The Covenant of Water

1977, Saint Bridget’s

Mariamma feels something burning her fingers. Her tea. She drops the cup. It bounces off her body and lands unbroken on the carpet. Hot liquid soaks through and scalds her thighs.

Pain has no past or future, just the now. She leaps back from the window and pinches her sari and skirt free of her skin.

“Goodness!” Digby says. “Are you all right?”

She’s very far from all right. On the other side of the French windows, the woman—the mother she has never known in her twenty-six years of life—sits oblivious on the beautiful lawn, sorting seeds in her palm. Something tells Mariamma that she has yet to blink. A lifetime passes before she can find her voice.

“How long has she . . . ?”

“She’s been here almost as long as you’ve been alive,” Digby says.

The conflicting signals in her brain clash with each other. There’s a photograph at Parambil of the mother she carries in her head: those gray eyes tracked her across the room every day of her growing up—they’d even watched her daughter dress and gird herself this morning to confront the man who sired her. That mother stayed youthful, composed, beautiful, and elegant, her closed lips suppressing a laugh—perhaps at something the photographer had said. It was the face of a mother a daughter might confide in. How is she to reconcile that long-dead mother with this living apparition on the lawn?

“I need air,” she says, turning her back to the window and fleeing the room.

She runs down a brick-lined path leading away from the main cluster of buildings; runs past an orchard, past a nursery; and arrives at the back wall of the property, hemmed in, until she spots a small gate that she flings open and races down mossy stone steps . . . and comes to a halt. Before her is the serene, slow-moving water of a canal that winds away to join a river she can hear but not see. Her feet are submerged as she stands on the last step. Every part of her, every cell wants to plunge in, to let herself be carried away as far from here as she can get.

She stands at this junction of land and water, her heart racing, breathless, and yet only now can she breathe. On the water’s green, rippled surface, she sees her undulating, fragmented reflection. She came here broken, came here to question the man who fathered her but who was not her father. Instead, she found her dead mother, who somehow lives. Who has always lived. Who has been alive all the years Mariamma pined for her, prayed for her to come back from the dead.

The canal flows past, soaking the hem of her sari, undeterred by her distress, her new knowledge. It is indifferent, this water that links all canals, water that is in the river ahead, and in the backwaters, and the seas and oceans—one body of water. This same water ran past the Thetanatt home where her mother learned to swim; it brought Rune here to reclaim an abandoned lazaretto; and brought Philipose to save a dying baby, his hands coupled with Digby’s; the same water swept Elsie away to die and then delivered her, born again, into the arms of the man who loved her more than life—and who fathered Elsie’s only daughter, Mariamma.

And now that daughter is here, standing in the water that connects them all in time and space and always has. The water she first stepped into minutes ago is long gone and yet it is here, past and present and future inexorably coupled, like time made incarnate. This is the covenant of water: that they’re all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone. She stays there listening to the burbling mantra, the chant that never ceases, repeating its message that all is one. What she thought was her life is all maya, all illusion, but it is one shared illusion. And what else can she do but go on.

She gathers herself. She walks slowly back. She pictures Elsie growing up nearby, motherless—they had that in common. Whatever else the young Elsie imagined, surely, she never imagined that she would end up here. Her mother did not choose to be a leper. With everything that Elsie had to offer to the world, how cruel that this is her fate: to be cloistered in a leprosarium, a place so apart from the world that it could be another planet. And all the while, an ancient, slowly dividing bacterium took away sensation, stripped her of sight, robbed her bit by bit of the ability to do the one thing she was born to do. Mariamma shudders at another appalling realization: through it all, her mother’s mind must have been intact, the artist forced to witness the creeping ruin of her once-beautiful body, the progressive diminution of her capacity to make art. Mariamma cannot even begin to fathom such suffering.

Digby hasn’t moved from the window, still looking out at the figure on the lawn, his unguarded expression showing sorrow and love, those two sentiments fused into one, and like a second skin for him. This scarred man stayed by her mother’s side all these years, bearing witness to her suffering and suffering himself in watching her deterioration.

The change in Digby’s expression when he sees Mariamma, his transition back to the present, reminds her of her father: often when she came up to him, she felt she’d summoned him back from an unfathomable place. The two men had this in common: they loved her mother. Mariamma stands beside Digby; they gaze out through the glass.

He speaks as if she’s never fled the room. “Your mother suns herself here at this time in the morning.” His voice is soft, wistful. “She comes through the fence gate, counts five steps to the center of the lawn. I grow these roses just for her. Her sense of smell is intact, thank goodness. She can name thirty species just by their perfume.” He’s like a parent bragging about a child’s new skill. “When she tires of the sun, she’ll take seven steps to this window and place both her hands on the glass and stay there for almost a minute, whether I’m here or not.” He smiles sheepishly. “It’s a little ritual of hers. Or ours. She’s never explained it to me. I think it’s like a blessing, a prayer she sends to me in the middle of the day, to tell me she loves me, that she’s thankful for me.” He smiles dreamily. “If I’m here, I put my hand on the glass, over hers. I think she knows when I do that. Then, whether I’m here or not, she leaves.”

“Does she know I’m here?”

“No!” he says quickly. “No. When you came to see Lenin, I never told her. It’s the only time in twenty-five years I’ve hidden something from her.”

“Why?”

He sighs and closes his eyes. He’s a long time answering. “Because her whole life has been about keeping this secret. Try to put yourself in her shoes, Mariamma. Imagine her right after Ninan’s awful death. Philipose . . . your father . . . blames her, and she blames him. After the funeral, she flees Parambil. Soon after, Chandy dies. Friends of hers, concerned about her mental state, bring her up to the hills to distract her. She’s full of rage and sorrow, tempted even to end her life. Quite by accident she discovers my attempts at sculpting, my tools. She takes her anger out with hammer and chisel and I think it saves her. She stays on with me after her friends leave. We become close . . . we fall in love. She gets word that Baby Mol is very ill and for that reason alone she goes to visit Parambil for a few days. She gets trapped there in a historic monsoon. During that time, she realizes two things: she’s with child. And the leprosy makes itself known to her, becomes explosive—you know how it can do that in pregnancy. Your father at this point . . . wasn’t at his best. Opium. She sees no way ahead, no good outcome. Whether she comes to me or stays there, she can’t be around you—that she knows from growing up next to Saint Bridget’s, from being around Rune. It would put you in danger. She and your father keep their distance. But he sees her in terrible distress one night, and he comforts her, and it leads him to want intimacy. She doesn’t stop him. When her pregnancy is obvious, in his altered state, he thinks it’s his child. She comes to a decision: Once she gives birth to you, she must vanish. She must die. You must all think her dead if she’s not to taint you forever, taint Parambil. Her only consolation is that she knows that she can’t do better than leaving you in Big Ammachi’s care at Parambil.”

“But if my father or Big Ammachi had known, they’d have taken care of her, they—”

He’s shaking his head. “How long before the fisherwoman no longer brought her basket around, and your relatives avoided the house? What this disease does to flesh is bad enough, but the fear of contagion rips families apart. Every week we take in mothers chased out by husbands. Fathers ejected and stoned by their sons. Only here do they all find a home.”

Mariamma wants to argue, to protest. But the truth is, if she weren’t a physician, would she even be inside these walls? She is a physician, a disciple of Hansen; she’s someone who has dissected leprous tissue; she knows the enemy . . . and still her first reaction was horror and repulsion at seeing her mother. Digby said, “Put yourself in her shoes,” but she finds it impossible to see herself in those thick-soled sandals cut from rubber tires; impossible to imagine living through the nightmare her mother has lived, and still lives through. As her mother turns her sightless face to the sun, Mariamma shivers.

Digby continues, “This disease ostracizes innocent children and she didn’t want you growing up tarred by the label she carries. Better you think she was dead than see your mother this way. Being here is as good as being dead,” he says bitterly. “Your loved ones will never see you again. They never want to. We never get relatives visiting. Ever. You might be the first. She staged her drowning and had me pick her up downstream. I wanted to keep her at my estate, but she refused. To keep her terrible secret there was only one place she could safely be. Here. As for me, I had no choice. I wasn’t going to lose her again.”

“Who else knows?”

“Only Cromwell. And now you. Cromwell is a brother to me. He’s made our life here possible. He was already running the estate, and now it’s entirely his. My estate friends think I found Jesus and that’s why I’m here. It turned out, I was needed at Saint Bridget’s. The Swedish mission struggled to find physicians or nurses willing to work here for long. The prejudice is too great. I was already familiar with Saint Bridget’s. Things had deteriorated after Rune’s death. There was much to do.

“The hardest blow was when your mother’s sight failed. Now I read to her every night. When we learned about your father’s passing, she was heartbroken. She stopped working. Mourned for days, wept for him. For you. She lives and breathes her guilt every day, but once you were orphaned, it reached new heights. That’s the only kind of pain your mother can feel now, pain of the soul. The agony of having to vanish from the earth to protect the ones she loves. All her art revolves around you, Mariamma, around the pain of giving you up. Your poor mother could only express her love by erasing herself, by becoming faceless, anonymous, unknown to her child. I see that in her sculptures, in the way they express the pain of having to hide her face, never being able to show it, being dead to you so you could live.”

She weeps hearing these words. She had all the mothering and the kisses she could have wanted from Big Ammachi, her father, Anna Chedethi, and Baby Mol. They doted on her. Her tears are because she missed her real mother, who was here all this time. Yes, she misses that woman on the lawn, misses the mother that Elsie might have been, if not for the leprosy. There’s a chasm in my life of all these intervening years, our separate lives.

Digby hands her an immaculate handkerchief. Mariamma takes it, grateful. She composes herself as best she can and she studies this man who fathered her, who came here to be with the woman he loved.

“You had to give up the world too, Digby.”

“The world? Ha!” His bitter laugh is out of character. He turns to her. “No, no. I gave up something far bigger, Mariamma. I gave up you. I gave up the chance to know my only child. I longed to know you. That’s not just her wound. It’s mine too, you know.”

Mariamma is shaken by the intensity of his emotion, by the anger and ache in his voice. She cannot hold his gaze.

“The only thing that eased the pain of not having you with us is that we had each other. And I was a surgeon of sorts again—I was paying Rune back too for what he did for me—while Elsie never stopped being an artist. Your mother and I have had a quarter century together! It’s been hard. When we came here, she was still a beautiful woman. And so strong! The force of her mind, the quality of her work . . . I wish you’d seen her in her prime. My heart breaks with every setback. Look at what time and Hansen’s bloody disease have done to her,” he says bitterly. “But at night, in each other’s arms, we try to forget. I’ll take that, Mariamma.”

She doesn’t know what to say about this kind of love. She’s envious.

“When your father’s columns eventually resumed, full of wisdom and humor—and pain—she knew he’d overcome the addiction. I dare say she was the Ordinary Man’s most avid reader. She’d translate them for me. Before she became blind, that is. Then others had to read his columns to her.”

“Does she know anything about my life?”

“Oh, God yes!” He smiles. “As much as we could find out. When your father’s editor wrote that article explaining the mystery of the Condition, the autopsy . . . she couldn’t stop thinking about it. It made her sad that the knowledge came too late for him, too late for Ninan. She felt she’d unfairly blamed him for Ninan’s death—in their grief, they’d turned on each other. By the time he was freed from the clutches of opium, Elsie of Parambil was long dead. She never got to say how sorry she was.”

Digby’s features are highlighted by the light coming through the window; Mariamma sees profound sadness, exaggerated by the scar on his face. She even sees something of herself in this man who is almost seventy years old. She leans on his shoulder. Tentatively, he puts his arm around her, this other father of hers, embracing his daughter as together they look out at her mother.

Love the sick, each and every one, as if they were your own. Her father had copied out that quote for her; she still has it, tucked in next to the title page of her mother’s Gray’s Anatomy.

Appa, am I to love this woman who declined to engage in my life? A woman who staged her death so that I’d never think to look for her? I might understand, but can I forgive? Can there ever be sufficient reason to abandon one’s child?

Abruptly, her body stiffens. She pushes away from Digby.

“Digby, I know her! Yes, lepers look alike. But I know her! She’s the beggar who’d come to Parambil. Always before the Maramon Convention. She’d walk up and stand there, unmoving. Digby, I’ve put coins in her cup!”

His guilty expression confirms it.

“She hungered to see you, Mariamma. We both did. I couldn’t, because as a white man, I stand out. But every year I’d drive her as close as I dared. She’d dress as a beggar and wait for hours until she spied you before she walked up to the house. I had my own deep yearning to see you. I was envious whenever she succeeded. If she failed, she was distraught. It became harder as the years went on. Once she became blind, it was all over. One year, it was Anna who put coins in her cup. Elsie was heartbroken when she returned to the car. Impulsively, we drove back past the house. I saw you for the first time . . . saw you coming down the road, clear as day. I still carry that image. I so wanted to know you . . . but you had a father. He was the better man, a better father than I might ever—”

“Yes, he was,” she says sharply. It’s on her tongue to add, Don’t you ever forget it! But she doesn’t have the heart. They’ve all suffered enough.

“Digby, as much as you knew of leprosy, couldn’t you preserve her sight? Or her hands?”

He stares at her in disbelief. “D’you think I didnae try?” he sputters. “She’s my worst patient! Her active leprosy is gone, thanks to dapsone and other treatments, but nerves—once they’re deid, they’re deid! She were robbed of the gift of pain. If I could’ve protected her from repeated trauma, she wouldnae look like this!” She’s taken aback by his indignation, the anger in his voice, and the flushed cheeks. It’s the first time she’s heard his accent twisting through. “But all that mattered to her was her bloody art. I’d pad her hands every morning, but if the dressing got in the way, she’d pull it off. She might still have sight, but when her facial nerve was affected and her cornea dried out, I’d patch the eye shut so the cornea could heal and she’d pull it off! We battled over this. We still battle over it. She says that I might as well ask her not to breathe! She says if she stops work, then she has no life . . . That cuts me deep. I suppose I want to hear that I am her life. Because I’m living for her.”

Digby looks at his hands, as if the failing resides there. She wonders if her own desire to be a doctor, to be a surgeon, to take the world in for repairs came from this man, from his genes.

He says more softly, “Ah, well . . . I always knew I was in the presence of genius. Your mother’s kind of talent only comes along once in a great while. Her art is bigger than me, her, or this wretched disease! Her compulsion is hard for us to understand. Believe it or not, she’s still making art. When her sight deteriorated, she was in a frenzy to complete her unfinished projects, further damaging her hands. Sometimes she has me strap charcoal sticks to her fist, and then I bind my hand on top of hers, and we draw.” He laughs ruefully. “We’ve come full circle!” Mariamma has no idea what he means. “In the dark in our bungalow, she works with soft clay. All she has is her palms. She holds the clay against her cheeks, or even her lips, to feel the shape. Unsighted, she’s created hundreds of unique clay creatures, enough to populate a miniature world. Her confidence is astonishing. She knows the value of what she produces. She’s always known.”

“Who gets to see it?”

“Just me. Nobody else. She wanted her work to be seen, but not if it revealed who she was. I wanted it seen. Years ago, we tried cautiously. I moved several pieces to a dealer in Madras, someone I knew, a former patient. I said it was the work of an artist who never wished to be named. It sold at once at an exhibition, four of the seven pieces going abroad. Then an article about this anonymous artist ran in a German magazine. People were intensely curious. The possibility of discovery terrified her. We never tried that again. I’ve two sheds here full of her work. Who knows if the world will ever get to see it? The only thing more important to her than her art is that the world think she drowned, that no one ever finds out that she lives here as a leper. She wants her secret to die with her, even if it means her art dying too.”

Mariamma thinks of her poor father, who died with his own secret, never knowing that his wife lived. Or did he know? Is that what triggered his sudden trip to Madras? Some new knowledge that came his way?

Mariamma breaks the silence. “Digby . . . Now that I know, now that the secret is out, do you think she’d want to talk to me?”

He sighs. “I don’t know. The purpose of her vanishing was that you should think she died. She—we—invested a lifetime making sure of it. She thinks she’s succeeded. I thought she had too—till you walked into the theater today. So . . . would she want to talk to you? Do we shatter the illusion she worked so hard to create? I don’t know.”

Mariamma thinks about her own shattered illusions. Should she thank or curse the Condition and Lenin for bringing her here? The Condition takes away, but it also gives gifts that one might not have wanted. She suddenly longs for Lenin.

She studies the woman seated on the lawn—Elsie. Her mother. She looks strangely at ease in that disfigured, broken body—or is that a daughter’s wishful thinking? All her mother has of what once defined her is thought . . . that and the remnant of a body that barely gets around but still tries to make art. And she has this man who loves her, even as less and less of her remains.

“Mariamma,” Digby says softly, “do you want to talk to her?”

The question makes her heart race and her throat turn dry. No! a voice within her says, without hesitation. I’m not ready. But another voice, a little girl’s voice, a daughter’s voice disagrees, addressing its mother: Yes, because there’s so much you should know about me. And about my father—you never knew the man he became, how he still loved you. He was the best father a girl could ever have.

The voice that finally emerges says, “Digby . . . I can’t tell you yet.”

She recalls Broker Aniyan’s words. Every family has secrets, but not all secrets are meant to deceive. The Parambil family secret, which was hardly a secret, was the Condition. Her father kept another secret: that his beloved daughter was not his. If Big Ammachi knew, she kept it a secret. Elsie and Digby’s shared secret was that she lived, she never drowned, but she lived with leprosy. These secret covenants kept by the adults in Mariamma’s life were meant to protect her. Broker Aniyan also said, What defines a family isn’t blood but the secrets they share. Secrets that can bind them together or bring them to their knees when revealed. And now she, Mariamma, who had been privy to no secrets, knows everything; they are one big, bloody, happy family.

Elsie, mother of Mariamma, gathers herself and slowly rises. Her stance is wide, her head tilted up like a visionary’s and making tiny arcs as the sightless will do. She turns with small, stiff steps like a child learning to walk, until she’s facing the French windows. With her palms and her finger remnants, she painstakingly adjusts the pallu of the white sari over her left shoulder and takes her first step, counting.

Mariamma feels her short life on earth compressed into this moment, this one moment that’s weightier than the sum of all those that came before. Her heart pounds.

Her mother raises her hands before her to shoulder height, those strange, diminished implements held out like offerings. She approaches with her wrists cocked, palms facing forward, a heartbreaking, childlike attitude in those outstretched arms as they anticipate the French windows. Her brave, tragic advance transforms Digby’s features; a loving, indulgent smile breaks out on his face as he watches her. Her mother comes closer, even closer, until at last both her palms touch the clear windowpane, arresting her progress. They rest there. Digby is about to place his hands on the inside of the pane, overlapping hers . . . but he stops and looks at his daughter, his eyebrows raised questioningly.

Without thinking, without having to think, Mariamma feels herself drawn forward. She puts both her palms on the glass pane, pressing and overlapping her mother’s hands, so that at that moment, all is one, and nothing separates their two worlds.