The Covenant of Water

1933, Madras

“Travel broadens the mind and loosens the bowels.” A street vendor’s lamb kebab in Port Said drops Digby to his knees, confining him to his cabin for two days, enough time to appreciate Professor Alan Elder’s parting words in Glasgow. By the time he recovers, they’re out of the Suez Canal and passing through the Bab-el-Mandeb, the Gate of Tears. This narrow strait, barely eighteen miles across, connects the Red Sea with the Indian Ocean. Off one bow, he sees Djibouti; off the other, Yemen. Save for a three-month posting in London, he has spent his twenty-five years on earth in Glasgow and might have spent the rest of his life there, never seen this confluence of waters, never discovered for himself that the English Channel, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean, despite their individual personalities, are one. All water is connected and only land and people are discontinuous. And his land is a place where he can no longer stay.

Under his feet, the ship is alive, making groans and sighs. He paces the deck in a broad-brimmed hat, though it can’t keep the sunlight from bouncing off the water and tanning his face, highlighting the pale, jagged scar that creases his left cheek from the corner of his mouth to his left ear. The shifting moods and colors of the Arabian Sea—azure, blue, and black—mirror the ebb and flow of his thoughts. The horizon rises and then dips; the salt spray is cool on his face; he has the sensation of standing still while plunging toward his future.

He peeks into a first-class stateroom, ashamed of his curiosity yet awed by the sofas and plush chairs, the thick brocade curtains and the pocket doors that allow valets and maids to attend to their employers. A maharajah is on board; he and his retinue have booked all of First Class. Digby is one class below, with his own tiny cabin. There are two classes below his, the segregation so complete that he hears rather than sees them.

A rough sea brings on what is either seasickness or a relapse of the ailment from the lamb kebab. Being a doctor means he has no objectivity about his symptoms. When he’s absent from the dining room for two seatings, Banerjee, who has a seat at the same table, comes to check on him.

Alarmed to see that Digby is barely able to lift his head, Banerjee returns with broth and paregoric. The tincture’s camphor-and-anise odor settles in the cabin and quietens his stomach. ­Banerjee—or Banny, as he asks Digby to call him—is in his late twenties, baby-faced, with the complexion of a boy raised on milk and cream, with meat never having touched his palate; his light-brown skin, which he assiduously protects from the sun, is fairer than the tanned Digby’s. Banny seems too young to be the barrister he is, called to the bar after four years of study in London. The path he has taken is much like Gandhi’s at the tail of the previous century, an observation Banerjee makes quietly but with pride.

When Digby rejoins the dinner table, Mrs. Ann Simmonds, the wife of a district collector in the Madras Presidency, says, “Duck tonight,” as if unaware of Digby’s previous absence. Her wide face has no edges, no angles; she reminds Digby of a bulldog, and has the moist, sagging eyes to match. From their first day she took command of their table, acting like a stateroom passenger choosing to dine with the masses out of her largesse. Listening to her hold forth, as he has every night, Digby is reminded of his three-month posting at Saint Bart’s Hospital in London—the prize for a medal exam he topped in Glasgow in his third year of medical school. Until he got onto the Bart’s wards, he wasn’t aware that he had an accent, or that it made others assume that he was provincial and stupid. It was a rude awakening. He couldn’t shed the accent entirely but one could soften it; he had worked hard to stay clear of those words or phrases or pronunciations that typecast him. Not that such efforts have fooled Mrs. Simmonds, who largely ignores him. Now he overhears her say to the diner across from her, “We English know what’s best for India. When you get there, you’ll see.”

Later that night, Digby strolls the deck with Banny. Despite the bond they’ve formed, they haven’t discussed politics. Digby confesses his ignorance of the world outside of Glasgow, or even outside of the hospital. “I lived in the infirmary these last few years. I had no cause to read a newspaper unless it appeared under a wound dressing, or in a belly I was opening.” He’s been making up for it by studying the papers in the ship’s library. The headlines are about Germany’s intention to rearm despite the Treaty of Versailles. A belligerent new chancellor promises to lead the country out of its economic devastation. But there’s little news of India.

“You could ask Mrs. Simmonds.”

“No, thank you,” Digby says.

Banny smiles, polishing his lenses and squinting at Digby. “Why go to India, Digby?”

Digby sees clouds in the distance, arranged as though along a plumb line. He imagines land beyond. They’re alongside the west coast of India, passing Calicut or Cochin. “A long story, Banny, I’m afraid. I fell in love with surgery. I was a good student, then a good houseman in surgery. Eager. Dedicated. When I wasn’t on duty, I loitered in Casualty, hoping to scrub in on accident cases. But when it came time to be selected for a surgical postgraduate post in Glasgow, turns out I wasn’t in the right pew. Outside of Glasgow there wasn’t a chance. So I joined the Indian Medical Service, hoping to develop as a surgeon.”

“Being a Catholic, was that it? How did they know?” Banerjee asks. “Your name?”

“No. Mine could be Protestant or Catholic. Now, Patrick or Timothy or David would be a giveaway. But I’d gone on scholarship to St Aloysius’ College. A Jesuit institution. I could hardly hide that. But even without that, it’s as if I’m giving out secret signals.” Digby looks at his companion uncertainly. “I’m sure it’s hard to understand.”

Banerjee laughs. “Not at all. It’s quite familiar.”

Digby is embarrassed. It’s a stupid thing to say to a man who has lived under the yoke of British rule from birth. But Banny can sound and seem more British than Digby. “I’m sorry—”

“Why be sorry, Digby? You’re the victim of a caste system. We’ve been doing the same thing to each other in India for centuries. The inalienable rights of the Brahmins. And the absence of any rights for the untouchables. And all the layers in between. Everyone who is looked down on can look down on someone else. Except the lowest. The British just came along and moved us down a rung.”

The ship rounds the southern tip of India and heads up the Coromandel Coast. At midnight, Digby stands alone on deck. The black waves turn a fluorescent green and blue, as if a fire rages deep in the ocean. He’s the only witness to an utterly beautiful yet mysterious spectacle. (Only the next day does he learn from the steward that it was phosphorescent plankton, a rare sight.) It seems to underline for Digby that he has in the course of this voyage peeled off his past like a soiled glove. More so than ever, he has shed a Glasgow shattered by the Great Slump, shed its patter, shed his last living relative, shed everything but the festering wound it left on him. The only industry that thrived in Glasgow was violence. It bubbled out of the Gorbals behind the infirmary and from elsewhere in the city; it showed up in the casualty ward every night. As a houseman, Digby sewed faces that had been expertly sliced by the warring razor gangs, the Billy Boys or Norman Conks, always a symmetrical pair of slashes hooking up from the corners of the mouth to the ears, marking the victim for life with a “Glasgow smile.” Digby feels fortunate that his own scar is just one-sided; the smashed bottle was duller than a razor and left him with a jagged dimple next to his natural one. It is a pale stigma of a life he wants to forget. He could have forgiven Glasgow his scar, his disappointments, his mother’s suicide. That was hardly reason to leave; even misery, when familiar, has its own comfort. What he couldn’t forgive was that after all his slaving, after his singular and almost maniacal devotion to surgery, he’d come to the manned door and was denied the password. His mentor, Professor Elder, a man beyond caste, albeit from upper-caste Edinburgh, did his best to help, suggesting a way out. “I know a place where you’ll get tremendous experience, and with luck find great mentors in surgery. Have you considered the Indian Medical Service?” What’s fur ye won’t go by ye, Digby thinks. It was a phrase his mother would use: whatever is in his destiny will come to him, regardless.

When he disembarks in Madras, he feels he’s arrived on a new planet. The city has a population of six hundred thousand, and most of them are at the quay, or so it appears to Digby from the cacophony, the confusion, and the heat. He breathes in the odors of cured leather, cotton, dried fish, incense, and salt water, the top notes of the antique scent of this ancient civilization.

Stevedores pour from the ship’s hold like a column of ants, bent forward from the weight of gunnysacks held over a shoulder with a grappling hook, sweat glossing their black skins. Women clustering outside customs make a bouquet of bright green, orange, and red saris with bold patterns. He’s entranced by the punctuation of a glittering stone in the nose, a red dot on a gleaming forehead, gold dangling from the ears and echoing the heavy borders of the fabrics. The rickshaws and carriages lined up outside are painted in every color of the rainbow. The vibrant, uninhibited palette of Madras is a revelation. Something clenched within him unwinds.

In the customs shed, he watches Mrs. Ann Simmonds greet a small but stocky man, presumably her husband, the district collector: little joy is evinced by either party at this reunion. She marches off to a small car, her chin in the air, her stubby nose pointed in the direction of Westminster, and with a royal’s expression on her face.

“Oi! I said no! You insolent babu! Do you want a thrashing?”

Digby swivels around to see a red-faced Englishman rise from behind a customs desk to loom over Banerjee. The tableau sends a chill through him, a wrenching recognition that he is, by virtue of arrival, one of the occupiers; his is the inalienable right to be first off the gangway, receive a quick stamp of his papers, and not be talked to in this manner.

In the humid customs shed the hands of the clock have paused, waiting to see what’s next. Digby’s breath quickens in the hothouse air, and reflexively he takes two steps to intervene.

Just then, another customs official intercedes. All Banerjee seeks is to disembark for the twelve hours that the ship is berthed, so he can visit a friend in Madras before continuing north to Calcutta. The senior official gives his subordinate an impatient look, stamps Banerjee’s papers, and lets him leave. Banny’s gaze falls on Digby. His hooded eyes have turned hard as stone, expressing the dogged resentment and the unwavering resolve of a subjugated nation that bides its time. Then the look vanishes. He bestows a stoic smile on Digby and heads for the separate exit for non-whites. He doesn’t wave farewell.