The Covenant of Water

1908, Parambil

“Drowning on land” is how she thinks of it. In its aftermath she has a recurring nightmare: she’s carrying her children, her mother, and her husband on her head, staggering under the weight, in danger of sinking into the soil if she stops moving, mud filling her mouth. When she arrives at the burden stone, the horizontal slab is on the ground, useless. She looks up and down the road for help, but she’s alone.

Somehow, she goes on, so that Parambil can go on. If her father were there, he’d encourage her to be “faithful in small things.” Nothing ruffled him, not even his own suffering. But she resists this verse. She’s furious with her God. “How can I be faithful in small things if you can’t be faithful in big ones?”

She’s surprised to feel anger toward her grieving husband. It builds within her. At first, like a hornet’s nest, it’s no more than a fleck of mud in a wooden joist. But it grows, and portholes appear, and soon a steady drone can be heard within. She prays for her fury to be lifted. She prays, even though God has failed her, because what else can humans do in such circumstances but pray? “I’ve never seen his lips touch toddy. No one can accuse him of sloth, or miserliness. He has never hit me, and never would. Lord, he doesn’t merit my wrath. He lost his child too. Why do I feel this way?”

She goes to his room after his bath, entrusting the baby to her mother. At this hour, just before dinner, he’s often recumbent, his hand draped over his forehead, as if the act of bathing exhausts him. She recognizes his mannerisms but never truly knows what they signify.

To her surprise, he isn’t lying down but seated on the bed, his shoulders back, his head up, as if he expects her and has steeled himself for what must come.

“I need to know,” she says simply, standing in front of him, their faces on the same level. He tilts his right ear to her. She’s been aware for a while that he hears poorly, but his silence makes it less obvious. She says it again. He watches her lips to see if there’s more.

Any other man would have said, Know what? But not him. She doesn’t wait. “I need to know about”—she wrings her hands in exasperation—“about the Condition.”

She has just christened it. Surely that’s the first step. She’s named this thing that she has sensed from the time the marriage was proposed: the whispers about drownings running in the family, the house built away from water, his distaste for rain, his strange way of bathing—the very things that afflicted their son. The Condition. You can’t ask how to hunt a snake if you don’t have a name for it.

He doesn’t feign ignorance, but he doesn’t move. Seated, he’s still taller than she is, but to her their age gap feels narrower than ever.

“For our daughter’s sake,” she says. “So I can protect her. And for the other children we’ll have, God willing. I need to know what you know. Why was JoJo so fearful of water? Why won’t you, my husband, get on a boat? Does Baby Mol have the Condition too?”

He stands up, towering over her, and her heart races. He’s never come close to threatening her. She braces herself. But he steps past her to reach up and retrieve a parcel wedged on the ledge just under the ceiling. It’s wrapped in cloth and tied with a string. He holds it outside the door and shakes off the dust.

“It was hers,” he says, as though that’s sufficient explanation. He sits beside her and unwraps the disintegrating coarse hemp cloth around it. The second layer is the cloth of a fine kavani. She gets the scent of a bygone era, and of another woman, the same scent that is in the cellar at times, and that was on the stored garments he gave her when he first took her to church. JoJo’s mother. On top of the pile is a gauzy, transparent cotton pouch that she can see holds a wedding ring as well as the minnu—the tiny, gold pendant in the shape of a tulsi leaf, with gold beads forming a crucifix on its surface. He tied this around his departed wife’s neck when they married, just as he tied her own minnu around her neck on their wedding day.

He moves the pouch aside and hands her a small square sheet: JoJo’s baptismal record. She’s wrenched with guilt seeing this, as though at this moment she’s breaking the news to JoJo’s mother of her son’s death. She fights back tears. She doesn’t dare look at her husband. Her anger has vanished.

Now his big hand lifts out a folded wad of papers, crumpled at the edges. The silverfish have chewed at the corners, while the paper beetles have made crescent-shaped fenestrations through it. Gingerly he unfolds the fragile parchment. It is an outsized map or chart made up of papers glued on their long sides, but the rice-paste glue, so delicious to silverfish, is largely eaten away. He spreads it out over both their laps. The writing is faded. A few more years and these papers will be just dust.

A tree. The thick, dark trunk is crooked, and on the branches are a few leaves. The leaves have names, dates, annotations. She recalls a similar genealogy drawn by her father. She’d sat on his lap as he explained. “Matthew gives us the genealogy of Jesus beginning with Abraham. Fourteen generations to David, then fourteen from David to the Babylonian Captivity, and another fourteen from the exile to the birth of Jesus.” Her father was convinced Matthew had omitted two generations. “He was a tax collector. He liked the symmetry of fourteen repeated thrice. But it’s inaccurate!”

The tree on her lap lacks symmetry and is devastatingly accurate. She understands at once that it is a catalog of the malady that has shattered the Parambil family, but unlike Matthew’s gospel, this is a secret document, hidden in the rafters, to be viewed only by family members, and only when they absolutely must see it. Did it take the loss of their son for her to earn the right to this knowledge? She’s had a child with this man! They are bound by blood, yet he kept this from her.

She brings the lamp as close as she dares. Surely this fresher writing that recorded JoJo’s birth must be JoJo’s mother’s—why was she allowed to see this? Did she already know of the Condition and ask? Other hands, some old and tremulous, as evidenced by the hitches in the loops, coils, and uprights of the Malayalam script, have laboriously penned entries too. Perhaps her husband’s mother, or his grandmother? And someone else before that, and before that. There are also smaller slips of ancient, coarse paper inside the folded map.

He peers over her shoulder, his hands clenched.

Using JoJo’s name printed on a branch as anchor, she sees that the Parambil lineage goes back at least seven generations (not counting the slips of paper) and forward two. She is entering unfamiliar backwaters. The past is as murky as the ghostly faint ink, the crumbling paper. The ancestral family boasts slave traders, two murderers, and the apostate priest Pathrose—it says so here. Next to one name she reads, “Just like his uncle, but younger”—she struggles to decipher the letters so closely crammed together—“and so never married.” An annotation next to a “Pappachen” three generations before her husband says, “His father, Zachariah, also deaf and staggered when eyes closed from the age of forty.” A loose note says: “Boys suffer more often than girls. Watch for exuberant children, fearless except for water. By the time they are taken to the river, all you mothers will know.”

They’re describing JoJo. Which mother wrote this warning?

She turns back to the tree, to a symbol that recurs on some branches.

“What are these squiggles under this strange crucifix?” she asks.

“Are they not words?” he says softly.

She turns to him, stunned. For the longest time she has read the paper to him at the dinner table, but has never seen him read. She assumed he never cared to. He cannot read! How could she not know this till this moment? The innocence of his question reminds her of JoJo when she first met him, and she fights back tears.

She shakes her head. “No. It’s not words.” He says, “Then it looks like water. With a cross.”

She is in awe of her husband. He is illiterate, yet he saw it for what it was, just as he might see a dusting of mold on a tree trunk. “True,” she says softly. “A cross over water. A sign they died by drowning.”

He says, “Is Shanthama there? My father’s older sister?” She finds her, and points: the cross on water is by her name. “She drowned before I was born.”

Which grief-stricken mother thought up this symbol? Under the dancing flame of her lamp, the crucifix atop the wavy lines also resembles a denuded tree at the head of a fresh mound of dirt: a grave.

“There’s a death by drowning every generation,” she says, tracing with her finger. A few of the crosses have annotations, and she reads aloud: “In the lake . . . the stream . . . the Pamba River . . .”

Her husband points with his chin in the direction of their sorrow. “Irrigation ditch.” It will be her task to write those words.

How much did the marriage broker know about the Condition? What about her mother or uncle? Did they know and conceal it from her? Or dismiss it? But of course her husband knew. She doesn’t want to hate the man she loves. But she has to get it off her chest.

“I wish you’d told me what you knew,” she says. “We could have protected JoJo, forbidden him from swinging on those things, climbing trees so—”

“No!” her husband says so vehemently that she almost drops the papers. He stands. She’s seen this kind of anger directed at others, but never at her. “No! That’s what my mother did. Kept me on the property, a prisoner, when all I wanted to do was run, jump, climb. And after my mother died, Thankamma and my brothers did the same. When I look at this I can only see squiggles,” he says, jabbing the papers with a finger. “You know why? She never let me go to the church school because it was across the river. She didn’t even want me to walk next to it. What I know now is there’s always a way to get somewhere, it’s just longer. My brothers and sisters have no problem with water. They went to school. Once, I ran away. My brothers and Thankamma locked me up. Out of love, they claimed! But it was out of fear. Out of ignorance!” His tone softens. “My mother and Thankamma meant well. They wanted to protect me like you wished to with our JoJo. But it made me weak. My brother cheated me because I couldn’t read.” He’s pacing the room. “Believe me, no one had to tell me or JoJo to stay away from water. If we can’t swim, we can do plenty of other things. We walk. We climb. Do you think I don’t mourn my only son? But if I had the chance to do it again, I’d change nothing. JoJo wasn’t on a leash. My son lived like a tiger the few years he had on this earth. He climbed. He ran fast. He made up for the one thing he could not do.” His voice breaks. He gathers himself and goes on. “I didn’t hide it. I assumed you knew. Your uncle certainly knew. I’m sorry if you didn’t. You only had to ask. But I don’t go around with a bell like a leper to announce it. This is a part of me. Like the goldsmith’s wife whose face is scarred by smallpox, or the potter’s son whose foot is turned. This is me. This is who I am.”

She’s forgotten to breathe. He’s said more words of significance in one evening than in their last eight years together. The crowd that is within him—small boy, father, and husband—rage and grieve together.

His expression softens. “You could have married better.”

She reaches for his hand, but he pulls away and leaves the room.

Her mind is in a whirl. Thus far, nothing suggests Baby Mol has any fear of water. Even if Baby Mol doesn’t have the Condition, she’ll be considered tainted, capable of passing on this bad seed.

With a shaking hand she records the year JoJo’s mother died. She draws a new branch arising from her husband’s name. She writes in her name and the date of her marriage, then a branch from their union where she writes “Baby Mol”; she will have Baby Mol baptized before she is six months and then she will enter her proper name and birth date. How many branches will lead down from Baby Mol once she marries? “I’m on the inside now, Lord,” she says. “The Condition is mine as much as it is his. How can I cast blame?”

Under JoJo’s name, she writes the year of his passing. She draws the three wavy lines, easy enough to do with her trembling fingers. How cruel, how viciously unfair that JoJo should die from the one element he worked so hard to avoid. Atop the wavy lines she draws the cross, which looks like a tree on the hill of Calvary, the three points breaking into sub-branches, reminiscent of the Saint Thomas cross, but also looking like tree branches that have been cleaved off, leaving the pointy ends clawing at the sky. She grieves now with JoJo’s mother. I know he was yours, but he was mine too and I had him longer. I loved him so much. Her pen touches the paper, struggling to fit the loopy shapes and tails and comebacks of Malayalam script in the small space: DROWNED IN IRRIGATION DITCH. Her mind swims with images of a much younger JoJo, his smile full of holes—if only she’d kept those baby teeth, then she’d still have something of his! He’d insisted on planting them to grow a tusk, and then he’d forgotten where.

She stares at the parchment when she’s done; the Water Tree, she might call it. Is the Condition a curse? Or a disease? Is there really a difference? She knows of a family in which the children have bones that break easily, and the whites of their eyes have a light-blue tinge. They grow out of it, and as adults, they seem almost normal. But when two first cousins eloped and moved away, their child suffered fractures in its journey out of the womb, and by its second year of life its legs were drawn up like a frog’s, its chest squashed, and its spine twisted. It died before it was three.

She reassembles the papers, ties a ribbon in place of the string. She takes the Water Tree to her room. It’s hers now. She will be the one henceforth to repair and preserve this genealogy, to annotate it and to pass it on.

At dinner, he doesn’t meet her eyes when she serves him. Her mother made an egg curry in a thick red sauce, scoring the hard-boiled eggs with three slashes so the sauce can seep in. Her red-eyed mother never asked about the voices raised in her husband’s bedroom behind the closed door.

That night, mother and daughter pray together. “May the living and the departed together cry out: ‘Blessed is He who has come, and is to come, and will raise the dead.’ ”

After she uncovers her head and snuggles with Baby Mol, feeling the emptiness where JoJo would have been, she feels entitled to speak frankly to God.

“Lord, maybe You don’t want to cure this for reasons I don’t understand. But if You won’t or can’t, then send us someone who can.”