“I am expecting word any minute.”
Satyam’s turn came to give his report. Just as he rose to speak, he was handed a telegram. He looked at it and smiled. It said simply, “Done.”
The Warangal squad’s action had been carried out under the guidance of a man named Iliaiah, who’d been a Communist since the days of the old party.
The squad decided to loot the house of a rich komati (moneylender/trader) in Jangaon, a small town near Warangal, since Iliaiah was from Jangaon and knew everyone there.
Iliaiah knocked at the komati’s door. It was opened without hesitation, as Iliaiah was a well-respected man. The rest of the squad members forced their way in behind him to storm the house. Finding the iron safe where the komati kept his cash, they surrounded him and demanded the key. But the komati pretended to be confused, insisting that he couldn’t think where it was. The looters then turned to the komati’s wife, hoping to make off with her jewelry. But most of her gold was locked up in the safe, and despite the looters’ threats, her husband refused to produce the key. So the looters set to breaking it. But the iron safe wouldn’t break. What to do?
The noise and commotion woke up the komati’s three-year-old daughter. Startled, she began to cry. One of the Naxalites, the nineteen-year-old brahmin engineering student Mallikarjuna Sharma, couldn’t stand to see her tears. He left the safe and ran over to take her in his arms, pressing the little girl gently against his breast. “Oh, don’t cry, little one, don’t cry,” he cajoled her, gently patting her back. “Shhh, shhh. This class war is not against you.”
When they saw this display of tenderness, the komati couple relaxed and started screaming for help. The neighbors came running. Iliaiah answered the door and told them, “Don’t worry, it’s me. I joined the Naxalites. Go bring something to help open the safe.” The villagers went off and came back with axes and spades.
The Warangal squad hacked away at the komati’s safe, but it proved too strong to crack open and was too heavy to carry away with them. It had been hours already since they started the action. At last they gave up, grabbed some clothes, and took whatever cash they found outside the safe, along with a battery-operated transistor radio and a few pieces of gold from the person of the komati’s wife. They warned the couple not to call the police.
With their meager loot, the squad trekked across the surrounding fields. When it got dark, they stopped at a hillock to take rest. As they spread the komati’s clothes on the ground to lie down on to sleep, a bunch of keys fell to the ground.
“Humma nee, this clever komati! Look where he hid his safe keys!”
For a while they debated going back to the house. In the end they sent one man back to see if the situation was clear. But by then the police had come and moved the iron safe to the Jangaon police station.
Little though they had to show for it, their action was technically accomplished. They sent off their telegram and proceeded to Adilabad according to plan.
From the meeting in Vizag, Satyam would go directly to Adilabad without stopping at Warangal. Seetharamayya would meet everyone at a place called Ranga Samudaram. There they would cross the river Godavari and enter the forests of Adilabad to begin setting up their guerrilla operations.
On the way back from the meeting, Satyam took a train and got off at Eluru. He had arranged for Maniamma to meet him there and see him one last time. They checked into a lodge together. He took her to the cinema, bought her jasmines, sweets.
On the second night, he told her.
“Maniamma, this is my last visit.”
Maniamma said nothing. She had no words for what was inside her, no capacity to articulate her feelings. She couldn’t even grasp that she had been wronged in this marriage.
“Do you want to come with me, Maniamma?”
Now she knew what to say, and she said it clearly. “The country and its problems—your responsibility. Your children are my responsibility. You take care of your business of liberating the country, and I will raise your children, protect them, and educate them.”
He warned her to destroy every photo of him and every piece of paper that bore his handwriting.
She came to see him off at the station. As the train pulled away, she stood under a lamp in a blue sari with the flowers he’d bought her in her hair. Under the dim light she waved to him with a smile on her lips.
“What courage, what strength, that woman has!” thought Satyam, sitting back in his seat as his train left the station. “She is sending her husband off to the jungles of Adilabad with a reassuring smile.”
A comrade named Goru Madhava Rao had told Satyam and others about his own wife’s reaction. “She fell to the ground in front of me and grabbed hold of my ankles and wouldn’t let go. She cried and cried. Abba, that daughter of a widow stood in my way. I kicked her aside and came here.”
Satyam reached Jannaram by train and started for Adilabad.
*
THE PLAN WAS TO TRAVEL in pairs and arrive at Adilabad from different directions. The time was deemed so ripe for armed revolution that all they needed to do was set out and throngs of youth would join them on their way into the jungles.
Iliaiah and another comrade started from Karimnagar. At Luxettipet they stopped at his favorite tea stall, where the teenaged Muslim server complained as always, “I hate this job.”
“Come with me, then.”
The boy followed them.
An aged brahmin with bad legs, a nostalgia for the Telangana Armed Struggle, and a wish for rejuvenation also joined the youthful Naxalites.
They were joined as well by a young man named Nagi Reddy, the idealistic son of a rich farmer who had long been waiting for the Naxalites to come to town. Before leaving, Nagi Reddy quarreled with his father and made off with forty thousand rupees for the armed struggle. In addition to that large sum, he brought with him a stack of maps. He was going to be the map expert.
News of the movement spread across Telangana. Everywhere people talked of the Naxalites. “They are here, they are here.” “What do they look like?” “Seems they look like students.” In the villages, people talked of the tender concern displayed by the young engineering student Mallikarjuna Sharma for the scared little girl during the Jangaon action. This became the popular image of the Naxalite.
But when the comrades met at Dharmapuri, Mallikarjuna Sharma and his mate did not make it. In their student clothes, wearing conspicuous sunglasses to hide their faces and carrying suspiciously heavy bags, they immediately attracted the attention of the villagers. The police were called. Before they laid a finger on the two, the students told all.
Y. Koteswara Rao hitched a ride on a lorry that was intercepted by the highway patrol. As soon as the lorry stopped, YK jumped out and began running into the shrubs on the side. The police were bewildered. They had stopped the lorry only to check if the driver had proper papers. When they caught up to the fleeing revolutionary, he told them everything before they had even asked him why he was running.
Satyam had foreseen that some of the comrades might be caught and might talk. That was the reason for traveling in pairs and letting no one know from which direction the others would be traveling. Still, he was not pleased. “Who told them to wear student clothes and sunglasses in a village?”
A few miles farther on, the old man with bad legs declared, “I am going back home. I did not know revolution involved so much walking.”
Every time they stopped to rest, Nagi Reddy spread out his maps. “Here, if we take this road, then we have the cover of this hillock, then on the other side, we have a dirt path.” They were in awe of his knowledge but could not follow what he said and did not need this level of expertise. Not just yet, anyway.
The men arrived on the banks of the Godavari River. They bathed in it and rested. In the early hours they boarded a bus to Ranga Samudaram. There, a poor washer-caste man joined.
As they approached the Lambadi thunda (colony), the Lambadis wept with joy: “Sons, where have you
been? We have waited for you fifteen years!” They remembered the Telangana Armed Struggle.
Two Lambadi youths joined: Bhoomayya and Kishtha Gowda.
In the afternoon, the comrades gave some money to the washerman and sent him into the village to buy rice, lentils, oil, and salt at the komati shop.
The komati stared at the washerman, who all his life had wrung his hands, bent his waist, speckled his speech with “I am your slave, sir” while talking to powerful villagers like the komati. The washerman said, “Hey, son, what are you looking at? Tell your friend, that munsub [head of the village], that son of a whore who raped my wife, tell him he is finished tonight.”
The washerman comrade returned with the groceries. The comrades cooked and ate and went into the Godavari to bathe.
Meanwhile in the village the komati locked up his store and ran to the munsub’s house to report what the washerman had said. The nearest police station was far away; the munsub would not have time to get there. But luckily a CRPF battalion was nearby in Jagtial because of the Separate Telangana Agitation. The munsub dispatched a manservant to the camp.
As the men were bathing in the river and enjoying themselves, they heard a huge commotion. As they struggled to figure out what was happening, the would-be guerrillas found themselves surrounded by CRPF forces pointing rifles in their direction.
Satyam saw some of his comrades swimming and others running away. He could do neither. He was dazed. He could see the two Lambadi youths swimming away fast, bobbing like jockeys galloping away on horseback, their white turbans blazing in the sun.
Satyam let out a grunt and fell to the ground. A CRPF man used his rifle to knock Satyam hard in the back.
When presented to the police chief, Satyam was naked but for his underwear. “Wrap some clothes around this man. I am embarrassed to look at the sad spectacle that his body is.”
“There is no shame in being rendered naked. There is shame only if I abandon the revolution.”
Along with hundreds of men arrested for their participation in the Separate Telangana Agitation, Satyam was thrown into a camp. Half-naked and hungry, he squatted on the filthy ground.
On the third night after his arrest, when everyone was asleep, Satyam got up on his tiptoes and slipped away. He walked through the fields, stopping to hide behind shrubs to check if he was safe. He was hungry. Exhausted. Alone. His heart was pounding. He didn’t know what had happened to his friends. Where was he going to go? He was hundreds of miles away from any place he knew, with no proper clothes, no footwear. No one was likely to help him.
It was jungle all around. No human beings. Strange howlings of animals and flappings of birds. He was scared to death when a twig broke under his foot. Sometimes something would scurry in the dried leaves. He would stop still, holding his breath. Hours passed. He kept walking. In the dark he suddenly began to see eerie creatures. He could not see their figures. They were there, stout, squat, dark, features unrecognizable. They were staring at him. They stood surrounding him, their eyes burning in the dark, darting here and there. “Why are they not coming after me? Why do they just stare?” Exhausted, he gave up and fell to the ground.
Waking, he realized the stout figures were young palm trees, the burning eyes fireflies. After two days, Satyam reached the safety of a friend’s house.
*
ON MAY 27, 1969, SIX months after the cave meeting, as they returned from a meeting with Charu Majumdar in Calcutta, Panchadi Krishnamurthy and six comrades were caught getting off the train at Sompeta. They were taken into the woods and shot dead.
Soon after, in the hills of Rangamatia, Krishnamurthy’s wife, Panchadi Nirmala, along with Subba Rao Panigrahi—a key leader of Srikakulam Armed Revolt—and four others were arrested, taken to a police station, tortured, and killed. Their bodies were tossed onto the roadside.
Eighteen-year-old Chandu’s mutilated body was found hanging in a hotel room, staged to look like a suicide.
Between March 1970 and August 1971, 1,783 young supporters of the CPI(M-L) were murdered, according to police records. The actual toll was likely higher. On August 21, 1971, up to a thousand were killed on a single day in one neighborhood in Calcutta.
This was the period when the word encounter entered the Indian English lexicon to refer to police killings of unarmed Naxalites, who were always said to have died in an exchange of fire between the police and the Naxalites.
With the killing of Panchadi, Satyam took over the task of meeting Charu Majumdar in Calcutta. He was the only one to take on this role and survive.
However, the meetings came to an end when a courier, succumbing to police torture, gave away Charu Majumdar’s hideout in Calcutta. He was arrested on July 16, 1972. No one was allowed to see him in the jail, not even a lawyer. Twelve days later, at 4:00 a.m., he died in the same Lal Bazar lockup, which was notorious for torture. His body was not released to his family. As the police took his body to a crematorium, the whole area was cordoned off.
In 1975, Bhoomayya and Kishtha Gowda were hanged.
The movement in Calcutta was snuffed out. The Srikakulam revolt was crushed as soon as it was launched.
The two survivors, Satyam and Seetharamayya, would escape to Hyderabad, where they prepared to launch a new movement, the People’s War Group, the most notorious, famous, and successful Naxalite party, a thorn in the side of the Indian rulers. Thenceforth the duo would be known by their noms de guerre: SM and KS.
Twenty-five years later, two of their old recruits from Warangal, both students, one who studied electrical engineering at REC and the other who was getting a master’s in science at Kakatiya University, took the reins of the party. They shifted the base of their guerrilla operations from Telangana to Chhattisgarh in Madhya Pradesh and changed the party’s name from People’s War Group to Communist Party of India (Maoist) and their class base from peasants in the countryside to tribals in jungles. They are now engaged in a bitter struggle against the Indian government and some of the world’s most powerful corporations, which are after the trillions of dollars’ worth of mineral wealth lying under the lands and habitations of the tribals.
Today if you visit the site of the temple in the hills around Guntur where the famous cave meeting took place, you will find a monument erected in memory of Charu Majumdar and the martyrs of the armed struggle in Srikakulam.
TEN
MANJULA NEVER BOTHERED TO CHRISTEN her third child. Ganga Raju came to see the new baby. Somehow they began talking about Italy and the Risorgimento. He said, “Why not call her Anita,” after Giuseppe Garibaldi’s wife. So they gave her that name, spelled the Indian way: Anitha.
Christened or not, Anitha brought good luck to the family. Prabhakara Rao finally passed his M.A.—not only passed it, but stood first. This time, he admitted, he had taken his wife’s advice. He received five marks more than the university gold medalist, but because he was not enrolled as a student, having prepared for the degree on his own and simply paid the fee to sit for the exam, he was not eligible for medals. With the high demand for English lecturers, he immediately found a post.
Manjula also received a job offer. Leaving her family in Anantapur, she reported to the Women’s College in Nellore, in the south of Andhra.
Manjula didn’t know anyone there, so she asked help from a Christian colleague of hers, Sunandamma. Sunandamma and her three spinster sisters, all of whose names started with Su, helped Manjula find a house right next door to them in James Garden, an untouchable colony.
It was a huge house, and though the rooms were small, they were surrounded by a large veranda. In front of the house was a well with a pulley and a bucket. A large front yard full of green trees shaded the house from the sun. Best of all, if Manjula needed anything, Sunandamma’s sisters were right there.
In Dussehra (harvest festival) holidays, Manjula went back to Anantapur to fetch her children. They were happy to see her. They clung to her calves, clamoring, “Amma! Amma! Amma!”
Rathna
mma came, too, bringing pots and pans and sheets. The children liked the new house. They ran across the veranda. The family had no cots and slept on the floor, Suja with her nayanamma (father’s mother) and Babu and Anitha with their mother.
Rathnamma, waking early to set up the kitchen, found monkeys had broken into it overnight. She ran out screaming onto the veranda. The house was surrounded by thirty or forty monkeys. They were sitting on the branches of the trees, on the roof, on the veranda itself. Big ones, smaller ones, babies, black-assed and red-assed. They seemed angry that their territory had been invaded.
Rathnamma and Manjula grabbed the children and locked the doors. Like animals in a zoo, they gazed out at the monkeys looking in through the windows. The monkeys started dancing and screeching and strutting about. After two hours, Manjula ventured out to get help from the neighbors. “No one can stop them. You just have to manage somehow.” Hindus would not allow the monkeys to be killed because one of their gods is a monkey.
The family stayed in for days. Then Manjula borrowed a large stick from the neighbors and went out to buy groceries. On her way back, the monkeys launched a surprise attack and made off with the groceries, screeching triumphantly. In time Manjula learned to wait until after dark, when the monkeys went off to other trees to sleep, to bring groceries home. Another time Rathnamma, cutting vegetables, was set upon and robbed of the produce. The family had to cook with doors and windows closed and latched. The back and front yards and great big verandas that were the house’s best feature were useless, as the children had to stay indoors at all times.
Manjula consoled herself. The ordeal would soon be over. When both husband and wife are lecturers, a government rule says that they have a right to work in the same place. Prabhakara Rao had already started looking into getting Manjula transferred.
Manjula enrolled Suja in the American Baptist Mission School, a pleasant, spacious, peaceful school. In missionary schools, where the staff are all untouchables, the untouchable children aren’t made to feel out of place. Manjula paid the fees, had Suja’s uniform tailored, and hired a rickshaw man to take her daughter to school. Babu and Anitha, three and two years old, respectively, stayed home with their nayanamma. Rathnamma didn’t seem happy to be there, but the children needed someone at home.
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