When Suja had a fever, Manjula went to college to ask Sivagami if she could take the day off.
“Respected madam, I need one day casual leave, as my child is ill.”
“How old is this ‘child’ of yours?”
“Five, madam.”
Sivagami laughed until her ribs hurt. “She is five and you still call her a child? Come off it, will you?”
Manjula was forced to stay.
In winter, Manjula and the children went to Anantapur on a surprise visit. Their eyes shining with mischief and joy, they knocked on the door of Prabhakara Rao’s house. They waited a long time. Prabhakara Rao finally opened the door. “Array, it’s you!”
“Why didn’t you come to the door?” Manjula asked.
He mumbled that he’d been in the lavatory.
Later the house owner called Manjula over and told her that her husband’s behavior had not been irreproachable. “The maid is always there. Sometimes he shuts the door while she’s inside.” When Manjula questioned Prabhakara Rao about this, his face became red. His hair stood on end. He put on clothes and sandals and went off somewhere.
In her absence he had become as indigent as a beggar. Instead of giving him money, she brought groceries from Nellore. There was nothing left over for treats. She had to renege on her ice cream promise after only one time.
When she returned to the college, Sivagami summoned her to her office and ordered her to testify against a colleague of hers, Padmavathi, whom Sivagami hated.
Someone had told Sivagami that Padmavathi had bragged in the staff room, “Within a week I will have Sivagami transferred to a remote place. If not, my name is not Padmavathi.”
As scared as she was of Sivagami, Manjula politely refused. “She may not like you, madam, but she never said anything about getting you transferred.”
“I want you to testify!”
“Then why don’t you ask Mrs. Kanakamma to testify?” Manjula suggested. Kanakamma was Sivagami’s friend.
“How dare you tell me what I should do! I want you to testify, and you are going to testify.”
Sivagami locked the door to her office from inside and made Manjula stand in front of her. For two hours, Sivagami prodded and threatened her.
Manjula knew that this meant the end of her hard-won government job. Sivagami had her in a stranglehold.
Manjula went home. She thought of going to the telephone exchange and calling her husband to see how the transfer efforts were coming along. “O Lord, just get me out of Nellore, emancipate me from Sivagami.”
Nessy paid a visit to pressure Manjula on Sivagami’s behalf. Sivagami set up spies everywhere to report on Manjula. She went to the bathroom, she got written up. She was thirty seconds late, she got written up. She dictated notes to her students. “You didn’t spend the whole hour on the lesson, you wasted time on notes.” Write-up. Manjula brought this all upon herself. She had no fondness for Padmavathi, who, like Sivagami, was highly contemptuous of Manjula for being poor and untouchable.
One day Manjula was summoned to meet some visitors to the college from out of town. It was Manikya Rao and Niranjanamma. Manikya Rao was powerful in the department of education at this time, and he and his wife were in Nellore for a meeting. They couldn’t believe that this person standing before them was Manjula. “Papa, you look so old! You look like a mother of ten children!”
The annual college fete was coming. Sivagami instituted a new rule that year. “We have invited Nellore’s prominent people. You are not allowed to bring your children to the fete. They are a nuisance.” No one dared say anything except a mild-mannered physics lecturer, Sarojini. “Madam, this is our college, we work here, this is our fete, and you want to ban our children?” The lecturers stood strong. They formed a line outside Sivagami’s office, and one after another, they went in to protest. She rescinded the memo. But on the day of the fete no lecturer dared to bring her children.
Manjula had wanted to. She was afraid to leave them alone after her usual hours. And it would have been a chance to show them where their mother worked. But she left them at home. Their clothes were torn and faded. They had no shoes.
Manjula couldn’t wait for the function to be over. There were speeches, praises, prizes. Her children were home alone. She asked someone, “What’s the time, madam?” Six o’clock. She had never stayed at the college so late.
There were patriotic songs, mythological dramas, traditional dances. Her children were home alone. What’s the time, madam? Seven o’clock.
There were sweets, soft drinks. Her children would have loved to eat those sweets. But they were home alone. What’s the time, madam? Eight o’clock. There were rustling silk saris, jingling bangles, fragrant flowers, glittering lights. But her children were home alone. What’s the time, madam? Half past eight.
The neighbors were away. Margaret was at college, too. Manjula’s children would be scared.
As soon as she was allowed to go, Manjula ran out. The house was not far, but the distance stretched out before her, uncrossable. It was dark out. Her children would be missing their mother.
As she ran along, she saw a small crowd of people by the side of the road, gathered around some spectacle. She had not a moment to stop; she merely threw a glance. When she did, it felt as if someone had taken her heart in his fist and squeezed hard. She saw them. Their eyes, three pairs of ali chippalu eyes, peeked out at her from under a filthy sheet on the roadside. It was January, the coldest month, and her three children were variously naked under that sheet, crouching there in the dirt, beside the sewer, in the middle of the deserted bazaar, silent and inscrutable, drawing a concerned but passive crowd.
Manjula gathered herself, walked over, and whispered, “Come.” She took Anitha on her hip, held Babu with her other hand, told Suja to hang on to her sari. With the soiled, tattered sheet under her arm, she brought them home.
In the semidark, her three abandoned children had ventured out, nearly naked, with nothing on their feet, into the streets, dragging their favorite, well-worn purple sheet with little black diamond shapes, looking for their mother.
She bathed them, fed them, put them to bed. She couldn’t sleep. What was she to do? Leave the job? Leave Nellore? Have their father come to Nellore, leaving his job? She had to choose. Tomorrow. It couldn’t wait.
The next day she got a letter from Prabhakara Rao that their transfers were being arranged.
She was lucky. Despite the rule that husband and wife were to be posted in the same town, because of corruption such transfers were seldom implemented without huge bribes. The going rate was eight thousand rupees. Many women were in Manjula’s situation, women who struggled with small children in a society with no concept of organized day care.
As she waited for her transfer to come through, Manjula took the children to Anantapur and left them with their father. She bought groceries and asked one of Prabhakara Rao’s poor students whom he had helped with civil service exams to act as housewife because her husband could not even make tea, let alone wipe his children’s noses and behinds.
Manjula missed her children. She missed her little boy, who, when she wouldn’t let him put on his favorite knickers because they were still drying, would sit sulking on the doorstep, holding them against his face, and grieve ever so quietly with his mouth a quivering upended smile and his eyes two brimming pools of tears.
And Anitha, the most delightful of all. She ate well, played vigorously, loved her mother’s stories, wouldn’t go to sleep. Every night, to get her to bed, Manjula had to threaten that a police uncle would come and get her. For some reason, Anitha feared police more than anything else in the world. One night, the same routine. “Shh, it’s night. We all go to sleep.” They were to sleep outside in the open in front of the house, all of them, on their newly acquired folding cot. Anitha wouldn’t come.
“Look! The police uncle.”
“Where?”
A man in khaki shorts and a nightstick materialized in front of th
em and roared, “Go to sleep, little girl! Or I will drag you off to jail,” startling Manjula. Anitha quickly shinned up onto the cot and shut her eyes tight.
The policeman, on his way to night shift, had overheard her mother’s warning.
When the transfer came, it read, “Manjulabai is hereby transferred to Kakinada Women’s College upon relief.” That “upon relief” was the key. The woman who was supposed to relieve her was posted in Hyderabad. No one working in the big city would ever agree to leave it to come to Nellore.
Sivagami called Manjula to her office. “Now is your last chance. Are you going to testify against Padmavathi or do you want to be written up for insubordination?”
Manjula knew that she was going to lose her job one way or another. It was better to quit.
The next day she came to college with her resignation letter in hand. A peon was waiting for her at the college gates. He took her straight to Sivagami’s office. Some high-ranking police officials were sitting in front of Sivagami, waiting to question Manjula.
“Are you Kambham Mary Manjulabai?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have a brother named K. G. Satyamurthy?”
Her brother must have been shot dead. “Yes, yes!”
“Do you know his whereabouts?”
Relief. “No.”
They asked if he had written her, when was the last time she’d seen him. Did he visit her in Nellore? Where did she live? Who all lived in her house? Where was her husband? Why was he in Anantapur?
She wasn’t told directly, but she could guess. Her brother had gone underground. Become a hunted outlaw. She had lost him forever.
When the police left, Manjula was given new transfer papers. Unexpectedly, the lecturer from Hyderabad was coming to relieve her.
*
TRANSFER DID NOT EMANCIPATE MANJULA from Sivagami. She, too, was transferred the same week to the same college. She would stay there until her retirement three years later, subjecting Manjula to continual abuse.
Because Manjula’s salary was garnished to pay back old debts incurred in Anantapur, she was not eligible for promotion according to the government rules. While all her contemporaries and juniors went on to become principals, she remained a lecturer to the end of her career.
Since she and her husband now both had permanent jobs and regular incomes, Manjula had entertained a hope that their financial troubles would finally go away. But that, too, never happened. In Kakinada, she lived as married women commonly do, not only with her husband and his mother and brother, but also his uncles, aunts, cousins, and their spouses and children. At any given time some twenty to twenty-five people lived in two adjoining houses, and as no one else except her, her husband, and her husband’s brother, Percy, was educated and employed, the others all lived off those three salaries. Although the cooking was done by each family separately, when Manjula was at work, the other families would come and pillage her kitchen for rice, lentils, tamarind, chili powder, cooking oil, and kerosene. If they couldn’t find what they wanted, they went to the grocer’s and put it under her account. They stole her saris and bedsheets from the clothesline.
While in Anantapur, Manjula had noticed that Prabhakara Rao was kind and generous except when his mother or another relative was around. Now that they lived in a joint family, the two of them were never alone.
For twenty-one years they lived like that. After the three children had finished school, with two having just left home to go abroad and one about to, Rathnamma died at the age of eighty.
Manjula was alone with Prabhakara Rao at last. She finally enjoyed a harmonious, loving relationship with him. It lasted until his death three years later.
AFTERWORD
I GREW UP IN THE untouchable slum of Elwin Peta in Kakinada. All around me was abject poverty. When you are surrounded by so much misery, you don’t see it as anything extraordinary. I remember when one of my friends in the neighborhood told me she’d had roast venison for dinner three days in a row. I laughed along with her, knowing that was her ironic way of saying she’d gone without eating. I was thinking of the joke she was making and not that some people don’t have anything to eat.
Yet two things I witnessed when I was seven or eight years old especially horrified me. Whenever I think of Elwin Peta, these moments come back to me. They will haunt me until I die.
A woman named Santoshamma with her two gaunt teenage sons lived across the street from our house under a thatch supported by four posts. She was only in her late thirties or early forties, but her body was so ravaged by starvation that she couldn’t walk anymore. She lay on rags under the thatch, moaning day and night, hungry and in pain. One day she just wanted something to eat. She sat up. But she couldn’t stand up. She put her hands on the ground behind her. Propping herself up on the heels of her palms, she lifted her ass up and propelled herself forward. Then she lowered herself to the ground again and stretched out her legs. Repeating these steps, she crawled all the way across the street and through our front gate.
I was skipping rope in front of our house. When I saw her come through the gate, I stopped and stared wide-eyed at the sight of her in her rags, her wrinkled skin hanging from her skeletal frame, her hair wild and dry like straw, with tears pooling in the folds around her eyes, desperate, crawling like some crushed and oozing creature.
She continued around the side of the house toward the kitchen in back to beg for some food from my grandmother. My grandmother, catching sight of her, was shocked and started weeping with helpless compassion and yelling at her in a trembling voice, abusing the poor woman for presenting us with such a bizarre and pitiful spectacle.
My mother would hire another woman, named Ruthamma, to do chores in our house. She was washing dishes in a bucket on the kitchen floor when I walked in, eating a piece of apple. It was the day after Christmas. We could afford apples only at Christmas. A couple of apples for the whole family. Ruthamma looked at the piece of apple in my hand with such a stupid, lustful grin, salivating openly, that I could not eat it anymore. I knew that she had never in her life tasted an apple. I can’t remember if I gave it to her.
Experiences like this made me wish there were no poor people in the world. But how could that be achieved?
Growing up, I heard about my uncle through my mother. She told us he had sacrificed everything, left his family, and gone off to help the poor. How did he help them? He had a gun. He would threaten rich people, take their money, and give it to those who had nothing. My uncle was like a cinema hero to me. I wanted so much to be like him. But we were never going to see him, my mother said, because the police were secretly watching our house. If he tried to visit us, he would be arrested and put in jail. All this made my uncle seem like a mysterious star shining in the sky high above.
My mother also told us that he never kept any of the money that he took for himself. He lived a hard life in the jungles. I practiced sleeping on the bare cement floor to prepare myself for the future when I’d have to sleep on the hard ground. I told my friends that I was going to be a Naxalite when I grew up.
One summer afternoon when I was fourteen years old, I was riding my bicycle home from my maths tutor’s house when I spotted a group of teenagers singing to a small crowd gathered on a street corner. Fascinated, I got off my bicycle. They were singing about poor peasants and workers, how unjust it is that they suffer from want because they are the ones producing the wealth, not the owners of the land and the factories. Never had I heard a song like this before. “Come on, peasant brothers,” they sang, “come on, all you exploited and impoverished, join the party of the peasants and the poor and let us all stand up to the landlords.”
I walked through the crowd right into the midst of the singers and declared, “I want to join.”
They were delighted to have won a recruit. I invited them home with me. My family was surprised but also curious. Sitting on our bed, they sang for us, filling the small, asbestos-ceilinged room with revolutionary passion. We were
enthralled. When my mother started talking to them and asking them questions, we learned they belonged to a party founded by none other than my uncle.
That day I became a Radical—a member of the Radical Students Union (RSU), the student wing of the People’s War Group (PWG).
It was all informal. Whenever the party needed me to take part in some activity such as distributing leaflets, they met me at home or in school and asked me. I was always ready to do what they wanted. I joined a street-theater group like the one I had met and went around singing about unemployment, the rising prices of basic commodities, corruption in government hospitals, the evils of the education system. When student strikes were organized by the party, I would make speeches asking people to support them. On summer holidays, I joined “village campaigns.” Ten or fifteen of us would spend a few weeks traveling from village to village in the vicinity of Kakinada, stopping for a day or two in each one to learn about the lives and aspirations of the poor peasants and to tell them their lives needn’t be so hard, that in China a people’s government had been established. For a couple of years I was the youngest member.
We were aware that someday we would be called on to take part in other forms of struggle. When I was sixteen years old and weighed about seventy-five or eighty pounds, I was attending a conference and a man my father’s age came up to me and shook my hand so vigorously that my whole body shook. He said to me fondly, “You are so frail, you must eat, put on weight! Else how are you going to carry your rifle?”
The party stood for people’s war: an armed struggle against the landlords to seize their estates and distribute the land to the poor peasants who actually worked on it. We Radicals looked forward to this future phase of struggle that we were helping to prepare for by winning mass support for the party.
In the meantime, we were very much on the receiving end of violence at the hands of the landlords and the police. Hundreds of PWG members and sympathizers were arrested. Torture in custody was routine. Every month I would hear of comrades being shot dead, including many students.
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