The principal of the college where Manjula taught was a despotic little spinster named Sivagami. For some reason, as soon as she met Manjula, Sivagami took a visceral dislike to her, recoiling from her physically. In the first month Manjula was in Nellore, Sivagami marked Manjula late five times, though she was never late by more than two or three minutes. She tried to leave early, but every morning the monkeys delayed her.
Because Manjula was on her own in Nellore, she did not have to hand her salary over to her husband. She was surprised to find how much better the family finances could be managed. She had neither savings nor debts. She wanted nothing more than for things to continue in this way. Someday soon she would be allowed to transfer, and the family would be reunited.
One time when she used her lunch hour to visit Suja’s school, she was amazed to find that her daughter’s teachers had so far taught her only the ka gunintham, the first one that is taught to children learning to read. A gunintham is the set of different ways that each consonant in the Telugu script can be written in combination with the twelve vowel marks. Telugu has thirty-six guninthams, so learning the first one—for the consonant ka—is something like learning the first letter of the alphabet. Manjula had assumed that Suja had already been taught all thirty-six guninthams because she was writing and reading them at home. She had made out the pattern from the one she was taught and picked up the rest on her own.
Manjula was pleased to find an old acquaintance of hers in Nellore, her AU batchmate Nessy, the Christian girl. Manjula took her children to pay a visit to Nessy. Nessy bragged on and on about her children. Finally, Manjula also felt as if she should tell Nessy a cute thing that one of her children had done: “My son sometimes becomes so adamant. When I make squash, he demands okra, or he won’t eat.”
Nessy cut her short. “Boys like that grow up to become nara hanthakulu,” she said, using a biblical word for “murderers.”
Another lesson for Manjula: Never talk about your own children. Neither brag about nor belittle them.
Some years later, Nessy would bring a small boy, the son of a poor family in Kakinada, into her household to work as her servant. After he left home, his parents never heard anything from Nessy or their son. They were too poor to travel to Nellore to find out what happened. When someone who knew Nessy in Nellore visited Kakinada, she told Manjula the word in that town was that Nessy had beaten the boy to death.
At Nessy’s house, her own children were given some kind of snacks to eat, but she didn’t offer any to Manjula’s, who looked at them with curiosity. They had no notion of what snacks were.
It made Manjula deeply sad to see this. On the way home, she had the impulse to take them to an ice cream parlor. She explained to her children that ice cream was a nice thing to eat. To them it was like a scoop of paradise. Watching them eat it, Manjula made a vow. Every month, the day she got paid, she would take them for ice cream before the money got spent on other things.
*
IN NELLORE, ALL THREE OF Manjula’s children contracted some terrible skin disease that produced boils. Babu got a few on the forehead, while the girls had such big ones, and so many of them, on their bottoms that they couldn’t sit. At one stage in the life cycle of these eruptions her daughters’ little globular asses looked like pink-brown breasts with multiple pus-colored nipples. Suja had to stop going to school and couldn’t be restrained from scratching.
Manjula took the children to a doctor and did all he told her to do. She changed their cheddis (underpants) often, washed them after they wet themselves, kept their sheets clean. But nothing helped. That James Garden was a filthy, filthy slum. The sooner they moved out, the better. Manjula prayed to God for her transfer to be approved.
Rathnamma, an uneducated woman who never stepped out on her own even to go next door, never understood the problems of her employed daughter-in-law. As Rathnamma hated Manjula more and more, Manjula grew more and more depressed, making Rathnamma hate her more and more. Neither of them had any concept of stress or mental illness.
Rathnamma would discuss her daughter-in-law with the neighbors: “Always complains of headaches.”
“Why is she like that?”
“A trick to lie in bed and do nothing.”
“Maybe she is possessed. Why don’t you take her to Priscilla’s husband?” Priscilla—a name that everyone, herself included, pronounced “Priss-killah”—and her husband were household servants in a sheikh’s house in Kuwait. They were in Nellore on vacation. Priscilla’s husband had lately earned a name for himself by performing exorcisms, ridding possessed women of Satan.
Manjula hated the idea. A lowly servant, a former slum dweller! The audacity of these people to suggest such a thing.
She didn’t refuse, though, because she knew the preacher had already told Rathnamma that the devil would refuse. Refusing to undergo an exorcism was the surest sign that one is possessed.
Manjula already knew what the ceremony involved. Priscilla’s husband would have the possessed woman kneel on the floor with her hands folded in prayer. He would then ask her to close her eyes as he started a prayer. He would hold a Bible in one hand, and the other he would place on the head of the possessed. He would talk to God, ask Him to drive the devil out. He would pray and pray, he would talk and talk. His pitch would go up as he talked faster and faster, louder and louder, until he was speaking in tongues. Then suddenly he would smack the poor woman’s head with the Bible in his hand. With eyes closed, the possessed wouldn’t see it coming. She would pass out and fall to the ground. When she came to, he would declare the devil had been driven out.
Manjula knelt on the ground as Sunandamma’s mother and Rathnamma watched. Manjula closed her eyes as she was told, but kept all her other senses sharp. She had to be ready. Right when the Bible was only an inch from her head, she ducked. This was not an outcome the exorcist was prepared for.
On his summer vacation, Prabhakara Rao came to Nellore. In the two months her husband was there, Manjula’s carefully balanced finances were ruined by his cigarettes, his three teas a day. He took his mother’s and Manjula’s own gold chains and pawned them to the marwaris. The women consoled themselves for the loss of their meager jewelry with the hope that as soon as they had the money to spare they could get it back from the pawnshop. Of course this never happened.
Manjula, who had been praying for a transfer, began to have doubts about this plan. If she lived together with Prabhakara Rao, she would have to give her salary to him, and he would use it up. The children would have nothing.
While he was there, Rathnamma told him many things about Manjula, complaining that she didn’t want to live with her. But if Rathnamma left, Manjula would have no one to look after her two toddlers.
To please Rathnamma, Manjula began waking up early in the morning to fetch water out of the well and wash the dishes and the clothes. One day, slicing vegetables, she cut her thumb badly. But for a long time a combination of self-denial and self-pity kept her from seeing a doctor. She went on fetching water, cleaning dishes, and washing clothes with a gashed thumb. Finally, she consulted a doctor, who told her to stop using that thumb until it healed. Manjula reluctantly hired a maid to do the dishes.
That Sunday, Manjula stayed in bed a little longer.
“Why are you asleep still?”
“It’s okay, atthamma. The maid is coming in to do the dishes.”
“The maid is here. Get up and put out the dishes!”
Manjula was annoyed at Rathnamma. “Let me sleep, will you?”
A hand grabbed Manjula by her hair, lifting her right out of bed and onto her feet. Prabhakara Rao was standing there like a dragon spewing fire. Then he slapped her face. Manjula screamed. The children woke up.
The scene that day is burned into Sujatha’s—into my—memory. The terrified woman—her mother—disheveled, her hand wounded, utterly naked, running to save herself. The man—Sujatha’s father, her beloved father—chasing after her mother, who, desperate, ran out
of the house. Her father went after her. Sujatha’s mother ran around to the other side of the well. Her father followed. He pretended to start chasing her mother in one direction, and when she tried to run away, he turned around and caught her from the other side. The children’s grandmother stood looking on with pride at her son’s display of manliness.
The three children, startled out of their slumber, with crusts in their eyes, dried saliva on their cheeks, and boils on their asses, their underwear soaked in piss, stood there wailing, scared out of their minds.
The adults were too busy to notice. One running for her life, the other trying to take that life, and the third watching the hunt.
The monkeys sitting on the veranda, startled, ran up to watch the spectacle from the rooftop. The neighbors, too, came out and watched. Sunandamma’s mother and sisters came by to pick up Rathnamma to go to church. They watched the scene for a while and left without interfering.
*
AT THE END OF THE summer Rathnamma went away with her son. Manjula had to leave her children alone at home to go to work at the college. When she returned, Babu had three scratch marks close to his eye from a monkey’s claw.
She took the three of them in her arms and consoled them, telling them that soon she would get a transfer to Kakinada.
“Amma, what is transfer?”
“We are all going to go to your nayanamma’s town and live together with your father, uncle, and nayanamma, and nayanamma is going to take care of you while I am gone to college.”
The children started to think transfer meant something exciting.
“Amma, when is the transfer coming?”
“Soon, soon.”
Sorting out her problems, Manjula decided the first step was to move out of James Garden and closer to the college. She found a room in Moolapeta, a neighborhood that was just beginning to develop. The surroundings were so unpleasant that no one else wanted to live there, so the caste-Hindu owners agreed to rent it to Manjula. Even though Anitha and Babu were still too young, they would have to go to school. She got uniforms stitched, paid the school fees, and hired a rickshaw to take them.
After Manjula had spent all that money, Anitha, just three years old, told her mother that she didn’t want to go to school. She organized her sister and brother, and the three of them stood their ground. Their mother could do nothing. A lot of money went to waste, but Manjula was delighted with her youngest’s leadership qualities. She told herself, “Anyway, after the transfer they would have to go to a new school.”
Their new living quarters were a portion of a house built to be independently accessible. Construction wasn’t finished. The floor was still waiting to be plastered, and the walls were just bare bricks. There were no windows, just holes, and the doors were raw wood. They had just one small, damp room and a dark kitchen, which was also the bathroom. There were no steps in front: the floor of their rooms was level with the street. And the street was not paved, but just loose dirt. Centipedes and scorpions crawled in through the cracks between the bricks. But it was going to be temporary because Manjula had heard from Prabhakara Rao that he was going to get a transfer to Kakinada and soon her own transfer there would be arranged. There was no question of his joining her in Nellore, even if that was possible—which it wasn’t, as there was only a women’s college there. She wanted to flee that town, to get as far away as possible.
The children wouldn’t go to school, but Manjula decided to try at least to take care of their nutrition. She got the idea to give them cornflakes as they do in England and America. She went to a high-class store that had recently opened in town and bought a package. If anyone found out, her relatives or colleagues or friends, they would be sure to ridicule her for her fancy ideas. She explained to her children what cornflakes were, and when she told them that was what they eat “in foreign,” Babu and Anitha were unimpressed, but Suja’s eyes widened in wonder. Manjula sat on the low stool in front of her little hearth and lit a fire. She put the milk on the hearth and fanned and fanned and fanned it for half an hour until the milk boiled. Then she put the cornflakes in a big tumbler that she used to make charu (mulligatawny). She poured the hot milk in and added a heap of sugar. Sujatha watched in awe while the other two were suspicious. When the meal was ready, the eldest child put a spoonful in her mouth and felt dizzy and nauseated.
Manjula tried patiently for three days to get her children to eat the cornflakes. But they didn’t like them, and it took too much time and too much effort to light the fire and keep fanning it until the milk boiled. For months she couldn’t get herself to throw away the package. So much money down the drain. She kept the box as a souvenir and token of modernity.
One evening Manjula came home and saw her eldest daughter’s hair all sticking up in a swirl on top of her head with a small cropped circle at the crown. She questioned her daughter as to where she had been. Had someone come into the house? Suja said no to everything. She was five and a half years old and felt too ashamed to tell anyone the neighbor boy and his friends had made her stand still while they spun their tops on her head—heavy wooden tops with sharp carpenter’s nails at their base. The nails made a small bloody hole in her scalp, and the hair was snarled and cut short. The boy and his friends had bullied the three children while Manjula was away teaching.
Whenever she could, Manjula would leave the children in someone’s care. She discovered that a very, very, very distant relative of Prasanna Rao’s—a Mr. Neelambaram—lived in Nellore. He had a son in his late teens who suffered from TB and stayed home. It was safer to leave the children with a TB patient than with no supervision at all.
The children spent the sweltering afternoons running around outside. Mr. Neelambaram’s son was nicest to Suja. One afternoon he put his hands in her armpits and lifted her up, standing her up on the cot. He opened his lungi and pulled out his jujji (Manjula’s made-up word for “genitals”). Suja had never seen a jujji like that before. It wasn’t small and mouselike. It was hard like wood and big. It was burning hot with fever. She felt bad for that anna (big brother) that this thing was hurting him, which is why he was asking her to caress it. He moaned and whispered. Somehow she knew that this also must be something to never tell anyone.
Manjula could only hope for her transfer to come and their nightmare to end. She rushed home from college each day and spent all her time with her children. She fed them, bathed them. The four of them slept on a thin sheet on the bare rough floor. She told them stories. They fought among themselves to be at her side with their knees in her ribs or their legs on her belly.
One night it rained and rained. It was cold, and the damp, absorbed by the concrete, rose up from the floor. The children and their mother, scared of the thunder, huddled against one another. They couldn’t sleep. Every time there was a peal of thunder they all screamed.
Then they saw it. The bloody head of a snake. Just the head. It came in through the space under the door and went crawling across the floor. They saw it crawl silently, purposely, relentlessly, making a drawing in blood on the floor. It crawled and crawled. They were scared to breathe. At last, they saw it go out through the kitchen.
In the morning, the Hindus told them that when it rained, all the snakes from the swamps came out and swarmed around the slightly higher grounds of the house. Some animal must have eaten most of the snake, leaving the living head to crawl off and die.
The next day, Manjula moved out. She rented a portion in a Christian house. It had three rooms and was way too expensive for Manjula. She approached a colleague of hers, Margaret, an unmarried zoology lecturer who was also looking for a place. Even though Manjula had found the place and paid the major portion of the rent, Margaret took the best, most private room for herself, leaving Manjula and her children in the open room in front with holes in the roof. They used the charu bowl and the water pitcher to catch the rain. Margaret saw the children sitting on the floor in a row while their mother made rice balls and put them in their mouths. Margaret was
touched by the scene. “Look at that, three pairs of ali chippalu [mother of pearl], their eyes are just like ali chippalu. So wide and big.” These tender feelings lasted but a moment. Ever after, Margaret did her best to keep the children from coming near her.
The house owners were a short, gray-skinned couple in their late forties. Manjula’s children called their sixteen-year-old daughter akka (big sister).
Manjula did not know what her children got up to when she was at work. She did not know that Suja became an accomplice in the neighbor akka’s schemes. Suja adored the older girl. She was pretty, with a long, long braid reaching down below her waist. When she walked, that braid bounced from one buttock to the other. She had big eyes, which she adorned with eyeliner. Akka’s parents wouldn’t let her go out to see “friends” because they suspected her friends were boys. But if akka took Suja with her, they allowed her to go, little thinking she would be so shameless as to make out with boys in front of a little girl. Suja saw akka touching and holding different annas in ways that were not familiar to her. She knew this, too, must be kept secret.
Akka liked to invite Suja to piss together in the alley between the house and the compound wall. When they did, Suja was filled with a sweet, breathless, restless sensation. The whooshing sound of the teenager’s pissing intrigued her. Suja longed to know how it was different between the akka’s legs and her own, what it was that made her piss whoosh while her own only tinkled.
Manjula had no time to watch out for her children. At college Principal Sivagami tortured Manjula. Puny and cold in a stiff sari, Sivagami walked around like Napoleon. When Manjula taught, Sivagami would come and stand at the door. She had made it her goal in life to bring down Manjula.
Ants Among Elephants Page 30
