From the roof of Pedda Atta’s you can see the old bus station. There are no signs or markings other than the bustle of people and a stone circle where a man stands, directing traffic. I recorded the scene for a couple of minutes, right after the singers with cymbals in their hands and the skeins of colored fabrics behind them. Then I pointed the camera towards town. Behind the gopram of the temple is Jayjaya’s house– where Nynamma used to sleep, and my father collected stamps.
When we were about to leave for the station Pedda Atta saw someone walk in front of the house and told me to wait. “Why?” I asked. She said it was bad luck to cross paths with someone from a lower caste at the beginning of a long journey. Yesterday, she performed a ceremony and invited her Muslim neighbors over for a Hindu ceremony and covered their feet in pusupu. Today, she was following narrow caste-based superstitions.
I boarded the bus, which smelled of a hundred bodies, all destined to sweat from a million pores into one metal box headed east, toward the ocean, toward Ongole, where Jhanse Atta lived. The woman sitting in front of me asked me what I was doing and where I was from. The next question, after finding out I was from the U.S., was the usual- what’s your job, how much do you make, are you a citizen? The question that followed was one that I didn’t expect. What is your caste? Why do you ask? Oh we don’t pay attention to it. If you didn’t pay attention to it, you wouldn’t ask. What’s your name then? Amar. No, your surname. It’s Ravva. You’re a vaisha then. She was smug. She had wondered if I was part of her tribe, and now knows, even though I never will.
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Aug 6, 12:59 AM