The Covenant of Water

1900, Parambil

The new bride dreams that she’s splashing in the lagoon with her cousins, piling onto their narrow skiff, deliberately capsizing it, and clambering on again, their laughter echoing off the banks.

She awakes confused.

A snoring mound beside her swells and subsides. Thankamma. Yes. Her first night at Parambil. That name rubs awkwardly over her tongue like the edge of a chipped tooth. From next door, her husband’s room, she hears nothing. Thankamma’s body hides a small boy—she sees only the shiny tousled hair on his head, and a hand, palm up, resting just beyond it.

She listens. Something is missing. The absence is disquieting. It comes to her: she cannot hear water. She’s missing its murmuring, soothing voice, and so she manufactured it in her dream.

Yesterday the vallum, a dugout buttressed across with planks, dropped her and Thankamma at a small jetty. They crossed a long field dotted with towering coconut palms laden with fruit. Four cows grazed, each tethered on a long rope. They walked through rows of banana trees, the floppy leaves nuzzling and knocking against each other. Bunches of red bananas hung down. The air was perfumed by a chempaka tree. Three well-worn, polished rocks served as stepping-stones across a shallow stream. Further up, the stream broadened into a pond whose banks were overgrown with pandanus shrubs and dwarf chenthengu palms laden with orange-­colored coconuts. An inclined washing stone sat near the pond’s edge; Thankamma said that spot was where she should come to bathe. The stream’s burble was a sound that augured well. She’d looked for the house when they landed at the jetty, but it wasn’t there by the river, so surely it must be by the stream . . . but she saw nothing. “All this land, over five hundred acres,” Thankamma said proudly, pointing left and right, “is Parambil. Most of it is wild, hilly, not cleared. Of the part that is rough-cleared, only a portion is cultivated. Before your husband tamed it, this was all jungle, molay.”

Five hundred acres. The home she’d known till yesterday sat on barely two.

They’d continued through a trail flanked by tapioca. At last she saw the house, high up on a rise, silhouetted against the light. She stared at what would be her home for the rest of her life. The roofline had the familiar sag in the middle, curving up to the ends; the low overhanging eaves blocked the sun, and shaded the verandah . . . but all she could think about was Why up there? Why not by the stream? Or by the river that brings visitors, news, and all good things?

Now, lying on her back, she studies the room: the oiled, polished walls are of teak, not wild jackwood, with crucifix-shaped openings at the top through which warm air can escape; the false ceiling is also of teak, a buffer against the heat; thin wooden bars across the windows allow the breeze to pass freely; and of course, there’s a split door leading out to the verandah, the upper half now open to admit the breeze, the lower half closed to keep out chickens as well as all legless creatures—it’s much like the house she left behind, only bigger. Every thachan, or carpenter, follows the same ancient Vastu rules, from which neither Hindu nor Christian will deviate. For a good thachan, the house is the bridegroom and the land is the bride, and he must match the two with as much care as the astrologer matches horoscopes. When tragedy or a haunting hangs over a household, people will say it’s because the dwelling was inauspiciously sited. And so she asks herself again: Why here, away from water?

A rustle of leaves, a tremble transmitted through the ground, sends her heart racing. Something near the door blocks the starlight. Is this a household ghost coming to introduce itself? Next, a leafy bush seems to grow into the room through the upper half of the door. A huge snake coils around the bush. She can neither move nor scream, even though she knows something terrible is about to happen to her in this mysterious, landlocked house . . . but would death smell like jasmine?

A swatch of uprooted jasmine hovers above her, held fast by the trunk of an elephant. The florets sway over the sleepers, then pause over her. She feels a warm, moist, ancient breath on her face. Fine soil particles fall on her neck.

Her fear subsides. Hesitantly, she reaches for the offering. She’s surprised that the nostrils look so human, fringed by paler freckled skin, as delicate as a lip, yet as nimble and dexterous as two fingers; it snuffles at her chest, tickles her elbow, then traces a path to her face. She suppresses a giggle. Hot exhalations puff down on her like benedictions. The scent is something out of the Old Testament. Noiselessly, the trunk withdraws.

She turns to find she has a startled witness. Two-year-old JoJo sits staring over Thankamma’s midriff, his eyes wide. She grins, rising, impulsively beckoning him and lifting him to her hip, and they head outside, following the apparition.

She senses spirits everywhere in Parambil, just as in any house. One paces outside on the muttam. The darkness flickers with invisible souls as plentiful as fireflies.

In a clearing by a towering palm, hovering over a stack of coconut fronds, the retinal glow of an eye sways like a lamp in a breeze. As her vision adjusts, a mountain of a forehead emerges, then languidly flapping ears . . . a sculpture carved from the black stone of night. The elephant is real, not a ghost.

JoJo absentmindedly encircles her neck with one arm, his fingers clutching her earlobe, comfortably settled on her hip as if he’s never known any other. She wants to laugh; just yesterday, she was the one clinging to Thankamma. They stand still, two half-orphans. The spirits take their orders from the jasmine-giver and retreat into the shadows that yield to the dawn.

In her short life she’s seen temple elephants worshipped and pampered with treats; she’s seen logging elephants lumbering through villages on their way to the forest. But surely this beast blocking out the stars is the world’s biggest elephant. To watch its leisurely chew, the graceful dance of the trunk as it folds leaves into a grinning mouth, soothes her.

On the elephant’s leeward side, just beyond the mud bund that creates a moat around every coconut tree to keep water and manure from draining away, a man sleeps on a rope cot.

Her husband’s elbows and knees jut from the sagging wooden frame. In the posture of his powerful left arm, curled to make a pillow for his cheek, the fingers gathered to a point, she sees echoes of her jasmine-bearing visitor.