My father was born on December 6, 1946 in the small village of Poduru, not too far from the mouth of the Vasistha Godavari, to Chellaboina Basavaiah and Saraswati. My grandmother always reminded us that he was born exactly 252 days before Indian independence. I often wondered whether she had actually counted the days in anticipation of freedom just to anchor his birth in that historical timeline.
My grandfather supported the family through textile-related work and was also an active political leader. Coming from a socially and economically backward class, he emerged as a champion of the lower classes. When my father was about three, a false case filed by political opponents landed my grandfather in jail for a few months. After clearing it, my grandparents decided to migrate to Karnataka and take up farming to support their growing family. Farming was not their traditional occupation, but necessity pushed my grandfather into adopting it.
Interestingly, none of my Chellaboina ancestors seem to have lived their entire lives in their birthplace. Each generation moved to a different town and settled elsewhere. This pattern continued with me and likely with my son—unless he someday returns to the place where he was born.
My father spent his first thirteen years in Poduru, living a typical village childhood: going to school, enjoying irrigation canals, climbing palm trees, and roaming freely. After primary school, he had to continue his education in a larger town, Maruteru, about six kilometers away, because Poduru had no high school. He travelled daily by bicycle or on foot.
When my grandparents moved to Karnataka, my father stayed back and lived with his maternal grandmother and maternal uncle in a village near Mamuduru. Because it was the middle of the academic year, he continued studying at Maruteru—now fifteen kilometers away from Mamuduru—and often walked the entire distance. After the school year ended, he set out to visit his parents in Ayodhya, the village near Hampi where they had settled. This was no small journey for a thirteen-year-old who had never travelled more than thirty kilometers from home, spoke only Telugu, and had only rudimentary knowledge of Hindi and no practical English. He had to switch multiple trains and buses in completely unfamiliar places, many of them Kannada-speaking regions. The final stretch required crossing the Tungabhadra River in a flat circular boat before reaching a shop in the village center where his father was supposed to meet him.
Looking back, the complexity of that journey was tremendous. He could easily have taken a wrong train or bus and ended up far away with limited cash and no real way to communicate. There were no phones; the only communication was through letters carried by the Indian Postal Service, which took a week or more to reach rural areas like Ayodhya and Mamuduru. The fact that my father and grandfather managed to find each other at a specific shop on a specific day seems almost unimaginable today.
This entire scenario reminds me of a book describing how international traders would somehow meet at common locations despite vast uncertainties. Life then moved at a slower pace, and people adapted to these uncertainties in ways we can hardly imagine now. I can relate this to my own childhood: when I was ten, my mother and I planned to meet for shopping at a designated place. She came from her college, I travelled from home, and we both waited—at different points of what each believed was the rendezvous spot. We never met. Later, when we reunited at my aunt’s house, part of the plan for after shopping, we realized we had been standing on opposite sides of the same busy road, unable to see each other. My mother spent the entire time worried, imagining all the worst possibilities as I had to change multiple crowded buses to reach that place.
In those days, uncertainty was standard. Visiting my grandparents’ house, if we expected someone to arrive, we would go to the bus stand daily for several days because no arrival date was ever certain. That was the algorithm.
My grandfather, in Ayodhya, would periodically visit the village center to see whether a thirteen-year-old boy speaking an unfamiliar language had shown up. Fortunately, people in villages knew one another well enough to guide strangers once communication became possible. For my father, this entire journey must have been a great adventure.
His stay in Ayodhya gave him one of his most cherished memories: my grandfather took him to Hampi and showed him every nook and corner of the ancient ruins. For reasons unknown, Hampi became deeply embedded in our family’s emotional landscape. My father visited it many times: as an engineering student with classmates, later with my mother and her grandparents—an Indian version of a honeymoon—and several times afterward. Hampi was likely the first place my mother visited outside her home state, and perhaps the same was true for my father.
The stories I heard as a child were so vivid that I always wanted to visit Hampi, though I never took the effort until my late thirties, after returning from the US. Fifty years after my grandfather took my father there, my father and I walked through the same ancient sites on foot. Ten years later, I visited again with my children, accompanied by my father and uncle. Perhaps this tradition will continue and my children will someday show Hampi to theirs.
Returning to my father’s story: many of his formative memories were from Mamuduru, where he spent much of his teenage years. Mamuduru was my paternal grandmother’s birthplace. She lived there until age twelve before marrying and moving to Poduru. Because my father stayed there for several years and my grandparents were in Karnataka, we regarded her parental house as her true home. My mother also treated it as her in-laws’ home for various rituals.
The house itself—nearly a century old before its recent demolition—had a dramatic history. It originally stood across the river Gosta in another village. A conflict had erupted when someone from a powerful, affluent community made an offensive remark about one of the women in my family. The family retaliated by beating the offender, and to avoid escalation, they relocated the house entirely—brick, mortar, and wood—using bullock carts, possibly wading through the river. The new site was beside a Godavari irrigation canal with a lock system for lifting boats, which remained the main transport mode well into my early years. My great grandfather, who built the house with money earned in Rangoon (Yangon), died when my grandmother was twelve. My great grandmother, left with four children—one of whom was polio-stricken but intelligent and well educated for his time—had to run a small shop for him to survive.
When my father arrived in Mamuduru, he helped lay the bricks for this small shop, a 10-by-6-foot room with a tiny storage area that doubled as a resting place on hot afternoons. For the next fifty years, that shop was a landmark. My father had to procure everything from the larger Mamuduru village, hauling supplies in a two-wheeled wooden cart. Goli soda—marble-stoppered soda bottles—was especially popular in the tropical heat. Transporting those heavy, pressurized bottles over two kilometers was dangerous; mishandling could make them explode. For a thirteen-year-old who spent his days in school, this work was enormous. He studied only about half an hour each night under the dim light of an oil lamp. Because of this, no one believed he would pass high school. Yet he not only passed—he secured the highest marks in his school and several surrounding schools.
He went on to complete his pre-university course and was admitted to the famous Andhra University to pursue chemical engineering. Andhra University, in the coastal city of Visakhapatnam, must have been breathtaking then, with the ocean within a kilometer, red sand hills, and cashew trees scattered across campus. I lived in Visakhapatnam more than fifty years later and still fell in love with it. My father’s eyes still lit up whenever he spoke about his university days. He was the first engineer in our extended family and became an inspiration for the next generation. My grandfather considered my father’s education the vindication of all the hardships he endured migrating to an unfamiliar place and leaving his sons behind in Andhra.
There is much more to his story. How he married my mother even before completing his degree at Andhra University is already captured in the write-up about her on my blog. The rest will be continued in due course.