Carey, at sixteen, was a wild kid, always getting into fights. Twice he had been expelled from high school.
The first time was in Gudivada, after a battle with the Kathari brothers. The Katharis were a golla family who through gangsterism, it was said, had acquired a monopoly over the bus routes out of Gudivada. The three Kathari brothers were older classmates of Carey’s. These sons of the bus baron ruled the school, intimidating students and teachers alike. They wouldn’t let Carey and his untouchable friends use the playground. One day the conflict broke into a scuffle when Carey punched one of the brothers in the mouth. That was just the beginning. The Katharis’ gang and Carey’s gang clashed throughout the day, chasing each other through school corridors and finally into the streets to fight it out in the main bazaar.
The next day the headmaster expelled Carey, and Carey alone. He had to go live with his father in Telaprolu and enroll in his father’s school.
In Telaprolu, Carey again got himself expelled. A classmate of his threw a paper rocket at his teacher. Carey knew who did this but wouldn’t say. The teacher sent him to the headmaster, who prepared to cane him. Carey was indignant. Why should he be punished for refusing to snitch? He grabbed the headmaster’s wrist and held it tightly—so tightly that the headmaster not only dropped the cane but fell to the floor and broke into tears.
Prasanna Rao asked Carey’s best friend, Pulla Reddy, to keep an eye on Carey for him. Pulla Reddy obligingly asked his friend if anything was troubling him. Carey confided that he was plagued by urges that he knew were morally wrong but could not control: he longed to touch and fondle girls. Carey could never think of one code for himself and another for other people. That females of all sorts were always chasing after him only deepened his predicament. Pulla Reddy felt for his friend’s anguish even while being privately amused by it.
Carey’s unwelcome impulses finally got him into trouble during the annual mela, a weeklong village festival. He spotted a reddy girl who had just emerged from the temple where she’d gone to pray. She stood on the veranda with one arm raised over her head, resting her hand against a pillar, watching the setting sun. Carey saw her breast silhouetted by the evening light. He couldn’t help sneaking up behind her to feel it, startling her.
A hullabaloo broke out when the caste men saw this. An untouchable kid cupping a caste girl’s breast, and in a temple no less. They ran up the temple stairs and surrounded him. Carey wasn’t scared, only ashamed. Just at that moment his caste friend Jagga Reddy rushed up, shouting, “Hettt! Toottt!”—flinging his arms and legs every which way to distract the men and give Carey a chance to escape.
Carey could have gotten his whole family killed over such an episode. He knew he couldn’t let a thing like that ever happen again.
He fell two years behind in school due to the expulsions, then further still by failing English. He had fallen so far behind, he’d become his younger sister’s classmate. The headmaster told him, “You will come to nothing.” Carey was deeply hurt, but never showed it.
The next year when Carey and Papa got their hall tickets for the final exams, they couldn’t believe their eyes. Not only were they assigned the same exam center, but by sheer chance their seats were right next to each other.
Carey’s weak point was English. Papa knew Carey might fail again and worried how that would affect him. When the English exam was passed out, she lifted her paper to let her brother cheat. But Carey stared down at his own paper without flinching.
“Lord Jesus, praise be unto you,” intoned Prasanna Rao a month later when the newspapers published the exam numbers. Carey had passed.
But neither of his sons could ever make Prasanna Rao as proud as his daughter did. Papa won gold medals for maths, science, and English, and silver medals for Telugu and social studies. Wearing his best pants and shirt, Prasanna Rao attended the honors ceremony and received the awards on her behalf.
By then Papa was already in Gudivada. She and Carey were so eager to join their brother there that they left the very evening they finished their last exam. They were going to Gudivada College for Intermediate. Their grandmother soon followed to keep house for the three of them.
*
LIKE SATYAM BEFORE THEM, CAREY and Manjula (as Papa began to be known) were going off to college without the means to do so. Despite what their father was earning from private tutoring, he still had many commitments to poorer relatives. He didn’t have enough to support two children in their studies.
Satyam sought advice from Mr. Bapanayya, who suggested they apply for scholarships available to untouchables.
To apply, they needed a municipal councilman to sign a form attesting that Manjula and Carey were Adi-Andhra (untouchable) Christians. Mr. Jalari Immanuel, the council member from Slatter Peta, flatly refused. Immanuel was one of those untouchable Christians who like to delude themselves that conversion from Hinduism has freed them from the caste system. “There are no touchables and untouchables in the eyes of our Lord Jesus,” he scolded Satyam. “You should be ashamed to think of yourselves in those terms.” Immanuel wrote in their caste as simply “Andhra Christian,” then signed, stamped, and handed back the forms.
For Satyam it was a minute’s work to add Adi-in front of the words Andhra Christian in a careful imitation of the councilman’s handwriting. As promised, Mr. Bapanayya saw to it that the applications were approved right away.
The scholarships would pay for books and tuition. Their father would send rice and lentils for meals. The three siblings planned to lead a beautiful, disciplined life together, to live according to their ideals. Reuniting in Gudivada, the three were so inseparable that people came to refer to them as a single entity: Satyam-Carey-Manjula.
Six hundred and fifty boys were in Manjula’s college to only fifty girls. Even though it was a coed school, the sexes were so segregated that they never even entered a classroom together. The boys went in freely while the girls had to wait in the ladies’ waiting room until informed that the lecturer was passing by. The girls then lowered their eyes to the ground and fell into step behind the lecturer. As he led them into the classroom, the boys all stood up. To an outsider it might have looked as though the boys were being chivalrous to the girls, but in fact they were showing respect to the master. The girls took their seats together on one side of the room in a row close to the dais, while the boys all sat on the other side.
At Gudivada College, 90 percent of the lecturers and students were of the kamma caste. In Manjula’s batch of only thirteen girls were seven kammas, one was kapu, and five were malas. Unlike in Guntur, with its well-off, educated population of “traditional Christians,” the boys in Gudivada College didn’t care for mala girls. At the end of the first week, someone mischievously posted in the ladies’ waiting room a list of the nicknames assigned by the boys to the girls they saw in class. Anasooya, who walked in with her eyes glued to the floor, was Blushing Bride. Vidyadhari was Maya Sasirekha, a mythological Hindu princess. The kamma girls were given fond nicknames, while the mala girls received insulting ones such as Fat Calf (Sampoorna) and Wan Sheep (Manjula).
Although the girls all stuck together and even walked to and from school as a group, the caste girls looked straight past the mala girls and never bothered to learn their names. The mala girls, used to such treatment in their home villages, didn’t think anything of it.
But there was one mala girl whom all the caste girls were fond of and wanted to be friends with: Manjula. The caste girls thought of her as “advanced,” as “fast,” as hardworking, as friendly, as soft-spoken and well-spoken. The reasons had everything to do with her upbringing.
The other mala girls in her class had lived all their lives segregated in malapallis. They came from impoverished, illiterate backgrounds and were the first in their families to be educated. Among caste people they felt inferior and out of place. Manjula, on the other hand, had spent years living in a village proper, where the rich reddys treated her family with respect. Whenever Manjula wen
t out, they would say, “There goes the master’s daughter.”
Manjula’s most singular advantage, what set her ahead even of the caste girls in her class, was her connection to her elder brother. It was highly uncommon for college students to read literature, and this was especially true for girls. Manjula had read Sarat novels in high school, and the summer before college she had read the short stories of India’s Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore in English. She read the poetry of Sri Sri, the height of cultural fashion among young people. Her own brother, who was fast becoming as distinguished as Sri Sri, showed his poems to her for approval. Under his influence, she could even talk about world politics.
When Manjula returned home, she would tell Satyam every single thing that had happened to her that day from the time she went off to school. She left nothing out, reciting every little incident in the order it occurred as though she were picking up beads and stringing them one by one on a long thread. He listened as she talked on and on about the events of her life like the vasa pitta, a bird that chirps nonstop. In turn he told her about politics, philosophy, poetry, whatever he was reading or thinking. They used to stay up until two, three in the morning, going to bed only reluctantly.
She told him about her English lecturer, Goparaju Sambasiva Rao. “Oh, really!” Satyam said. “Do you know who he is?” Satyam explained he was the brother of Goparaju Ramachandra Rao, the famous founder of the rational-atheist movement in Andhra.
Influenced by his progressive brother, this lecturer of Manjula’s had married a widow and even encouraged his wife, who had little formal education, to write poetry. He was devoted to the uplifting of untouchables as well as women, and when his eye fell on Manjula, he devoted himself to uplifting her. As it was Mr. Sambasiva Rao’s habit to take a walk in the evenings, he began to make a point of passing through Slatter Peta so he could stop by the shack where Manjula lived. Sometimes he would even take a cup of tea with her, a remarkable thing for a brahmin to do.
Sambasiva Rao advised her not to limit herself to textbooks. He pushed her to take part in extracurricular activities, starting with a debating competition.
“Yes, why not?” Satyam said when he heard. He trained her thoroughly for each debate, which had topics like “Is education good for females?” and “Pen or gun? Which is superior?” Satyam taught his sister how to stand, where to put her hands, where to pause, where to raise her voice. “Shoulders square. Remember to look at the audience.” He wrote out entire speeches for her to memorize, then watched her as she practiced them.
The debate took place in an auditorium with a speaking platform, a sound system, special lighting. But with all that hungama (fanfare), only four students turned up to participate. In those days even boys rarely dared to attempt public speaking. For a girl to do it was unheard of. Manjula didn’t speak perfectly. In fact she talked like a little girl, vonkara-tinkara (haltingly), and she wasn’t even expressing her own ideas. The whole performance was her brother’s handiwork. But none of that diminished her achievement. After that debate, Manjula became a star in her class.
Encouraged by Sambasiva Rao and her brother, she went on to participate in a mock legislature and even a radio quiz show. For the latter, Satyam coached her for weeks on every subject, from politics and history to Telugu literature and current events. He took her by train to the All-India Radio station in the big city of Vijayawada and waited nervously outside the studio. After all the distance they’d traveled, she couldn’t answer any of the questions. Finally, she got one right, as if she’d thrown ten stones and one happened to hit the mark. Her brother and Sambavisa Rao both assured her it was all right, that she would learn.
Manjula’s classmates wondered why she didn’t major in science. “You could have become a doctor,” everyone told her. But with no composite maths in high school, science was not an option for Manjula. Satyam had dissuaded her from taking Telugu, and she was scared of English, leaving her to choose between political science and history. She took history.
Carey opted for maths and economics, to Manjula’s great relief. As it was, her younger brother slapped her twice a day to warn her to behave like a proper lady. “Why do you sit on the veranda?” he would say. “Don’t talk with that girl in a short-sleeved blouse.” “You were seen laughing in the street.” If she’d had to sit in the same classroom with him, she would have been scared to breathe.
It was only for lack of choice that her family had allowed Manjula to attend a coed school. There was no ladies’ college within a hundred miles. Since she had to sit in classrooms with boys, her family made sure she looked as unattractive as possible. One weekend when Prasanna Rao came to visit, he and his sons and mother-in-law sat together and decided that Manjula ought no longer to wear half saris, which looked too youthful. All her old clothes disappeared overnight. To replace them, her father bought a bolt of coarse white cloth without a spot of color and cut it into four pieces. Even brahmin widows dressed better than sixteen-year-old Manjula. They wore white, too, but proper saris, not lengths of fabric with no borders. In Slatter Peta, Manjula was given a new nickname: Musali Papa (Geriatric Baby). The decision about Manjula’s dress had been made right in front of her, but no one asked her what she thought of it.
While Carey told her outright what to do and slapped her when he thought she was straying, Satyam never treated her that way. Instead, he and Nancharayya would make fun of bad girls in her presence so she would be led to think, “Oh, I should never do that thing.”
Only bad girls wear two braids.
Only bad girls part their hair on the side.
Only bad girls learn to ride a bicycle.
And so on.
Manjula would do anything to avoid being talked of in this way.
*
A FEW MONTHS AFTER HE formed the Toilers, Satyam was drawn into a historic political struggle in his state.
Language groups across India were demanding states of their own. But the Telugus’ cry for a separate Andhra was the shrillest, and it was led by Communists. To Nehru it seemed as if the rear end of the country had caught fire.
On October 19, 1952, a former disciple of Gandhi’s named Potti Sreeramulu announced that he would fast until a separate Andhra state was granted.
Forty-five days later, Nehru wrote to a Congress leader in Madras, “Some kind of fast is going on for the Andhra Province and I get frantic telegrams. I am totally unmoved by this and I propose to ignore it completely.”
On December 15, on the fifty-eighth day of his fast, Potti Sreeramulu died. Within hours the news of his death had, as one newspaper reported at the time, “engulfed entire Andhra in chaos.”
When the news reached Satyam and Nancharayya, they rushed to the Gowri Sankar Cinema Hall, where hundreds of people were pouring into town from neighboring villages. They had no leader, no direction.
Satyam sent word to his troupe members to come at once. They brought their drums and a megaphone. Satyam addressed the crowds: “Come, let’s flood the streets like a tidal wave!”
Along the way, more people joined, leaving their homes, their businesses, their schools. They roared:
Nehru, Nehru,
Andhra rashtram—
istava,
chastava!
(Nehru, Nehru,
Andhra state—
you will yield
or you will die!)
The impromptu procession grew bigger and bigger. When it reached the municipal office, Satyam went upstairs to address the crowd from the rooftop:
“Dear friends! We are thousands upon thousands! We are an army! An army that will liberate three million Telugus!”
He announced he would lead them to the tehsildar’s office—the main government office in town—where they would hang a black flag as a symbol of mourning for Potti Sreeramulu.
As the crowd prepared to move on, the police stirred. Satyam picked up his megaphone to say, “O police! This battle is not with you. Our fight is with the Nehru government. You an
d us, we are bhai-bhai!” (brother-brother).
But as the marchers approached the tehsildar’s office, they came face-to-face with a line of fifty policemen standing with rifles drawn. This prompted a three-way split in the crowd. Some turned their backs and fled. Some stood still—they didn’t run away, but neither did they advance. And in the front, led by Satyam and Nancharayya, a group of some fifty people kept moving forward.
“Step back!” ordered the police commander. “Or you will be shot!”
“We dare you!” Satyam replied.
“Young man,” came the response, “why do you want to die unnecessarily?”
“I am ready to die!”
Satyam felt no fear. His dream was coming true, his dream of dying for the people. The whole town was in a state of high melodrama. He could hear women sobbing in the street.
Just then, police clerk Surya Narayana emerged from the tehsildar’s office and made his way through the line of police. “Oh, mister,” he told Satyam, “the deputy superintendent wants to speak with you. Follow me!”
Satyam didn’t know what was going to happen. He told Nancharayya to remain where he was, but Nancharayya replied, “If you go, I go.”
The clerk escorted the two young men into a huge office, where they were greeted by the deputy superintendent, looking grave. Unexpectedly, he shook their hands and politely asked them to sit down.
“Look, mister,” he said to Satyam, “do you think I am opposed to separate Andhra? I merely ask you to conduct your protest in a peaceful manner. If there is violence, then, as a police officer, I must do my duty. Our hero Potti Sreeramulu has become a martyr. I do not wish you to become one, too.” The deputy superintendent then ordered tea to be brought in and, in a gesture of respect, served it to the leaders of the protest with his own hands.
Minutes later, Satyam and Nancharayya unfurled a black flag from the terrace of the tehsildar’s office. Returning to the head of the crowd, they led another march through town. The marchers stopped to hang black flags from every government building along the way.
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