Ants Among Elephants

by Sujatha Gidla

  Ramachandra Rao liked talking politics with the low-caste men who gathered at his tea stall. He was a Congress man, a firm anti-Communist. But he wasn’t a Gandhian. Like Satyam, he had been a great admirer of Subhas Chandra Bose, the leader whose portrait Satyam had tacked to the blackboard in his high school, the one who led a militant faction in Congress in opposition to Gandhi. That year, when Rao organized a memorial meeting for Bose, he decided to ask Satyam to speak. He was so impressed by what he heard that he invited Satyam to give political classes to his customers. One time Satyam said to him, “Listen, I am a Communist and you are an anti-Communist. How can there be friendship between us?” Ramachandra Rao laughed and told him, “You are the kind of Communist I like.”

  Among the customers at the tea stall were a couple of madiga youths who ventured out of their colony to spend time there, Sulaiman and Rama Rao. As Sulaiman was not in the habit of wearing a shirt, everyone knew of his remarkably thick growth of chest hair. He never knew anger and was never seen without a smile. Rama Rao’s manner was so familiar that no one who came across him ever stayed a stranger with him for long. He always put castor oil in his wavy hair and combed it back neatly. Satyam befriended these two men and through them was finally welcomed into the madiga goodem.

  They introduced him to another madiga, a thief named Subba Rao. Subba Rao was only a small-time thief, but he had the air of a big-time bandit. He wore his thick mop of hair in the style of a current cinema hero. When he was amused, he laughed like a villain, but mostly he affected a faint, sensual smile like a movie star surrounded by adoring fans. He had two wives. His first wife got up early in the morning to pluck tamarind leaves, putting them into a bamboo basket. She spent the rest of the day going from hut to hut in the two untouchable colonies of the village to sell the leaves for pinches of rice. A hard day’s work yielded enough for four servings. When she got home, she cooked the rice and made a curry with tamarind leaves and carrion beef—the same meal day after day for years, but Subba Rao never tired of it. After eating with his first wife, he took what was left over to share with his second wife, with whom he spent the night, waking up the next morning entwined with her long after his first wife had left for the tamarind grove.

  Subba Rao took to calling Satyam “Comrade Noble,” and Rama Rao’s wife would say sadly, “Here is another Noble getting ready to be shot.”

  One day the police grabbed Subba Rao and locked him up for a theft somewhere far away. The madigas were all illiterate and utterly without resources. They couldn’t think of raising bail or hiring a lawyer. When Satyam got in touch with civil liberties activists in Vijayawada and had Subba Rao released, Satyam came to be seen as a hero, a magician who knew how to get people out of the hands of the police. The madiga laborers began to regard him as a leader.

  *

  WHEN THE TEACHER ASKED FOR a volunteer to use the English word while in a sentence, Papa raised her hand. The teacher knew she was one of the few students he had who was capable of answering such a hard question. But even so he was surprised by what she said: “The Koreans are harvesting while the Americans are bombing them.”

  The teacher put his hand to his chest and swooned. The answer was not merely grammatically correct, it was creative. The contrast it drew between American aggression and the peaceful labor of the Korean people made a meaningful statement. And that a student of his—a girl, at that—knew anything of international politics was entirely unexpected.

  The teacher did not know it was all her brother’s influence.

  Normally a man like Satyam would turn to male companions to discuss politics or literature. But whenever Satyam was thinking deeply about something, he longed to tell it to his sister. “Too bad, amma, too bad you were born a girl. Otherwise, we could spend every minute together.” Women and girls were expected to stay at home unless they had a specific reason to go out.

  Papa and Carey would pick up the books their elder brother left strewn around the house. Imitating him, they got into the habit of reading novels, although they never developed the slightest appetite for abstract thinking or poetry.

  Papa and Carey were especially drawn to the novels of Sarat Chandra, a Bengali author whose works were being translated into Telugu. Sarat’s novels typically featured a heroine who supported her weak husband, cared for her failing in-laws, and set her husband’s wayward younger brother on the right path. These books were modern in their depiction of a strong-willed female character, though she used her strength not to assert herself but rather to endure her unhappy fate. She strained to prop up the very thing that was crushing her, the patriarchal family.

  Papa and Carey each formed an ideal of life from these novels.

  Carey longed to deliver a prostitute from her wretchedness by marrying her and making her a respectable woman.

  Papa dreamed of becoming an exemplary wife, daughter-in-law, and sister-in-law. Above all, she would be honest. She would do nothing that needed to be kept secret from anyone in the world.

  Now that Papa was living in her own home at last, loved and cared for by her own father, with nice clothes to wear and plenty to eat, she felt grateful to her family. Whereas earlier she had wanted to spend all her time playing with her school friends, now she liked to be at home with her father and brothers. She did work around the house without anyone forcing her, helping her grandmother cook and clean. She washed dishes, heated water for baths, served her father meals when he came home.

  *

  PAPA WAS HELPING HER GRANDMOTHER wash clothes in the backyard when it started to rain. Marthamma called out to Papa, “Come quickly and take these dry clothes inside!” Prasanna Rao, who’d been chatting with the other two Christian teachers, said goodbye to his colleagues and rushed inside to place pots under the known holes in the roof.

  The breeze became a violent wind, and the light rain turned into a torrential shower. Satyam and Carey came running home to take shelter. Hours passed without respite. The family watched as night seemed to fall in the early evening. Coconut trees swayed hysterically in the engulfing darkness.

  The wind shook the palm roof of the hut more and more forcefully until the pole supporting the roof began to rattle. Marthamma screamed, “O Yammo!” (O Mother!). Prasanna Rao grabbed onto the pole in a desperate attempt to keep it in place. The whole family held on to it like life itself.

  Around midnight their eastern wall collapsed—the mud construction simply melted away. Their home was now more of a hazard than a shelter. Leaving the roof to fly off where the wind would take it, they fled. Outside, there were no lights as far as they could see, just water and wind.

  Over in the brahmin quarters, poor brahmins were taking shelter and comfort in the homes of the better-off. Some went inside the Rama Temple. Throughout the village, families of each caste helped others from the same caste.

  But no one offered to take in the Christians, whose primitive huts were all swept away. The three Christian families left behind all their belongings and ran for their lives to take shelter in the school. They had no trouble getting in; luckily, the reddys had stinted on its construction and never attached gates or doors to the entrances.

  The three families were stranded there for three days and three nights with no food, no dry clothes, no bedding. The two infants cried and cried for milk until they could no longer cry or even move. Their mothers stared down at the infants’ limp limbs helplessly.

  All the families could do was wait and hope. The storm was international news. With the heavy rains, the great Godavari River had swollen until it burst its banks and swallowed up hundreds of villages. Hundreds died in the swirling waters.

  On the fourth day, when the sun came out, the villagers of Telaprolu discovered the Christian families huddled inside the school. “This morning we have been looking for you,” the villagers said. “There is no trace of your houses left. Where are you going to live?”

  The Christians had no answer. The reddys came up with a plan. Sheltering the Christians in
their own houses never entered the reddys’ minds, though they were avowed Communists. But they generously offered to let the Christians move into an old grain storehouse attached to a rice mill owned by one of their caste fellows.

  When the Christian families emerged from the school, they were astounded by the destruction. All over the delta you could see human and animal carcasses lying about wherever they had floated into a shrub or fallen branch. Many children had been carried away. Most villages in India had no electricity, but in the nearby towns that did, many people were electrocuted when they stepped on high-voltage wires brought down by the wind.

  For three months the three Christian families lived together in the old storehouse. They never quarreled over the limited resources they shared. There were no separate rooms, no kitchen, no toilet. They all lived in one dark, sprawling, musty, rat-infested space half filled with rotting, flood-damaged grain and the tiny insects that lived in it. They set up brick hearths to cook on and spread out old clothes to sleep on.

  They lived in a peculiar harmony arising out of their common deprivation, their isolation from the rest of the village. They were all quite helpless, but at least they were all together. Papa played with the babies of the other families. The grown-ups helped each other with cooking and other chores. They shared rice, lentils, sugar, salt, and milk.

  While the Kambhams were still living in the storehouse, Papa, then thirteen, became a “big person”—that is to say, she got her first period, an event that is celebrated as a mark of a girl’s reaching maturity. Papa’s family didn’t miss the chance to celebrate. Prasanna Rao was determined to observe the occasion as grandly as possible. He took every measure to ensure that his daughter would not feel her mother’s absence at this time.

  Relatives on both sides—members of the Kambham and Medapati families—set out from their respective villages to converge in Telaprolu. They brought sweetmeats, green lentils, turmeric, sesame oil, new clothes, and bangles.

  The Christian families living with the Kambhams helped with all the preparations. The teachers built a tent outside the storehouse. Carey gathered bright green coconut leaves.

  For ten days and nights, Papa stayed on a bed of bright green coconut fronds under the frond-covered tent. For those ten days she drank a mixture of sesame oil and raw eggs; she ate rice and green lentils cooked with ghee. Every day she bathed in warm water and applied turmeric paste to her feet.

  On the tenth day, Prasanna Rao threw a great feast of goat-meat curry and pulauv (pilaf) for all his relatives, colleagues, and friends (untouchables only, of course). They presented Papa with the gifts they’d brought. She delighted in the attention. The change she had lately felt in herself was being announced with great fanfare.

  On the eleventh day of the rite of her entering womanhood, Papa returned to school to find all eyes on her. No one needed to say anything. Everyone knew what had happened. The boys and the teachers all knew why a girl would spend ten days absent from school and come back in new clothes with gobs of turmeric smeared on her feet.

  After three months Prasanna Rao’s family left the storehouse and moved into a new house a reddy man had built for them. He charged Prasanna Rao rent to stay there. On top of that, Prasanna Rao had to agree to educate the man’s son and make sure he scored well on all his exams. But now the family lived in a pukka (solid) house made of bricks—not a mud hut with a thatched roof—with three separate rooms, one behind the other like cars on a train.

  *

  ONLY ONE OTHER GIRL WAS in Papa’s class, a rich brahmin whose father owned a cinema hall. She was intelligent and beautiful, but Papa never thought to compare herself to this girl. Her own father was the most popular teacher in the school, and she was also proud of her talented brother. Papa was the tallest girl in the school and stood first or nearly first in her class in every subject. Including the one that had always given her the most trouble, maths.

  Ever since schools had closed in respect after Gandhi was assassinated, Papa had prayed before every maths exam for Nehru’s death. One time Marthamma was pleased to see her granddaughter kneeling in prayer and asked her what she wanted from Lord Jesus Christ. When Marthamma heard what it was, she said to her granddaughter sternly, “It is not done to pray for such things.”

  But Papa had finally overcome her fear of maths through hard work—she committed the whole textbook to memory. That’s all it takes in India to do well in school, just memorize everything. And Papa had a great memory. She could recite page after page from her English and Telugu textbooks word for word.

  Papa wanted to take the advanced class, composite maths. Only by studying composite maths could one become a doctor, an engineer, a physicist, or a chemist. It would have been an unconventional and audacious choice for a girl to take composite maths. But Papa was an excellent student, and the most famous maths teacher in the area was her own father. With his help she could have gone far indeed.

  Yet Prasanna Rao’s greatest concern was his daughter’s chastity. He believed that girls are born to debauchery. And boys, he thought, are naturally predatory. When he taught private classes in composite maths at home, the front room of the new family house was full of boys. Papa was never under any circumstances allowed to enter that front room while a class was going on. So she sat alone in the second room and studied general maths, which did not require special tutoring. Once every two weeks or so her father would sit down with her and clear her doubts about square roots or the Pythagorean theorem.

  Papa hardly talked to the only other girl in her class, the brahmin girl. But Papa did find a friend, an eighth-class student named Bharati. Bharati was a madiga, the martyr Noble’s daughter.

  Bharati was a quiet, tragic girl who studied hard and kept to herself. She was dark but extremely beautiful. Once when she and Papa were walking together, Papa felt thirsty. Since they were walking close to where Bharati lived, Papa asked if they could go to her house and have a glass of water.

  Bharati became agitated and said no. When Papa tried to argue with her, the girl flew into a fury. Her reaction was entirely out of character and seemed to make no sense. Only many years later did Papa come to understand.

  Bharati lived in the madiga goodem. The madigas are forced to eke out a living by trading in dead animals. When an animal falls dead in the village of disease or old age, a madiga comes to haul it away. The carrion flesh is sold to untouchables as meat, and the hide is tanned and made into leather goods. Not all madiga families engage in this occupation, but even if only four or five of them do, the whole madiga goodem is polluted by the festering piles of guts on the ground and dripping pieces of flesh hanging in the sun. The smell of the blood is everywhere.

  When Papa asked to come over, Bharati was caught in a situation she had never before encountered. Never had she expected that an outsider would want to come to where she lived. She had to refuse, but she couldn’t say why. When she was forced to defend this refusal, her shame changed into anger.

  A few weeks later, Papa went to school only to be told it was closed for the day. It was the day of a maths exam. Had someone died? Yes, but not Nehru.

  The night before, Bharati had been sitting at the entrance of her hut studying for the exam with a small kerosene lamp for light. Her mother was asleep on the ground outside. They were so poor they couldn’t afford a lamp with a glass cover over the flame. Bharati dozed off. The lamp fell over. Kerosene spilled. The hut caught fire. Thirteen-year-old Bharati, the daughter of the martyr Noble, was consumed in the blaze.

  *

  THE FIRST GENERAL ELECTIONS IN independent India were to be held at the end of 1951. Nehru himself was coming south to Andhra to drum up support for Congress Party candidates. Satyam, Sulaiman, Rama Rao, and Subba Rao made plans to take the bus to Guntur, where the man who’d ordered the massacre of the people’s army in Telangana would be speaking.

  The Congress Party had reason to be concerned about its fate in the elections, especially in Andhra. All across India, Neh
ru’s government was facing demands for a redivision of the old provincial boundaries drawn up by the British. At least thirty major languages are spoken in India, and several of these linguistic groups were asking for states of their own.

  When the British ruled the subcontinent, they divided it up for their own convenience into units called provinces or presidencies. The whole of south India was contained in the Madras Presidency. Within this province lived speakers of four mutually unintelligible languages: Tamils, who spoke Tamil; Andhras, who spoke Telugu; Kannadigas, who spoke Kannada; and Malayalis, who spoke Malayalam.

  When independence came, Nehru and the Congress not only kept these very different peoples lumped together in one province but also imposed the north-Indian language of Hindi on them and everyone else as the national language.

  The Telugus were at the forefront of agitation for a separate state. The rich peasantry—kammas, reddys, and kapus—who now had profits from agriculture were looking to invest it somewhere. But Andhra had little industry, and that was dominated by the north-Indian baniyas and marwaris (moneylender, merchant, and trader castes) represented by Congress. The Telugu elite needed to drive out competition from non-Telugus and carve out a territory for themselves.

  The demand for an Andhra state had grown so popular that, as elections approached, Nehru was forced to concede to it in principle. But he clearly wasn’t happy with the idea, and still less with the precedent it set for other parts of the country.

  So when Nehru came south, protest was in the air. He faced angry crowds in Vizag after admitting that he was personally against linguistic provinces. He claimed to be willing to make an exception in the case of Andhra, but few took comfort in this assurance.

  At Guntur, Nehru attracted the largest crowd of the whole tour. He was pleased because he planned to give his most important speech of the southern campaign there, to be delivered in both English and Hindi—the language of the former colonial rulers and the language that the northern native rulers were trying to force on the South.