Rama Rao had heard from someone that this man had earned his B.A. and M.A. from one of the oldest and most prestigious modern colleges in Asia—the Madras Christian College. No wonder he was so debonair. He’d studied under British and other European professors—civil servants, political leaders, and businessmen from around the world. Rama Rao found out the man even had an L.L.B., a law degree. However, since he did not get a second class in his M.A., he’d been hired at Rajahmundry only as a tutor, not as a lecturer.
Rama Rao was curious to get to know this man. As he needed a roommate, he proposed that they rent a house together and share the rent and cooking.
The man shared rent all right, but as for food, Rama Rao cooked and the man just sat at the table, cigarette in hand, with a book in front of him. Without taking his eyes off the book, this noble-looking man would sip the tea and eat the meals that Rama Rao put in front of him. That was how the sharing worked out. Rama Rao often wrote Satyam, “You would be interested in meeting my roommate.”
When Satyam finally came to visit, he was impressed. The man talked about T. S. Eliot. Satyam’s cheeks burned with admiration.
During his visit, the students at the college called a strike, demanding that their regular lecturer, a famous man and reputable teacher, be replaced by Rama Rao’s roommate, Prabhakara Rao, a mere tutor. The famous lecturer had made the mistake of asking Prabhakara Rao to fill in for him and entertain his class one day when he was called away.
Prabhakara Rao decided to lecture this teacher’s final-year B.A. students on Macbeth. No matter that the work was not on their syllabus. When he lectured, he was transformed. He went into another world and took the students with him. At the end of the hour, it was as if they had come out of a trance.
The principal responded to the striking students’ demand, “But how do you expect me to appoint a tutor in the place of a lecturer? He doesn’t have an M.A. These are not my rules. These are government rules.” Yet the students stubbornly kept up the protest for a week.
Nonetheless, Satyam had not pursued Prabhakara Rao as a match for Manjula.
Carey, too, who had earlier visited Rama Rao in Rajahmundry, thought no less highly of the man. Carey was especially pleased to find out that Prabhakara Rao played tennis every day and was good at soccer, too. His English was so good and his voice so splendid the sports department used him as a commentator in cricket matches.
A few months after Carey’s visit, both Rama Rao and Prabhakara Rao left Rajahmundry, Rama Rao becoming a librarian at the Government College for Women at Guntur, and Prabhakara Rao an English tutor in Anantapur College, where Ganga Raju met him.
Now here was Prabhakara Rao again, put forward a second time as a marriage prospect for Manjula. Two of Satyam’s closest friends and well-wishers of his family had recommended this man as a suitable match for his sister. And finally he and Manjula had a chance to meet.
He took a seat on the only chair in the room. Manjula and Satyam sat on the cot. They didn’t think to offer him tea or coffee or even water.
Few words were exchanged. Then Prabhakara Rao left.
After he went back to Anantapur, there was no word from him. And no other prospects for Manjula. Satyam asked Ganga Raju to find out what was going on with Prabhakara Rao, to see if he liked Manjula. Ganga Raju went looking for Prabhakara Rao and found him at the tennis courts.
“So have you made any decision regarding my friend’s sister?”
“Yes, I like her.” Prabhakara Rao blushed somewhat.
Ganga Raju immediately telegrammed Satyam the good news.
Even though Prasanna Rao had never seen the groom, he was satisfied since both his sons respected Prabhakara Rao for his scholarly qualities. But as the Kambhams began to think of wedding plans, no further communication came from Prabhakara Rao.
Three long months went by. Manjula had no other prospects. Then like a pleasant breeze in a suffocating summer came a letter from Prabhakara Rao: “My family will bring nischitartham to yours.” Engagement ritual.
Prasanna Rao had earlier gone to Kakinada to see what Prabhakara Rao’s family was like. He returned brimming with joy. They seemed like a respectable family.
When he returned home from that trip, a man was waiting for him. The man said he was looking for a bride for his son. Strange, no one had ever sought after Manjula, and now that she had a match, here came another one.
It was a good match. The boy was a forest ranger. Rangers make suitcases of money and regularly employed several peons and chauffeurs. And the proposal was very much according to the custom—the groom’s family had come to seek the hand of the bride. Anyone would readily ditch Prabhakara Rao to go after this forest ranger.
But Prasanna Rao was a man of honor. “Forgive us, sir, we’ve already said yes to someone else.” The forest ranger’s father asked the Kambhams to at least meet his son. “Sorry, sir.” The man went away much disappointed.
The Kambhams went into a frenzy preparing for the groom’s party’s visit. Prabhakara Rao’s mother was naturally excluded, as she was a widow. Widows are held to be bad luck and barred from all auspicious events. His uncles Paul and Paulus and their wives came. The women wore elegant saris, and Mr. Paul wore Western-style clothes, while Mr. Paulus dressed in traditional attire. They were all finely dressed and smelled good, too, like cardamom.
Prasanna Rao and Satyam, all dressed up in their nicest and most respectable clothes, well-groomed and polite, stepped forward to receive them. “Please come in, please come in.”
The two parties sat down to face each other. They exchanged a few words and laid out a plan. Manjula would come out to be presented to the groom’s family. After she had their approval, they would give her the sari and jewels they had brought. She would go and put them on and come out again, and they would all pray and feast.
When Manjula came out for the first time, the groom’s party made no effort to hide their disappointment. The bride’s party was terrified. The groom’s party did not present Manjula with the gifts.
Instead they said, “Let us pray.” Then they dropped the bombshell: “You must give us five thousand rupees as a dowry.”
The Kambhams were stunned. There had been no mention of dowry until now.
Aunt Nagarathnamma, who had come for the occasion, was outraged. “This man is a mere tutor! Our Manjula is a lecturer. How dare they reject her!”
Carey yelled at her, “You! You keep quiet. Tutor, lecturer, what does it matter if they like each other?”
“What is the problem, gentlemen?” Satyam asked.
Mr. Paulus said one of Manjula’s legs was shorter than the other.
From inside the house, Manjula heard that. Just as she’d beat herself up when she got second class at Benares, trying to figure out what had gone wrong, she thought, “Maybe from sitting on the floor my foot might have become numb and I walked funny.”
Prasanna Rao stood up. “We cannot afford a five-thousand-rupee dowry. Even if we could, we wouldn’t pay.” Not paying or receiving a dowry was a matter of principle for him. And to ask for it like this was an insult.
In all of this, Prabhakara Rao was silent. Then suddenly he got up and walked out quietly. Carey ran after him, baffled. Prabhakara Rao reached the train tracks and started walking on them. Carey was distressed, thinking Prabhakara Rao surely meant to kill himself. Carey ran up to him and, persuading him to turn back, took him home. Meanwhile, Prabhakara Rao’s family had left without touching the feast. Then Prabhakara Rao left, too.
In the face of the other party’s outrageous demands, the Kambham men had stood firm. But as soon as they left, Prasanna Rao collapsed. Satyam wept. All three of them climbed into their beds and stayed there, sobbing. They would not eat, they would not sleep, they would not go out.
Now there would be rumors. Speculations as to what could be wrong with Manjula. After this engagement, Manjula was touched water. No one else would drink from the same glass. Where before she’d been hard-to-sell goods, s
he was now rejected merchandise. Not only were her prospects gone, but the honor of the whole family was spoiled. Prasanna Rao could not show his face in the street.
Prabhakara Rao wrote a letter apologizing for his folks’ behavior and promising to convince his mother to accept the match despite the views of his uncles and aunts. But by now it was pure fantasy to continue to hope. In any case, Prabhakara Rao never wrote again.
Satyam approached Manjula with tears in his eyes. “I am sorry, amma. Again I ruined your life with my stupidity.” He was referring to his handling of the Aseervadam affair.
Manjula determined to set things right for her brothers and her father. She was willing to do everything in her power to restore the family’s honor.
“Annayya [big brother],” she said to Satyam, “I want to go to Anantapur and talk to Mr. Prabhakara Rao.”
Satyam had to agree even though it was thoroughly ignominious behavior for a girl to travel hundreds of kilometers to approach a man. The two of them kept Manjula’s journey a secret from the rest of the family. Ganga Raju was told to receive Manjula.
When Manjula arrived at Ganga Raju’s house, she took a bath and ate. Then Prabhakara Rao was brought in.
When the two were alone, Manjula went off like a long string of firecrackers. Prabhakara Rao listened patiently as she blasted away: “Why, why have you behaved like this? Why can’t you take a decision, one way or another? Why did you have to leave us in the lurch like this?”
He didn’t reply.
“But why?”
He finally said, “I am like that. If I ever do what I should, it is by mistake. I only blunder into right. This is the weakness of my character.”
He said all this in English. Manjula, despite her hurt and anger, was in awe of his command of English.
Ganga Raju took them both to see a movie. The next day Manjula took a train back. At college, O. Vijayalakshmi was eager to know what happened.
“He is an offensive man,” Manjula said.
“Why?”
“He asked me an offensive question.”
“What did he say?”
“He wanted to know if I know cooking.”
“That’s what you found offensive! Any man would ask that question. It is a compulsory question.”
“But I very much take objection.”
Manjula waited for his letter. Again there was no letter, and then they decided that no letter would ever come. Manjula would have to resign herself to a life of spinsterhood.
SEVEN
UNQUALIFIED TO TEACH IN GOVERNMENT colleges because of his third-class marks, Satyam had only been able to find work in temporary high school teaching jobs at private schools owned by kamma Communists. He went wherever he was offered a job, leaving Maniamma and the children with his father. By now he had fathered a third child, a daughter whom Maniamma had named Sri Devi.
After two years of teaching here and there, he received an offer from the party to move to Guntur and take up the editorship of a new youth magazine. Rama Rao couldn’t believe that Satyam would be foolish enough to quit his job with three children to take care of, but he went ahead.
He agreed once he was sure that it was an unsalaried position. He had decided never to accept salaried employment from the party, having seen how the party treated their full-time activists, regularly withholding their allowances until they were forced to beg for a little to live on. One of the leaders said, “But you have to eat.” He suggested that Satyam take up a second job, a paying position working for two Communist leaders in charge of the tobacco workers’ union. “They need an office assistant. Your main job will be reading the newspapers every morning and giving them the gist. They are busy and don’t have time to read papers. They also need someone who can make coffee and book train tickets when needed.”
Satyam declined. Instead he got himself a job teaching history at Ravi College, a private school owned by a kamma Communist named Dhan. Dhan paid Satyam one rupee per day—barely enough to buy a meal.
Half starving, Satyam went to work for the magazine. He named it Yuvajana (Youth). Even though the magazine was entirely Satyam’s work, the party made him answer to one of his batchmates from AU, a brahmin with an M.A. in Telugu literature. This man wrote nonsensical articles that read as if they were written by a five-year-old, and Satyam would have to rewrite them.
While working at Yuvajana, Satyam adopted a pen name: Sivudu. Meaning Shiva. The austere god with blue skin and three eyes, dressed in a loincloth of animal hide, adorned with ashes, garlanded with a cobra. The god who lives in the cemetery.
As Sivudu, he wrote an open letter to the president of India telling him to get out of Nehru’s way. Nehru wanted to pass the Hindu Code Bill—a uniform set of rules to govern marriage, divorce, inheritance, adoption, and like matters among Hindus. It was a chance for oppressed Hindu women to finally get some rights, at least on paper.
The conservative elements of Congress egged on the president, Rajendra Prasad, in his fight with Nehru over this bill. They went so far as to campaign to change the form of government from a parliamentary model to a presidential one in order to transfer authority over legislation from the prime minister to the president.
Satyam’s open letter was wildly popular. Readers of Yuvajana wondered who Sivudu was. One man, intent on finding out, traveled to Guntur to the office of Yuvajana. He was none other than Rachakonda Viswanatha Sastry—or Ra. Vi. Sastry, as he eccentrically styled himself—who would come to be known as the James Joyce of Telugu literature.
After heaping praise on Satyam, Sastry went back home and sent him a set of six stories to be published in Yuvajana. The series was titled “Six Liquor Stories.” The moment he saw liquor in the title, Satyam tossed the manuscript in the trash bin. Owing to the Christian morality in which he’d been brought up, he strongly disapproved of alcohol. Because he never read the stories, he had no way of knowing they were tales of poor people, not stories advocating drinking.
Rejected by Yuvajana, Sastry sent his stories to another magazine. His “Six Liquor Stories” became classics of Telugu fiction. If Kafka had sent Satyam his “Metamorphosis,” Satyam would surely have thrown it away, asking, “Who needs to read about a dirty cockroach?”
Within a couple of months, it became clear to Satyam that Yuvajana had been launched by the right-wing faction of the Communist Party to get the youth on their side in case of a split, after which it would survive as an organ of their new party. He quit.
He concluded it was time to forget about politics and find a proper job. And then there was Rama Rao nagging him. His adoring friend had for some time been openly critical of Satyam’s attitude toward his family. Rama Rao had special sympathy for the long-suffering Maniamma. “Why does she have to live under other people’s roofs? You are her husband. Her children are your children. Get yourself a job, take care of your family.”
Shortly after, Carey came to see Satyam. Carey had passed his B.A., undergone a two-year training program in sports coaching, and was now teaching physical education as an assistant director in the sports department at the medical college in Warangal. He had come with a message from Seetharamayya, who was working as a teacher near where Carey was living, at St. Gabriel School in Khazipet. Seetharamayya had found a job for Satyam at the school and wanted him to join him there with his family. Satyam decided right away to accept.
On the train to Khazipet, Maniamma, pregnant with her fourth child, suffered from fever and chills brought on by severe anxiety. Satyam was bringing her to a strange country—Khazipet is in Telangana, the Nizam’s old realm—where she knew no one. “Can he provide for us in that place, or will we simply starve and die?”
Indeed, to Satyam and his family, Khazipet was a foreign place. People spoke Telugu, but a dialect of Telugu they could hardly understand, and some people spoke a different language entirely. Men had beards and women wore black garments that covered them up from head to toe. The people had bloodred tongues from chewing pan (a mixture o
f fragrant and stimulating ingredients wrapped in betel leaves), and the streets and walls were splashed with red spit.
When they arrived, Maniamma still couldn’t stop shivering. The children, too excited, flitted around the station like butterflies.
Carey came to receive them at the train station. He hired two rickshaws, which went trundling downhill so fast the children started screaming as if they were on an amusement-park ride. They stopped in front of the house that Seetharamayya had found for Satyam. Carey helped unload the family.
Seetharamayya, beaming, came over to welcome them. His own household was right next door and now included not just Anasooyamma and her children but his own children, Karuna and Chandu, who had come to live with him the previous year when their mother found a job as warden of a girls’ hostel in Kakinada and couldn’t take them with her.
“Now here we are!” Seetharamayya said to Satyam. “We must start planning our activity.”
Satyam told him, “I just want rest.”
A few months before, at the SFI state conference, Satyam had met his old classmate Panchadi, who asked him, “Why don’t you move to Srikakulam? We are leading a movement there very soon.” He told Panchadi the same thing he told Seetharamayya: “No, I want to find a job and live with my family.”
Satyam had been occupied with political movements since he was eleven. At thirty-one, his mind and body needed repose. Now that he had a proper job, he only wanted to eat, sleep, lie down with his wife, look at his children.
In Telangana, the biggest city is the twin city of Hyderabad-Secunderabad, which was the capital of the erstwhile realm of the Nizam and later of the state of Andhra Pradesh. (As I write, the state is being redivided.) The second-largest city is Warangal, which consists of not twin but triple cities: Warangal, Hanamkonda, and Khazipet. After Hyderabad, Warangal is the greatest educational center in Telangana. People come from all over the region to go to school there.
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