Maniamma’s tantrums made Manjula feel unwanted. It was time to leave, but she had no money for the train. Nancharayya offered the money and Carey was ready to take them back, but the infant was not ready to travel. It had been raining continuously for days on end, and Satyam’s house had no shutters on the windows. The cold wetness closed in upon the infant. Her lungs filled with moisture. She was gasping, her chest pumping spasmodically. They could not afford a doctor. An Anglo-Indian neighbor advised Manjula to drink two spoonfuls of whiskey before breast-feeding. “You can also dilute two drops with water and pour it in the baby’s mouth,” she said.
For the first and last time in her life, Manjula drank alcohol. She was aware that she was talking too much but could not stop herself. Nancharayya tried to calm her. “Papa, stop talking, amma, stop talking. Just stay calm.” With his drunken sister and drunken infant niece, Carey got on the train.
Carey said, “Amma, please stop talking and go to sleep.” He sat holding the month-old baby in his hands for sixteen hours straight. Whenever the train whistle blew, the sick infant woke up, startled. Carey held her tight against his chest.
They arrived in Anantapur station. They got into a jetka (horse buggy) and began the ride home. As they passed the town’s clock tower, Manjula said to Carey, “Annayya, this baby, is she alive or dead?” When Manjula said that, Carey’s heart stopped. He shook the infant.
She opened her puffy, toadlike eyes. Carey and Manjula were relieved.
The jetka stopped in front of the house. Prabhakara Rao was home. When he saw the baby, the callous husband she had left behind transformed at once into a loving father.
Manjula went back to work, teaching in a night college in Anantapur. Prabhakara Rao would sit holding the baby all night, never moving. Without having slept an hour, he would go to work in the morning.
Manjula had no one to teach her how to bathe the baby. She hired a woman. The woman boiled water. Manjula was expecting the woman would mix in some cold water to make it lukewarm. But the woman poured the boiling water on top of the infant’s head. The baby screamed—Manjula could see her tongue, her uvula—and the infant’s skin changed color like the flesh of a chicken when it’s dropped into a sauté pan. Manjula grabbed her baby away.
Manjula tried to bathe her baby in such a way that she would have as pleasant an experience as possible. Manjula would put her nipple in her daughter’s mouth and, while breast-feeding her, would slowly and carefully wash the baby in her arms, rinsing her with warm water from a tumbler.
When the baby was born, Manjula’s niece had made a list of names and said, “I like Sujatha.” Without a proper christening, they started calling her Suja.
But then a conflict arose. Rathnamma had been expecting them to name the child in her honor or at least to leave the choice of name to her. She said, “I want Grace.” Rathnamma had had a daughter named Grace who died when she was eight.
Manjula was appalled. She didn’t want an old-fashioned name like that. She justified her taste by saying she was secular and didn’t want to give her child a Christian name.
Prabhakara Rao, who had to decide, would say nothing either way. The day of the christening, he, Manjula, and Rathnamma walked up the aisle to the pastor with Prabhakara Rao in the middle, carrying the child, flanked by the silently feuding women. When the moment came, they gazed helplessly at his lips. Were they forming Gr or Su? He said, “Sujatha.”
When Sujatha was six months old, her head was shaved to remove the birth hair. When her parents brought her back to Anantapur, one of their students, a teenager, named her Nirupayoga Swami (Swami of Uselessness) and took to smacking her smooth little head.
Manjula cried, “Please, don’t smack it!”
“But, madam, I can’t resist, madam.”
Suja had round everything: face, mouth, eyes. Prabhakara Rao was especially fond of her ass. “My daughter’s ass is shaped like an apple.” He brought an apple from the bazaar, held it up beside the ass. “See, right?” he asked his colleagues.
Nine months after Sujatha was born, Manjula got pregnant again and was let go from her job. Losing her job was a regular part of life for Manjula at this time. In government colleges she was only eligible for temporary positions, filling in for someone who was away on leave. It was easy for principals to fire her if for any reason they did not like her. Yet she could not qualify for a permanent post in a government college without taking the state lecturer selection exam. Because few positions were open in the state, this exam had not been held in years.
During summer holidays, Prabhakara Rao took the family to Kakinada. When Prabhakara Rao returned to Anantapur, Manjula stayed in Kakinada with her in-laws to look for work in town. She applied for a position at a women’s college under the trusteeship of a wealthy Hindu temple—Annavaram Satyavathi Devi College—where, because it was a private college, she was eligible for a permanent job. She was interviewed by a group of old brahmin males, the three of them looking extremely orthodox with their heads totally shorn but for a tuft of white hair at the top and long, vertical red lines drawn down their foreheads. For an untouchable young woman who desperately needed a job, a more daunting party of examiners could hardly be imagined. Manjula, intimidated, sat in front of them, her palms sweaty and cold, her knees pressed together.
“What is democracy?” one of them asked, peering over the top of his glasses.
“Umm … Democracy is a political system where the supreme power lies in the hands of the citizens. In democracy, it is the people who run the government through their elected representatives. In essence, democracy means a government of, by, and for the people.”
The ancient brahmin males nodded approvingly and made check marks on the sheets in front of them. But she was not done.
“This is what they write in the textbooks. This is what the professors teach their students in colleges and universities. This is what students are forced to write in exams, and candidates to utter in job interviews. As I have just done.”
The aged, conservative brahmin males looked up at her.
“But so far there has been not a single example of democracy in the world. Nowhere in the world, not in one single country, is there a rule of the people, let alone by the people or for the people. The British, the Americans, the French, and now the Indians—they may claim they have democracy in their countries. But it is all bogus. Hypocrisy. The very definition is wrong!”
In all their years as directors, those highly placed brahmins had never come across another candidate like her. An untouchable, at that!
She got the job.
At the women’s college, the principal harassed her, constantly finding fault with her teaching methods. The filth of Elwin Peta exacerbated her morning sickness. It was mango season, and flies were everywhere. Suja had grown thin. Even with Manjula’s job, the family could not afford milk powder, so they fed the baby rice, lentils, and vegetables. One day, Suja suffered a dangerously severe bout of diarrhea. She shat twenty-three times in one hour and was dehydrating fast. There was no money for the doctor.
Prabhakara Rao visited for a long weekend. Manjula begged him, “Please take me home. I cannot live here. We are going to die.” Prabhakara Rao simply said, “Let’s go.” Another temporary teaching job had opened in Anantapur. If she wanted to grab it, they had to start right away. In spite of a dangerous typhoon and flooding, they took their lives in their hands and left at once.
Manjula got the job. Three days later, she was ousted.
Prabhakara Rao and Manjula were dangerously in debt to the marwari moneylenders. Prabhakara Rao avoided telling his wife how bad their situation was. But he was drowning. When she was away in Khazipet, he had the desperate idea of treating one of his thug students to chicken meals in the hope of enlisting him to scare off the usurers who were after him. The plan came to nothing.
It wasn’t just Prabhakara Rao. Most of his colleagues, on the first of the month, came out of the clerk’s office with their salaries a
nd handed the envelope over to the marwari waiting outside. Lecturers were special targets for marwaris, as they had a regular income.
Manjula blamed their situation on Prabhakara Rao’s habit of smoking and having two cups of tea a day. “Imagine how much money you are wasting!”
Prabhakara Rao hated being called an appulodu (indebted man) even more than being called a sissy. It humiliated him. He carried on borrowing, paying back, borrowing, paying back.
Late one evening, he returned from work, got into bed. “Come here, lie next to me.” He proposed a suicide pact. “Let us do it in a hotel.”
Manjula did not ask him why he wanted to die. Perhaps he’d had a terrible encounter with a marwari who threatened him. She did not show the same sympathy that he did when she brought her fears to him, but self-righteously told him, “If you want, you go do it. I have no reason to kill myself.”
Manjula constantly worried about the toddler. Little Suja turned out to be a danger magnet. One time she peeled off the masking tape her father had put over exposed electric wires; another time she stuck her hand in chili powder; and yet another she tried to reach for burning coals. She needed to be watched all the time.
Manjula had been out of work for some time. Her life was a series of temporary jobs and oustings. During this particular hiatus, she swept the house every day. Every day she came across a stray envelope on the floor. Every day she brushed it aside. After a month went by, she finally grew curious enough to open it. It was a job offer. Yet again she started work.
For her second delivery Manjula decided to have Prabhakara Rao by her side and did not go to Khazipet. They wrote Rathnamma to come and help. In his mother’s presence, Prabhakara Rao once again turned cold.
Rathnamma harassed Manjula day and night. She was a mere skeleton, yet her pregnant belly was huge. Prabhakara Rao asked her to make tea. She said, “Do you have to have two teas a day?” As she brought out the cup, she could see he was seething with anger. His mother was saying, “What a fuss just to make one cup of tea.” Prabhakara Rao refused the tea. Manjula tried to pacify him. He got up from the chair, flew at her, and slapped her so hard that a big clot of blood fell on the floor.
Rathnamma said, “She has bad teeth. That’s all.”
Manjula knew that if she told her brothers about her situation, they would break up her marriage, probably beat her husband, too. She wanted to keep the marriage. She wanted social respect. She never said a word to anyone.
Early one winter morning, she went into labor. “We need to go to the hospital.” Her mother-in-law began making tea for her son. Then she boiled water for him to take a bath. Then she made breakfast. Suja, who ate her food with hot mango pickle like an adult, had diarrhea. They had to wash her. Again another tea. All this while Manjula was moaning.
Finally, three hours after her pains had started, they got into a jetka and arrived at the hospital. When they reached the hospital veranda, the baby boy came out. Leaving Manjula at the hospital, her husband and mother-in-law turned around and went home.
Manjula’s son was so beautiful. Big, fair-skinned.
But from the moment he was born, he was seriously ill. He cried and cried due to colic. A young nurse, to calm him down, mixed glucose powder in a spoonful of water taken directly from a rusty, moldy tap and poured it into his mouth. Immediately he began having diarrhea and vomiting. Manjula panicked.
The doctors saw that Manjula’s son was choking on his own vomit. He was immediately taken to the ICU. Observing this drama, one of the visitors of the patient in the bed next to Manjula’s ran after the doctors to see what would happen.
Manjula waited in tears. Hours passed. No one would tell her anything. While dozing off, she heard the patient next to her talking to someone. “The boy has gone.”
Manjula screamed until the veins in her neck popped out. “My baby, my baby!”
The nurses came running and calmed her down. “What’s the matter?”
Manjula screamed, “I want to see my baby.”
They assured her he was going to be okay.
What the patient had actually said was, “The woman who went off with the baby has been gone a long time.” Because Rayalaseema Telugu is different from the kind spoken in coastal Andhra, Manjula had misunderstood.
In India, the patient’s family is responsible for helping the patient to the bathroom, bathing her, and feeding her. Manjula was hungry. No one sent food from home. She waited five hours before Prabhakara Rao arrived with something to eat. “Where were you?” Manjula asked.
On his way to the hospital, he had stopped to play a game or two of tennis. He took so much offense at Manjula’s question that he turned around and left.
After a few days in the hospital, Manjula came home. Her husband was waiting at the door, blocking her way in. “I don’t want you here. Take him and go wherever you want. You cannot come in.”
Holding the infant, she waited outside for hours. Finally he let her in. She never asked him why he’d treated her like that.
The baby was christened Abraham, but at home he was always called Babu (little boy).
Babu’s diarrhea, which began the day he was born, lasted thirteen months. Manjula grew sick with anxiety. Opportunistic as always when it came to faith, she turned to God. “Lord Jesus, save my son. I will in turn help the poor and the less fortunate.”
Manjula feared for the lives of her children. She feared for her own life. It occurred to her that her mother had died at twenty-seven, a year younger than Manjula was now. She tried to calm herself, thinking, “Just because my mother died at this age doesn’t mean I will.” She took her son to the pediatrician almost every day. He was kind to her. He always tried to assure her that her son was going to be okay.
The next time she went to see the pediatrician, the compounder (a peon in a doctor’s office) informed her that the doctor had died. Some failure of a vital organ. He had only been twenty-eight, the same age as Manjula. Her efforts to assure herself that she was too young to die lost all meaning.
When the sun went down, her fear of death became impossible to bear. She would pester her husband. “Look, my hands are turning blue. I read in the Indian Express that is a sign of impending death.” He would tell her again and again, “No, you are not going to die.”
When she woke up in the morning, she would feel a little better, but as the day progressed, she was surer and surer that she and her children were going to die.
Her students hated her, too. They didn’t want this anxious skeleton of a woman teaching them. Prabhakara Rao’s students once went on a strike to have him appointed their permanent teacher. Manjula’s students now did the same to have her replaced. The last straw for them came when she walked into the classroom and began to scream, “There are cracks in the ceiling. They are widening. This building is collapsing. We must run.” There were no cracks in the ceiling.
When she walked on the sidewalk, she could feel the pavement moving, she could see the shops on either side of the street sliding in opposite directions. She tried to make sense of these experiences. She told herself she was crazy. She tried to assure herself that it was all in her head and to stop worrying, but time and again she would hear of some local tragedy that brought her fears back. A boy pissing on an electric pole electrocuted himself. A colleague was correcting exam papers at home and his son, the same age as Suja, interrupted him. “Daddy, come play with me.” The father gave the little boy a shove. The boy’s head hit the leg of a cot and it killed him.
Manjula knew death was around the corner. She wanted to save herself, her children. She did not care about her husband.
Finally, the crisis to which all these dark premonitions had been leading was upon her. She was attending a colleague’s memorial service. Prabhakara Rao was sitting beside her, and on the other side was Ganga Raju. As the ceremony concluded, she let out a loud gasp and dropped to the floor. People came running.
She was actually dying. After all these months of feeling
death approach but never being sure if it wasn’t all in her head, she knew it was real and it was now.
Manjula looked around her, dazed. It was time to speak a few last words, to disburden herself of her earthly responsibilities. She reached for a trusted hand. Not Prabhakara Rao’s. Ganga Raju’s.
“Ganga Raju garu,” she implored, adding an honorific suffix to show respect, “please take care of my children.” Then her hand let go of his.
A few seconds later, Manjula came to. She was surrounded by the anxious faces of the lecturers.
Prabhakara Rao helped his wife back home. Just as they entered their home, their colleague Damodar walked in behind them. His face red with fury, he launched into a tirade against Prabhakara Rao. “What kind of a husband are you! Are you a man or a beast? Look at your wife. With two small children, she cooks, she cleans. And she has to correct the test papers. If not cooking and cleaning, can’t you help her with preparing marks lists! Tchee tchee tchee! Shame on you!” Damodar stormed out.
In fact, these days it had been even harder for Manjula than usual. Prabhakara Rao sat up all night, night after night, to prepare for his M.A. exams. Manjula had to get out of bed in the middle of the night and spend forty-five minutes lighting the hearth to make him cups of tea.
He took the exams every year, failing each time. Manjula asked, “What’s the point? You are only going to fail again. I know what your problem is. There will be five annotations and five essays. You love annotations and spend all three hours on one single annotation. Each annotation carries five marks. Even if you do all five, you only get twenty-five marks. Spend time on essays. And don’t show off all your brilliance. No examiner likes a student more knowledgeable than himself.”
He had to go to Aligarh (near Benares) for the exams.
Ants Among Elephants Page 25
