. Satyam took a chance and asked if he could join the guerrillas. Govindayya replied that he would talk to the leaders above him. He never said why he’d arranged to meet Satyam in the first place. It looked to Satyam as if he was being sized up.

  Govindayya met Satyam a couple more times. The safest place was at Satyam’s hostel. As always, the watchman admitted Satyam’s visitor. When S
atyam asked about joining, he was told the party had stopped recruitment. But one evening Govindayya sent word that he had an assignment for Satyam. Not in the field of battle, but in a role that was no less important. Satyam went as instructed to an abandoned, dilapidated house in a remote corner of town to meet Govindayya and a man whose name he was not told.

  They asked Satyam, “Would you like to live here?”

  The remote house was the scariest place Satyam had ever seen in his life, filled with cobwebs and dust. Little plants were growing out of the walls. But still he answered without hesitation, “Yes.”

  Govindayya once again described the gains that had been achieved in Telangana. He told Satyam about the land distribution, the abolition of debts, the establishment of a people’s government. The region was already liberated. There was no need for more armed struggle there. The red troops were crossing the Krishna River to spread the revolution to Andhra.

  What the party needed now were secret dens in Andhra to allow the underground leaders to come and go. Satyam’s assignment was to live in this safe house and take care of it—keep it clean and receive visitors when they came. He would also act as a courier, passing on secret messages. Satyam was thrilled. Govindayya told him it was an important task, and dangerous. If the police ever learned of his role, he was sure to be shot. Satyam was prepared to take that chance. At least in this way he could make himself of use. They told Satyam they’d need to meet once more in a few days to arrange the details; Satyam would hear from them soon. For the next few days, as he waited to be summoned again, Satyam was too excited to sleep.

  Then news came from Moses that the party had no use for Satyam after all. No explanation was offered.

  What had happened was that one of the party’s top leaders had left his underground den and disappeared. No one knew where he was. His former comrades feared he would talk to the police and tell them about the party’s underground activities. The party members were afraid that if he did, they would all be hunted down and killed. Since this leader knew of the plans to extend the network of secret dens into Krishna district, these plans had to be abandoned.

  Satyam wasn’t told any of this. He understood simply that no one needed him. Not even if he was ready to risk his life.

  Then he received a letter from his father. Prasanna Rao was now living with Papa, Carey, and Marthamma in a new village called Telaprolu. The rich landlords there paid Prasanna Rao handsomely to tutor their children. At last the family was doing well.

  Prasanna Rao wrote that Satyam shouldn’t feel ashamed for not having completed his studies. His father asked that he just come home.

  TWO

  TELAPROLU IS A RICH VILLAGE dominated by the landlord caste of reddys. Before the 1950s, in the eyes of the landowning castes, education was worth nothing. An educated man was noble but useless. These castes measured a man’s worth by how many acres of land he had, how many cows or buffaloes he kept, how high his cattle-fodder pile was, how large a house he lived in, whether he slept in a four-poster bed, and how much gold was hanging from his wife’s appendages.

  As soon as the British left and power was transferred to the natives, the reddys and the kammas were swept up in enthusiasm for education. In the changing society, training in maths and science could prepare one’s children to become doctors and engineers. And training in English could get them into the civil service, until then the exclusive domain of the brahmins. After independence, government careers meant not only wealth from bribes but prestige and political power—for the caste as a whole as well as for the individual.

  So in 1951, when the reddys of Telaprolu decided to educate their children, the district government obligingly set up a school in their village.

  The school needed good teachers—nothing less than the best would do for the landlords’ children. But the best teachers then were untouchable Christians. Thanks to the work of missionaries in the coastal districts, untouchables were second only to brahmins in education.

  So when the three new teachers arrived in Telaprolu, a problem arose. Where should they live?

  The Telaprolu malapalli—its colony for untouchables of the mala caste—was so far away from the school in the middle of the village that if the teachers lived there, they would be late to work every morning. And the teachers themselves did not want to live in the malapalli. As salaried people, they could afford to live a little more decently than other untouchables. But as untouchables, they were not allowed to rent a house inside the village.

  So the three Christian teachers went to the school committee and appealed for permission to rent the vacant lot next to the school building. The committee, after discussing the matter with the reddy elders, granted their request. They could have a place in the village to live—segregated, but on the inside.

  In a vacant lot under tamarind trees, the Christian families erected small mud-and-thatch huts. No one from the village gave them a hand, not even the upparis—the digging caste—whose own colony was right next to theirs.

  *

  WHEN PRASANNA RAO WAS POSTED to the new district school in Telaprolu, he decided to bring his children from Gudivada and naturally expected Marthamma to join him there. But she refused to come.

  Marthamma had become a bitter woman back when Prasanna Rao was looking for a piece of land. His plan was to buy the land near his own village and lease it to his brother Nallayya. Marthamma wanted him to buy land near her own village instead and lease it to her son Nathaniel.

  Marthamma argued, “It was I who had to leave my job to raise your children, send them to school when you ran away from home.” She asked: “Did that Nallayya raise your children? Did any of your brothers come to take care of them?”

  For his part, Prasanna Rao, the mildest of men, never argued back. All the same, he wouldn’t for a minute consider buying land in his in-laws’ village. It was an outrageous suggestion. What kind of a man buys land in his wife’s village?

  In fact he deeply resented his mother-in-law for the way she’d been raising his children. When he was in the military, he thought he was sending her more than enough money to provide for them decently. Yet when he came home several years later, he was shocked to see them living like a coolie’s children.

  What had she done with the forty rupees he’d sent every month? It was a mystery to him. If when he came to visit he bought thirty kilos of rice to last thirty days, Marthamma ran through them in five days.

  Prasanna Rao’s interest was in his own children, while Marthamma was interested in the well-being of all of her grandchildren. When she’d set up house in Gudivada for the purpose of educating Prasanna Rao’s children, she’d brought along two of her son Nathaniel’s sons—one of whom had been working as a semibonded laborer—to “help raise Prasanna Rao’s children.” From then on, at least two of Nathaniel’s sons always lived in the house, fed and clothed and sent to school with the money Prasanna Rao provided.

  But what could Marthamma do? How could she see her son’s children live in slavery while sending her daughter’s children to schools and colleges? Her mother’s heart would not allow it.

  To Prasanna Rao, Marthamma had been raising his children in poverty. When she refused to join him in Telaprolu and went off to live with Nathaniel instead, thinking, “I will see how this Prasanna Rao will raise his children without me,” Prasanna Rao let her go, thinking, “I will show this Mrs. Marthamma that I can very well raise my children on my own.” He brought the two children to Telaprolu.

  *

  THE CHRISTIANS’ HUTS WERE TINY. Prasanna Rao was a six-foot man. The roof of the hut he built was a good foot lower than he was tall. To enter the hut, he had to bend himself double. In that cramped space, which barely accommodated his body, he lived with his two younger children. Every morning he woke up before they did and lit the hearth and made coffee. With a cup of coffee in each hand, he woke up Papa and Carey. As they drank the coffee and got ready, he would make rice and curry to eat when they returned for lunch. Then
adara-badara (in a rush) they would all run off to school.

  Prasanna Rao was then in his thirties. He always dressed neatly in a full-sleeved shirt tucked into pleated trousers and secured with a nice belt. With his handsome features, groomed hair, and courteous demeanor, he was a special sight for the villagers. When they saw him in the street, they stopped and gaped. “Abbo, Masteroo! Very handsome! What dignity!” In school, he was instantly popular with his students.

  His reputation as an excellent teacher soon spread throughout the village. The reddys had land and wealth and power but no education. Even for those who could read and write, English was hopelessly beyond them. How could they help their children with their homework? They all wanted Prasanna Rao to give their children private tutoring.

  He seized the opportunity with both hands. Students would come to his house after school. He charged only a small fee—only five rupees per head every month—but he had so many private students that he was soon making ten times his regular teaching salary. In addition to fees, the grateful reddys sent gifts to his home—milk, curds, butter, fruits, nuts, vegetables, pickles, cobs of corn, buttermilk, coconuts, honey, jaggery, sugarcane, fish, and many other things. In Telaprolu, Prasanna Rao and his children lived in plenty, as they had never lived before. There was nothing they needed.

  With this kind of income and no need to buy food, another man would have saved the money and bought land. But after his bad luck in Sankarapadu, Prasanna Rao didn’t want to gamble. The land he’d bought to supplement his income had only made the family poorer. He remembered too well the starvation they’d had to endure for the past three years. So he spent all of his salary to provide things for his children. Every day he would go to the bazaar and buy delicacies and sweets for them. For the first time in their lives, Papa and Carey had fine clothes and new books.