The Covenant of Water

1935, Madras

Celeste’s driver parks outside Digby’s quarters. From the house next door, a quavering rich old man’s voice leads young girls in singing “Suprabhatam.” The devotional’s parsimonious scale, melody, and syncopation feel like a part of her. Janaki, her Tamilian ayah who has been with her from the time she was a little girl in Calcutta, would sing it as she brushed Celeste’s hair. That devotional is used to wake the deity, Lord Venkateswara, at the famous temple in Tirupati.

After Celeste’s parents died, Janaki became the only family she had left. Years later, when Claude, despite her protests, took their young boys away to boarding school in England, Celeste felt life had flown from the house. To bring her out of her depression, Janaki took her to Tirupati. Barefoot, they joined the thousands climbing the mountain on steps polished by millions of past pilgrims, and she heard “Suprabhatam” once more. The solidarity of so many worshippers, all bearing their own troubles, gave her strength. When Janaki let the barber shave her scalp, gifting her hair to the temple, Celeste followed suit. As her tresses fell to the ground, grief lightened its grip. After hours in the queue, when she finally laid eyes on Lord Venkateswara, she felt goose bumps rise on her arms. The ten-foot-tall, bejeweled, peaceful being was no mere idol, no representation, but the incarnation of Vishnu himself, radiating so much force that she felt the mountain rumble under her feet and her life shift.

On his return, Claude could have learned of her transformation, her commitment to seva, if he’d asked. Instead, he stared at her shorn head and was silent. Seva meant erasing awareness of self through service. For her it took many forms, including volunteering every weekday at the Madras Orphanage.

Digby emerges with a cloth sanji over his shoulder, a bag few Britishers would choose to carry. He climbs in looking nervous and excited. Like a schoolboy ready for an outing, Celeste thinks.

A dark hand passes a tin through the car window. “Saar forgot samosas,” Muthu says.

“May I?” Celeste pries open the lid. She bites into a samosa, the filling giving off steam. “Heavens,” she says, leaning forward so the crumbs don’t spill on her orange kurta, “these are the best I’ve ever had.”

“If Missy liking, I’m making plenty,” Muthu says.

As they drive away, Celeste laughs. “He called me Missy. As if I’m a schoolgirl.” Digby grins, tongue-tied.

On the outskirts of Adyar, crossing the river and passing wide-open marshland, Digby stammers, “I confess, I was sleepless last night.”

“Oh?”

“I worried that I’ve misled you into thinking I know something about art. I didn’t have the kind of upbringing I imagine you had. Never saw the great museums of Europe and all that. The few months I worked in London I never left the hospital. There! I had to get that off my chest.” The confession makes him blush.

“Digby, I’m going to disappoint you. No great museums in my growing up, I promise you. My parents were missionaries in Calcutta. Ours was a two-room house. We had one ayah, not ten servants like others I knew. Don’t look so worried. It was a blessing! Since they were too poor to send me to England, I was spared the heartbreak of being sent away at five years of age. That’s the rule, you know. Ship the little ones across the ocean to boarding school—Claude did that to my boys. Every other year an ever-taller child gets off the boat. No possible way he’s yours. He shakes your hand and says, ‘Hello, Mother,’ because his memory of ‘Mummy’ has already faded.”

The Model T’s loose suspension makes them sway in unison, a rhythm conducive to confession. “I’m fortunate they come home at all. Some children spend every summer with ‘Granny’ Anderson or ‘Aunty’ Polly in Ealing or Bayswater, who for a fee will take your role. It’s unspeakably cruel.”

“Then why do it?”

“Why? Because the esteemed medical opinion is that if the children stay in India they will succumb to typhoid or leprosy or smallpox. Should they survive, they’ll be delicate, lazy, and mendacious. It doesn’t matter that countless numbers of us survived just fine. You’ll find it in the civil service handbook! ‘The quality of the blood deteriorates,’ according to Sir So-and-So, FRCS. Perfectly good schools here, mind you. But then my poor sons would have to be educated alongside Anglo-Indians. They’d have a chee-chee accent like their mother and be called ‘fifteen annas’ behind their backs, even if they were not Anglo-Indians.” There were sixteen annas to a rupee, and to be a Celeste was to be one short. If her bitterness startles him, it surprises her too. He listens to her with his whole being, she thinks, offering a clean canvas for her thoughts. God, he looks besotted. Be gentle with him.

“I had no idea,” he says. “An Englishwoman who’s never set foot in England.”

When Claude mentioned his new assistant surgeon, he said the man was a Catholic from Glasgow. That was all Claude needed to classify a human being. But the man beside her is much more than that. Without thinking, she reaches out and touches the ragged scar on his cheek. He colors as if she’s exposed something grotesque about him, though her intention was quite the opposite. She quickly speaks to mask their surprise.

“I did see the motherland. A friend of my parents underwrote my passage when I finished school. I was curious.” She remembers sailing into the cold, foggy harbor at Tilbury, and getting her first glimpse of the great city of London. The grand buildings she had so anticipated were gray and choked by the smoke of coal fires. In the unyielding country towns, tiny houses shared walls and pushed up against each other like halwa in a sweet shop. Even the washing on the line was gray. “I had a scholarship to a school meant to train girls as missionaries. Believe it or not, I aspired to go to medical school. But then, a few months after I left India my parents died. Cholera,” she says matter-of-factly.

She stares out at the ocean now visible on their left. A car coming toward them requires both vehicles to pull carefully to the side so as not to get stuck in the sand.

When she turns back, she finds Digby studying her, like an artist studying a model.

“I was orphaned too,” he says shyly.

At Mahabalipuram, Celeste leads Digby through the dunes. Ahead of them, the milky white ribbon of beach is interrupted by dark rock shapes, like the wrecked hulls of ships. “Those five sculptures carved out of single boulders are called rathas,” Celeste says, “because they’re in the shape of chariots. A convoy. And—” She catches herself. “Nothing worse than a tour guide. Digby, you go explore. I’ll meet you by the fifth one, with the stone elephant beside it. You’ll see it.” He takes off without hesitation. She’s a bit disappointed that he didn’t protest.

Outside the first ratha, a pair of larger-than-life, curvaceous female figures stand guard; a string of cloth barely conceals their nipples, and another the pubic area. She watches Digby pull out his sketchbook. What does this orphan child of Catholic Glasgow—how grim that sounds—make of such sensual sculptures on a sacred structure?

She sits in the shade of the fifth ratha, taking off her tinted glasses to examine the apsidal-shaped masterpiece. Her first visit here drove her to learn all she could about temple art. That journey led her a few years later to organize an exhibition of South Indian painters. The Hungarian dealer who bought many pieces admired her curation. He advised her to “buy what you love and what you can afford.” So she became a collector. Is that why I’m here? Am I collecting Digby?

After a long while she spots Digby emerging from the fourth ratha like a rabbit out of a hat. He sees her and a flash of worry snags his smile—has he kept her waiting? They walk north through the dunes to where the driver waits with a hamper in the shade under a portia tree. She spreads out a blanket. Facing them is a massive yellow sandstone boulder, fifty feet tall and twice as long, its surface a sprawling narrative of gods, humans, and animals. Digby gazes at the panel while demolishing her tomato-and-chutney sandwiches, unselfconscious for once. “What’s this, then?” he says, still chewing.

“Descent of the Ganges. That cleft is the Ganga, flowing down in answer to the king’s prayers, but if it fell directly to earth it would shatter the world, so Shiva lets it fall through his hair—see him with the trident? Those flying pairs on the top are my favorite. Gandharvas. Demigods. I love how they float effortlessly. And you see laborers, dwarves, sadhus . . . See the cat standing on its hind legs, pretending to be a sage? And mice coming to worship? It’s got humor, drama, something new each time.”

Digby hurriedly finishes his sandwich, reaching for his sketchbook. “Might we stay here a bit?”

“Of course! I have my book.” She rests against the tree and opens her novel.

She wakes to find Digby studying her. When did she fall asleep? She sits up. She extends a hand. “May I?” He hesitates, then yields his sketchbook. He’s recorded quick impressions, three to four per page. His draftsman’s eye coupled with his anatomical knowledge offers a precise shorthand of what he sees.

“My word, you’ve been busty!—Sorry, busy! I swear, I meant busy.” He hasn’t exaggerated the breasts any more than the sculptors have, but still, his pencil on white paper favors them. He’s captured all the hand gestures, the mudras—a vocabulary for dancers. “Digby, I’m speechless. Such a talent!”

She turns to a page of a woman with tinted glasses and the tiniest gap between her lips that sip the air as she sleeps. She feels like a voyeur peering at a temple voluptuary in repose. Her image on paper alongside the rock-hewn figures has fused the centuries. She studies this other self. Flattery isn’t the right word for his portrait. It’s empathy—the same quality in the sculptures that surround them. The ancient artists were devotees above all else. Without love of their subject, they’d just be cutting stone; their adoration is what brings it to life. She feels her face flushing. Digby’s an innocent, but he’s skilled in the female form from hours of careful regard along with the macabre intimacy afforded his profession.

Digby looks on anxiously. “I like it,” she says, sounding like someone she barely knows. “You have a gift . . .” Has Claude ever come close to paying her this kind of a tribute? She’s overcome by a desperate urge to break free of her present life.

“Escape,” she hears Digby say, as though he’s reading her mind.

She blushes again. “I beg your pardon?”

“It’s an escape. Not a gift. As a boy, I’d draw worlds that I imagined were happier than mine. Faces. Postures. Exactly what I’m seeing here.”

Did the desire to create come with the desire to take apart? To put back together again? “Escaping what, Digby?”

His features become as still as sandstone. It’s as if she touched the scar again. At last he says, in too bright a voice that deflects further probing, “They weren’t shy about the body, were they? That comes across. They were comfortable in their own skin.” He looks directly at her.

She nods. “Very true. I visited the Khajuraho temples up north with my ayah, Janaki. Astonishing sculptures of intimate couples, courtesans . . . well, let’s say nothing is left to the imagination. The pilgrims visiting would have been scandalized to see that on a cinema poster. But on a temple wall it’s sacred. The sculptures simply echo their scriptures. ‘This is life’ is the message.”

“It wouldnae be right in the High Kirk o’ Glasgow, that’s for sure!” Digby says, deliberately letting his accent twist past his usual vigilance. He is rewarded by her laughter. “Seriously,” he continues. “I never liked that Christianity begins by telling us we’re sinners. If I had a penny for the times my Nana said to me that all boys were thieving, lying connivers, and that I’d be no exception . . . Sorry, Celeste. I hope my beliefs, or lack of them, don’t offend you.”

She shakes her head. After her parents’ deaths, how was she to hold to their faith? She and Digby are surrounded by ghosts, and not just those of the ancient sculptors who left their mark on stone.

“Digby, how did your parents die?” Her question floats in the air like one of the gandharvas. Digby’s features turn dark; a little boy trying to be stoic in the face of the unspeakable. “Forget I asked that, would you?” she says. “Forget it.”

Digby’s lips part as if to speak. But then he presses them together.

On the drive back home they are both silent. She feels the afterglow of traveling back in time, which is the gift Mahabalipuram offers its visitors. She worries about her companion. They’re both cut from the fabric of loss. She steals a glance at him, at the firm chin, the wiry, strong shoulders. He’s not made of bone china, for goodness’ sake. He’ll be all right.

“Celeste . . .” Digby says when they reach his quarters, his voice hoarse from the silence that piled up on the drive back.

She reaches over and takes his hand before he can say more. “Digby, thank you so much for a lovely day.”

“That’s what I was going to say!” he protests.

She smiles, though she’s overcome by sadness and a peculiar longing. She squeezes his fingers, keeping her body reined in, upright. She looks down at their hands.

“You’re a good man, Digby,” she says. “Goodbye. There, I said it for both of us.”