The Covenant of Water

1908, Parambil

With the birth of her daughter, her previous life is swept away. Her body is at the beck and call of a beloved tyrant who rudely summons her from sleep, demands access, and by sheer force sucks milk from her breasts that are so swollen that she struggles to recognize them as her own.

She finds it hard to remember those nights when it was just JoJo and her, sleeping coiled together, his fingers woven into her hair to ensure that she didn’t abandon him to his recurring nightmare of being adrift on the river. Was there really a time when she had three pots on the fire, one ear cocked for the hen about to lay its egg, and the other for the rustle of rain, so that the drying paddy could be brought in? And all the while pretending to be a tiger for JoJo? Now, she hardly leaves the old bedroom next to the ara, which they had put to use for her labor. Her connection to Parambil feels doubly cemented with a daughter who’ll claim this as home, at least till she marries.

Dolly Kochamma, without being asked, moved in during the last stages of her confinement, to help with the household tasks and with JoJo. Quiet and easygoing, Dolly never speaks of the challenges she and Georgie face. On his small plot of land, the gregarious Georgie should grow enough coconuts, tapioca, and bananas to live on, and even have a small profit, but somehow, they barely get by. Shamuel says it is from poor planning, along with his weakness for schemes such as planting wheat instead of rice, because it was less work, only to find wheat grew poorly and there was little market for it. Georgie must know he is a disappointment to his uncle and so he stays away, but every morning, when the baby falls asleep after her ten o’clock feeding, Dolly Kochamma oils the new mother’s hair, and massages her with spiced coconut oil. When Big Ammachi thanks her profusely, Dolly says, “Your husband rescued us when we had nothing and I was pregnant with my first child. JoJo’s mother did this for me. Now, you’re doing me a favor, allowing me to be of use.” Dolly encourages her to go to the stream and bathe properly. “Don’t worry. Baby Mol”—for now the child has no name other than “Baby Girl”—“won’t stop breathing in your absence.”

Meanwhile her mother has taken over the kitchen. The hollow-­cheeked, gray-haired woman who stepped down so gingerly from the bullock cart has a decade’s worth of bottled-up thoughts to share, even if she doesn’t have quite the energy she once did.

JoJo doesn’t understand why his Big Ammachi spends so much time with the baby, or why he must be quiet when the baby sleeps. One morning his jealousy drives him to climb high up the plavu and cry for help as though he’s stuck up the tree. When he’s ignored, he’s furious, and comes down, wraps his valuables in a thorthu, and announces his permanent relocation to Dolly Kochamma’s house. Dolly and Georgie indulge him; their children spread a mat for him next to theirs. This is how JoJo spends his first night away from Parambil, praying the place will fall apart in his absence.

When word comes the next day that his Big Ammachi misses him, JoJo races back, but he slows at the threshold, pretending he’s returning only under duress. His mother smothers him with kisses till he’s forced to give up his façade. “You’re my little man! How can I go down to the cellar for pickles without you? That ghost welcomes me as long as you’re there.” Her little man invites his new friends over, and soon the muttam echoes with the sounds of children laughing and playing; the cacophony reminds her of her own childhood, surrounded by the constant sounds of cousins and neighbors. Thankfully, Baby Mol sleeps through most anything. Now and then, while nursing Baby Mol, she’ll hear one of the children wailing. In the past, she’d have raced out to investigate, but now she tells herself, “A crying child is a breathing child.”

After a month she moves back to her bedroom, preferring the familiarity of the bamboo mat she unrolls on its floor to the raised bed in the original bedroom next to the ara where she gave birth. Baby Mol is beside her atop a folded towel, while JoJo and her mother sleep on their mats on her other side. In the mornings, each mat is rolled up around its pillow and the bedrolls stacked on a raised ledge.

Every evening, after his bath, her husband appears at the threshold of her room. Her mother, if she’s there, feigns a task in the kitchen and disappears. Words may escape the mountain, but only when he’s alone with his wife. His biceps bulge as he brings the bundle of cloth and flesh that is his infant to his bare chest, while the new mother marvels at the sight of Baby Mol swallowed by his huge, callused hands. “Are you eating well?” she asks. “Yes, ‘Big Ammachi,’ ” he says, teasing her. “But your mother’s erechi olarthiyathu isn’t as good as yours.” He isn’t aware that he’s paid her a compliment she cherishes.

She recalls Thankamma saying her brother was like a coconut: fibrous and forbidding on the outside but with precious layers within; its water soothes babies with gripe, while the tender white flesh is vital for every Malayali dish; that same flesh when dried and pressed—copra—yields coconut oil; the discards from pressing copra are fodder for cattle; the hard shell makes a perfect thavi, or ladle; and the thick outer cover, when dried and spun, yields coir rope. Life would cease in Travancore without the coconut, just as Parambil would stop without her husband. But his saying her mother’s erechi olarthiyathu is “not as good as yours” is his way of saying that he misses her.

At night, after she puts the baby to sleep, her blouse sodden and smelling of her own milk, she wonders if there are nights when her husband comes seeking her while she’s asleep. Does he touch her, try to shake her awake? Or does the sight of her mother and the two sleeping children halt him at the door? The truth is, she isn’t ready for him. The ordeal of labor is fresh in her memory. She was left with a tear that is finally less painful, but her body is still offering strange new embarrassments that thankfully seem to diminish with time. It will be a while before she’s fully healed. Every month some story reaches her of a birth gone awry, a woman bleeding to death, or a baby stalled during its exit, an event that is fatal to mother and child. “Thank you, Lord, for bringing me through this unscathed.” She doesn’t share with the Lord that she misses the closeness with her husband, misses the excitement of getting on his bed, her heart pounding, and hearing his heart do the same. “Well, you can’t have one without the other,” she says, but just to herself. There are certain things that God does not need to be told.

The rhythm of Parambil is one of constancy and constant change. JoJo excitedly reports that Georgie’s twin brother, Ranjan, along with his wife and three children, appeared in the night with all their worldly possessions. Big Ammachi can hardly imagine Dolly’s plight with so many crammed into her tiny house. Ranjan, like Georgie, was left nothing by his father. He found a decent job as an assistant manager on a tea estate in Coorg. The pay was good, but theirs was a lonely existence in the Pollibetta hills. Something happened that caused the wife to restrain her husband with rope, throw him in a cart, and bring the family down the mountain and eventually descend on Georgie and Dolly Kochamma. The wife, a stout woman with a square jaw, and the habit of squeezing her eyes shut before speaking, appears formidable, more so because she wears a large wooden crucifix that would look better nailed to a wall than hanging over her bosom. She carries a Bible tightly clasped in her hand as though fearful someone will rip it free. Dolly’s children secretly call her “Decency Kochamma,” because (according to JoJo) everything looks indecent to her. If she isn’t railing against a sin the children have committed, she’s railing against one they’re about to commit.

A few days later, Big Ammachi sees the twins walking up to call on their uncle, holding hands the way close friends do. They are identical, but Ranjan looks rougher for the wear. He shares his brother’s boyish fidgetiness, as though an eccentric wheel turns within, producing a restless dance of his lips, eyebrows, eyes, and limbs and affecting his gait. Both men have the same expression of unwarranted optimism, despite their circumstances—an admirable trait. They try to act solemn just before they go in to see her husband, but when they emerge, they are elated, bouncing off each other like boys let out of school. She learns later that her husband has deeded Ranjan a small, sloped, uncleared plot that sits adjacent to Georgie’s. He’d probably decided on it when he first heard of his nephew’s return; so now he has provided for Ranjan as well as Georgie. She admires her husband’s generosity, but he struggles to match it with warmth, or with the kind of wise counsel that might help his nephews be more successful. That is not his way.

JoJo reports that the twins have decided to tear down Georgie and Dolly’s small home and build a new joint dwelling using the best wood and good brass fittings—just the sort of house that the long-suffering Dolly Kochamma deserves, but it’s happening only because Ranjan and Decency Kochamma are throwing in their savings. The new foundation will sit mostly on Georgie’s plot, which has the well and the best drainage; most of Ranjan’s plot will go to a new approach road, and to grow kappa and plantain. A shared kitchen will sit between the two wings of the house. Big Ammachi can’t help worrying for Dolly Kochamma.

JoJo has outgrown the house. Since he avoids water, he cannot challenge the other children in diving or swimming; instead, JoJo rules the heights. Trees are his domain, and he tops the others in his daring and recklessness. He puts monkeys to shame in the way he scampers along a high branch of a tree, jumps to its neighbor, or dismounts by swinging off a vine and doing a backflip before landing on the dead leaves below. That last stunt makes him a hero to the younger children.

On a Tuesday, after being confined by two days of rain, the older children race outside to swim in the river. Only the toddlers are there for an audience as JoJo clambers up a tree, grabs a vine, and swings out. But his hands slip off the wet vine, throwing off his backflip. He’s leaning too far forward when he lands, his momentum forcing him to race forward before he falls facedown into a shallow drainage ditch filled with rainwater. The toddlers applaud the splash, and the added comical touch of JoJo choosing not to stand up and instead to thrash in the puddle like a hooked fish. The little ones are in hysterics, clutching their bellies. That JoJo! The things he can do! But they get bored when JoJo doesn’t get up, and they gradually drift away.

“JoJo is hiding in the water, and he won’t play,” one of them reports to Big Ammachi.

Lulled by feeding Baby Mol, she smiles.

Seconds later, she rips the baby off her nipple. Its arms fly to both sides as if to break a fall. She puts the baby down. “What water?” she screams. “Show me! Where?” The child is startled, but points in the direction of the irrigation ditch and she runs.

She sees JoJo’s shoulder blades and the back of his head cresting the water, his hair wet and glistening, hair that’s such a struggle to wash. She leaps into the turbid ditch, jarring her spine because of its unexpected shallowness—it barely reaches her knees—and flips him onto the ground. She pushes on his stomach and mud surges out of his mouth. She cries, “Breathe, JoJo!” Then she screams. “AYO, JOJO, FOR GOD’S SAKE! BREATHE!” The sound pierces the air, and it carries for a mile. She hears footsteps pounding over wet leaves. Her husband slides down to her, on his knees. He squeezes his son’s ribcage, pushes on the belly. Shamuel arrives breathless and kneels across from the pair, reaching into JoJo’s mouth to sweep out mud, and more mud, but still he doesn’t breathe. Georgie suspends JoJo by the ankles while Ranjan pumps JoJo’s arms up and down and water pours out, but he won’t breathe. Ranjan covers JoJo’s lips with his and blows into his lungs as JoJo hangs upside down, his arms alongside his ears like a fish being weighed . . . but he doesn’t breathe. They lay him down and take turns breathing into his mouth, thumping on his back, pushing on his belly. She circles them like a madwoman, tearing at her hair, crying out in disbelief, screaming at them, “Don’t stop! Don’t stop!” But JoJo, stubborn in life, is more stubborn in death and will not breathe for her, or his father, or Shamuel, or all others who try; he will not breathe to save their broken hearts. Their efforts seem to be violating his limp body. At last, her husband pushes them away and holds his son to him, groaning, his body shaking.

She registers a distant shrill wail that empties a pair of tiny lungs, then a gasp for air, then another shriek. She has completely forgotten Baby Mol! If you’re crying, that means you’re alive. She backs away, afraid to leave JoJo. She runs back to her room and picks up the infant. She lifts her chatta, shoves a nipple at the baby, alarming it by her brusqueness, making it only wail more. She studies the infant’s face, the bared gums, the ugly mask of its discontent; she resents its blind need for her teat. At last, it latches on.

With the baby at her breast, she stumbles out to see her JoJo, her faithful shadow and companion for eight of his ten years, her little man, lowered down on the verandah bench by his father, the boy’s belly grotesquely distended. Her shattered husband turns and leans his raised arms against a pillar, as if to push it down, but the pillar is the only thing keeping him upright. The expression on JoJo’s face is one of puzzlement. She squats by her son, her hand on his cold forehead, and she wails. Baby Mol’s eyes roll up in fright and she bites sharply on the nipple. Lord, Big Ammachi thinks, I’ll willingly trade this new life if you give me my JoJo back. This thought shames her into a measure of sanity. She reaches out to her husband, still chained to the pillar, as silent in grief as he is in joy.