Ants Among Elephants

Home > Other > Ants Among Elephants > Page 17
Ants Among Elephants Page 17

by Sujatha Gidla


  Maniamma was wearing a beige silk sari with a red zari border. The women of the village had rubbed her skin with cream and turmeric before they bathed her. They decorated her eyes with katuka (eyeliner), hung twelve red glass bangles on each arm, and wove jasmine blossoms into her long, silky hair.

  The pastor finished his ritual with a song:

  Pelli kante mundu, mana peddalu

  Pandi pelli chestarayyo

  Panditlo.…

  (Even before the wedding, our elders

  Perform the pig’s wedding

  In the tent.…)

  The guests were impatient to get out of the church and on with the revelries. Men wearing just loincloths would wave handkerchiefs and dance. They would climb up on one another’s shoulders and get thrown off when they least expected. The pinnacle would come when they chased the main reveler and pulled off his loincloth. People would laugh when he ran off covering his crotch with his hands.

  But it was not to be. Satyam imposed a ban on drinking. Without “getting poured,” the men in charge of the wedding revelries weren’t in the mood.

  The afternoon feast, courtesy of the groom’s family, was the most insipid in the history of Sankarapadu. Prasanna Rao served vegetables and lentils. The villagers made faces as if they were throwing up. Laddoos, appadams—such stuff was too dainty for their taste.

  With each disappointment the groom doled out, they muttered, “This man’s system itself is separate”: Satyam’s ways were incomprehensible to them. Their consolation would be the feast at night, courtesy of Kutumba Rao. Until then they went home and sulked.

  Then all at once they heard cinema music echoing through the tiny village. They came out of their houses, crying with joy, “Or-oray, they brought stupor for Satthi-fellow’s wedding, they brought stupor!” They substituted for the English word mic the Telugu word closest to it in sound—micum (stupor). Satyam had a Communist friend who owned a sound-system rental shop in Gudivada. Many of the villagers had never seen a single electrical appliance in their lives. At the day’s end, the cinema songs, blasted earsplittingly through a loudspeaker, more than made up for all of Satyam’s follies.

  *

  AFTER THE WEDDING, THE VILLAGE celebrated the couple’s first night together, after which Satyam returned to Gudivada by himself. On a convenient date soon after agreed to between the families, Maniamma’s family brought her to Slatter Peta and left her there.

  The day Maniamma came to live with him, Satyam said to her, “Let’s go get our grandmother back.” By tradition, the responsibility of looking after Marthamma fell on her eldest son, Nathaniel. But she had spent half her life raising the Kambham children.

  Accompanied by a group of his friends and their wives, Satyam and Maniamma went off to Parnasa. On their way they bought a string cot to carry Marthamma back home.

  When Nathaniel’s family got word of Satyam’s arrival in Parnasa, they hastily propped Marthamma up in her cot and tried to arrange things to look as if they had been taking good care of her. But Satyam could see she had been reduced to a mere skeleton. She stared at her beloved grandson with eyes of glass.

  Right away, Maniamma tucked in her sari and plunged into her duties. Working as a team, she and the wives of Satyam’s friends set about bathing the old woman and combing her hair. The men laid her on the cot and bore it on their shoulders to the railway station. At the end of the train journey, they had to carry the cot on foot across two villages to reach Slatter Peta.

  Satyam had a mattress made for his grandmother. Since she couldn’t get up, they cut holes in the mattress and cot and placed a pan underneath. Carey cleaned her bedpan every day—a fact he would insist on ever after, perhaps to assuage his conscience.

  Maniamma took care of feeding and washing Marthamma. To please her, Satyam would read her the Bible and pray. Then they would all drink tea together.

  Satyam, the only one of the siblings old enough to remember their mother’s death, could see by the way his grandmother rolled her eyes and gasped for air that her death was near. When it came, the three of them together with Maniamma gathered around her bed.

  Not a single paisa was in the house for Marthamma’s burial. Everything had been spent on the wedding. Satyam had to go to the Communist bookstore in town to borrow five rupees. The necessary flowers were sent by his supporters among the untouchables he’d saved from eviction, the pakis from among whom he’d recruited his troupe, and the rice-mill workers he’d organized in defense of Manikya Rao. They all came out en masse for the funeral.

  Who could have imagined that the body of this diminutive black-skinned untouchable woman, a gleaner of fields, a singer of songs of toil, a pounder of rice, a Bible woman, the widow of a railway coolie, the mother of a plantation slave, a woman who’d never spent a single moment of her life on herself, would be carried to her grave in a procession of hundreds of men and women carrying red flags and singing “The Internationale”?

  Aunt Nagarathnamma came late, after everything was over. The moment she walked in, Satyam, who had not shown his grief till then, burst into tears. Nagarathnamma’s daughter snapped at him, “If you’d cared about her when she was alive, there would have been no need to cry so much.”

  Satyam was in no state to respond.

  Nagarathnamma took him aside and inquired, “Did she admit her sins to Lord Jesus?”

  Satyam told her he was not aware that she had committed any.

  “If I were with her at her deathbed, I would have prayed and made her confess.”

  While they were discussing Marthamma’s sins, Nathaniel’s family was eager to get a look at what possessions she had left behind. The only thing she owned was a small iron trunk eaten through with rust that she had never let anyone touch. No one knew what she kept in it.

  Nathaniel’s wife pried it open. Inside they found an old, chipped plate—the one her son David used to eat off of—and his high school graduation medal mounted on a small piece of silk. David, who was going to be the first in the family to go to college, died of TB at the age of sixteen. That was all except for a rickety wooden folding chair that she had acquired late in life. Nathaniel’s son Sundara Rao called it first.

  *

  THE 1955 ELECTIONS WERE THE funeral of the Communist Party in Andhra. Out of 169 seats they contested, they won just 15, while Congress won 119 out of 142 they contested. The rich peasants dealt the deathblow. They had supported the Communists in 1952 when the party was coming off the fight against the feudal elite in Telangana, but by 1955 that battle was over and won. The landed classes, by and large, united behind Congress. Out of this unity arose new rivalries among the rich peasant castes. Now the kammas were vying with kapus for dominance.

  The student-body elections reflected electoral politics in the state. The Communist student wing—the SFI—was weak and Congress strong, with a rift between kammas and kapus on campus. Some kamma boys were harassing nonkamma girls. Kusuma, a dazzlingly beautiful kapu girl, was a special target. The boys would challenge each other to cycle past her and snatch the jasmine blossoms from her hair. Satyam told his friends to be vigilant and try to defend the girls against these attacks. He also sought to take advantage of the underlying caste rivalry. Kammas dominated the Congress panel in the student elections, so Satyam recruited kapus for his SFI panel.

  That was how he came to nominate Vithaleswara Rao for the post of general secretary. Vithaleswara Rao, the son of a wealthy kapu landlord and high town official, was tall, with high cheekbones and smooth, hairless dark skin that made him look like a sculpture in brass. While not especially studious, he was popular and always surrounded by a number of friends.

  For her brother’s sake, Manjula took an active part in the campaign. Not long after she joined, Vithaleswara Rao approached her and said, “I want you to be on my panel as ladies’ secretary.” Manjula blushed, smiled copiously, and modestly demurred. But Vithaleswara Rao insisted: “You will do it, and there will be no more discussion.”

 
Against all odds, the SFI won and Vithaleswara Rao was elected general secretary. Manjula, quite unexpectedly, lost by one vote. But the girl who won wanted to be the ladies’ secretary in name only and asked Manjula to carry out her duties.

  The campaign marked the beginning of a friendship between Manjula, Vithaleswara Rao, and a friend of his, a kamma named Ashok. The two boys never missed walking Manjula home after classes. When they reached Manjula’s house, they lingered in front of her door for hours. Each day when the two boys saw Manjula in class, their faces would light up. She would smile back.

  As Ashok had a slight limp, whenever he and Vithaleswara Rao both had something to say, Manjula would always pay more attention to Ashok. She was careful not to make him feel he was being treated as someone less on account of his handicap. But everyone in Vithaleswara Rao’s wide circle of friends, knowing his feelings about her, thought of her as his girl. In those days a young man would commonly affectionately address his friends as mama (father-in-law) or bammardi (brother-in-law). When Vithaleswara Rao’s friends spotted Manjula, they often joked, “Hey, son-in-law, look, there goes my daughter.” His family knew how Vithaleswara Rao felt, too. They knew he loved watching her in the classroom, sitting there with lots of hair oil applied to suppress her irrepressible curls, running her palms over her head again and again in a vain effort to keep them down.

  It wasn’t Satyam’s way to say anything about her friendship with these men to Manjula directly. Instead, he and Rama Rao would often talk about Vithaleswara Rao and Ashok in her presence. As that year they were studying Paradise Lost, Satyam would refer to Vithaleswara Rao as Satan and Ashok as Beelzebub. Rama Rao went further, telling Manjula that Vithaleswara Rao was a bad sort of chap and habitually saw prostitutes. “I know,” Rama Rao said, “because I have seen him roaming the streets late at night.” In fact, Vithaleswara Rao liked to go on patrol with a friend of his, a police inspector who was on night duty. In spite of this smear campaign, Manjula kept up her friendships with Ashok and Vithaleswara Rao.

  Once, as the three approached her house, Manjula spotted Carey in the distance. She dropped her books, shaking like a blade of grass, and told her two friends, “You must leave now. Please go away.”

  “Why, what’s the matter?”

  “Carey might see us together.”

  “Why, what would he do?”

  “What would he do? He would hack me to pieces and make little heaps of my flesh.”

  Vithaleswara Rao was taken aback. He could not imagine how this intelligent girl who showed so much poise and confidence in the classroom could be so scared of her brother. It puzzled him all the more because he knew Carey’s reputation as a notorious skirt chaser. How could he be in a position to judge her?

  Vithaleswara Rao didn’t understand how Carey’s mind worked. The more females who succumbed to his seduction, the more Carey was convinced that the entire female race was born loose, and the more tightly he sought to control his sister’s movements.

  Manjula feared another man: her history lecturer, Mr. Rama Prabhu. A dogmatic brahmin who despised untouchables, he flaunted his brahminism, wearing an old-fashioned panche (a traditional men’s garment worn around the waist), a tonsure, and a forehead bottu (ritual mark). Every day, every single day, he made Manjula stand up and scolded her in front of the class. “Why are you here? If you want to giggle, giggle outside, not in my class.” “Why are you looking there? If you cannot focus, why do you pursue education? Education is not suitable for the likes of you.” All the students could see he was tormenting her for no reason. He always picked her to answer his questions. If she couldn’t do it, he would disparage her intelligence, and if she did answer, he would say, “So you think you know everything? You know nothing!” When he did such things, Vithaleswara Rao and Ashok would send Manjula glances of sympathy from across the aisles. Rama Prabhu had the two men come to see him in the staff room and asked, “Why do you talk with that girl? Can’t you see she’s nothing?”

  Then in January, Niranjanamma came to Gudivada to stay with Manjula’s family in Slatter Peta for a week. During her visit, she noticed Vithaleswara Rao walking Manjula home and asked her, “What caste is he?” When Niranjanamma heard, she advised Manjula, “Forget about him. Intercaste marriage is not for you. Don’t let it get into your head that you mean anything to him.” This from Niranjanamma, of all people!

  Manjula was hurt. She started to wonder, “Why does he always walk with me? There must be a reason.”

  Finally she asked him, “Are you befriending me because you want to get close to Kusuma?”

  Vithaleswara Rao was bewildered. “No, I have no interest in Kusuma.”

  “Then who is it? Tara?”

  Vithaleswara Rao was offended. “If I am interested in them, I can very well talk to them directly.”

  Then it dawned on Vithaleswara Rao. With her dark skin, tall and slender build, and high cheekbones, Manjula was considered ugly, considered herself ugly. But Vithaleswara Rao, an avid moviegoer, had picked up Western tastes in female beauty from Hollywood films. He liked tall, slender girls; he loved high cheekbones. As for skin, it wasn’t dark or light that mattered to him. Manjula’s skin was fabulously flawless, and that was what had caught his eye when they first met.

  After Satyam’s marriage, Maniamma was attentive to Manjula. In Telugu there is a saying, Maradalu ardha mogudu: “Husband’s sister is half a husband.” Maniamma, wanting to be a good bride, did everything for Manjula. To make her feel better about the marriage, Satyam and Prasanna Rao bought Manjula half a dozen saris—not plain white ones this time but real saris with floral prints and borders. Every day Maniamma washed those saris and starched and ironed them so Manjula could go to class in style. Her classmates began to look at her in a new light.

  For all but the handful of women in Manjula’s classes, including herself, who planned to go on to postgraduate studies, getting their B.A. was the end of their education and the end of an era of their lives. Now they would get married off and stop living for themselves. Marriage meant living for husbands, children, and in-laws.

  On the last day of classes, the girls in Manjula’s class were filled with strange feelings. They did not want to leave campus. They sat around chatting, saying nothing of substance. They laughed and laughed at the smallest things. In college, the girls had felt a kind of freedom they would never again have in life.

  When finally it got too late to stay any longer, they started home together for the last time. First they reached the kamma neighborhood, tearing two girls away from the group. The rest went on to the kapu colony, where Kusuma said goodbye.

  One by one, all the caste girls were dropped off. In the end only two remained, Manjula and Chandra Leela. The caste neighborhoods were behind them now—only the malapallis on the outskirts of town remained. Manjula lived in the better of the two, and Chandra Leela in the filthier and poorer one. The two of them walked on in silence.

  Taking leave of Manjula, Chandra Leela lashed out at her with pent-up righteous fury. “You know, Manjula, I’ve always wanted to be your friend, but you only care to have caste friends, you don’t care for your own kind! You really have mental problems. You hurt me and I wanted to let you know it.” Leaving Manjula standing speechless at her doorstep, Chandra Leela went on alone to Mandapadu, the farthest and most isolated neighborhood of all.

  “She’s right,” Manjula thought. “I do like kammas more. But I can’t help it. I don’t like poverty—I like kammas and I prefer their friendship.” After that, she stopped thinking about it.

  On the first day of preparation holidays (as they called the interval between the last class and the first exam), Vithaleswara Rao was filled with anxiety. At first he couldn’t tell what was wrong. But after a couple of days, he realized that it was the prospect of not seeing Manjula. For three years, he had taken her company for granted, and now that time was over. It would be nearly impossible to see her. They lived in different parts of town, and a man cannot go out
of his way to see a woman without a proper reason. From this moment on, he began making plans to ask for her hand. There was simply no other way he could continue to spend time with her.

  Manjula knew this to be out of the question. Marrying for love was taboo for all castes and classes, and few respected this taboo more strictly than Manjula’s family. It was the Christian way, or so the Western missionaries had taught them. And as untouchables striving to gain respectability in a caste society, families such as Prasanna Rao’s had to be especially mindful of these traditional rules.

  If there had ever been a chance of Manjula’s going against her family in her choice of husband, the Aseervadam affair had foreclosed it. She’d vowed never to tarnish her honor. Manjula had warned Vithaleswara Rao never to approach her father for any reason.

  But Vithaleswara Rao, taking this hint, nevertheless failed to understand how Prasanna Rao could object to a proposal from a popular, wealthy, politically powerful high-caste boy who also adored his daughter. “It should be the other way round,” Vithaleswara Rao would say to his father.

  Late one Sunday evening during the preparation holidays, Vithaleswara Rao and Ashok came to the door of Manjula’s house in Slatter Peta. Scared, she ran inside. They should know her father would be home on Sundays.

  Vithaleswara Rao had come to ask Prasanna Rao to give his daughter permission to travel with the rest of the boys and the girls in her class to attend a classmate’s wedding. Gentle and dignified Prasanna Rao exploded. Was this a new excuse for young people to freely parade around town together? Did the two boys think his daughter came from the kind of family that would allow her to go around in the company of boys?

  Inside, crouching beside the hearth, Manjula trembled. She would have to convince her father that she had not put her friends up to this.

  Vithaleswara Rao understood that as long as Prasanna Rao had breath in him, he would never let Vithaleswara Rao marry Manjula. And as long as she lived under her father’s shadow, she would never disobey him.

 

‹ Prev