Ants Among Elephants
Page 9
Not since her mother’s death, when she was only four years old, had Papa lived with a parent of her own. Now for the first time she could remember, she felt as if she was in her own home. She no longer had to fear her grandmother’s scoldings and beatings. She didn’t feel as if she was living at the mercy of others. “This is my house,” she could say. “This is my father.”
Prasanna Rao, conscious perhaps of having neglected his children in the past, showered them with love. Papa was his favorite. She was thirteen years old now and already wearing half saris—an intermediate step to full saris that girls normally take at age sixteen. Taking after her father, she was growing like a beanstalk. Yet every evening when Prasanna Rao returned home, he would lift her in his arms like a baby—Papa, who had never before known a parent’s love. Carrying her around like that, he would sing her lullabies. He was twelve years late, but better late than never. He didn’t know any real lullabies, so he sang her hymns from the Andhra Christian hymnbook.
In the three years that his children spent with Prasanna Rao in Telaprolu, he made up for having deserted them, and then some.
But with the cooking and housework, life was terribly hard for him. Especially when the monsoon season came and he had to get up at four in the morning to light the hearth. The wood would be damp and it would take a long time to start the fire. A man of heft, he would have to get down on his elbows and knees in front of the little three-brick hearth, bending low with his bottom hoisted way up in the air, and blow, blow, blow through an iron tube for over an hour. By the end of it, his lungs would ache. He had to walk a quarter mile to draw water since he wasn’t allowed to touch the nearby caste well. He carried it back in heavy iron buckets. He would take one bucket in each hand and make a dozen trips back and forth from the well. The family needed water for everything: cooking, drinking, taking baths, cleaning, washing. When Prasanna Rao cleaned the dishes, he had to scratch loose with coconut fiber and brick powder the food stuck to the bottom of his earthen pots. When he did the washing, he had to beat the soaked clothes against a stone and then rinse them and dry them and fold them.
Because he was living in the caste area, he had no one to help him. If he had been living in the malapalli, he would have gotten all kinds of help. The untouchables of Telaprolu and even the surrounding villages were proud of their “Masteroo.” But Prasanna Rao was determined to shield his children from the wretchedness and disease and shame of the malapalli. And his children themselves were no help to him. They didn’t know how to cook or clean. Marthamma had always done everything for them.
Prasanna Rao would return from school to lead his private classes without a moment’s respite. Then late in the evening he cooked for his children and fed them. No sooner had he fallen asleep than it was already 4:00 a.m. and time to wake up and fetch the water and get the fire started.
He lacked one indispensable thing in that traditional society: a woman’s presence.
Papa took the initiative. When school holidays came, she told her father, “Give me bus fare to go to Parnasa.”
In Parnasa, Marthamma’s situation was not at all good. Her son’s family, for whose sake she had robbed Prasanna Rao all those years, did not reciprocate her concern for their welfare. Nathaniel did not have much say in how his mother was treated. His wife, who was in charge of family affairs, did not care for her mother-in-law. She saw her as an unwanted burden.
In Prasanna Rao’s house, Marthamma had been the master. Whatever she said was a verse from the Vedas. Living with Nathaniel, she had tasted the ordinary lot of a widow. There she was treated with contempt.
When Papa appeared at the doorstep, Marthamma took her in her arms. In each other’s embrace, grandmother and granddaughter wept for a long time.
When they recovered, Papa wiped her tears and made the little speech she had rehearsed on the bus: “Ammamma, you did so much for us. Without you we would not have survived. Why abandon us now? Please come back to us.” Marthamma followed her willingly.
With Marthamma taking over for the second time the family responsibilities her daughter had left behind, Prasanna Rao put his mind to his work. Night and day he engaged students. He was making more money than he’d ever dreamed of and spending it freely on his family. In place of scarcity, Marthamma now had abundance to manage.
Now that their life was a chariot of flowers, it was time to bring back the eldest son, the one who’d left and never returned. Prasanna Rao sent him a letter: “Come home.”
*
THREE YEARS EARLIER, WHEN SATYAM had gone off to college, it was as if the whole Kambham clan were sending a soldier into battle. Now he was returning to his family wounded and defeated.
The day he was to come back, they prepared for his arrival as if for a special guest. Marthamma cooked a lunch with three different curries. The night before she’d made curds. Prasanna Rao went to the bazaar and brought home bananas and sweets. Carey fetched a bucket of water for his brother to wash up. Papa placed a clean tumbler next to the bucket. She lowered the cot where their father slept at night and spread a clean sheet neatly over it for her brother to sit on.
When Satyam walked in and they saw him for the first time since he’d left for college, they were shocked. He looked like a famine victim, with sticks for arms and legs and a big pot for a belly. His skin was pale; his eyes looked yellowish. His beard had never been trimmed.
Prasanna Rao finally found his voice. “Okay, come, wash up and eat something.”
No one could think of anything to say until night fell and Satyam went to sleep. Then they sat together and made plans to restore his health.
Marthamma said that goat’s milk would quickly strengthen Satyam’s body. The next day Prasanna Rao went to the bazaar and bought a goat. He finally had the means to follow the advice the doctor had given him nineteen years earlier when Satyam was born: “Give your son some milk every day.”
In the morning as Satyam sipped his coffee, Carey clipped the overgrown nails on Satyam’s fingers and toes and shaved his beard. Papa boiled water and Carey bathed his brother, gently scrubbing his delicate body. Papa laid out his clothes. They did everything for him. Carey and Papa would fetch water for him, bring him a towel. They served him food and washed his hands after he’d eaten.
This marked the beginning of Satyam’s lifelong physical dependency on others. He never learned to shave. He couldn’t clip his own nails or even bathe himself. First his brother and sister would do all such things for him, and then his wife, and finally his political followers. If he wanted a pen, he would say, “Someone, bring me a pen.” But even writing was too much for him: he preferred to dictate. It’s astonishing that anyone could go on living like that. It takes a lot of effort to be so helpless. But Carey and Papa loved to pamper him. They simply adored their brother.
In Prasanna Rao’s house, no one ever said a word about the college debacle. Prasanna Rao didn’t ask his son when or if he planned to retake his exams.
After a few weeks under the family’s care, Satyam’s health was nearly restored. Since his father had more private students than he could handle, Satyam offered to help. Prasanna Rao was by then known all over the taluka (district subdivision). Parents from other villages would send their sons and daughters to Telaprolu for tutoring. Some had to walk five to ten miles; others came on bicycle.
Prasanna Rao assigned his students in Ampapuram, a nearby village, to Satyam. He would ride his bicycle and get there early in the morning. He’d finish class by 9:30 a.m. Then he would race back to Telaprolu and wait outside the library for the doors to open at ten.
*
TELAPROLU WAS KNOWN AS a great Communist center, and the Vemana Library was its beacon. The local Communist leaders had stocked it with Telugu literature and all the writings of Marx and Lenin that had been translated into Telugu. With around a thousand volumes and some thirty or forty dailies, weeklies, and monthlies housed in two modest rooms equipped with wooden benches, it was not as big as a city library,
but for Satyam it was perfect. For two years he went there daily. He read every book in its collection, from the medieval Telugu epic Manu Charithra to the latest poems of Sri Sri.
In the library, he read the novels of Chalam and Kodavatiganti Kutumba Rao, and many Bengali novels in Telugu translation. They were the first works of Indian literature to depict romantic relationships realistically. He read them looking for answers. In his dreams every night, Satyam found himself racing to the station to catch a train. As he stood there panting, he would see the back of the train already pulling out. Every morning as he woke up gasping, his first thought was of Flora. He wondered, if he’d done this instead of that, would she have come to him?
When the library closed, Satyam would go home and lie in a corner with a book in his hand. Or he would read sitting on the banks of the Eluru Canal or stretched out on the little bridge that went over it. He read up in the branches of a pipal tree. He read as he wandered through a mango grove.
When his eyes got tired from reading, he would lie on his belly in the grass and watch a herd of goats swimming across the river to the other side, where there was more grass to eat. One day, just like that, a poem came into his head:
Ee
Eethaku
Aa
Methaku
Saripothundi.
(For
This swim,
That grub
Is just enough.)
At the riverside, he would listen to the songs of the canoemen and canoewomen as they pulled themselves across:
Your mother and my mother
They went to Karempoodi.
Come and pound the spice,
O Lambadi Ramdasa!
My sari’s turned all yellow,
The yellow of new motherhood.
Where do we hide the baby,
O Lambadi Ramdasa?
Let’s drink the wine of Seethampeta.
Let’s climb into a canoe.
Let’s elope to a faraway town,
O Lambadi Ramdasa!
*
SITTING IN THE LIBRARY, HOLDING the latest issue of Telugu Swatantra in his hands, Satyam could not believe his eyes. He read that story, his story, his first published story, over and over. It read even better in print. The editor had changed the original title, “Siksha Smriti” (literally “Penal Code,” but the word siksha means “education” as well as “punishment”), to “Father and Son”—losing the pun. But no matter.
In the story, a young man, the son of a village teacher, wants to go to college. His poor father doesn’t have the money to send him.
One day the young man leaves home and boards a train to Bombay. There he finds a job. He starts sending money to his poor father back in the village. Every month his father receives a money order but never a note from his son. The young man never asks after his father’s health, nor does he write to tell about his own. When his father writes letters, the son ignores them.
Finally the old man boards a train to Bombay, holding a scrap of paper on which he’s written out the “from” address that appears on the money orders. With great difficulty, he finds the office where his son is employed. He sends word to his son and takes a seat to wait. At last his son comes out. But his son will not speak to him, not one word.
The old man understands it is a matter of crime and punishment. His son is penalizing him for having failed to fund his education. The father goes home and lies down on his cot to die, muttering, “I can punish you, too, Son.”
The publication of “Father and Son” resolved for Satyam whatever resentment he’d felt toward his father for not sending money while he was away at college. It worked like a medicine to heal the wounds left by the hardships he had faced.
At A.C. College, Hanumayya had whetted Satyam’s intellectual curiosity. In Telaprolu, Satyam set out to learn directly, through his own study, from Marx, Engels, and all those great men. He also read India Today, a political history of India under colonial rule written by R. Palme Dutt, a British Communist of Indian origin. Satyam was not going to be an ordinary party member who followed what the leaders said. He was intent on becoming a theoretician.
Kattamanchi Ramalinga Reddy, a well-known poet and social reformer, wrote a book called Analysis of the Philosophy of Poetry in which he makes fun of the style and content of traditional Telugu literature. Satyam wrote an essay criticizing this book, which he titled “Analysis of the Analysis of the Philosophy of Poetry.” He pointed out that Reddy merely attacked the form of classic Telugu literature without recognizing that its character arose from the feudal society that produced it.
This work of Satyam’s never saw publication. It was rejected by Telugu Swatantra, the journal that had printed his short story. Telugu Swatantra’s founder, a man known as Gora, was an anti-Marxist social reformer like Kattamanchi himself.
Undaunted, Satyam wrote another article a few days later and sent it off to a magazine called Shanti (Peace), where it appeared in the next issue. Based on a report on the economic condition of the West that Satyam had read in an English-language version of a magazine from the Soviet Union called New Times, Satyam’s article predicted there would soon be a global depression and, as a result of this crisis, a third world war. A few years later he came to recognize (as he saw it) the faulty understanding of Marxism that had led him to this wrong conclusion.
At the age of twenty, Satyam had already written several of his best-known poems—poems inspired by the rhythm and imagery of Sri Sri’s verse as well as the verbal grandeur of the reactionary brahmin writer Viswanatha Satyanarayana. A poem of Satyam’s called “My Penance” was published in Visalandhra, the organ of the Andhra Communist Party:
This night is
A bird that flapped its terrible wings
This night is
Venom spewed by
The fanged demon
From this night
From this earth
Towards the light
Of a new world
Towards the sweet
Morning light
This is my penance
For the meek and the oppressed
And for the lowest of the low
This is my penance
A fearsome march
Against the evil and the cruel
In Telaprolu it was thought that Satyam must be a saint or a sage. He sat under the tamarind tree in the lot beside the school just like Buddha under the pipal tree. Always reading, writing, thinking. This son of Prasanna Rao, failed student though he was, became for his father a source of great pride.
*
BY THE TIME SATYAM ARRIVED in Telaprolu, the Communists who had built the library were nowhere to be seen. They had all gone underground.
Satyam knew what had been going on in neighboring Telangana. He’d heard that, as the Indian army advanced, the guerrillas took their rifles and fled into the jungles of Warangal to the north. Those who didn’t escape were captured or shot dead.
The army then occupied the area and carried out what the government called its “pacification program.” This meant that whole villages were razed and Communist sympathizers there rounded up and sent off to concentration camps. Where roads had been dug up to aid the guerrillas, Indian soldiers buried peasants alive in the trenches and forced the survivors to build new roads over these mass graves. The Nehru government’s atrocities in Telangana were even worse than the Razakars’.
And they were not confined to Telangana. Many people from Andhra, especially Krishna and Guntur, had gone to fight alongside the peasants of Telangana.
The Nehru government dispatched a special battalion of the army, the dreaded Malabar Police, to Krishna district in order to root out Communists and their supporters. By the time Satyam arrived in Telaprolu, scores of Communists there had been arrested and one shot dead. The Communist leader in the village, Senagala Viswanatha Reddy, had gone into hiding. A senior cadre in nearby Buddhavaram, a kamma man named Paparayudu, was shot dead shortly after Satyam arrived.
How did he know? He’d read what had happened in neighboring China, where a great leader named Mao Zedong had led his peasant army on what was called the Long March. They retreated only to return one day, stronger than ever, to complete the revolution and establish a Communist society.
The armed peasants of Telangana, too, must have made a tactical retreat to evade Nehru’s forces. Soon they would return. With that hope Satyam bided his time.
Then came the news that even without Communists to lead them the landless masses of Telangana, defying the army and the doras, were organizing strikes and winning hikes in wages. Some of these struggles were even led by women.
This news inspired Satyam to try to raise the consciousness of the agricultural laborers in Telaprolu, the largest and most wretched section of whom were madigas. But whenever he tried talking to them, they got nervous and made some excuse to leave the scene. The madigas of Telaprolu remembered what had happened to one of their own a few years earlier, a man named Noble.
Noble was born to a poor, landless couple. Educated by missionaries, he became a schoolteacher. Everyone called him Noble Masteroo. When he learned that poor men and women in neighboring Telangana were rising up against the landlords, this frail dark young man said farewell to his wife and five small children and went off to join the guerrillas.
The Malabar Police made an example of Noble, who was the only madiga among the Communists of Telaprolu. He was taken to a deserted area where they tortured him for days. Then they tied him to a tree and shot him dead.
His illiterate wife was left with no income. She and her five children were penniless.
*
AS A MALA, SATYAM COULD not simply walk uninvited into the madiga goodem—the colony for untouchables of the madiga caste—and talk to the people there. That would be taken as suspicious or threatening.
So every evening when he set out on the road leading to the madiga goodem, he always stopped along the way in the low-caste colony at a tea stall owned by Ramachandra Rao.