The Covenant of Water

1908, Parambil

One morning, in her nineteenth year on earth, she wakes unrested, unable to rise, weighed down by a blanket of melancholy. JoJo tries to cheer her up, weaving her a ball from coconut fronds. “Over-under, over-under, then under-over, under-over, all right?” he says, forgetting who taught him. He is ten and already taller than his Ammachi, who will soon be twice his age, but whenever they are alone he reverts to acting much younger. An anxious JoJo helps her to the kitchen, but the simple act of blowing on the embers leaves her breathless.

After lunch she retreats to her bedroom and only wakes when her husband’s cool hand strokes her brow. She is shocked to see the sun is going down. She has done nothing for dinner; she bursts into tears. He sends JoJo away with a glance.

Why the tears? he asks with his eyebrows.

She shakes her head. He insists.

“You must forgive me. I don’t know what’s come over me.” His expression says he knows there’s more to it.

Ever since their marriage was consummated, she confides freely in her husband except when it comes to her mother. She’s ashamed for him to know just how impoverished her life had been before her marriage. When she was sixteen, she’d found the courage to beg Shamuel to accompany her on a trip to see her mother; she had Shamuel ask the thamb’ran’s permission. The thamb’ran agreed. She’d used Shamuel because she didn’t want to put her husband into a position of saying no to her. She wrote to her mother giving her the date of her visit. She had made up her mind that if she found her mother miserable, she would bring her back to Parambil. She could only hope her husband understood; a husband had no obligation to care for his mother-in-law. Two days before she was to leave, her mother’s letter came, emphatically forbidding her from visiting, saying it would only make matters worse. Her mother added that her brother-in-law promised that they would all visit Parambil very soon. Of course that never happened.

“I worry about my mother,” she says at last, weeping, relieved to finally confess what she has kept from him. “I know in my bones she is being mistreated, even starved. After my father died, my uncle wasn’t kind to us. My mother’s letters talk of everything but herself. I can feel her suffering.”

Her husband’s anvil-like hand remains on her brow but his face is very still.

The next day, he and Shamuel are gone before she wakes. There’s no sign of them all day and by nightfall they have not returned. She is beside herself with worry.

The following afternoon, a bullock cart jolts up the path from the boat jetty, brushing past the overgrown tapioca. Shamuel sits in front with the driver. A familiar figure peers over his shoulder.

She’d forgotten her mother’s tall forehead and her pinched nose, both of which are exaggerated because she’s so thin, her hair white, and her cheeks collapsed from missing molars. It’s as though fifty years and not eight have gone by. Her mother clutches her meager belongings: a Bible, a silver cup, and a bundle of clothes, as she descends stiffly from the cart. Mother and daughter cling to each other, their roles reversed: it’s the mother returning to the safety of her daughter’s arms, crying into her bosom, no longer hiding the misery of the intervening years.

“Molay,” her mother says, when she can finally speak, “God bless your husband. At first, when I saw him, I thought something happened to you. He took one look around and he understood. ‘Come, let’s go,’ he said. Molay, I was so embarrassed, because your uncle wasn’t pleasant—didn’t even offer water. Then she pipes up behind him to say I owed them money for . . . for breathing, I suppose. Your husband raised his finger.” And she holds up a digit as if testing the wind. “ ‘Not another word,’ he said. ‘This isn’t how my wife’s mother should be living.’ I shook that dust from my feet and didn’t look back.”

Shamuel, grinning, nevertheless scolds the daughter. “Why didn’t you say something to the thamb’ran before? Your mother was living like the women seeking alms outside the church! Just a tiny corner of the verandah for her sleeping mat.”

Her mother drops her head, ashamed. She says, “Your husband put us on the boat. He said he’ll come another way.”

In the room they will soon share she watches her mother take in the teak almirah where she can put her clothes, the writing desk, the dresser with the mirror. Her mother sees her own reflection and self-consciously tucks white strands of hair behind her ears. In the kitchen she serves her mother tea, then quickly grinds coconut, retrieves eggs from the pantry, reheats a fish and a chicken curry, chops beans for a thoren, telling Shamuel not to leave before eating. “Oh, my baby,” her mother says when she’s served, tears trickling down her cheeks. “When have I seen meat and fish and egg together on the same leaf?”

Later, her mother sits on the rope cot watching her. She grabs her daughter as she rushes to and fro. “Stop! No halwa, no laddu, nothing. I want nothing more! Just sit here and let me see you, let me hold you, my precious.” In the way her mother looks at her she sees how much she herself has changed, no longer the child bride her mother last saw, but the capable mother of JoJo, and the mistress of Parambil. Her mother runs her fingers through her daughter’s thick hair that she has missed combing and braiding; she turns her daughter’s face this way and that in front of the lamp. “My little girl is a woman now—” Abruptly her mother pulls back, her eyebrows rising as she takes in the discoloration of the cheeks and across the bridge of the nose, like bat wings. Wide-eyed, she exclaims, “My goodness, molay! You’re with child!”

She knows at once that her mother must be right. Perhaps it isn’t strange that her heart called out for her mother, now that she’s to be one.

At midnight she’s pacing the verandah alone, rejoicing at a reunion she dreamed about, but also praying and worrying. At one in the morning, she sees a distant glow from a torch made of dried, tightly bundled palm fronds.

She runs to greet her husband as if he’s been away for years. She can’t help herself, jumping into his arms like a child, and wrapping her legs around a body that feels like an overheated furnace after his two-day march. He throws aside the torch, and it sparks out against the ground. He holds her. She buries her head against him, overcome with relief. She pleads silently, Never grow old, never die, knowing it’s too much to ask. My rock, my fortress, my deliverer.

He washes by the well. His lids are heavy as he eats dinner. He recounts his route, and she traces his circuitous path on her palm. He has walked for eighteen hours and over fifty miles.

He heads to his bed, too tired to even carry his lamp. She follows him past the threshold of his room. She’s rarely in there without his leading her in. She lies next to him. She takes his hand and puts it on her belly, and smiles at him. He’s puzzled. Then, ever so slowly, understanding shows on his weary features and he smiles. She hears a low exclamation. He squeezes her to him, but then catches himself, fearful of being too rough in his embrace. If God gave her one moment in time that she could stretch out for as long as she lives, this would be it.

She hears his breathing become deeper, steady. His expression is still joyful in sleep, and his hand stays on her belly, cupping his child. In that sheltered, sacred nook between his arm and chest, she’s at peace. “Forgive me, Lord.” She thought her prayers were unanswered. But God’s time isn’t the same as hers. God’s calendar isn’t the one hanging in her kitchen. To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.

It’s pointless chastising herself for not rescuing her mother sooner. Happened is happened, she thinks. The past is unreliable, and only the future is certain, and she must look to it with faith that the pattern will be revealed.

The girl who shivered at the altar, who now lies beside her husband, who is now with child, cannot see that one day she will be the respected matriarch of the Parambil family. She doesn’t know that in time she’ll earn the label with which JoJo has christened her, the first English word the little fellow learned, and at once offered her, not to tease her about being tiny, but in tribute: “Big.” He called her “Big Ammachi.” She doesn’t know that she’ll soon be Big Ammachi to one and all.