Chapter 1

Village Days

This is the story of the persons, authorities and events that made me who and what I am.

I was born around 1940. I say 'around' because neither my parents nor my grandparents recorded anywhere the actual date on which I was born. All that my mother remembered was that I was born at mid-day in midsummer. It could have been sometime in April or May. Date, month, and year are not things that a totally illiterate young Dalit woman in a village can be expected to remember. My father was as illiterate as my mother. They started learning the alphabets of our mother tongue after I entered the Indian Administrative Service in 1962.

No soothsayer, the village equivalent of an angel or a sage, appeared in my mother's dream to tell her that the little child in her womb will be a son, who would one day become the Chief Secretary of a big State like Andhra Pradesh. Like all village women, my mother experienced a rebirth after labouring to give birth to me without any medical assistance.

Certainly, the two most important persons who made me what I am are my mother Smt.Kaki Manikyamma and my father Shri Kaki Shobanadri. My parents were as poor as all those who make a living by working for wages in the fields in rural areas.............