When Carey returned, his girl was gone. He couldn’t understand why his brother, of all people, would break up an intercaste couple. He felt betrayed.
He fell into Satyam’s bed, covered himself with a sheet, and cried and cried. For a whole week he went on crying pitifully, stopping only briefly at mealtimes, when he would shuffle over to the mess and consume enormous quantities of food. Manjula, concerned for his welfare, came to watch over him. She and Satyam had both waited until the final week before exams to do all their studying for the year, and they both spent that crucial week at Carey’s side, trying to console him.
Satyam dropped his exams rather than fail or get bad marks. That way he would have a chance to study on his own and attempt them later on. Manjula took her exams and received a third class. The two siblings returned home shamefaced.
The two years Satyam spent at university were another two years devoted to politics. And his political efforts, too, had gone to waste. For all their study and planning, the circle Satyam led never cohered into a Maoist organization. When he and his friends graduated, each went his own way.
Satyam was twenty-six years old. He had no M.A., no job, no money of his own. And he had a second child now, a girl he named Anupama. It was too much to ask his father, whose financial situation was dire, to go on supporting him and his family. And poor Maniamma had been married for two years now and still didn’t live with her husband. Instead she’d been staying partly under her father’s roof and partly under Prasanna Rao’s, where Satyam would pay her an occasional visit like a sanyasi (vagabond). And every time he saw her, he gave her another child.
Now Satyam needed to find work. He learned of an opening for a subeditor at Visalandhra, the Telugu-language Communist daily based in Vijayawada. He was recommended for the job by a district committee member who had long been impressed by his intelligence.
Satyam was relieved. His plan was to spend one or two hours every day after work studying for his M.A. exams. Two months before exams he would take leave from the job to complete his preparation.
Since the job was in Vijayawada, Satyam planned to stay with Manikya Rao, who had been living in that city ever since he made peace with his wife’s family.
Satyam’s old friend was doing quite well, tutoring day and night and earning money with both hands. He and his fine wife received Satyam lovingly. When they sensed he had come to ask to stay a few days, Niranjanamma whispered something and she and Manikya Rao excused themselves to go into the kitchen. When they came back out, their attitude was very different. Manikya Rao dropped his air of hospitality and became mealymouthed. At last he mumbled something about having an appointment to go to. “You should come and visit us sometime,” he told Satyam.
Satyam couldn’t believe it. This was the man he had spent two years of his life fighting to defend. For whose sake Satyam had bankrupted his poor father and angered his grandmother. Whose wife Satyam’s sister had watched over day and night, whose child she had cared for. Whom Satyam’s brother had followed like a shadow day after day and guarded every night, sleeping at his feet at night, ready to kill. And now this man couldn’t bring himself to let Satyam stay in his house for a couple of days. Manikya Rao and Niranjanamma turned him away just as he came, without even offering him a glass of water.
Satyam had never felt so much shame in his whole life. “They must think since I am poor, I have come back to get paid for the help I gave them,” he said to himself. “Well, they have money, I don’t. I don’t want them to think that I am after some rupees. We helped because we wanted to. We want nothing from them.”
Hurt, he went to see Kondapalli Seetharamayya, who had recently moved to Vijayawada. He had always been like a father to Satyam, and his wife, Koteswaramma, was fond of Satyam, too.
The Kondapallis’ house, which they’d had built for themselves in Mogalrajapuram, a new extension of Vijayawada, was not like other houses in the city. It was more of a cottage, a peaceful little cottage thatched with palm fronds. They had planted rosebushes all around it.
Seetharamayya and Koteswaramma were so happy to see Satyam. They made him sit on a cot and gave him coffee to drink. When they found out he was looking for a place to stay, they said, “Why stay two days only? Stay here with us as long as you are in Vijayawada. Bring your family here!”
It was a tempting offer. True, that cottage on the outskirts of Vijayawada was far from Satyam’s office in the center of the city. But it was pleasant and comfortable, and he would be with friends. Satyam decided to rent from Seetharamayya and Koteswaramma.
Maniamma loved traveling to new places, especially towns and cities. Any place on earth was bigger than her village, Sankarapadu. Right away she got busy packing the family’s things. When she saw Carey packing, too, she flew into a rage. “He mustn’t come with us!” she demanded.
“What is this, Maniamma? Why are you saying this?”
Maniamma told Satyam of a fight she had had with Carey: “He called me names, he raised his foot to kick me.” To her, Carey had crossed a clear line, raising his foot to his brother’s wife.
Satyam was upset to hear this, but said, “Okay, you are right, that was unacceptable. But what can we do? Where is he going to go?”
Maniamma could not believe Satyam’s response. Not only did he condone Carey’s behavior, he wanted to invite him to live with them in Vijayawada.
She flung the packing at hand to the floor and went off to sulk on the doorstep.
In the end Maniamma prevailed and they moved to Vijayawada without Carey. The Kondapallis’ cottage still smelled new and fresh, and the rosebushes all around it spread their own delicate fragrance. Satyam loved the place.
The cottage was divided into three portions. In one lived Seetharamayya with Koteswaramma, their two children, Karuna and Chandu, and Koteswaramma’s widowed mother. Dashing Seetharamayya had rescued Koteswaramma from a life of widowhood. In landed castes such as hers, the girls were married off when they were only months old. She was a child widow, and because it was taboo for widows to remarry, she thought she had nothing left in life. But Seetharamayya married her and brought her into the movement. They lived underground during the Telangana Armed Struggle, he as a guerrilla fighter and she as a courier. He was a big bear of a man, she a little bird of a woman. Though she was born into the reddy caste, everyone who saw the fastidious way she spoke and carried herself used to take her for a brahmin.
In another portion of the cottage lived Anasooyamma, the widow of a “martyr” killed in the Telangana Armed Struggle, and her two small children. She was the one the party accused Seetharamayya of having an affair with. He always denied these accusations, saying he was merely consoling her for her loss. They addressed one another as annayya (brother) and chellemma (sister).
Anasooyamma came from a wealthy kamma family. She was a healthy, full-figured woman who dressed in fine saris and had a lively tongue. While Koteswaramma cooked vegetables that her mother grew in the front yard, Anasooyamma prepared aromatic chicken curries.
In the middle portion of the cottage, between these two households, Satyam and his family set up their new home. It was nothing less than paradise for him to be living among these veterans of Telangana and listening to their stories. Maniamma was delighted to see all these high-caste kamma, reddy people treating her husband as one of them. They were nice to her, too, and the six children played together. The rose-bordered cottage was a little utopian world without caste.
But they had hardly settled there when trouble arose. The neighbors objected to a family of outcastes coming to stay among them. They pressed the Kondapallis to kick the family out. Even Koteswaramma’s mother, Anjamma, openly threatened, “You tell them to go, or I go.”
But the couple stood strong. They told everyone to go jump in the Ganga. Satyam was touched by their affection. Seetharamayya’s teenage children, Karuna and Chandu, played with the little ones, his own and Anasooyamma’s, who called them “big brother” and “big sister.” The t
hree families became that close. At night they would all set up their cots under the open sky and laugh together and sing revolutionary songs.
The Visalandhra office was located in Buckingham Peta, in the middle of the city. To get there Satyam needed to take a city bus, which stopped a couple of miles from where he lived. But he loved the cottage so much he was willing to make this trip every day.
Visalandhra was launched as a weekly during the last days of the armed struggle. For a time it had operated underground. When Nehru lifted the ban on the Communist Party and its publications, the paper came out of hiding as the organ of the Separate Andhra agitation. Now it had settled down as a daily and was run like any other capitalist newspaper while still touting itself as the Communist voice. The money was put up by a tobacco baron sympathetic to the party who nevertheless expected it to turn a profit. The top editors and managers were party leaders, but they treated the staff, who were all members themselves, as mere employees.
The paper had twenty editors and subeditors. The chief editor and the members of the management committee were all kammas, while Satyam’s direct supervisor, an assistant editor, was a brahmin.
Satyam’s job was to take the national news that came out of the teleprinter, translate it from English to Telugu, give it a title, and format the text so it could be composed and sent off to the printer. Half the time he worked the night shift, but since the Kondapallis and Anasooyamma were living with his family, he did not have to worry about them.
One evening after Satyam had been staying at the Kondapallis’ only a month and a half, he came home to funereal silence. Seetharamayya was standing at the window. Koteswaramma sat staring at the floor. Her children were holding Satyam’s children and shushing them when they made a noise.
After years of hesitation, the party leaders had finally grown bold enough to expel Seetharamayya over his alleged affair with Anasooyamma. Seetharamayya explained that the two of them had sat together and decided, “They are accusing us of having an affair. Let us just go ahead and have one.” They decided to go off to settle in Telangana, taking Anasooyamma’s small children with them.
Satyam had no words. He held his comrade tightly and cried like a little boy whose father was leaving him. Whenever Satyam had acted against the party’s approval—when he organized a rival theater troupe, when he fought the eviction of poor people in Gudivada, when he defended Manikya Rao’s right to live in peace with the woman he loved—Seetharamayya along with Koteswaramma had always been there to encourage him, telling him that he was right. With the old man gone, Satyam would have to stand up to the degenerated party all alone. He hoped they would one day have another chance to fight together.
Koteswaramma felt sorry for Satyam. She called him over and consoled him like a mother. “Why do you cry so much? Do you think this man is worth it?”
It had become apparent to Satyam soon after he’d come to live there that the party’s accusations were true. Seetharamayya preferred Anasooyamma’s chicken curries to Koteswaramma’s homegrown-vegetable fries. But Satyam did not hold this lapse against his idol.
Seetharamayya had nothing to say to Satyam. He took Anasooyamma and her children and went far away, leaving Koteswaramma and her children behind.
Koteswaramma bore the pain of this betrayal in silence. Though she’d known about the affair all along, she’d never imagined her husband would leave his family to go off with his mistress. He never bothered about how they were going to live. Koteswaramma had little education and had never held a job in her life.
*
TWO WEEKS LATER, SATYAM WAS summoned to his manager’s office and sacked. He was humiliated. He couldn’t say a word.
The manager, who wouldn’t ordinarily have taken the trouble to explain himself to a mere employee, took pity on him and said, “You have no efficiency. You’re too slow.” Satyam did not always finish the galleys he was given and did not translate as fast as they would have liked him to. “You cannot take forever, polishing and polishing and chiseling and chiseling,” the man told him.
Satyam understood what the manager was saying. The job was not like writing poetry. But Satyam had no experience in this kind of work. They knew that before they took him in. Where could he learn, where could he get the experience he needed? Someone had to give him an opportunity. This was not a capitalist paper, it was a Communist Party paper. He had moved his family here, relying on the job. He had no savings, nothing.
But the hardest part for him was walking out of the building in front of his coworkers.
In the evening all the subeditors came to Satyam’s house to express their sympathy. Later Satyam heard that some of them had gone to the management and protested. Manikya Rao went to the office in person to speak out against how Satyam was treated.
It was whispered that he was fired because the management found out his caste. Others said management had learned he was the youth from AU who had told the party representative to go home, the firebrand student who had proposed a motion in the party to expel all the top leaders, including Sundarayya.
SIX
MANJULA ALONE AMONG ALL THE girls graduating from Gudivada College had got admission into a master’s program that year. And of the boys, only Satyam and another classmate of theirs had been accepted to Andhra University as she was. Neither Ashok nor Vithaleswara Rao had gotten a seat. Manjula was convinced that whether she studied or not, God was on her side and she would always pass.
The ladies’ hostel at Andhra University was located not on campus but in Maharani Peta, right on the beach, in the summer palace of an erstwhile raja. For the first time in her life but for a brief spell in Telaprolu, Manjula was living in a pukka residence. Not only that, it had a ceiling fan.
Two weeks after moving in, Manjula was informed by the watchman that she had a visitor. She was stunned to find Vithaleswara Rao waiting in the visitors’ lounge. He was emaciated, disheveled, shivering as though with fever. His eyes were those of one who hasn’t slept in ages.
He asked her how she liked the university, what she wanted to do after. No doubt he wanted to know if she would marry him, but neither of them referred to that. After a few hours talking to her, he left unhappier than ever, leaving a greeting card on which he had scrawled something vague like “Much water has passed under the bridge.” Manjula would never see him again.
Every day the university bus picked up the girls and brought them to campus, where all the boys waited anxiously, sweating in the heat, making sure their hair was in place, jostling to get a glimpse of the girls as they got off the bus.
*
MANJULA MADE A NEW SET of friends who considered themselves sophisticated. They read Telugu novels, talked about Sri Sri’s poetry, and went out in the city to cinemas. They were smug and assumed they could pass without studying hard. They sat in the library or lounged on the verandas facing the beach, laughing and gossiping about everyone on campus.
They especially liked to laugh at the other Christian girls, the majority of whom went everywhere together, even to the bathroom. These other girls—Nessy, Sarada Kelly, Suseela, and the rest—went to church on Sundays and holidays and met in the evenings to read the Bible, sing hymns, and pray. They studied diligently and respected their elders and those in authority. They looked down in turn on Manjula, and especially disapproved of her going to the movies, which was considered a sin.
Another Christian girl in the hostel, Rajeswari, also did not belong to the Christian clique. She was the embodiment of a popular stereotype of untouchable Christian girls. As portrayed in Telugu movies and novels, the young woman of this type is named Lily or Rosie or Roja or Mary. Usually a nurse or a secretary, she is vulgar in her dress and behavior and constantly throws herself at men. Manjula and her friends called girls of this type moderns.
Rajeswari used eyeliner and lipstick, coated her dark face with talcum powder, and loosely braided her hair. She wore high heels, short-sleeved blouses, see-through saris whose ends were always slippin
g off her chest, and, most horrifying in Manjula’s eyes, a brassiere! The other girls wore a smaller white blouse inside their blouses. To have straps visibly outlined against a girl’s back was too shocking. When Rajeswari walked by, the boys made fun of her strong talcum-powder scent and loose braid, while at the same time tripping over each other to catch a glimpse of her bra strap through her blouse.
Rajeswari was friends with the only other modern in the hostel, who to everyone’s shock was not an untouchable Christian but a brahmin. Manjula often wondered what was wrong with this girl. While many untouchable Christians liked to be stylish in this way, brahmins typically reveled in looking old-fashioned. But the boys would never harass a brahmin girl, however provocatively she dressed or behaved.
When exams came, every girl went mad with anxiety. The Christian girls spent their days in a frenzy of prayers and cramming. One night Nessy got on her knees to pray and fell asleep, waking up in the same position only five minutes before her exam started.
Manjula’s friends, she accidentally discovered one night when she woke up to go to the bathroom, were hiding in closets and studying hard. The reason? It was all competition when it came time to apply for jobs. The higher your marks compared to the others’, the better your chances would be. To dupe their classmates into complacency during exam preparation, the girls would pretend not to study at all.
When the exam results were issued, Manjula found out that God does not bless those who are lazy and go to cinemas. With the third-class degree she received, she would never get a college teaching position.
When she returned home with just a third class, she lost the respect of Maniamma, who now fought with everyone in the household. Maniamma would imply that Manjula had only been good at studies because she wasn’t pretty, saying, “As soon as I was twelve years old, all the grooms were chasing after me, making it impossible for me to focus on schoolwork.” Maniamma would denigrate Carey for trying to elope with a minor (knowing full well the girl had been of age) and constantly compared the Kambhams unfavorably to her own family. Maniamma had never forgotten how Manjula had bitterly opposed her marriage, and now her resentment was rising to the surface. One day this conflict came to a head when Manjula finally responded to Maniamma’s attacks on Carey’s character by asking, “What about your sister?” After Santhamma’s husband kicked her out, she had taken up with a kamma man as his mistress.
Ants Among Elephants Page 19
