Pleased with all the cheer, Satyam lay down smiling on Nagabhooshanam’s floor, folded his hands across his chest, and closed his eyes.
When he opened them, he saw what he took at first to be a beautiful bright painting set up before his eyes. A painting of a lovely red-complexioned girl in a red sari filling her shiny brass pitcher at a well.
Satyam propped himself up on his elbows and rubbed his eyes. The frame of that painting was in fact the doorframe of Nagabooshanam’s shack. There was a well outside and a reddish sun in the sky. Struck by the beauty of the red-complexioned girl, Satyam walked up to her.
She was Maniamma, Satyam’s second cousin. Her parents lived in Sankarapadu, the tiny village settled by the family’s ancestral clan, but she spent most of her time with her aunt and uncle in Erikepadu.
Satyam stopped at the well and asked her to pour him water to wash his face and rinse his mouth.
“What, Maniamma, how have you been doing?”
She acted coy. “Ah, I’m fine. Heard you were dancing away until dawn.” Her uncle had been in the crowd cheering him on the night before.
Satyam came to the point directly. Would she marry him? She needn’t answer right away, but could she come by his house and let him know by three o’clock?
Three o’clock on the dot, Maniamma came to Slatter Peta and told Satyam yes. “Now it is your turn to go to Sankarapadu and ask my father for my hand,” she added.
Sankarapadu is only sixteen kilometers from Gudivada. Satyam caught a bus for part of the journey, and the rest of the way he had to walk, as there were no roads into Sankarapadu.
Sankarapadu is like an encampment in a wilderness. But for a cluster of seventy huts and one pukka house, there is nothing there. Even to buy a matchbook, you have to walk five kilometers to the next village.
When Kutumba Rao heard Satyam ask for his daughter’s hand, he was delighted. An impoverished man such as him wouldn’t have dared to dream of getting an educated, talented man such as Satyam for a son-in-law.
Prasanna Rao, too, was overjoyed at the news. For some time Prasanna Rao had been dropping hints to his son about Maniamma. He would talk about how much he had done for his children, how nice it would be to have a daughter-in-law who would mingle with the family as if she had always known them, who would be glad to look after him in his old age.
That night, Satyam and Maniamma sat together in back of her house. After holding each other and kissing for some time, Satyam gave his fiancée a speech about their future life together. He told her how the party was in bad shape after the defeat it had suffered, how he needed to devote all his time outside of studying to political work. Maniamma said she understood. Then Satyam listed his demands. He had five.
First, after marriage, Maniamma would have to take care of him in every way and see that he sat home and studied and passed his exams.
Second, Maniamma must tend to all his sister’s needs, cook her meals and wash her clothes, while she studied so she could pass her B.A. exams with a first class. That was important.
Third, after exams, he and Maniamma would go to Parnasa and bring Marthamma back. “My grandmother served us all her life,” he told Maniamma. “She should die in our house. It will be your responsibility to look after her.”
Fourth, when Prasanna Rao grew old, Maniamma would have to take care of him as well.
And, finally, Satyam explained, Carey was a wild man. If Maniamma was going to be part of the family, she would have to put up with his temperament.
Maniamma gladly agreed to everything. Satyam was a hero in her eyes and in the eyes of the entire village for marrying her, a girl who couldn’t even graduate from high school, without asking for a dowry.
He made one further demand, though, which Maniamma didn’t accept. She couldn’t. She wouldn’t accept it, she told him, even if the king of England offered to marry her without a dowry.
But Satyam refused to drop it. He said he would not marry in a church.
When Prasanna Rao heard this, he got up and walked out of the village in tears. Satyam refused to budge. The engagement was off.
Satyam waited. He figured Maniamma would come around. Yet when he saw her again in Erikepadu, poor, bewildered Maniamma told him that she couldn’t even see what the problem was. It wasn’t something that a Sankarapadu girl such as Maniamma could understand.
Satyam thought it over, and as he did, he began to think like this: He was already twenty-four years old. Maniamma had agreed to every one of his stipulations but this one. Her beauty—it was something else. But how could he compromise his principles as a Communist and an atheist?
He called to mind the Marxist distinction between form and content. The content here was Maniamma. Whether they had a church wedding or a party wedding where the bride and groom simply exchanged garlands in the presence of party leaders—that was after all merely a matter of form.
When Manjula was told of her brother’s engagement, the news struck her like a hammer blow. Without a word she went inside, lay down, and stared up at the ceiling with tears running down her cheeks.
Satyam had replaced her dead mother and, for many years, her absent father. Even now, he was more of a father to her than Prasanna Rao could ever be. Though only six years older than her, Satyam had always addressed her as amma, the way members of an older generation—fathers, uncles, grandfathers—address a girl to show their fondness.
Now she felt betrayed. He was going to share his life with another woman. “So it was all an illusion. He is a liar. My family, they all conspired and kept me in this state of delusion all these years.”
And to be replaced by Maniamma? Maniamma had been Manjula’s schoolmate in high school, and Manjula had always been scared of her. She was high-spirited and her friends were all wild. She often quarreled with other girls. No one dared cross her.
“My brother is a gentle and soft-spoken man,” thought Manjula. She couldn’t imagine a worse match for him. She cried nonstop for days.
Everyone warned Prasanna Rao. Maniamma was a black widow. But he wouldn’t listen to any such talk. Growing up, he had always looked up to her grandfather (Prasanna Rao’s uncle), who was better off than anyone else in the village. He owned the single pukka house standing among the huts. Before meeting Maryamma, Prasanna Rao had always hoped to marry into that family. But Maniamma’s beautiful aunts were all given to suitors who, though they lacked his education, owned some land. Now, through his son, Prasanna Rao had a chance to vicariously fulfill this dream. He enthusiastically started making preparations for the wedding, to be held in Sankarapadu, which was the couple’s common ancestral village. The first order of business was procuring provisions for the wedding feast.
*
ON THE MORNING OF THE wedding, Manjula was woken by loud cries from the alley next to her uncle Gollayya’s house in Sankarapadu. She sat up in fright and started praying: “O Deva! Jesus Lord, save us!”
A cousin of hers sitting nearby put her sari end to her mouth to hide her smile. “What, Papa, no need to be scared. They’re chasing the pig.”
When Prasanna Rao announced his son’s wedding to the village, everyone started drooling at the thought of the pig. A wedding in an untouchable colony is a festival, and at the center of the festival is the feast, and at the center of the feast is the pig. As soon as a match is fixed, both the bride’s house and the groom’s house get hold of a piglet, either buying one in an untouchable market or catching a stray. For weeks the families raise their pig with great care.
A wedding pig is no ordinary pig. It must be treated with respect. No one is allowed to talk harshly to it, even if it should get in the way: “Hey, watch your mouth! That’s the wedding pig!” The families feed it as well as they can, giving it starch water left after rice is cooked to drink, or sometimes even cattle fodder. Most untouchable families don’t have that kind of food to spare, and the best thing about a pig is that it can feed itself. The staple for pigs in India is what’s delicately called malinam—
filth. They eat human shit. If the wedding family is too poor to feed their pig, it’s not a big deal. The pig simply goes around the village eating shit and gets just as fat. Untouchables will often marvel, “Shit it may eat, but a pig’s meat is the sweetest meat of all!”
But the announcement of Satyam’s wedding meant more than just the prospect of a pig. Prasanna Rao had risen above the condition of all those he’d left behind in Sankarapadu. He was a teacher, not a farmhand. He had lived in cities and towns. He interacted with caste people, with other educated people, people with jobs. In the eyes of the villagers he was wealthy—he owned four and a half acres of land. His son was the first ever college-going man from that village. And now that eldest and favorite son was getting married! There would be a lot of pork at his feast. Prasanna Rao, it was said, might even get a pig of that exotic new breed.
Only a year or two earlier, a new breed of pig had arrived in the country. They are known as seema pandulu—European pigs (they came from Russia). Some call them red pigs because their skin is pink and hairless and smooth. They’re raised on farms, in pens, not let loose in the streets. They’re fed a calibrated diet and grow many times fatter and larger than Indian pigs. In fact, they seem to have nothing in common with the black, hairy, filthy native pigs. But whenever anyone tries to raise one of these foreign pigs on his own, pretty soon it loses its caste and turns into an ordinary Indian pig, its pink turning to black, its fat shrinking away, as it runs through the streets, wallowing in sewers and swallowing the effluvium.
Everyone in Sankarapadu looked forward to tasting a European pig at Prasanna Rao’s son’s wedding. But Prasanna Rao’s son had other ideas.
When the matter of the pig came up, it pained Satyam to realize that his relatives were so different from his caste friends. He had attended many of his friends’ weddings while living in Gudivada, and except for Nancharayya none of them had served meat. Meat is believed by Hindus to be impure. Brahmins, the purest caste, eat no meat at all, not even fish or eggs. Untouchables, being impure themselves, eat even carrion beef—the flesh of cows that drop dead by the roadside of age or disease, which, since cows are sacred and cannot be slaughtered, is the only kind of beef that falls to human consumption under Hindu law. Middle castes, except for merchant castes, eat meat but never beef, and it is inauspicious to serve any meat at all at births, funerals, or weddings.
Satyam considered it uncultured and even barbaric to eat the flesh of a pig on any occasion. A pig, to caste Hindus, is a symbol of filth. Untouchables are commonly associated with two creatures: the crow for its blackness and the pig for its foulness. When people assembled under the banyan tree to plan the feast, Satyam told them there would be no pig.
The elders took the cigars out of their mouths. “What, what! A wedding feast with no pig?”
Satyam replied, “There won’t be any meat.”
They couldn’t believe their ears. The most fabulous wedding they would ever attend was turning out to be the worst one they had ever heard of. They wanted nothing to do with it. Men, women, and children turned and went home disappointed. But Satyam was unmoved.
Discussion in the village went on for several days. In the end, the elders came to Prasanna Rao with a proposal: How about a pig for the village and hens for the “having-read people” (the educated ones)? Satyam said, “Never!” Prasanna Rao took his son’s side. He had stopped eating beef in Vizag when he had to hide his caste for the sake of being allowed to rent a room in the house of a caste-Hindu family, and now the very thought of beef was revolting to him. He didn’t mind pork himself, but he could understand how his son felt. Instead of a pig, he had bought sacks of vegetables and—from some kammas whose children he taught in Telaprolu—some strange, uppercaste flour-based foods: appadams and laddoos. The villagers decided to boycott the wedding feast.
One thing saved the day. Neither Prasanna Rao nor Satyam had a say in what the bride’s family could or could not serve at their feast on the night of the wedding. Everyone knew Kutumba Rao had already been raising a pig for the last few weeks.
Whether Kutumba Rao had bought his pig or caught it himself was not clear, but it was a black Indian pig. That was the pig the young men of the village were chasing on the morning of the wedding when they woke Manjula with their cries.
Manjula went out to watch the agile young men, armed with long thick sticks and clenching cigars between their molars, running through the village, loincloths pulled tight over their crotches and between their buttocks, their bodies shiny with sweat. One carried a special net. The children of the village, twenty, thirty of them, naked, dust coated, wild haired, runny nosed—the girls among them also all naked but for their snail-shell anklets and the little silver or copper disks strung around their waists to preserve their modesty—ran alongside the hunters. Everyone was screaming as loud as he or she could, and the pig was screeching even louder. Wild with fear, it whizzed past the huts like a cannonball, desperate to escape the murderous youths. A cloud of dust rose from beneath its hooves and the feet of the men right behind it.
The pig is chased, instead of just being tied down and butchered, to save its blood. The blood is what makes it tasty. The idea is to scare the pig with screams and cries and make it run for its life until it collapses from exhaustion.
In Sankarapadu that morning, young women and girls admired the muscles rippling beneath the men’s glistening brown skin as they wielded their sticks. The women’s eyes ran all over the hunters’ bodies, taking in the smalls of their backs, their thighs, their chests, their narrow waists, the lips that held their cigars. Each thought fondly how her own man ran faster than the rest, how he tackled the pig expertly to the ground. The men were aware the women were watching, and they tried their hardest to impress them.
The pig ran and ran for half an hour until it could run no more and finally dropped to the ground. One hunter threw his special net over it, and the others raised their sticks and beat the animal half-unconscious. They carried it to the center of the village and tied its snout shut with a rope. They tied its front legs to a pole and stood it up on its hind legs. The dazed pig looked up at the sky.
As a piglet grows in size, its neck soon gets so fat that as long as it lives it is never able to lift its head and look at the sky. But a wedding pig, in the last moments of its life, gazes skyward at last. Untouchables will say of an unfortunate man who has lived in poverty all his life, never having had a moment of happiness but for a small respite at the end when his son gets a job and is finally able to take care of his parents, “Veedu pandi lanti vadandi. Chacchipoyye mundu akasanni choosedu” (This fellow is like a pig. He saw the sky for the first time at the end of his life).
On that wedding morning, the men responsible for preparing the pig gently roasted the still-living pig and carried it to the bride’s house. For lack of a cutting board, they unhinged the front door and laid the pig on it. Two elders, Uncle Nallayya and cousin Abednego, were invited to do the honors and carve the pig.
A few years before, a brahmin in Gudivada who worshipped Gandhi had spread the principles of nonviolence among all and sundry, especially the cruel and crude untouchables. One day, he found himself in an untouchable colony where a wedding feast was taking place. Before the men could lay the pig on the door, the brahmin pushed his way forward and laid himself down in the pig’s place. He wept. “How can anyone with a heart hurt this voiceless animal? Are you not human? Haven’t you heard the teachings of our Great Spirit Gandhi?” He pleaded with the untouchables to cut him up before they took a knife to that creation of God’s. The youth in that colony, full drunk, pinned the brahmin down and held a knife to his throat before their elders intervened. The brahmin scurried off and never tried that again.
Good thing he didn’t stay to watch what they did next. If he had, he might have fainted. Manjula herself couldn’t bear to watch as the wedding cooks separated out the intestines, which would make a tasty sauté. Other special parts were carefully removed: the heart, the
brain, and the liver. A curry made out of these is not meant for everyone. A portion is given to the pastor who performs the wedding, and the rest goes to the wedding families.
For days, the pig would feed the whole colony. They’d make soup with its bones and curries out of its hooves and testicles. People would swear how divine it is to eat pork fry while drinking. “Chicken is nothing,” they’d say.
But the affair of the pig is more than its taste. It’s the circus of hunting it, the feats of the men. It’s heroic, it’s romantic, it’s erotic. It’s a metaphor, it’s rhetoric. It is deeply philosophical. But these are all mere superstructures. At the base, it’s economic.
“The cheapest meat for the cheapest man on earth.”
*
THE MORNING OF THE WEDDING, everyone in Sankarapadu, from the ancient to the just-born, congregated in the church by the lotus pond. Except for the pastor in a rusty chair, everyone was seated on the mud-dung floor. The pastor kept switching unpredictably between the roles of officiant and reveler, one moment speaking of the sanctity of marriage and the next cracking obscene jokes at the expense of the groom or crooning a cinema tune.
Few of Satyam’s friends were invited. Rama Rao, a high kamma and close friend and follower of Satyam’s, was asked not to come. Satyam told him, like a good Communist, “The cost of the feast will go up if you come.” Not: “There will be pork, there will be tribal dancing. I wouldn’t want you to see how my folks live.”
But Satyam’s untouchable friend Nancharayya was there. Manikya Rao came, too. He consoled Manjula, trying to assure her she was not losing her brother.
Manjula looked through her tear-filled eyes, dazzled by the sight of the bride and groom. It was, she thought, as if God had gathered all the beauty in the world and poured it in front of the pastor in two glowing heaps.
Satyam was wearing a white shirt; a fine cotton cloth (called a kanduva) over his left shoulder with a zari border (patterns woven with silver thread); a long beige zari-bordered panche (a traditional men’s garment) wrapped to fall in delicate pleats from around his waist down to his calves; and a pair of leather thongs on his feet. His soft curls, washed with herbs, shone in the morning sun.
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