Prasanna Rao bought a bucketful of sunnam (white lime), mixed it with water, and with a makeshift paintbrush made of old rags wrapped around the end of a bamboo stick he and Samson whitewashed the mud walls of the hut until they glowed fluorescently.
Maryamma plastered the floor with fresh cow dung her mother had been collecting for a week. She bought muggu--a mixture of powdered white lime and cream of rice--and, taking a small amount between her thumb and index finger, let it trickle onto the dung-coated floor while it was still wet to make floral patterns.
Marthamma prepared some lumpy sweetmeats from unrefined brown sugar called jaggery.
On Christmas eve they all went to sleep early with happy dreams of their son's first Christmas.
Maryamma got up before the cock crowed and leisurely washed her long hair. She bathed her son and, holding his head over an earthen vessel filled with smoldering incense, dried and perfumed his hair as she told him the story of Christmas.
Before going to church she wanted to make a trip into the village to the komati kottu--the general store--to buy some spices for the pulav and beef she was going to make. Vaisyas (in Telugu, komatis) are the trading caste, so in villages the store where you buy everyday articles is called the komati kottu--the vaishya store.
Maryamma put on a bright orange saree that the missionaries had given her for a Christmas bonus and a pretty flower-print blouse with puffed sleeves which she had made herself out of the used children's clothes brought by the missionaries from Canada for poor Christians in India. The clothes that came from Canada were usually badly crumpled old scarves and winter coats. Occasionally there were girls' dresses but because Indian women and girls could wear only traditional clothes, they would cut up the cast-off Western clothes and restitch them into Indian patterns. Maryamma looked beautiful in her orange saree and new flower-print blouse.
It was only within Maryamma's lifetime that untouchable women in Andhra had been allowed to go around in sarees. Before that, no untouchable--male or female--was allowed to wear anything more than a loincloth that barely covered his or her genitals. They had to stay, at all times and in all seasons, naked from the waist up so that their clothes would not accidentally billow and pollute a caste Hindu by contact.
In those days, when the cloth produced by the weaver-caste people with their ancient tools was scarce, the brahmins decreed that none of it should ever go towards clothing untouchables. An untouchable could only get his loincloth from clothes he had taken off the dead body of a caste Hindu before it was cremated. The right to pick clothes from corpses was an exclusive privilege of untouchables that no caste Hindu, however poor, had the right to infringe upon.
This dehumanizing dress code varied only slightly from region to region. In Kerala an untouchable woman was allowed to wear a saree but not a blouse, and whenever she saw a caste-Hindu man she had to throw her patima--the part that goes over the chest--to the ground and stand bare-breasted before him.
This was all seen by the caste Hindus as well as the untouchables as absolutely normal. It was the horrified Christian missionaries who first introduced blouses to the untouchable women of Kerala.
Starting in Marthamma's time, untouchable women in Andhra began to be allowed to wear sarees and men to wear dhotis and shirts (though the men were still required to wear a dirty rag around their necks to offset the decency of their clothes). Maryamma--an educated woman, a teacher, and a Christian--felt she had the right to dress as well as she was able to afford. She was proud of her new saree and flower-print blouse.
In these new Christmas clothes Maryamma went out into the village for the spices. in front of the komati kottu several fat kshatriya men were sitting around and smoking fat cigars and chatting. Maryamma lowered her head as untouchables had to in the presence of caste Hindus. When the men noticed the young mala woman in colorful new clothes, their eyes turned the color of bile--they were filled with contempt. One of them took his cigar out of his mouth and said, "Why does a mala bitch need clothes like that. Let's strip her of that pompous saree and beggarly blouse."
Maryamma withered in her flower-print blouse. She turned and ran home without her spices as the men behind her jeered.