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CHAPTER 1
"MATTER CAN NEITHER BE CREATED nor destroyed," the lecturer told the junior Intermediate students.
Satyam, sitting in the last bench, muttered, "What does it matter to me?" He used to be fascinated by all the new things he learned in the physics class. But he hadn't eaten in a long time.
His father had stopped sending money. It seemed that Satyam was expected not merely to survive without food, but to study and get his degree in this condition.
The problem of how to support Satyam while he was in college was one Prasanna Rao had spent years planning with care. In the military, Prasanna Rao stinted on everything and each month put away a large share of his salary. By the time he left his job there, he had saved up a solid five thousand rupees — an unimaginable sum in his community.
He knew exactly what he wanted to do with that money. He was going to buy some land and use the money he raised from the sale of its produce on his son's education. That way, in a few years not only would he be the father of a college graduate but also the owner of a piece of land.
Prasanna Rao had been raised in a village. And in villages, a man may be educated, he may wear a shirt and pants, he may even have a job with a good salary, but the real prestige lay in owning land. Among untouchables, owning even a small piece of land is rare.
So with his savings Prasanna Rao bought two and a half acres of land. He borrowed and bought two acres more. The rate of interest on the loan was high, but the land he had bought was so fertile he expected to be able to pay off the debt in no time.
Prasanna Rao also found a job teaching in a government school. With his salary and what his land would produce, he would surely have more than enough money to put his son through college. And that son would surely become a doctor.
Man makes his plans. God has his own.
Season after season, Prasanna Rao would see his land turn green with beautiful, tender plants that bent and swayed under the weight of golden rice. But just when the crop was ready to be reaped, the stream that nourished his land — the Budameru — would flood and wash away his hopes.
Prasanna Rao's debts, like water-soaked logs, got heavier and heavier, sinking his family deeper and deeper into poverty. Soon they could not afford two meals a day. Carey and Papa were too young to endure starvation, and Prasanna Rao, as the sole breadwinner, needed to preserve his own strength to provide for the family. So the brunt of their sudden poverty was borne by the son who was away at college. Unable to spare anything for him, Prasanna Rao sent Satyam neither money nor explanation.
Satyam was in a painful predicament. He knew no one at A.C. College, no one in the entire city of Guntur, whom he could turn to for help. He did not pay the mess bill for July. He was given a month's time, but when he failed to pay the following month, the administration added his name to the list of delinquent students posted at the entrance of the mess hall for all the world to see. To avoid running into his classmates he started going to the mess just before it closed, after everyone else had left. Even then, every time he walked in, the manager would look at him as though to say, "You don't pay bills and you show up to eat?" Satyam skipped meals as often as he could.
Poverty was nothing new to him. All his life he had been poor. In Slatter Peta the difference between his family and the rest of the malas was small. They were all ants. It mattered little if one was a bit bigger than the others. But here at A.C. College, Satyam was an ant among elephants. No other student was in his situation. He suffered from hunger, but even more from loneliness and shame.
At home, as poor as they were, the Kambham family lived within the limits of what they had. They never thought to want more. They simply lived the way they had always lived. When they made egg curry, a man was served half an egg. In their family, that's what a man ate. They never thought of fruits unless they saw some on a tree, or unless someone was sick. When Satyam's mother was sick and dying, every so often Prasanna Rao would buy her a grapefruit. Their idea was that nature designed grapefruits for the sick. When the children asked to share it, the grown-ups told them, "There is medicine for your mother inside that grapefruit, and all of the medicine is in one single section of the fruit. From the outside we can't tell which one has the medicine in it, so we have to let your mother eat the whole thing."
But now Satyam was all alone in a strange town with no one to ask for help. His family had made a mistake in sending him to A.C. College. They had been greedy. They wanted too much for their own good.
*
SATYAM WAS ASHAMED THAT HIS classmates might have seen his name posted at the entrance of the mess hall. He had no money for books or lab records or term fees or exam fees. He couldn't afford to dress the way students were supposed to, in shirt and pants. The strap of his thongs was broken and secured by a safety pin that kept coming undone. So he stopped going to classes.
With nothing better to do, he started reading newspapers at the college library. After finishing the papers, he would wander into the stacks.
The A.C. College library, located above the lecture hall, had a large collection of Telugu literature. Satyam had never been particularly interested in Telugu literature. What he had seen of it in his high school textbooks had bored him. Classical Telugu poetry was of two kinds: puranas (mythological poems in praise of the gods) and prabandhas (courtly poems in praise of the rulers). They were written in a highly formal dialect that borrowed heavily from Sanskrit. To most Telugu speakers, including Satyam, it was all but unintelligible.
While looking through the stacks in A.C. College library, Satyam discovered a new kind of poetry that took as its subject matter neither gods nor rulers. It was about ordinary people and contemporary life. The verse, Satyam found, was free of the strict and complicated metrical rules that marked the older forms. The language was modern colloquial Telugu, easy to understand and yet beautiful. Satyam read the Navayuga Vythalikulu (Harbingers of the New Era) anthology of Muddu Krishnudu. It was the first anthology he had ever seen, a selection of modern Telugu verse. Much of it was love poetry. Reading it, Satyam felt new sensations stir inside him.
Like a canoe,
Why that tender smile?
And for whom,
Satyam looked up at the moon. He saw riding in it a girl in a shimmering white sari, beckoning to him. He wished he could make out her face. Was it his cousin Kamili? Or Suryakantham, his childhood friend?
He went on to read every modern poem in the library. Poems by Joshua, Devulapalli, Nandoori, Duvvoori, Thripuraneni, Karunasree, Gurajada. These were pioneers of navya sahityam, "new literature," as the movement he had chanced upon was called. While on the floor beneath him lecturers lectured and students studied, Satyam read. He read eda-peda (left and right). He learned to hide in the library when it closed at night and even slept there sometimes.
The father of navya sahityam was Gurajada. His most famous poem was one he wrote in 1910 called "Love Thy Country." Two lines in this poem had a great impact on the political consciousness of Telugu speakers: A nation is not the soil.
A nation is the people.
Two simple lines and yet so powerful. It was as though Gurajada was explaining what a nation was to the many for whom this was a modern and abstract notion. These two lines followed Satyam wherever he went.
Satyam read poetry as though he were preparing for an exam. If he didn't know the meaning of a word, he would look it up in dictionaries or ask people he thought might know. He copied his favorite poems into a notebook. In his room, he would sit up into the night, reciting from his notebook as tears welled in his eyes. Sometimes he would wake before dawn, make up a tune, and sing softly to himself the lines he had learned by heart.
His roommates, who had always looked at him strangely and left him alone, became curious. What was he doing, staying up all night? When he went out, they sneaked a look in his notebooks. They found the poems he had copied and some of his own that he'd started to write. Soon after, a boy from the next room came to him with a request: "Would you write a love letter for me?" Before long, a procession of boys was asking Satyam to write for them lyrical messages to the girls they admired. As a love-letter writer, Satyam finally began to achieve recognition among his classmates.
*
THE BRITISH HAD LEFT INDIA, but at A.C. College the English principal, Sipes, refused to leave. The word was that different factions of untouchable Christians were vying by stratagem and violence for control of the vast property owned by the Lutheran mission, including A.C. College. Sipes had to settle the quarrel and appoint a successor before he could leave.
In the meantime Sipes continued to rule A.C. College like his own private colony. He insisted on continuing to hold detention exams to decide who could sit for their finals. The students were angry. This was supposed to be a free nation now.
Satyam, who hadn't been going to classes, had not heard of this grievance. He only knew when the library opened, when it closed. On his way to the library he noticed groups of students gathered in front of the administrative building.
"What is going on?" he asked.
"Strike. We are fighting against detention."
Satyam felt a wave of nostalgia. He stayed for the rally, but only as an onlooker.
The next day, finding the library closed on account of the strike, Satyam went back to observe the protest. Hundreds of students had boycotted classes. Satyam saw girls taking part alongside boys. Lecturers joined in support. They all shouted slogans. Satyam was moved. He joined the crowd, chanting along with the others:
"Down, down, Sipes!"
"Down, down, detention!"
Throughout the day, the strike leaders made speeches one after the other. During a lull, Satyam seized his chance. He got up on a wall to speak, exhorting the students not to be scared of the police, to stand strong until they won. As he finished, he saw one of the strike leaders, a short round dark boy with smiling eyes, the same boy Satyam had met on the evening of the independence celebration, making his way toward him with a big grin. He congratulated Satyam on his speech and seemed genuinely pleased to see him taking part in the strike. His name was Manday Pitchayya.
Encouraged by Pitchayya, Satyam gave his speech every day as the strike wore on. Finally Sipes called in police to break up the protests, as they had the year before in Satyam's high school.
But these were not colonial police. They were the police of a newly independent India. Yet, Satyam noticed, they didn't hesitate to use force. When students lay down to block the gate, the police simply trampled on the students' bodies. And when the police raised their lathis and let them fall on the students' backs and heads and shoulders and shins, the students ran for their lives. Some were seriously hurt, with broken limbs or blood running down their faces. When the police had cleared the area, the ground was strewn with placards and sandals. To this day such scenes are common in India whenever police attack a student demonstration.
After a month of relentless agitation, the administration gave in and abolished the detention system. The sense of belonging that Satyam had felt during the strike was short-lived. When students went back to their classes, he retreated into loneliness and poetry. But Pitchayya kept in touch with him. He would visit Satyam in his hostel room. He seemed to like Satyam despite his impoverished appearance. Pitchayya was the only person on the campus who did not seem to notice Satyam's shabby clothes and broken footwear. Satyam learned Pitchayya was an untouchable like himself, though not a Christian. His mother was a poor widow who owned two acres of land. In addition to working her own tiny plot, she worked for wages on the land of others.
Pitchayya looked around Satyam's room, noticed a stack of poetry books, and asked, "Do you like reading this stuff?"
Satyam caught a touch of sarcasm in Pitchayya's tone but did not know how to reply.
Pitchayya then asked, "Have you ever read the Abhyudaya?"
"What's that?" Satyam asked. The word abhyudaya means "progress." That was all he knew.
Pitchayya pulled a magazine out of his pocket and showed him. "You can read this, but be very careful. Don't let anyone see it." Satyam hadn't heard those words since the end of colonial rule.
That night he couldn't put the magazine down. Not 150 miles from where he was sitting, a struggle was raging in the countryside. It wasn't being fought against foreign rulers, but against a native king and native landlords. And this time it wasn't Gandhi and Congress who were leading the struggle, but the Communists.
In the pages of the magazine Pitchayya had given him, Satyam first learned the story of the Telangana struggle, which was then still unfolding. He was shocked by what he read. Telangana was a neighboring region — just across the Krishna River from Andhra — yet had neither been under direct British rule nor under that of the new Indian government. Rather, it had its own feudal sovereign. Nothing much was known about it outside its borders: no news ever escaped this realm. The situation there, as Satyam learned for the first time through the Communist propaganda he was given, was fantastic, grotesque, totally anachronistic — like something out of an old folktale.
*
O BROTHER AND SISTER, MOTHER and father, this is the story of Telangana.
Once there was a king who ruled the kingdom of the Deccan in southern India. The Deccan was a realm of silk and pearls and diamonds and gold.
This king was the lord of the untold riches of the Deccan. To this very day, to the moment these words are being written, no richer man has lived on earth.
The king's pearls could overflow an Olympic-size pool. His gold could fill a five-story building. He had treasure houses loaded with rubies, emeralds, and priceless sapphires. He had great trunks full of diamonds. The world's fifth-largest diamond was used in his study as a paperweight.
The city of Hyderabad, built as a token of the great king's love for his queen (Hyder Mahal), was one of the most beautiful yet modern cities on the subcontinent, with its palaces, gardens, and bazaars; its clean, wide roads; its hospitals and universities.
The king was a man of passion who worshipped beauty and pleasure. The royal palaces of Hyderabad were filled with beautiful princesses from Persia, Turkey, Egypt, and Arabia — his wives and mistresses. They bathed in rosewater and wore crushed pearls on their skin.
The king was a lover of the arts. During his reign, famous architects from east and west converged on his royal court. They designed architectural marvels for the royal city — forts, mansions, palaces, bridges, theaters, and grand monuments. Every night banquets were held on tables a mile long.
Poets, scholars, musicians, painters, and sculptors came from all over the world to seek the monarch's patronage. They invented new styles, new forms. The king himself was a great scholar, a master of four languages, and a composer of sublime verse on the subject of unrequited love.
Hyderabad was no mere city. It was paradise on earth. Its monarch was no mere monarch. He was the monarch of monarchs. He was His Exalted Highness Sir Mir Osman Ali Khan, the Nizam of Hyderabad and Berar, Prince Asaf Jah VII.
Now how was all this possible?
Let us grant that this king — the prince of the great Asaf Jahi dynasty that was ruling Hyderabad and Berar, the Nizam as he was known in Urdu — was the great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of the first caliph, the prophet Muhammad (peace be unto him).
Let us even agree with the mullahs that he was appointed by Allah himself to rule the earth.
But, even so, how was it possible for anyone to be blessed so much in excess of any other human being ever born?
*
IN THE KINGDOM OF THE Nizam was a young couple who had a little son.
They woke him up one morning to get him ready for a trip. His mother bathed him and fed him with her hand. She dressed him in his best and they set out on the road.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Ants Among Elephants"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Sujatha Gidla.
Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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