But soon Manjula would be leaving home to pursue her master’s. Hopefully he would get admission wherever she enrolled. Then they could be together for the next two years. That would be plenty of time to convince her to marry him, whether her family agreed or not.
FIVE
EXAM RESULTS CAME OUT. SATYAM, Manjula, and their father passed (he had enrolled in a B.A. program by correspondence). Carey failed. It was English again.
Many of Manjula’s classmates passed, but only three of them were accepted by Andhra University: Manjula, Satyam, and their friend Ganga Raju.
On the day they were to leave for Vizag, Manjula made a special visit to her old history lecturer Mr. Rama Prabhu’s home. He wouldn’t let her into his house. Standing outside the gate, she thanked him: “Sir, without you pushing me hard the way you did, I never would have passed, let alone received a first class.”
She meant it. She had the demented notion that this man had humiliated and terrorized her with no other purpose than to make her study hard. As though Rama Prabhu were a stricter version of Sambasiva Rao, with the same ideals of uplifting untouchables but with different methods. Manjula wasn’t aware of her tendency to prostrate herself before caste Hindus, especially brahmins. Throughout her life—in this and other ways—she coupled rebellion with obeisance.
On a sweaty summer evening, friends and family went to the railway station to see off Satyam, Manjula, and Ganga Raju. Manjula, beaming with excitement, sat at the window to wave goodbye. As the train pulled out, Carey ran alongside it and snarled at her, “Behave yourself.” She shrank with hurt and shame.
The next morning they arrived at Waltair Station in Vizag. Vizag is a beautiful port city on the Bay of Bengal with pristine white beaches on one side and green hills on the other. Its endless streets slope up and down, lined with palm trees and street vendors. At nearly every corner you see a Hindu temple or a Christian church.
Vizag was also where Satyam and Manjula’s mother was buried. Since fleeing the city during the Japanese bombing, they had never returned, except when Satyam, in the final year for his B.A., had visited Andhra University to represent his college in a statewide debating competition. The topic his team was given was “Capitalism or Communism?” Satyam’s teammate, intent on accruing extracurricular credits, wanted to defend Communism because he thought it was easier. With a wave of his hand, Satyam let him have his choice. Arguing for capitalism with great passion, lyricism, and good sense, Satyam won his college the gold medal.
Returning to the AU campus as a student at the Arts College, Satyam settled into a hostel. In the mornings he liked to stand at his balcony looking out at the campus below. He soon noticed a pretty paki girl who came to clean out the latrines in the faculty quarters. She reminded him of his beautiful Maniamma, who was pregnant when he left home.
In his first week at AU, Satyam was called to a meeting for SFI members and a few Communist workers from the dockyards. They gathered late at night in an older student’s room. A senior representative of the party had come to speak.
After Stalin died and Khrushchev took over as the Soviet leader, major changes occurred in international Communist policy. The purpose of the meeting was to inform those attending of the Indian Communist Party’s new line.
Before the party man even started to explain, Satyam lost his temper. “If you want to follow Moscow’s orders blindly, you do that!” he interrupted. “Don’t expect us to do the same. We will study the documents ourselves and come to our own conclusions. Now you just go home.”
Satyam could see what was going on in Russia. The Soviets were going the same way the Indian party had started to go under the leadership of Dange and Rajeswara Rao, who rejected any renewal of the armed struggle and relied solely on elections to bring the party to power. This unofficial faction proclaimed, just like Khrushchev, that socialism could be achieved peacefully through a gradual transformation of society. When Stalin was alive, everyone took his sayings as verses from the Vedas. But Stalin had been dead three years, and now Khrushchev was saying Stalin had committed crimes.
Not long after that meeting, Satyam learned that Sundarayya, the great organizer of the Telangana Armed Struggle, was visiting AU. Satyam was eager to approach him. After all, Sundarayya had opposed Dange and Rajeswara Rao on the question of withdrawing the armed struggle.
Satyam went to see him at the university guesthouse and asked, “This change in the party line, comrade, what are we to make of it? Where is the party going, and what are we students to do?”
Sundarayya, even Sundarayya, could only tell these young men—who were ready to sacrifice their lives—to pass their exams and find themselves jobs.
In the midsemester exams, Satyam stood first in political theory, economics, and history. While he was home in Gudivada for recess, Maniamma gave birth to a boy, whom he named Siddhartha. When the happy news came out, Satyam’s supporters from the ghettos—pakis, field laborers, rickshaw pullers—flocked to the house bearing gifts. It made Manjula gravely uneasy to see lepers from Satyamurthy Nagar take the infant in their arms and kiss him, but Satyam made sure she didn’t say a word.
Marriage and fatherhood had little effect on Satyam. All the passion and poetry that was in him—little of it now went toward his wife and son. His mind was still occupied with the problem of how to make an Indian revolution.
He got his hands on some documents of the Chinese Communist Party that put forward an alternative to the Soviet line. There Satyam at last found a diagnosis of the ailment afflicting the Soviet Communist Party. The Chinese called it revisionism—a fundamental departure from Marxist doctrine. They attacked the Soviets for embracing the possibility of “peaceful coexistence” between socialist states and imperialism and of a “peaceful transition to socialism” in the capitalist countries.
Satyam saw that the Indian revolution had to take the Chinese path. The toilers could never come to power by legal means such as elections. His task was to assemble and train the cadres to build and lead an army of peasant guerrillas. Its aim would be to liberate the countryside village by village, driving off the landlords and gathering forces to ultimately encircle the cities and capture state power. After years of questioning, Satyam had found the way forward.
On returning to campus, he plunged into a serious study of the writings of Chairman Mao. Slowly a circle formed around him. Satyam earned the sobriquet AU Mao.
This group of like-minded friends included Chalasani Prasad, a kamma student a year ahead of Satyam with an impeccable Communist pedigree. Chalasani’s family—not just his immediate family, but the extended family as well—had fought in Telangana. His own brother, his sister’s husband, and an uncle of his had been shot dead by police. Another uncle and several cousins had languished in prison for years. Chalasani admired his dead brother dearly.
There was also Panchadi Krishnamurthy, a man of the kalinga caste, from Srikakulam district. In Srikakulam, the kalingas, although officially a backward caste, occupy the same social and economic status as do the kammas in Krishna district. Panchadi, however, came from a poor kalinga family. Satyam was struck by his handsome looks and the discipline he showed in his studies. He woke up early, bathed, dressed neatly, and combed his hair so as not to let a single hair stray. He sat and studied for an hour before class, and when he returned, he would have his tea and settle down again with his textbooks. He was studying economics.
Satyam reckoned that Panchadi would be a great asset to the coming Maoist movement. He tried to draw him into his circle. But Panchadi told him clearly, “Look, my family is very poor. They put all their resources into my education. I am going to get a first class and become a lecturer.”
Yet he had a strong feeling for social justice. He could not hold out long. He was lured by Satyam’s spontaneous disquisitions, the documents he would leave in Panchadi’s room. His friend Chaudhari Tejeswara Rao, who often visited him at the hostel, also soon joined the Maoist circle.
Then there was Y. K
oteswara Rao, a twenty-one-year-old from Nellore district. When he came to school, he was in the Youth Congress. Thin, uncouthly dressed, and obviously penniless, he was nonetheless brilliant and honest. Seeing that he came from a poor weaver-caste family, Satyam trained his sights on him and soon turned him into a Communist.
These and others gathered around Satyam. They all hated the Indian Communist Party. They all hated Khrushchev. They saw it as their task to prepare for guerrilla war.
Every morning at eight they met at the India Coffee House, where they read and discussed the day’s news. At ten, they went to classes. At five, after class, they met again over tea to study the national and international situation.
Each of them chose a field of work to specialize in. Some wanted to become speakers, some theoreticians. Others, who wanted to become guerrillas, exercised furiously and learned to read maps.
Satyam would go to the pure white beach that Vizag was famous for to practice speaking. He faced the endless ocean, making believe he was addressing the masses. “You must rise to the hour,” he exhorted the tide, and told the waves, “Yes, you are retreating, but you must retreat in an orderly way, with discipline, keeping in mind that this retreat is tactical only, that you will return to fight on when the time is right.” This vision of the ocean as the masses and the waves as guerrillas would later inspire his famous poem “Alala paina nigha…” (Surveilling the waves).
At the start of his second year at the university, Satyam proposed capturing the student council in elections. His friends thought it would be impossible—the campus had a virulently anti-Communist atmosphere in the aftermath of the 1955 electoral defeat that made it dangerous to be known as a Communist sympathizer. But Satyam told his friends, “You wait and see,” and set about his task.
He used the same strategy that had worked in the Gudivada College elections and allied with the enemies of his enemies, in this case with the Youth Congress. Congress students weren’t perpetrating the anti-Communist intimidation on the AU campus; rather, the members of the Democratic Students Union (DSU), the student wing of the Socialist Party of India, were.
At first Satyam found it hard to understand how a group that called itself socialist could be so violently hostile to actual socialists like himself. The DSU was so far right that to them Congress was left-wing, and they menaced Congress students and SFI members alike. Satyam came to see that the ideology that stood directly opposed to Marxism was not capitalism but Gandhian socialism.
Gandhian socialists espoused the virtue of traditional ways and a traditional village economy. They stood for self-reliance, self-employment. Producing one’s own food, weaving one’s own cloth. They hated modern technology and heavy industry, which was why they hated Congress under Nehru, who did not share Gandhi’s regressive fantasies.
The DSU students were mainly brahmins, and they were all rich. They wore what was coming to be the distinctive attire of the politically connected feudal elite: pure white cotton pants and shirts, starched and ironed.
Satyam joined hands with Congress. Together they put out the word that when Satyam was a student in Gudivada, he was implicated in no less than seven police investigations into anti-eviction struggles against powerful landlords. This gave the DSU members pause. “These sons of a bitches, they are violent sons of bitches,” they said among themselves, and backed off their intimidation of Communist supporters, fearing for their personal safety. The SFI won.
Satyam and his friends wanted to assert their victory. Chalasani Prasad proposed that on behalf of the AU Literary Association they invite Sri Sri to speak on campus.
During the 1955 elections, when Telugu society split into Communists and anti-Communists, even the Progressive Writers Association split, with all its leading members going over to the anti-Communist side but for one man: Sri Sri.
For his loyalty to the party, Sri Sri paid a heavy price. Every day the newspapers printed an article or poem denouncing him. This man who had been a legend in his own time was painted in the press as a buffoon, a traitor, a terrorist. “Srirangam, nee rangam khalee, khalee” (Sri Sri, you are finished) was the jeering refrain.
In the 1955 campaign, as Sri Sri’s performance troupe crisscrossed the state in support of the Communist ticket, troupe members noticed the great poet behaving strangely. He would latch onto certain names and words and utter them over and over nonsensically. His friends soon realized he had gone mad. Not wanting to give the anti-Communists the satisfaction of knowing they had driven Sri Sri out of his mind, they spirited him off to Madras and consigned him to a mental hospital, where he slowly recovered.
Satyam felt it was the duty of any Communist to show appreciation to Sri Sri for his unwavering refusal to desert his comrades. Chalasani being the keenest Sri Sri fan of all, Satyam appointed him to organize the event.
The day after it was announced, some DSU members came running to Satyam in a terrible state. “Tell us, Mr. Satyamurthy, is it true there is going to be a bloodbath?” Satyam asked them to explain. They told him how the evening before, as they were peacefully chatting in the India Coffee House, Chalasani had come up to them and said, “Boys, if you are thinking of making a scene when Sri Sri speaks, watch out! There will be a bloodbath!”
Unhappy as he was about Chalasani’s acting on his own, Satyam told those who came to complain about it, “Just try and disrupt Sri Sri’s speech and you will see for yourself what will happen.”
While Chalasani busied himself booking rooms at the university guesthouse and arranging the audio system, Satyam organized a thirty-man security squad. The event took place in the open grounds in front of the India Coffee House. The security situation was more challenging than it would have been in an enclosed auditorium. Satyam and his men surrounded the crowd and kept a close watch.
Throngs of students attended. Many came because they admired Sri Sri, many others because they wanted to witness a bloodbath.
When Sri Sri went mad and for a time was unable to write, his friends in the Madras cine field set him up with dubbing jobs. Now he told the students, “I am currently doing dubbing. See, dubbing. You know what I mean? Dubbu-ing.” In Telugu, dubbu means “money.” Sri Sri was pleased with this pun. Next to him sat his new young wife, Sarojini, to whom he turned and said, “I need to do dubbu-ing for my Sarojini.” Then he fixated on her lips. “Lips lush. Lush lips. The movement of her lips.”
He babbled on incoherently. The anti-Communists could have jeered, but under the eyes of Satyam’s security team no one dared. The event was a failure, but at least Sri Sri left AU unscathed.
Later on, at Satyam’s proposal, the students invited Kondapalli Seetharamayya to give a seminar on Marxism.
Kondapalli Seetharamayya, like Sri Sri, was in dire need of rehabilitation. The Communist Party was waiting for a chance to expel him. They didn’t like his call for a renewal of armed struggle. But they hesitated because of the authority he had among younger cadres like Satyam, who admired him precisely for his militancy.
Looking for a reason to kick the man out, the party had fastened on rumors that he was having an illicit affair with the young widow of a Telangana martyr. Seetharamayya denied these accusations. “She is a widow with two children,” he explained. “She has lost her husband. She is lonely. She is our comrade. I only want to comfort her. She is like a sister to me.”
Unlike Sri Sri, Seetharamayya was a masterly speaker. He was so charismatic and compelling that if you left him with a consummate anti-Communist for an hour, he would turn that man into a Communist guerrilla. The event was a great success. Seetharamayya left happy and encouraged.
In the last month of classes, a spectacular dinner was held for the graduating students. At the end of the feast, Satyam invited all the students to the back of the hall and asked them to look outside. Around the trash heap where the scraps from the dinner were thrown, tens of children and old men and women were fighting over these remains with stray dogs and pigs.
“This is the conditi
on of the Indian people,” Satyam said. “You are graduating. Think about what you will do with your lives, what you want to do for your country.”
Only a week was left before exams. As he hadn’t looked at his books the whole year, Satyam now needed to sit down and study without distractions.
But at this moment Carey appeared at Satyam’s doorstep, tired and disheveled, with a young girl in tow. The girl looked scared. Carey said, “Brother, help us marry.”
When Carey failed his B.A. exams, his father sent him to Bunder College in the town of Machilipatnam in a neighboring district. Carey shared a room with other students in the house of a goldsmith-caste man. He then promptly seduced the landlord’s daughter. But this time he fell in love hard. Carey’s roommates disapproved. They didn’t like to see an untouchable boy fooling around with a caste girl, especially since they weren’t getting such an opportunity. They ratted on him to the girl’s father, who forbade her to see him.
He found a chance to elope with her and straightaway they went to Vijayawada to see Manikya Rao. Who better to help an intercaste couple on the run than a man who had gone through hell for his own caste wife?
But Manikya Rao turned Carey away. Now time was of the essence. The girl’s family was hunting for her. Carey needed Satyam’s help to marry her before they were caught.
“Okay,” Satyam told him. “Let me talk to the girl.” He promised to settle everything. In the meantime, he had his friend Rama Rao take Carey to the beach to calm him down. As Carey anxiously paced the sand, Satyam sent word to the girl’s family. A few hours later, her brother showed up in a car he had rented specially to track her down.
Satyam turned to the girl, who was hiding behind a chair, and asked, “What would you like to do, amma?”
She took two small steps back, then one big hop forward, and went running into her brother’s arms.
Ants Among Elephants Page 18
