The Covenant of Water

1900, Parambil

In the wake of Thankamma’s departure, silence descends on the house, a feeling of being underwater with too little light filtering through. JoJo, unsettled, doesn’t let his stepmother out of his sight; even in sleep his small fingers are curled in her hair. Their first night alone, she’s awake, not because of her husband’s snores from the adjacent bedroom but because she has never slept without an adult beside her. His snores, though distant, are reassuring; they are punctuated occasionally by a cough and then a disgruntled rasp, as if someone prodded a slumbering tiger. He talks in his sleep, more words than he’s said to her since her arrival. Seeing him be so playful with Damodaran, who has left as mysteriously as he came, she knows there’s a childlike side to him. Still, she only dares speak to him to tell him dinner is ready.

Shamuel comes by several times during the day to ask if she needs anything and is disappointed if she doesn’t. She’s touched by his concern.

“Shamuel, there is something I need.”

“Ooh-aah, anything!”

“Paper, envelope, and a pen to write to my mother.”

The eager smile on his face fades. “Aah.” He clearly has no experience with those commodities. Still, he surprises her when he returns from the market, proudly retrieving envelopes, paper, and a pen from the collapsed sack on his head.

My Dear Ammachi,

May this letter find you in good health. Thankamma was here all this time. I manage well. I cook several dishes.

Not long after her father died, her mother lost her dominion in the kitchen; she bemoaned the fact that she hadn’t taught her daughter to cook before her wedding.

It’s just me and JoJo now. He is my shadow. Without him I think I would miss you so much more. The only trouble he gives me is when I want to bathe him.

When she first tried it, JoJo fought her. Still, she poured water over his head, but then he turned pale, his eyelids fluttering like a moth’s wings and his eyeballs rolling in their sockets. She was terrified, thinking he was about to have a convulsion. She never poured water on his head again, resorting instead to a washcloth for his hair and face. Even so, it’s a daily battle. There’s a war, she now sees, between the men of Parambil and the waters of Travancore. She won’t share this with her poor mother. Maybe she already knows?

How can I be a better householder, a better mistress of the house?

She wishes she could erase that sentence, because her mother is no longer the householder or the mistress of the house. Her trials in the joint family home began soon after she became a widow, her brother’s and sister-in-law’s characters changing. Her mother likely sleeps on the verandah now and is bullied and treated like a maid. Meanwhile, at Parambil, her daughter lacks for nothing; grain threatens to spill out of the ara, and the lockbox is never short of coins.

When I pray in the evening, I say to myself, “My Ammachi is also praying right now.” That way I feel close to you. I miss you so much, but I cry only at night when JoJo can’t see me. I wish I’d brought my Bible. There isn’t one here. I know Parambil is far, but please, Ammachi, come visit me. Come stay a few nights. My husband doesn’t like to travel by boat. If you can’t come, maybe I will try to come. I’ll have to bring JoJo . . .

She pictures her mother reading the letter, her mother’s tears staining the page just as hers do. She imagines her folding the letter under her pillow, then keeping it with her few possessions in her bedroll. Then, in her thoughts she sees a hand—her aunt’s—­probing in the bedroll while her mother bathes. It keeps her from asking her mother if she’s eating better now that there’s one less mouth to feed. A part of her wants those prying eyes to read those words and recognize the injustice in their souls. But it would only make things more difficult for her mother.

A reply comes in three weeks through the achen who performed the marriage and who travels to the diocese office in Kottayam every two weeks; there he mails and collects letters if there are any. A boy brings it over to the house. In her letter her mother showers her with love and kisses and says she’s proud to imagine her daughter stepping into the role of householder thanks to Thankamma’s coaching. At the end of the letter, her mother uncharacteristically and strongly dissuades her daughter from coming back to visit, giving no explanation. And she doesn’t respond to her daughter’s impassioned request that she please visit Parambil. The letter only makes her worry more about her mother’s welfare.

Thankamma’s homilies run wild in her head like braids that have come unraveled. The bottom tier of a banana bunch always has an even number and the tier above is odd. If someone tried to sneak off with just one, Thankamma would know; to maintain the pattern, they would have to remove a banana from each row and that would be obvious. But then again, who would steal? Be observant—that must have been Thankamma’s lesson. Yet that morning, she isn’t. She ignores a speckled hen’s urgent clucking and its repeated and determined forays into the kitchen, shooing it away.

“She’s ready to lay an egg, Ammachi!” JoJo says.

Did JoJo just call her “Ammachi”? Little Mother? Her chest swells with pride. She hugs him. “What would I do without you, little man?”

She grabs the hen and sets it on a sack in the pantry, then inverts a wicker basket over it. The hen fusses indignantly at her from the dark. “Forgive me. I’ll be listening for when you’re done, I promise.”

There are few visitors. She feels very alone. She daydreams of her mother strolling up from the jetty, surprising her with a visit; she conjures this up so often that she finds herself glancing in the direction of the river several times a day.

The only visitors she’s met properly are Georgie and Dolly from the tiny house closest to Parambil on the south side. It was Thankamma they came to see, and they came just once. Georgie is the son of her husband’s brother, the one who tricked him out of his birthright. Their house sits on a two-acre plot that her husband gave to his nephew, because in the end Georgie’s father died destitute, leaving Georgie and his twin brother nothing but debt. She liked Dolly Kochamma at once. (Since Dolly is at least five years older, kochamma is how she addresses her.) Dolly is fair, with doe eyes, a quiet woman who feels no pressure to speak, her expression one of saintly patience. Georgie is the lively, gregarious type, surprising the new bride by happily crowding into the cozy kitchen with the women, something her husband would never do. She wonders why her husband would generously rescue his nephew yet have so little to do with him. Shamuel says that Georgie isn’t much of a farmer, not like the thamb’ran; but if her husband is the standard, no one measures up. Perhaps Georgie feels unworthy of his uncle’s gift.

JoJo never lets his “Ammachi” out of his sight except when she goes to the stream to bathe, or when she goes to the river near the jetty and plunges in, something she loves to do. JoJo waits anxiously at home for her return. For JoJo, “bath” in any form remains a daily battle. She loves her bathing spot where the creek broadens, forming a pool, the water so slow and clear she sees tiny fish swimming in it, yet deep enough that her toes barely touch the bottom. The inclined washing stone squats on the bank beneath the shade of a rambutan tree, whose hairy red fruits hang down like ornaments.

Parambil is bursting with mangoes. Shamuel pulayan and his helpers bring in basket after basket, forming a mountain in the foyer outside the kitchen. Even after dispatching full bags to the pulayar huts, to the craftsmen, to their relatives, there are too many left. The sweet, fleshy varietal that comes in hues of yellow, orange, and pink fills the kitchen with a fruity perfume. JoJo’s chin is raw from the juice that drips. She pulps as much as she can for syrups and jams. With the remaining pulp she makes thera—mango-fruit jerky. First she cooks it with sugar and roasted rice flour. She spreads this paste onto a woven mat as long and as wide as a door and places it in the sun. JoJo’s task is to chase off birds and insects. After it dries, she adds more layers, waiting for each one to dry before spreading the next, until it is an inch thick and can be cut into strips. She’s thrilled to see her husband carry away a plug of thera after breakfast and lunch, chewing on it as he works.

As a treat for JoJo she carves an unripe mango, splaying it open like a lotus flower—a trick her mother taught her—then sprinkling it with salt and red chili powder. JoJo finishes every last sour and spicy morsel and then walks around sucking air through pursed lips, his mouth on fire, but begging for more.

The ara—the central, windowless room of the old part of the house—is built like a fortress. Its one-piece door is three times as thick as a regular door, and it is protected by a huge lock for which she has the key. The sill is so high (to contain the paddy in there) that while her husband steps over it, she must climb over. Inside, her feet sink into the grain that reaches her knees. She opens the ara at least once a week to get money from the strongbox, and less often to remove paddy or to store it. Beneath the ara and accessed by small stairs from the adjacent unused bedroom is a dark, musty cellar where she keeps her preserves in tall porcelain jars. Razor-thin shafts of light come through the ventilation grille cut into the wood. Every house has its indoor and outdoor ghosts, and those in the Parambil house are still new to her. She resolves to speak to the one who inhabits the cellar because she has reason to suspect that it has an awful sweet tooth. She feels it hiding in the corner, behind the cobwebs, a gentle, sad, and perhaps frightened spirit, more wary of her than she of it. “Help yourself to anything you choose. I don’t mind, but do put the lid back on tight,” she says, standing bravely before it. She had planned to add, Please don’t try to bother me, but just then JoJo’s indignant voice rings out, “Ammachi? Where are you? When you play hide-and-seek you have to hide where I can see you, or it’s not fair!” She can’t help giggling. A sudden lightness in the closed air of the cellar tells her the ghost is laughing too. Only after she emerges does she wonder if this spirit might be JoJo’s deceased mother.

When the monsoon arrives and the clouds open, she’s ecstatic. In her father’s house, she and her cousin would oil their hair and step out into the downpour with their soap and coconut-fiber scrub, delighting in the heavenly waterfall. They anticipated the monsoon as much as they did Christmas, a time when body and soul are cleansed. The dust and the shed skins of insects cemented to stalks are swept away, leaving a brilliant shine on leaves. Without the monsoon, this land whose flag is green and whose coin is water would cease to exist. When people grumble about flooding, about flare-ups of gout and rheumatism, they do so with a smile.

The rain never holds anyone back. Her umbrella becomes a halo that goes wherever she goes outdoors, while her bare feet happily slosh through puddles. Shamuel fashions a cap from palmyra bark that allows water to sheet off his head. But rain confines her husband in a way that baffles her; she’s not brave enough to probe. She gradually gets accustomed to seeing him sitting for hours and sometimes all day on the verandah like a child forbidden from play, subdued, glowering at the clouds, as though that might persuade them to reverse their course. He has JoJo for company because JoJo is the same way. Once, an unexpected rain squall caught her husband unawares, without an umbrella as he approached the house; the raindrops seemed to make him stagger, his legs turning wobbly as he ran for shelter, as if stones and not water had fallen on his head. Another evening she sees him seated near the well, bathing by soaping and rinsing his body in sections. He doesn’t see or hear her; she’s tempted to run away but is too mesmerized by this sight of his body to move. She roils with emotions: guilt for spying on him; a terrible urge to giggle; embarrassment, as if she were the one naked; and a fascination with this sight of her husband fully revealed. He has never looked more powerful and frightening, even if this piecemeal bathing renders him childlike. There’s a practiced ease and elegance to his miserliness with water, but the element missing from his movements is pleasure.

Every morning when she reawakens the embers in the hearth, the kitchen welcomes her like a sister with no secrets, and it makes her happy. She’s come to believe this has everything to do with the benevolent presence of JoJo’s mother. The cellar may be the spirit’s preferred haunt and the place where what is amorphous comes as close as it can to taking physical form, but her spirit also drifts up here, drawn by the crackle of the hearth fire, or the voice of her child conversing with his new Ammachi. Why else do the bride’s dishes turn out better than she has any right to expect, since Thankamma’s recipes are hopelessly muddled in her head? She cannot give all the credit to the seasoned clay pots. No, she’s being rewarded for taking loving care of JoJo. She feels one with the rhythm of the house and has the sense she is running it well.