Ants Among Elephants

by Sujatha Gidla

  Maniamma was outraged. She dropped what she was doing, gathered her children, and walked out, swearing that the Kambhams would never see her again.

  Prasanna Rao, coming home, learned what had happened and went running after her to the bus station. Maniamma told him she could never again live under the same roof with Manjula.

  The menfolk discussed the problem and decided to send Manjula away to get another master’s and try, this time, to get at least a second class. They needed peace in the house. They knew Manjula would not be permitted to reapply to the regional university, AU. Her only chance to pursue her studies was to seek entrance to one of the central universities, of which the closest was Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in northern India, a journey of two days by train. And it was now too late to file her application by mail. She would simply take all that she needed and travel to the campus to apply in person, with no assurance she would be accepted.

  Prasanna Rao sold his house and the two hundred yards of land it stood on for six hundred rupees. With three hundred of those rupees he sent his daughter far, far away from home, to a place they had never been to, where people spoke a different language, ate different food, wore different clothes, and even lived under a different climate.

  For lack of money for an extra ticket, Manjula’s brothers for once relaxed their policy of not allowing her to travel by herself. They just put her on the train to Benares. She found her berth, tucked her luggage under it, lay down, and promptly fell asleep.

  Thussooook! The newly married marwari girl sitting on the opposite side with her husband sneezed in her feminine way.

  Manjula, startled, woke up agitated and began to mutter, “Naini? Naini?”—the name of the station where she’d been told the train stopped long enough for her to get out and refill her water bottle. The marwari groom replied kindly and knowledgeably in Hindi, “Naini, aayegee, duss, pundrah minit mein.” Manjula made out only the “duss, pundrah minit” (ten, fifteen minutes) part. She lowered her feet into her pair of white Hawaii slippers and bent to look under her berth to make sure her green iron trunk was still there. From the small cloth bag in which Maniamma had packed food for the journey, Manjula pulled out a thin bottle whose label had long since been scrubbed off with Sunlight soap and water. Years ago Marthamma had bought it for ten paisa from a woman who sold empty tin cans and bottles and old newspapers. The train slowed and eased into Naini station, just as the marwari man had said, within duss, pundrah minit. Manjula got off and ran over to the railway tap on the platform. She splashed cold water on her sweaty, soot-encrusted face. Then she cupped her hands under the tap and drank to her heart’s content. She filled the old bottle with water and carefully screwed the cap back on. Feeling refreshed, she looked up.

  The train was pulling out of the station. Manjula’s heart stopped. With one hand clutching the bottle and the other gathering the folds of her sari to lift it off the ground so she wouldn’t trip over it, she sprinted frantically behind the moving train. The gigantic mountain of metal was slithering away like a dragon, spewing clouds of black smoke, as she, a speck of a girl, raced behind it, her braid lashing across her chest and the railway water sloshing in her belly.

  She reached out her hand as far as she could until her fingers felt the steel bar on the door of an unknown compartment. With one last burst of effort, she caught hold of that bar and hoisted herself onto the second step leading up to the door. She was in. Tears did not stream down her cheeks because she was a brave girl, a strong girl. But her heart pounded and her temples throbbed from the enormous expenditure of energy and, not least, the thought of what would have happened had she not caught the train.

  The green trunk was not just the only trunk in her family’s possession; it contained the documents on her birth, the documents certifying that she had gone to school and passed, and the documents recording her caste, together with the three hundred rupees her father had given her.

  Manjula arrived in Benares and hired a tonga, a horse-drawn buggy, to take her to the campus. The ladies’ hostel was nearly empty, as it was still summer break. The warden of the hostel, a statuesque spinster, questioned Manjula and, finding she was so lost and clueless that she had traveled fifteen hundred kilometers without filing an application first, took pity on her. The warden let her stay in one of the rooms and asked her to write an application.

  *

  IT WAS HELLISHLY HOT. NO fan. Unable to sleep, Manjula would lie in the open on the terrace as people did at home. People who saw her were horrified. “Don’t you know in these parts people who sleep outside in summer are dead by morning!”

  She submitted her application for the master’s program in history, got accepted, and was given a piece of paper, which she carefully placed under her pillow.

  The first day of class, the professor told Manjula her name was not on the list of registered students. She had neglected to read the piece of paper she was given and had literally slept on it. The writing on it was not some official gibberish, as she thought, but a warning that if she did not pay her fees by the required deadline, her admission would be rescinded. Manjula made an appointment to see the vice chancellor, but emerged from the meeting empty-handed and with tears in her eyes.

  The sun was blazing and not a single leaf moved in the breezeless afternoon. As she walked back to the hostel, Manjula recalled her mother and her dying wish, her father and his fervor for education, her grandmother’s hardships for the sake of Manjula and her brothers, her brothers who doted on her, the family house, her sister-in-law who had packed her meals, the disappointment she had caused them all, the hopes she had dashed—theirs and her own. As she thought of these things, tears burst out of her like water splashing out from under the lid of a boiling pot.

  “Aapko koyee parayshawny hai kyaa?”

  Manjula raised her head and saw a man of her own age standing in front of her. The man spoke no English and she spoke no Hindi. She kept saying things in a mixture of Telugu and English, appending hai to the end of each sentence in a pointless effort to make her speech at least approximate the sound of spoken Hindi. After a great while and many frantic hand motions, this patient man at last divined her trouble. He pointed toward a particular building and, with an encouraging wave of the hand, urged her to go in.

  In the lobby, she saw a group of twenty-year-old men lounging around a table and chatting loudly. These were the student union men, and this building was the student union office. One of these young men, leaning back in his chair with his foot resting on the table, simply took her papers as he continued talking, and without even looking at her, scrawled something on them—Admit her, a simple order to V. S. Jha, the vice chancellor of the university—and handed them back.

  That was how powerful the student union was. Universities such as BHU are training grounds for politicians. Today’s student union officer is tomorrow’s minister.

  Summer was over, and the students returned to campus. The girls in the ladies’ hostel were true ladies. The majority of them were fabulously wealthy—not the kamma type of wealthy that Manjula knew. Daughters of business tycoons, members of the aristocracy. One girl was even Nepalese royalty.

  Her roommates were unfriendly. They blackmailed her for fun. Manjula had borrowed a Telugu novel from an Andhra girl who warned her not to lend it to anyone else. Manjula did, though, to a male classmate, who wouldn’t return it. Manjula’s roommates threatened to tell the Andhra girl. Another lesson for Manjula: never do anything that you have to keep secret. She finally went and admitted her misdeed to the Andhra girl.

  Every girl in the hostel belonged to a clique. North Indians bullied south Indians and never mingled with them. There were separate messes for north and south. North Indians wouldn’t go to the south-Indian mess while south Indians wouldn’t dare set foot in the north-Indian one.

  Within both north and south were subcliques based mainly on language. BHU was a Tower of Babel. The students from Kerala were divided into two cliques, Christian and Hindu
, while Andhra girls stuck together. They opted to live in a single room and did everything as a group. When a new Andhra girl came, the others looked after her and helped her get settled.

  But no one helped Manjula, nor did anyone invite her to share a room. She was utterly isolated.

  Desperate to find a group to belong to, Manjula looked for a church. Benares was the most quintessentially Hindu of cities, so it was hard to even find one. Also called Varanasi, it is an ancient city on the banks of the sacred river Ganga that has been a center of Hindu learning and piety for thousands of years.

  The only church Manjula could find was the one established by migrants from Kerala. But when she went to see it, she found the Christians in that church were not like the Christians she knew. They all looked like elite, high-caste people. The service was ritualistic, with incense burning as in a Hindu temple. Manjula felt so out of place that she left in the middle of the service.

  There was also the problem of English. Through the end of her B.A., all of Manjula’s classes had been taught in Telugu. She had struggled at Andhra University to read and write in English, and at Benares she faced the same difficulty. Outside her classes, her lack of fluency was a source of shame on this cosmopolitan campus where English was the lingua franca. As Lohia, an independence leader second only to Gandhi in stature, once said, “The use of English is a progenitor of inferiority feelings.”

  Manjula had brought her father’s military woolen rug with her, which was useless in Andhra because of high temperatures. Here, too, it was useless because it couldn’t retain even the smallest amount of warmth. But she couldn’t afford to buy something more suitable. She put on all her clothes and layered all her sheets and still couldn’t stop shivering through the night, inevitably going to her classes drowsy.

  One day a theft took place in the ladies’ hostel. Some valuables were stolen. Immediately the authorities launched an investigation. Along with the campus police, two female professors came, equipped with a public address system. They ordered all the girls to come out of their rooms and gather in the quad. They announced rooms at random and ordered the girls of that room to go back in escorted by the professors. Manjula’s room number was called.

  “Vimala Saxena, Pushpa Aggarwal, Manjulabai. Please step forward and enter your room.”

  The professors searched the room thoroughly, looking even inside the soap dishes and books. They opened Manjula’s green metal trunk. The two women peered into the trunk. When they saw what was in that trunk, their eyes opened wide. Slowly, in unison, they raised their heads and looked at each other in disbelief.

  Manjula stood there with an embarrassed smile. No ill-gotten valuables were stashed inside that green trunk. Those two ladies were astonished at how little it did contain, and that of no value at all. They’d never known such poor people existed in this world. They said nothing; they were neither patronizing nor mean. But their shock was transparent.

  Manjula understood why she was undergoing these torments. It was the wages of her sins—the sins of not having studied hard in AU, of having gone to the movies and had fun. This was her penance.

  Papa prakshalana. Atonement for sins. She must not waste one moment on feeling sorry for herself. She must purify her soul. She must work hard now, with the aim of getting a first class. She studied all the time, spending long hours at the library. Except for meals and six hours of sleep, all she did was study.

  At the end of first year, Manjula stood second, just two points below the first-rank student.

  On her way to the library one morning, Manjula was accosted by the history department’s peon. He told her the head of the department wanted to see her.

  Professor R. S. Tripathi was old and doddering, but his renown as a historian was such that he was welcome to keep his position at the university as long he liked. Inside his office, Manjula saw her own instructor, Professor Pathak, sitting to one side with a broad smile on his face. He proudly introduced Manjula as the most brilliant student in his class.

  As Professor Tripathi gazed at her, his face darkened; his eyes shrank into black slits. He was revolted by the sight of Manjula. One look at her and he knew she was poor and untouchable. The Mary in her name made it unmistakable.

  “She is the one I told you of,” Pathak explained. “You wanted to meet her.” But Tripathi merely stared at her coldly and said nothing. Humiliated, Manjula excused herself.

  She left the office feeling dizzy. As she walked to the library, she could feel the venom of this poisonous man spread through her veins, shutting down her heart, her brain. She was on the point of collapsing. She ran back to the hostel and fell on her bed. She stayed in for a week.

  In the second year, Manjula’s social life improved slightly. Her new roommates were an Andhra woman named Durga Kumari and a north-Indian girl named Asha.

  By the rough hand of circumstance, the pure and the impure were thrown together. Durga Kumari was a brahmin doctoral student in mathematics. Despite her high caste, she, too, was ostracized by the Andhra clique because she was too old—thirty—and at that age sure to end up a spinster. And she was poor.

  Asha, a baniya (as the merchant caste is known in north India), came from the richest family of any of the girls in the hostel. They sent her to the university with 150 sets of clothes so that she would never have to wash.

  Even so, Asha was especially kind to Manjula. Asha went to the south-Indian mess with her. When Manjula met Asha’s aunt, Professor Priyamvada Shah, Manjula learned it was not necessarily a curse to be a spinster, as she had always been taught. In elite circles, some women chose not to marry and didn’t feel ashamed in the least. Miss Shah devoted herself to mathematics and saw family life as a distraction.

  Manjula decided when she had a daughter, she would name her Asha.

  *

  BENARES HAS BEEN A PILGRIMAGE center for over two thousand years. The pious come to the city to bathe in the Ganga and wash away their sins.

  Though Manjula’s roommate Durga Kumari was ostracized by her Andhra classmates, as a brahmin she felt entirely at home in Benares. She loved going to the temples. Since she could not go alone, she asked Manjula to come along.

  When they got to the temples along the river, Durga Kumari almost fainted from emotion. The force of the divine that infused every element there—the air, the water, the sand, the fire—consumed her brahmin soul. Manjula, on the other hand, almost fainted from disgust. The filth, the stink, the slime, the revolting activities going on all around them, overwhelmed her.

  Surrounding the temples were thick masses of people in nothing but wet loincloths, displaying their potbellies, hairiness, hairlessness, diseased skin, running noses, coughing mouths, oily hair, hernias, sagging breasts, toothless gums, shaven heads, missing limbs, wrinkled arms, stiffened fingers, fungal toes. They were all bathing shamelessly, men and women together. The Hindu worship equipment, the dead flowers, the leftover food, were strewn all over. Manjula had seen many untouchable colonies, including those of madigas. But she had never seen, could never have imagined, a filthier place on earth.

  On the Ganga, bodies burned on the ghats (steps leading down to the river) in ritual cremations, and the remains were pushed into the water, often only half consumed. The waters of the river were dark and dense. It was perhaps the most polluted water Manjula had ever seen. She watched in horror as the throngs of bathers took that water into their mouths, let it swirl into their throats, and swallowed it down.

  Manjula and Durga Kumari faced an unspoken problem at the entrance to a temple. As an untouchable, Manjula was not supposed to enter. Should Durga Kumari pretend to be oblivious of her friend’s uncleanness and walk in beside her? What should Manjula do? Should she pretend, out of politeness, that such a monstrous oppression did not exist and attempt to casually enter the temple with her friend?

  Yet this dilemma resolved itself simply as soon as it arose. Manjula, of her own will, refused to enter even the holiest of temples, the Kashi Vishwanath. Sh
e knew if she took one whiff of that air into her lungs, she would drop dead on the spot.

  But when the university girls planned a picnic to Sarnath, Manjula went along, thinking, “What kind of history student would I be if I am in Benares and do not visit Sarnath?”

  Sarnath, just thirteen kilometers from Benares, at the confluence of the sacred rivers Ganga and Gomati, is where the Buddha first taught his dharma and attracted his first disciple. Sarnath was where, in the third century B.C., Emperor Ashoka built one of the many pillars bearing the inscription of his edicts. In utter contrast to the Hindu temples, it was a clean, peaceful place.

  Except on that day. When the boys learned of the girls’ picnic, they, too, planned one. They brought along a gramophone and a manservant who carried it on his head. The boys followed the girls, and the manservant and the music followed the boys. When the girls turned around to look, they made the servant kneel down and changed the record to “Mudh mudhke na dekh…,” from the hit Hindi movie Shree 420.

  Don’t look, turning, turning around

  In the journey of life,

  You are not alone

  We are also there with you.

  Manjula always loved the wealthier students’ endearing mischief.

  As their two-year program was coming to an end, Asha and her rich friends discussed the idea of giving farewell presents to Manjula. Asha knitted a sweater and told Manjula it was called a cardigan. Someone else gave her a sari; another, a handmade jewelry box. Manjula was overwhelmed by her roommate’s kindness.