Board schools are government schools that teach the higher classes--fourth class to eleventh. In Gudivada, as in other towns, there was only one Board school and children couldn't automatically get into it. Not only did you have to graduate third class, you had to take a separate entrance test. Three years earlier, when it had been time for Carey to take this test, he'd missed it because he came down with typhoid. The school refused to admit him. Marthamma visited the headmaster to make a special appeal.
"But ask anybody, andee," she told him using the respectful from of address. "My grandson is very clever, andee. He is excellent in maths, he is excellent in science, he...." She would go on listing all the subjects her grandson was good at.
"But that is not it, andee," the headmaster told her patiently. "We cannot let in any student who didn't pass the test." Every time he tried to explain the government rules and sent her home, she would come back in again the next day to plead with him.
At last, pushed to his wit's end, the headmaster put his head in both hands and groaned, "It is true, andee, I agree that your grandson is clever, and I would very much like to admit him, but the problem is the admissions are over and all the seats have already been filled."
Marthamma's eyes lighting up with the greedy light that lights up in poor people's eyes when they spot, somewhere far in the distance, a chink in the darkness that surrounds them, she hurried to say, "Ayyo, that's not a problem, andee, we will arrange for our own seat. You just let my grandson into your school. We will send him with a small bench from home." The headmaster gave up. He didn't even try to explain that when he said the seats had been filled he didn't mean the school was short of chairs. That's how Carey got into Board school. When it was Papa's turn she had no trouble taking and passing the entrance test.
Her primary school had been located in her own neighborhood because it was a mission school, not a government school, and the missionaries set up their schools in the untouchable colonies where most of their converts lived. But the government never set up schools in untouchable colonies. In Gudivada the Board school was located right behind the bammala puram (brahmin town, as they called it).
One could say the brahmin colony and the malapallis were right next to each other if it weren't for the long, wide, festering sewage canal that divided the most sacred community from the most execrable. This canal, called the Kolivi, like the great rivers of the world around which civilization developed, was the center of a variety of activities from washing clothes to watering animals to shitting.
Until the twentieth century there was no concept in India of having a special place for people to go and shit. Men, women, and children would shit in open grounds, in fields, along canals, on the side of the street, behind bushes, in abandoned buildings, on their own rooftops, behind walls. Indians only learned of outhouses when they came into contact with the Europeans. It was the brahmins--not all of them, but the few who could afford it--who first had outhouses built. They were called dry latrines, which are similar in concept to cat litters: four walls open to the sky and filled with sand at the bottom. The brahmins would shit in the sand and the pakis, a subcommunity of untouchables, would come and remove the shit with a broom or else their bare hands. They weren't paid for the job since it was the duty of their caste to perform it. If a brahmin was charitable he could feed them scraps of foul-smelling, leftover food (it had to actually smell bad to be fit to offer to the untouchables), but they had no right to demand it.
The Kolivi that flowed between Slaughter Peta and the brahmin colony was the most popular place to shit in Gudivada, even after the municipality built a public outhouse right next to the Board school (Papa often complained of headaches, as third class was adjacent to the public latrines). People would squat on the bank and wash their assholes in the canal. But the canal was deep enough that all the filth sank to the bottom, leaving the water clear and seemingly clean. The chakalis washed clothes in it. Peasants from neighboring villages who brought their produce to town in bullock carts washed and watered their bullocks here. Every day the Board students from the untouchable colonies had to cross this useful canal on earthen bridges into the brahmin colony to get to school.
a girl would
be considered
past
marriageable
age