The Covenant of Water

1923, Parambil

When she is thirty-five, in the year of our Lord 1923, she’s pregnant again. It feels like a miracle. Her first clue is a metallic taste in her mouth, followed by her appetite walking away. When she tells her husband, he seems startled. She’s tempted to say, Don’t tell me you have no idea how it happened! But his worried expression stops her; there’ve been three miscarriages in the long years since Baby Mol was born, each bringing crushing sadness, a sense that she’s being punished for JoJo. Her husband’s fears are never spoken, but she knows how badly he wants a son to whom he can pass on the Parambil he created; a son who will care for his parents in their old age. If he is anxious, she’s at peace, confident this pregnancy will come to term. Her certainty must come from God. Has it really been fifteen years since she brought a child into the world? Her only sadness is that her mother isn’t with her. The cancer took her within two months of their visit to the doctor in Cochin.

When she’s in her seventh month, her center of gravity lowered, her feet spreading out as she walks, she finds her husband seated on the verandah after dinner, staring at the moonlit yard. His expression is dreamy, a rare sight. In profile he’s ageless, though his hair is receding and mostly gray and he hears poorly. At sixty-three, he still pitches in to repair a bund, or dig an irrigation channel. He makes room for her, smiling. Of late, he’s often troubled by headache, though he never complains; she knows only from the set of his jaw, his furrowed brow, and because he’ll quietly take to bed with a wet cloth over his eyes.

She eases down beside him, her back aching, the baby pressing down on her. She remarks on her swollen feet, and that she can’t imagine how Odat Kochamma had ten children . . . She has hungrily watched Shamuel and his wife Sara in their unguarded moments, seen their back-and-forth, their talking over each other—even their arguing feels intimate. But she must carry speech for both herself and her husband.

He watches her lips so as not to miss a word. His feet swing almost imperceptibly in time with his heartbeat. “Why do you speak so little, my husband?” she says after a while. He answers wordlessly by lifting and slowly lowering both his eyebrows and shoulders. Who knows? She shakes him in annoyance. It’s like trying to shake the trunk of a banyan tree.

He says, “Since you fill the spaces where I might drop in some words . . . I keep quiet.”

She makes to rise, offended, but laughing silently, he pulls her into him. His laughter, silent or otherwise, is even rarer than his speech, and she especially loves it when it leaves his body, unguarded and booming. His arms encircle her. She laughs with him. Why should she be self-conscious about anyone seeing them embrace? His nephews—the twins—walk together holding hands (even if their spouses are at each other’s throats); heading to church, she sees women hold hands. But married couples stay conspicuously apart, as if to deny that in the dark they touch and more.

He releases her, but his shoulder still presses against hers. She waits. It’s too easy to snuff out what he might say by speaking first. “I never learned to read,” he says at last. “But I learned that ignorance is never revealed if one holds one’s tongue. To speak is what removes all doubts.” You aren’t ignorant! You’re wise, my husband. His confession sits between them in the friendly twilight. She puts her arms around him as if to enfold him, but she can no more do this than wrap her arms around Damodaran.

In the throes of labor, she screams her resentment that men should be spared what they brought about, just as she resents this thankless infant she’s grown within her who now wants to split her in two. But then, when that minuscule mouth latches onto her nipple, she feels a rush of both colostrum and forgiveness, the latter bringing a kind of amnesia. Why else consent to sleep once more with the man who caused such pain?

After his first squawking breath, her baby boy looks around at the world of Parambil with an alert, serious expression, frowning in concentration. She’d already decided (with her husband’s blessing) that she’d name him after her father, Philip. But her newborn’s scholarly expression makes her record his baptismal name as Philipose. She could have chosen “Peelipose,” “Pothen,” “Poonan”—all local variants of “Philip.” But she likes “Philipose” for its echo of ancient Galilee, its soothing last syllable that sounds like flowing water. She prays he will know the pleasure of being carried by a current, then striking back to shore.

His baptismal name will be used in school and in anything official. She prays it won’t be altered into some diminutive before then. Too many children get a pet name early that they can never shake: “Reji,” “Biju,” “Sajan,” “Renju,” “Tara,” or “Libni,” to which a tail might be affixed: “mon” (little boy) or “mol” (little girl) or the genderless “baby” or “kutty” (child). Baby Mol has two tails in lieu of her Christian name, which sits abandoned in the birth register. When Philipose is middle-aged, younger people will address him with a respectful suffix: Philipose Achayen or Philipochayen (and for a woman it might be Kochamma or Chechi or Chedethi). When he’s a father, he’ll be Appachen, or Appa to his children, just as he’ll soon call his mother Ammachi or Amma. Confusion is inevitable. She heard of a man known to his family as Baby Kutty and to his adult friends as Goodyear Baby, though he’d left that company after his marriage and now worked for the tax office in Jaipur. His wife’s relatives knew him as Jaipur Baby. His wife’s portly uncle arrived in Jaipur after a long journey and went seeking him in the tax office and became enraged when the staff said no Jaipur Baby worked there; the police were called. When George Cherian Kurian (aka Jaipur Baby) heard of this and went to post bond, he couldn’t find the uncle because he only knew him as Thadiyan Baby (fat baby) and not by the name he was booked under, Joseph Chirayaparamb George.

A few weeks after she gives birth to Philipose, her husband takes to bed for five days with a crippling headache, along with alarming projectile vomiting. She’s beside herself with worry, trying to nurse the child while rubbing oil on her husband’s brow, and reassuring Baby Mol, who is upset by her father’s state. Shamuel camps outside the thamb’ran’s room, refusing to go home. The vaidyan’s pills and poultices make no difference. She wants to take her husband to Cochin, to the sa’ippu doctor Rune, but he refuses to travel by boat. Then, as mysteriously as it began, the headache eases, but in its wake he has a droop on the left side of his face; he cannot quite close the left eye, and water dribbles out of that corner of his mouth. It bothers her more than it bothers him. He takes off to the fields. Shamuel reports the thamb’ran is working as hard as ever, though he’s now stone deaf in his left ear.

Her husband’s face lights up every time he sees his newborn son, but his smile is lopsided; she learns to look at the right side for his true expression. There’s something new in his eyes; at first, she thinks it’s sadness. Is he recalling the fate of his first son? No, it’s anxiety, not sadness; anxiety untethered to anything she can put her finger on, and it troubles her. Baby Mol too is worried, abandoning her bench to trail after her father when he’s in the house, or to perch on his bed, silent, staying there until her mother takes her to bed.

When Philipose is a year old, Big Ammachi cannot deny the truth about her little boy: he bathes willingly, but alarms her whenever she empties the pail over his head: his eyes close but then open to reveal his rolling eyeballs, and often his limbs turn floppy. Despite this, and unlike JoJo, he laughs, as though he welcomes the disorientation. He thinks it’s a game. His swimmy eyes urge her to do it again. When he’s big enough for her to put him in the shallow uruli, the giant unused vessel meant for cooking payasam on festive occasions, he splashes with pleasure, laughing as the vertigo tumbles him out of the uruli onto the muttam. Like a drunken sailor, he gathers himself and crawls back in. His shocked parents watch in disbelief.

Big Ammachi says to her husband, “I cannot lose this beautiful child.”

“Then let him live. Don’t imprison him,” he says vehemently. “That’s how my older brother could take advantage of me. Because my mother never let me go anywhere. Did I tell you that story?” Has he truly forgotten? “What I don’t understand is why my son seeks out water when it is no friend of his,” he concludes.

A few months later, in the evening, while Odat Kochamma looks after Philipose, Big Ammachi escapes to plunge into the river. Unlike her husband and son, nothing restores or renews her more than this. Nearing the house on her way back, she hears a repetitive scraping sound. She finds her husband squatting and digging half-heartedly with a stick at the edge of the muttam. For a moment, she feels she’s watching a child at play, but his face is serious.

“Why are you digging? That too after your bath!” He looks up. For the briefest moment it’s as though he has no idea who she is. He rises and staggers. But for a few stuttering steps he’d fall to the ground. Her heart rises to her mouth. She’s peering into the future.

In the ensuing weeks, it happens again: she finds him scraping at the soil, but he doesn’t say why. It prompts her to say to Shamuel, “Keep a close eye on your thamb’ran.”

He’s startled. “What’s happened? Why do you say that?” She doesn’t answer, just looks at him. “There’s nothing wrong with him,” Shamuel says vehemently. “His face is tired on one side, but who needs two sides? That’s what I tell him. One is enough.”

“Well, he’s not a young man. How old are you, Shamuel?” Shamuel’s hair is gray, and his mustache, where it’s not yellow from the beedi, is white. The wrinkles around his eyes are as plentiful as Damodaran’s.

Shamuel makes a twisting motion with his wrist. “At least thirty years, maybe more,” he says. She bursts out laughing, and then he does too—a rare sound for both of them these days.

She decides to tell Shamuel about the digging. It’s as though she struck him.

When he finds his tongue he says, “Maybe thamb’ran is looking for coins that he buried. Before we built the ara we did that. There may be one, or one hundred coins. Gold, silver, brass,” he says, taking refuge in nouns, which he prefers to numbers.

“You really think there’s buried treasure?” she asks.

He avoids her gaze and his voice trembles. “Why ask what I think? I think only whatever the thamb’ran thinks.”

His fear is palpable. For his forefathers there was never certainty of shelter or of food. They were indentured laborers to a household, forever paying off ancestral debts, but that practice is now illegal. Shamuel gets paid for his labor and he owns the plot his house sits on. He could work anywhere. But he can’t imagine working for anyone else. Her heart breaks for this man who for all his years has been at her husband’s side, his shadow. She senses Shamuel’s enormous love for her husband. Without the thamb’ran, what happens to the shadow? If he can’t depend on the thamb’ran, he must depend on her.

A few days later, she stands holding Philipose on the verandah in the late afternoon while they watch Damo. Suddenly the hairs on the nape of her neck rise and she senses a hulking presence behind her. It can’t be Damo and yet it is the same sensation of an immense form throwing a shadow over her. She turns to see her husband. He looks over her shoulder to where Damodaran feeds noisily, kicking his leaf pile around. Standing beside her father is Baby Mol, dabbing at her face with both hands. Baby Mol, who never cries, doesn’t understand the nature of tears, or why they are salty, and why they won’t cease.

Damo becomes very still, eyeing the thamb’ran. The two old giants face off, expressionless, and for a moment Big Ammachi imagines they’ll charge and lock tusks. Her husband puts a hand on her—not for support, but to indicate possession.

“What’s he want?” he says in a low voice, saliva glinting at one corner of his mouth.

“What do you mean ‘want’? It’s our Damodaran!”

“No, it isn’t. It’s some other elephant. Send him away.” He walks off, meandering a bit before finding his way to his room, thanks to Baby Mol.

At dinner time, Damodaran lumbers up to the house, ignoring the fresh coconut fronds Unni gathered for him. He seems to be waiting for the thamb’ran to emerge, perhaps to complain about being called an impostor. Big Ammachi takes a bucket of rice and ghee to Damo. He ignores it.

She makes her husband’s favorite dish, erechi olarthiyathu. When he sits down at the table for dinner, on the verandah of the old section of the house, he doesn’t seem to notice that Damo has made his way there, though Damo is impossible to ignore. As usual, as soon as the sizzling meat touches the banana leaf, her husband can’t resist sampling it before she can serve rice. But then, to her utter astonishment, he spits it out. Since his lips don’t seal well, he has a mess on his chin. He flings what’s on the leaf to the muttam.

“This isn’t fit for dogs!”

Caesar, their newest pye-dog, disagrees, racing up to lick the meat cubes off the pebbles. Damodaran steps closer.

“Ayo! Why did you do that?” She’s never before raised her voice to her husband. She tastes the meat. “For goodness’ sake, there’s nothing wrong with this! What got into you? I’ve been frying this dish just this way for nearly a quarter century!”

“Aah, isn’t that my point? You’ve been making this dish for so long. You think by now you wouldn’t make a careless mistake. So it must be deliberate.”

She looks at him in disbelief. This man who hardly speaks, and never harshly, now lances her with his words. “All these years I wanted you to talk more! I should’ve been grateful for your silence.” She turns her back and walks away seething, another first. She finds Damo looking right at her, his trunk held curled in his mouth. Forgive your husband, he knows not what he does. She hears it as clearly as if she’d heard a human voice.

Heeding this, she returns from the kitchen with vegetable, and pickle. He hardly eats. She holds the kindi for him, directing the spout over his fingers as he rinses off. He walks stiffly to his room, passing Baby Mol as he does so. Big Ammachi realizes that for once, Baby Mol wasn’t by her father’s side at dinner. Instead, she’d retreated to her bench. Her tears are gone and she’s happy, chattering to her dolls instead of obsessively tailing her father. He pauses, looking down at Baby Mol, expecting his daughter to latch onto him as she’s done for days now. But Baby Mol looks right through him.

Big Ammachi checks on her husband after covering the embers in the kitchen. She’s still smarting from earlier. He’s in bed, staring at the ceiling. She sits by him. He looks at her and asks if he can have some water. The glass is by his side. She holds it out to him. He rises up and, in the manner of a child, he covers her fingers on the glass with both his hands. His hands are powerful, but gnarled and weathered by age, callused from the trees he has climbed, and the ropes, axes, and shovels he has wielded. Together they raise the glass to his mouth, and he drinks. Her hand, dwarfed by his, is no longer that of the girl who came to Parambil a lifetime ago; it bears scars from the sparks of countless wood fires, and from splattering oil. Her knobby fingers show the wear and tear of endless chopping, grinding, peeling, mincing, pickling . . . Their overlapping hands bracket their many years together as husband and wife. When not a drop remains, he releases his grip, lies back down, sighs, and closes his eyes.

She leaves him after a while. She’ll check on him after putting Baby Mol and Philipose to bed. But despite her best intentions she falls asleep with her children. She wakes up in the middle of the night and gets up to look in on her husband as has been her habit for some months now. His dark form is very still. When she touches him, his skin is cold. Even before she lights the lamp, she knows he’s gone.

His face is still, his expression troubled and penitent. In the silence, she feels her heart beating furiously, feels it strain at its moorings, trying to tear free of her chest and beat for him, because the heart of Parambil that toiled for so many years cannot do it any longer.

Weeping quietly, she climbs onto the bed and lies next to her husband, gazing at the face she’d first glimpsed at the altar and had been terrified of, and then loved so fiercely, her silent husband who’d been so steadfast in his love for her. All around her, the sounds of the land he made his and where he lived his life feel sharper and exaggerated: the chirp of crickets, the croaking of frogs, the rustle of foliage. Then she hears a prolonged trumpet, a lament from Damo for the man who rescued him when he was wounded, for a good man who is no more.

Her husband would be pleased that he didn’t have to receive or converse with the many mourners who stream into the house, all the relatives and the craftsmen whose lives and fortunes he altered so profoundly. The Nairs from the tharavad on the edge of Parambil come to pay their respects. All the pulayar are there too, from every house, standing silent on the muttam, their faces dark with sadness. Shamuel is chief among them, shattered and weeping—Shamuel whom she’d led inside to the bedroom despite his protests, so he could take his final leave of the thamb’ran he worshipped. Her husband would have been impatient with the funeral, wanting nothing more than to be in the earth he so loved, to lie beside his first wife and his firstborn son.

A few weeks after they bury him, as life at Parambil struggles to find its new normal, she hears the sounds of digging and scratching in the courtyard just as she’s about to fall asleep. It stops. The next night, she hears it once more. She goes out to sit on the verandah, facing the sound. “Listen,” she says, “you must forgive me. I chastise myself for not coming to you after putting the children to bed. I fell asleep. I’m sorry we argued at dinner. I overreacted. Yes, I too wish it had been different. But it was just one night out of so many that were perfect, was it not? I hoped for many more perfect nights but each was a blessing. And listen: I forgive you. After a lifetime of goodness together, you were more than entitled to a tantrum. So be at peace!”

She listens. She knows he has heard her. Because, as was always his way, he expresses his love for her the only way he knows how: through his silence.