Ants Among Elephants

by Sujatha Gidla

  “Don’t leave me with these sick children.”

  He left.

  “You will never pass!”

  The Sunday after he’d gone to Aligarh, Manjula tried on a new blouse a tailor had just stitched for her. It was too tight around the biceps, and it made her vein swell as when a nurse ties a rubber band to draw blood. She could not throw the blouse away, as it had cost money, nor could she take it back to the tailor, who would take another three months to fix it.

  Suja woke up crying. Manjula picked her up. Holding her on her hip with one arm, Manjula went about washing dishes, feeding Babu, cleaning him. When Manjula tried to set Suja down, even for a second, she started crying loudly. She would not even let her mother switch her to the other hip.

  Manjula noticed a vein as long and thick and hard as a pencil sticking out of her upper arm. She knew at once it was abnormal. She left the chores and, taking the two children, right away went to see the doctor, who told her to rest immediately.

  Manjula, having developed a kind of masochism in the face of her problems, went on with her chores, with Suja on her hip. By the evening, the vein had swelled up more. Manjula ran back to the clinic.

  Dr. Nayanam was furious. “Do you have any brains? What did I tell you! You are educated. If you don’t understand, then at least listen to the doctor! This is called thrombophlebitis. There is a blood clot forming. If it travels to your heart or your brain, it will mean immediate death. How about this? You go and die, for all I care. I gave you advice and you didn’t listen. You deserve to die.”

  Manjula went home. She panicked. Her temples were throbbing. She sweated, grew dazed, and was overcome by a strange, crazy feeling.

  Rathnamma woke up. Rathnamma, who never stepped out of her home, who knew nothing of the outside world, ran outside, calling for help. A neighbor rushed to the center, brought back a jetka, and helped the women into it. In the middle of the night, the jetka sped through the empty streets. At the general hospital, the doctors checked Manjula’s blood pressure, which was dangerously high, and immediately took her to the ICU, gave her an injection, and laid her on a bed. On her fourth day in the hospital, a close colleague of hers who had come to visit his own relative looked straight at Manjula and walked right past her. She was unrecognizable. At twenty-eight, all her hair had turned gray.

  Prabhakara Rao returned from exams. Manjula had returned from the hospital four days earlier. He listened to her story. He said nothing. Maybe he was sick of his sick wife. Maybe he was sick of the hospital bills.

  “I was so ill. What if I had died? Why did you have to leave me and go away?”

  The moment that last word left her mouth, Manjula saw the rapid change in Prabhakara Rao’s features and realized what a mistake she had made. He bristled with rage.

  “I want neither you nor this marriage!” he roared. He plucked off his wedding ring, ran to the front steps, and tossed it.

  Manjula ran out looking for it, in the bushes, in the gutter. She was upset, not because it was their wedding ring, but because it was the most valuable thing they possessed. Hours later she found the band, but the most valuable part, the emerald, was missing.

  The next year when Manjula, again pregnant unexpectedly, was due to deliver, Prabhakara Rao flew into a rage over some insignificant matter. He was listening to the BBC. He leaped from the chair, picked up the radio, still plugged into its socket, and threw it at her. She ducked. Electric sparks burst out of the socket.

  Prabhakara Rao knew his pregnant wife needed nutrition. He could afford to buy vegetables but no eggs, no meat, no fish, no fruit. They had to stop giving milk to the children.

  One peaceful Sunday afternoon, Prabhakara Rao asked Manjula to make him a cup of tea. She got up muttering, “What if you didn’t have so many teas?” She went into the kitchen. When she returned with the tea, she could see her husband was angry. Rathnamma, throwing kerosene on the fire, added, “So what if he wants tea, why do you have to complain?”

  Manjula was already well into regretting she had uttered a word. She began, “Okay, let us forget—”

  Still sitting in his chair, her husband raised the hot cup and threw it through the open door at the houses on the other side. Suja and Babu were scared and began to cry pathetically, helpless little persons caught in a war. Manjula started crying, too.

  “Ayyo, look out, Husband, the babies, our babies,” she cried.

  Prabhakara Rao was breathing laboriously. “We will see about your babies. I will lay you and your babies out in the street and hack you all to pieces.”

  This time Rathnamma tried to calm her son while continuing to blame Manjula for causing the fight. Almost every day the radio, the papers, had news of men who had too much debt killing their wives and children and then killing themselves.

  *

  FIVE LONG YEARS AFTER MANJULA received her M.A., the government announced lecturer selection exams for history. This was a life-changing opportunity for Manjula. If she received a good rank and then passed the oral exam, she would finally escape the cycle of temporary employment. With a permanent government job, her livelihood would no longer depend on the whims of a principal.

  As she came out of the exam hall, it was pouring. Her husband was waiting outside with an umbrella, holding their son. He was tense, like a strict father anxious about his daughter’s performance. He scanned the question paper she handed him and asked her which topic she’d chosen for the essay. She showed him. He grunted, “Hmm. We will see.”

  Manjula came in tenth out of the tens of thousands of history graduates statewide who took the exam. But she had yet another hurdle to face: an oral interview with a panel of high-level academicians. Here test scores lost all value. Candidates relied on bribery or nepotism. Manjula had neither money nor connections.

  So she went to appeal to Thomas Reddy, an MP from Anantapur and a Christian of reddy caste. Manjula and Prabhakara Rao hoped he would help them as fellow Christians. He said he would, but one could not expect much on such a flimsy basis.

  In the interview, Manjula was asked every question she had anticipated and prepared for, and in the very order she had guessed. As she was leaving the interview room, one of the committee members, a highly respected mala professor named Bullayya, stopped her to ask one last question: “What is your opinion on apartheid?” It wasn’t a test. He genuinely wanted to hear her views on that issue. Manjula just giggled stupidly and ran out, leaving Professor Bullayya confused. She did not have an opinion on apartheid, having never heard that term before.

  A few days later, Prabhakara Rao received a telegram from one of his friends in Hyderabad: “Congratulations. Your wife has been selected.”

  Manjula and Prabhakara Rao went to thank Thomas Reddy. “Dear girl, no need to thank me. Thank our Lord Jesus. I did nothing. Your interviewers told me all about you.”

  After seven years of temporary positions, night jobs, and oustings, Manjula finally received posting orders from the university board to report to Tirupati College.

  Tirupati was far away. But beggars cannot be choosers. Manjula resigned her job in Anantapur and took a train to Tirupati.

  The principal there, a brahmin woman named Rajeswari, took one look at Manjula and said, “You have no job here. I won’t let you report.”

  Manjula could not believe what she was hearing. In tears, she left the principal’s office.

  The clerk saw what had happened. He had nothing but pity for Manjula’s situation. “Look, amma, it would be no use going to the board. If that woman says no, then it is no.” What hurt most was that Manjula had left the job she had.

  Prabhakara Rao, who had accompanied her to Tirupati, sympathized but was helpless to defend his wife. They did not sleep that night.

  She would have to rush back, see her principal in Anantapur, and beg for her job back. By six-thirty the next morning, she and her husband were at his doorstep. Mr. Habibullah simply said, “Write a sick-leave application for the two days you were away. I will rip u
p your resignation letter.” Then he called his wife and he told her in Urdu to bring tiffin and coffee for the couple, their first meal since the debacle in Tirupati.

  *

  RATHNAMMA’S HEALTH WAS POOR. HER heart was enlarged. Her feet were always swollen. She suffered exhaustion and shortness of breath while doing household chores. But she kept on working by sheer habit, by sheer force of tradition. Her so-called educated sons could not care less. Prabhakara Rao only defended his mother’s “authority” against Manjula. Other than that, he never did anything for her. He never brought her things she liked to eat, never walked her to church, never even talked with her much. Yet he chased and beat up his wife to champion his mother.

  Rathnamma asked her son to take her to a famous Christian hospital in Tamil Nadu for a medical checkup. But Prabhakara Rao, fearing the prospect of more debt, remained silent.

  Manjula, without telling her husband, sold the gold chain that Prabhakara Rao’s family had given her for her engagement to the owners of the restaurant opposite the house. She gave the money to Prabhakara Rao. “Take your mother to Vellore.” The doctors did the tests, gave Rathnamma prescriptions and advice, and sent her home.

  In Anantapur the family bought the medicines. The doctors had said that Rathnamma should go on a special diet and take bed rest. Manjula took care of everything.

  But she had selfish motives in doing all this for her mother-in-law. Manjula observed that her husband was a loving man when they were alone, yet turned into a monster in the presence of his mother. She knew that Rathnamma wanted to go back to her family in Kakinada. She had only been waiting to get the medical checkup and medicines she wanted. Once she got all that, she left.

  Manjula took Babu with her and went to Khazipet for her third delivery. Carey was not there to receive her at the station. He had married a Telangana girl in a simple ceremony in Seetharamayya’s house, and the couple had gone to Nirmal to visit the bride’s mother.

  It pained Satyam to see his sister in this condition. She was nothing but bones, pale and weak. If she wanted to sit, she needed to be helped down. If she was sitting, someone had to put his hands in her armpits and lift her up.

  Satyam was busy. Every night after supper he left home, walking in the dark across fields and hillocks to avoid police, and went to Warangal. He would have meetings with mill workers, students, railway workers, peasant youths. He was organizing teachers. He was fully immersed in his activity. Coming back at four or five in the morning, he would go to Nancharayya’s house, and without disturbing his friend’s family, he would sleep on the bare floor of their porch, leaving before they woke up. Sometimes they would get up early and find him there. Manjula wondered how this brother of hers, who behaved like a prince at home, was able to work so hard for his ideals.

  One night at two, when Satyam was out doing his clandestine organization, Manjula began having contractions. Maniamma locked the five sleeping children, including her two-and-half-year-old boy, inside the house and took Manjula to St. Ann’s. As the nurse was taking down the patient information, Maniamma remembered what Satyam had said to her. “My sister is too weak. If she has a fourth pregnancy, she is sure to die.” Without telling Manjula, Maniamma told the nurse to arrange for a tubectomy after delivery. At that, the hospital turned Manjula away. As Catholics, they did not approve of birth control.

  In the dead of the night, Maniamma took Manjula to the government hospital in Hanamkonda, two hours away by rickshaw.

  No one knew why, but during delivery Manjula started to bleed uncontrollably. A doctor told Maniamma to go out and buy an injection to stop the bleeding. It cost seventy-five paisa, which she didn’t have. She had spent all the cash they had between them to hire the rickshaws. And the medical stores would not open for hours. A thoughtful nurse used an injection that was meant for another patient whose life was not in danger.

  After the baby was born, Satyam arrived at the hospital. The doctors were waiting for him. “Her condition is very poor,” he was told. “We strongly urge that she have a tubectomy.”

  Manjula hesitated.

  Satyam was furious. “You are going to do as I say.”

  In a few minutes the very same doctor who had told Manjula she must have the operation returned to inform Satyam that the hospital could not operate on her. “We need a signed permission from her husband.”

  But that husband, once she left Anantapur, never wrote, never phoned. To get in touch with him, they would have to write a letter. The going-and-coming of those two letters would take at least ten days, and the operation needed to be performed within two or three days of the delivery.

  For the second time, Satyam committed forgery for the sake of his sister. Posing as her husband, he signed the permission.

  The doctors prepared Manjula for surgery. After the anesthesia was administered, the surgeon had to leave her on the table to fill out some papers. The last thing Manjula heard was “I will be right back.”

  The next thing she felt was excruciating pain. Her belly was being cut open. The doctor, having returned well after Manjula’s anesthesia had worn off, performed the surgery as she lay awake.

  After the operation, they did not give her penicillin, because her family had yet to find the money to buy it. The doctors simply stitched her up and went away. Modern thinking was Manjula’s curse. She knew the importance of antibiotics. She was sure she was going to die.

  The next morning, Manjula woke up screaming. The janitor, a rude paki woman, had come to clean her. Perhaps out of some psychological reaction to their own horrible oppression, the pakis working as janitors in government hospitals often behave cruelly toward patients who are poor. This woman was irate to find Manjula still asleep after sunrise. “Hey, you! Why are you sleeping day and night? Get up!” She violently pulled off Manjula’s sheet.

  For hours, blood had been oozing out at her incision, soaking the sheet, and as the blood dried, the sheet got stuck to the stitches. Tearing off that sheet, this woman ripped the incision open.

  Maniamma, asleep by the bed, woke up and, catching the janitor by her bun, yanked her neck back and punched her in the mouth. Maniamma was the girl all the other girls, including Manjula, had been scared of back when they went to high school together. When she got angry, she was the incarnation of the goddess of wrath.

  But the janitor was not afraid of Maniamma. The two women, one wilder than the other, wrestled on the floor.

  Maniamma had set upon the janitor to defend her helpless sister-in-law, but once the fighting started, Maniamma forgot all about Manjula. Locked in each other’s arms, the two combatants crashed down on top of Manjula and tore open more stitches. Visiting relatives of other patients in the ward, who had been watching the spectacle, stepped in to separate the two women. Manjula, losing blood, was taken away by nurses to get her stitches repaired.

  By afternoon, the janitors’ union had called a strike. They wanted Maniamma to apologize. As she was the wife of a Communist leader, the situation was delicate. The party tried to intervene, but the union refused to back down, and finally Satyam had to force Maniamma to apologize.

  The ordeal of the delivery and the surgery had one important effect on Manjula. She had tasted death, gone through it, knew now what it was like.

  She lost her fear.

  NINE

  IN FEBRUARY 1966, WHEN MANJULA came to stay with Satyam’s family in Khazipet to deliver her third child, she rarely saw her brother at home. He was busy leading, from behind the scenes, an agitation in Warangal around the grievances of the native Telangana people.

  Ever since Andhra and Telangana had merged into one state, sentiment within Telangana had been turning against the Andhra migrants flooding into the region. Telangana people complained they could not compete with Andhras in any field. In the countryside, rich Andhra settlers were buying up all the farmland. In the urban areas, Andhra doctors, teachers, professors, and administrators were taking all the jobs. Andhra students filled the medical and engine
ering colleges. Telanganas, held back culturally and economically under the rule of the Nizam, were being pushed aside.

  A disgruntled Telangana Congress leader had called on the people of Telangana to fight to separate from Andhra. So then sporadic attacks on Andhras living in Telangana turned into systematic, government-funded, police-aided anti-Andhra pogroms—looting, rape, arson, murders. Everywhere the cry was raised “Andhras, go back!”

  Carey was relatively safe. Not only had he married a Telangana woman, but also many of the Telangana thugs leading the anti-Andhra violence were his friends. Satyam had no such security. He was forced to temporarily move his family out of their home into a place near the Railway Workers Colony, where friends and supporters would protect them.

  Seeing that Telangana people were indeed losing out to Andhra people in every field, Satyam took up the cause. He wrote leaflets setting out these just grievances, had them printed, and littered Warangal’s main square of Hanamkonda Chowrastha with them overnight. Every morning fresh ones would appear. They were unsigned. These writings struck a chord with the Telangana public. People looked forward to the new one that would be left each day and argued over the mystery of who the author was.

  Satyam also organized meetings of supporters in the Azam Jahi mills in Warangal and the Khazipet Railway Colony. These workers had been taking part in the looting of Andhra-owned businesses. He told them, “Okay, there is injustice done to you. But what did the ordinary Andhra man, a clerk, a teacher, do to deserve to be attacked? Why humiliate his wife, his daughter?” He told them they should instead fight against the landlords, exploiters of both Andhras and Telanganas:

  Kadupu chetto pattukoni vacchina vadini kadayya,

  Kadupu kottataniki.

  (Attack those who deprive your stomach,

  Not those who came here for their stomachs’ sake.)

  It is not Andhra versus Telangana, he said. It is exploiter versus the exploited. He organized looting of shops selling grain or clothes regardless of the regional identity of their owners.