The Covenant of Water

1935, Madras

At four thirty, as Celeste takes her tea in the cool of the library just off the living room, she sees the Model T pull up. Claude tumbles out. He bumps into the stationary Rolls, bounces off it to knock over the potted jasmine on his way indoors. He’s drinking more recklessly, starting from the moment he gets up, she suspects. When Claude sees her, he’s surprised. He vainly attempts to gather himself, but his eyes are swimming.

“How was your day?” he says, enunciating too carefully, and still managing to slur. She cannot conceal her revulsion. “What the hell are you looking at?” he says at last, in an ugly voice, giving up all pretense of politeness, not waiting for the driver to withdraw.

In the past she could count on his civility, no matter what else was going on. Wasn’t that the mark of an English education, as opposed to her chee-chee one? He might be planning to draw and quarter her, but till such time, he’ll pull out the chair for her at dinner.

“Get me a drink, Celeste,” he says. He looms over her.

The absence of “darling” is a relief. She rises to get away, disgusted by this proximity to him. Claude assumes she’s headed to the drinks cart and says magnanimously, “Pour yourself one.”

“No, it’s much too early,” she says. “Get a hold of yourself, Claude. You hardly need another drink.”

She might as well have slapped him.

“Celeste!” he shouts, pointing a sweeping finger that seeks to find her, swaying, as he spins around. “I’ll have you know—” But he loses his balance and falls, striking his head on the coffee table. He touches his forehead with his hand; his fingers come away bloody. “Oh, God!” he says, in a frightened voice, and then throws up over the coffee table.

He looks up pitifully at her, a string of saliva hanging off his lips.

She gives a bitter laugh. “Claude, your only real talent used to be that you could hold your whisky. I don’t know why I stayed with you so long.” And she walks out and mounts her bicycle. There is someone else she must be honest with.

It’s dusk when she pushes through the door to Digby’s quarters, startling him. He’s in his studio, bare-chested, cleaning his brushes with turpentine. A paraffin candle throws a ghostly light on the still life he has arranged: an eccentric earthen pot and three mangoes on the wooden worktable. Next to the pot, an emerald silk sari looks casually tossed on the table, so that a part of it cascades down the leg like a waterfall, and the excess folds form a careless bouquet on the floor.

She drains a glass of drinking water. When she studies Digby’s face she senses a change. Did they get to him? She surveys the room, a long sweeping look, as though trying to memorize it, and then turns to Digby.

Digby sees her expression, and he understands at once that she has come to say goodbye. His insides turn to stone. A pike has been shoved just under his rib cage, into his solar plexus: Is she part of the plot?

At long last, she says, “Digby.” Her eyes glisten with tears. “I—”

“Don’t! Not yet. Wait . . . don’t tell me.” He moves closer, breathing in her scent, seeing moisture on her brow, the circumferential groove left by her hat. In medical school he’d seen Harry the Alienist perform, dragging people out of the audience and then, finger on his temple, revealing startling personal details about them. “You’ve decided to stay with Claude, haven’t you?” he says, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice.

“No. Just the opposite.”

He’s thrown off his script. His features lighten.

“Digby, I came to tell you that Claude plans to file for divorce and will name you as—”

“I know.” It’s her turn to be surprised.

“What? How?”

“I got an anonymous letter warning me. At the Adyar Club. Someone with no sympathy for your husband. But what I want to know, Celeste, is how does Claude know?”

Her laugh sounds like the crack of a whip. “He doesn’t know about us, Digby! It’s just a stratagem. Since he can’t threaten you directly, he’ll sacrifice me to get at you.”

“Wait . . . Is that why you came here the first time we . . . ? The day you showed up unexpectedly? Did you come on his behalf to tell me not to testify?”

“God, no! I came to warn you. The moment he told me what he meant to do—make me an adulteress to suit him—I was furious. I walked out on him. I rode my bicycle to get away. I ended up here. Yes, I intended to warn you.” A flash of anger enters her voice. “I never got to it, if you recall.”

Digby’s words are loaded with venom. “Why didn’t you speak up? Did you decide you might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb? Did you say to yourself, ‘I’ll sleep with old Digs before he’s silenced’? Maybe you’re still working for him—” Digby’s voice rises.

“Stop it, Digby!” She is calm, commanding . . . and wounded by his words. “If you’re going to shout, I’m leaving. I’ve had enough of that for today.” She stands tall, upright, her nail beds turning white as she clasps her purse, as though it assures her safe passage to whatever is next. In the light of the paraffin candle she’s like an artist’s model. The artist stares back.

“I’m sorry,” he says, penitent and sheepish.

“Claude will do anything to preserve himself, including sacrificing me. Anything to make you look bad. But he thinks it won’t come to that. He thinks if he names you then you’ll buckle—I pray you don’t. Maybe he thought that I’d buckle and come plead with you. But it won’t work, not on me. I want the divorce . . .”

Does he dare feel jubilant? Why does her face not mirror his excitement?

“Celeste . . . Then there’s nothing stopping us . . . we can be together.”

She shakes her head.

“Celeste, I don’t understand . . . I love you. I’ve never said that to another living human being but my mother. I love you.”

“Digby, I’d say I love you too. But I have no idea who ‘I’ is. I need to know. I want a life of my own, and on my own in order to find out.” His eyes are like a child’s, pleading with her. She puts her hand out to his cheek, but he withdraws.

“Where will you go?”

She sighs. “I’ve been planning for this, even if I didn’t know my leaving would take this shape. I’ve put away a bit of money. It isn’t much, but after nearly twenty years it isn’t trivial. I have jewelry he gave me in the early years. I have a warehouse full of art, and I know which pieces are worth something now and which will be worth something in the future. I’ll take a room at the Theosophical Society. Janaki and I, if left to ourselves, can live very simply and happily. The only hold he had on me was the children, but they’re old enough, I hope, to see through him. They’re old enough to want to get to know me. Once I find out who I am.”

Digby digests her words. She doesn’t need him—isn’t that what she’s saying? He’s angry with himself for allowing his dreams to sail so far ahead of her.

The door opens and Muthu enters, clearly surprised to see Celeste, to see them both standing there facing each other like combatants. He brings his palms together. “Good evening, Missy, I’m not hearing you came.”

“Muthu,” she says, nodding, not taking her eyes off Digby.

Muthu looks from one to the other. “Digby Saar . . . I’m going to my native. As before I mentioning? I gone two days only.” Digby is still staring at Celeste. Muthu turns to her. “Missy is liking something to eat before I go? Shall I make samosa?”

“Muthu,” she sighs, her voice sounding suddenly very tired, very husky. “Missy is liking a double whisky, please. And one for him too.”

“Yes, Missy!” Muthu says automatically, but doesn’t move. She finally turns to him, raising her eyebrows.

“Muthu?” she says.

“Sorry, Missy . . . Whisky we’re not having.”

“Gin, then?”

He shakes his head. “Doctor Saar not drinking—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Digby—” says Celeste, her voice rising in a manner that startles all of them.

“But whisky soon coming, Missy!” Muthu interjects hastily, mortified that he got Digby into trouble. He runs out the back.

The two of them stand there. They hear raised voices outside, Muthu speaking in angry tones that don’t sound like him. Muthu returns, a little disheveled, bearing a tray with two glasses, an ice bucket, a soda dispenser, and a bottle of whisky that is three-­quarters full, as if it had been waiting just outside the door. He sets it down, avoiding Digby’s astonished stare.

“Good man, Muthu,” Celeste says. She suspects that Muthu walked into the neighbor’s home and grabbed their drinks tray.

“Yes, Missy,” Muthu says, as he steps behind Celeste and opens the drawer where Digby keeps money, something Muthu has never done before. He counts out some bills, holds them up to Digby. “Saar, I am explaining after. Please just leaving tray and everything in front verandah, Saar. I am back in two days.”

Muthu leaves by the front door and at once they hear a man shouting in Tamil, a woman’s raised voice too, and Muthu placating them. The shouts subside into grumbles.

Celeste pours. She hands Digby his glass. They have been standing all this time.

Wounded, unable to meet her gaze, Digby takes his drink. Until a few minutes ago, he could not imagine a life without Celeste. Yet she can readily imagine a life without him, one in which he doesn’t exist. How is a dream that involves two people to be sustained by one?

Belatedly, he touches her glass with the rim of his. He gulps it down. The whisky burns. How strange to try to drown pain with fire. Celeste’s left cheek and forehead are lit by the paraffin candle, an orange glow as if filtered through layers of muslin, producing ochre and mustard tones that creep in from the side before sinking into her dark orbits. She looks as if she is about to speak. But he doesn’t want to hear it. He stops her mouth with his lips.

He slowly unbuttons her dress, right there before the easel, as if he might pin her to it. In the face of her naked beauty, the sting of the message she carries is diminished. She is not just Celeste whose words grieve him, but she is also a miracle of physiology, a magnificent body housing its constellation of organs under the confines of her skin. Compared to their messy, roiling emotions, the body is always steadfast, reassuring.

He dips his index finger in the undiluted paint on his palette: Rose Madder Genuine. Celeste draws in her breath as his finger hovers over her chest. Her eyes become wide. Will he do it? She sighs when the finger touches her. Yes, he will. He will trace out her organs, working slowly to postpone the inevitable—that she will leave him. He outlines the left ventricle, peeking out from behind her breastbone and reaching her nipple. Should he have used yellow? Her traitor’s heart? No, that’s too harsh. Besides, for all its metaphorical freight, a heart is a singularly unimaginative organ, two pumps in a series, one pushing blood through the lungs and the other through the rest of the body. Hers is no different from his.

She could resist if she chose to, but she does not, caught up in his worship, aware of the pain she has caused him and relieved to move past words. She sips from her glass, watching him. He outlines the arch of the aorta. Now he takes the glass from her and lays her gently on the tarpaulin on the floor, smiling. He rests the pallet on her pelvis, on the mons veneris, where it wobbles precariously. The candlelight shivers across her skin. He outlines the liver, high on her right side, crossing her nipple at the fifth intercostal space. She has gooseflesh and her nipple is erect. Her breathing accelerates. Next, the spleen, the kidneys.

He gazes down at the masterpiece that is her body, which he has now adorned. Or has he defiled it? He has turned her inside out. But suddenly he feels contrite. He has gone too far. Was it the whisky? He is unaccustomed to spirits.

“Forgive me,” he says. “It hurts me to think that we may not have a life together. But it doesn’t stop me loving you.” He tastes tears on her lips, tears that could be his too.

She raises her head to look at what he has done, the canvas of herself. She shakes her head in amazement. She whispers, “You’ve helped me find myself, do you know?”

Then why leave me? I’d adore your body for the rest of your life. He loves her enough not to say it. Her mind is made up. He is both aroused and resentful that she would walk away from what they have. She reads his state. She pulls him down. She pulls him in.

Afterward, they collapse, drenched in colored sweat, their release like a drug that keeps them from moving from the tarp on the unyielding floor and going to his bed. They drift off, their bodies juxtaposed, a smeared canvas.

Why am I leaving him? There was a reason, but sleep overtakes Celeste before she can remember. She turns to one side, feeling chilled as the sweat evaporates. She drags the emerald sari off the table—his still life be damned—and she covers herself.

When Digby wakes, his head pounds; it is a huge effort to open his eyes. The room is unusually bright, a dancing ethereal haze. Pigments riot over his naked body, the violence of it unsettling.

He smells smoke. He turns his head and the mystery is solved: they must have knocked over the paraffin candle in their sleep. He scrabbles around to find it, but then he notices, as if from afar, an optical illusion: his hand is blue and the skin hangs down, like honey pouring off a ledge. All is blue: the floor, the tarp on which he sleeps, the easel, the canvas on it. He wants to laugh at the strange sight. Laugh in disbelief. The melted paraffin has found a mound of turpentine-soaked rags, and blue flames scale the walls.

He turns to see an even stranger sight: the silk sari he uses as a backdrop is on the floor, but it is alive, writhing. It is coral and ginger and olive green, and beneath it, he registers at last, is Celeste, fighting to break free. He lunges for the sari, pulling it away even as the burning, melting silk sticks to his flesh, but he refuses to let her go. If he can only peel it off, restore the beautiful cloth to where it sat draped next to the earthen pot, next to the fruit, its folds spilling to the floor, if he can only restore it to the way it was, the way it should be—Still Life with Mangoes—then all will be well. He is sure of it.