The Covenant of Water

1926, Parambil

When her son is nearly three, she takes him by boat to Parumala Church, where Mar Gregorios, the only saint of the Saint Thomas Christians, is entombed. Philipose is delighted by his first boat ride, but she keeps a close eye on him. Neither her husband nor JoJo could ever be persuaded to get on a boat, whereas this one cannot see water without wanting to challenge it. His friends dart around the pond like fish. He doesn’t understand why he is unable to do the same. It makes him fiercely determined like a fire ant to overcome the obstacle. His many attempts at “swimming” terrify his mother; his failures are pathetic to watch.

The saint’s tomb is to one side of the nave of Parumala Church. Above it is a life-size photograph of Mar Gregorios; this image (or else the widely reproduced portrait by the artist Raja Ravi Varma) is on calendars and framed posters in every Saint Thomas Christian household. Mar Gregorios’s beard outlines delicate lips, and his white sidelocks frame a handsome, kindly face with eyes that look surprisingly youthful. He alone had advocated for the pulayar to be converted and welcomed into their churches, but it didn’t happen in his lifetime. She doesn’t think it will happen in hers.

Her little boy is awestruck by the church, and more so by the saint’s tomb with the hundreds of candles before it. He tugs at his mother’s mundu. “Ammachi, ask him to help me swim.” His mother doesn’t hear him; she stands with her head covered, gazing up into the saint’s face. She’s in a trance.

Mar Gregorios looks directly at her, smiling. Really? You came all this way for me to put a spell on the boy?

She’s stunned. She heard his voice, but when she looks around, she sees that clearly no one else did.

Mar Gregorios has seen right through her. She cannot hold the saint’s gaze. “Yes,” she says. “It’s true. You heard what the boy said. He’s so determined. What am I to do? The boy has lost his father. I’m desperate!”

One of the legends about Mar Gregorios is that he had wanted to cross the river flowing past this very church to visit a parishioner on the other bank. But near the jetty, three high-spirited women were bathing in the shallows, their wet clothes clinging to them, their shrieks and laughter floating in the air like festive ribbons. Out of modesty he retreated to the church. Half an hour later, they were still there. He gave up, muttering to himself, “Stay in the water then. I’ll go tomorrow.” That night his deacon reported that three women seemed unable to get out of the river. Mar Gregorios felt remorse for his casual words. He fell to his knees and prayed, then said to the deacon, “Tell them they can come out now.” And they did.

Big Ammachi is there to shamelessly ask for the inverse: that Mar Gregorios prevent her only son from stepping into the river. “I’m a widow with two young ones to raise. On top of that I must worry about this boy, who, just like his father, is in danger around water. It’s a Condition they were born with. I already lost one son to water. But this one is determined to swim. Please, I beg you. What if five words from you, ‘Stay out of the water,’ mean he’ll live long and glorify God?”

She hears no answer.

Philipose is frightened to see his mother, her face ghost-lit by the rows of candles before the tomb, talking to the saint’s photograph.

On their way home she tells Philipose, “Mar Gregorios watches over you every day, monay. You heard me make a vow before his tomb, didn’t you? I vowed that I would never let you get into water without someone by your side. If you do then harm will come to your mother.” That part is true. She would die if something happened to him. “Will you help me keep my vow? Never go alone?”

“Even after I learn to swim?”

“Yes, even then. Forever. Never swim alone. A vow cannot be broken.”

He’s shaken by the thought of harm coming to his mother. “I promise, Ammachi,” he says earnestly. She will often remind him of their visit and of her vow and his.

When he turns five, her little boy goes to their new “school” for three hours a day; it’s just a shed with a thatched roof, open on three sides. On their first day, Philipose and the five other new students bring betel leaves, areca nut, and a coin for the kaniyan, who receives the gift and then takes each child’s right index finger and traces the first letter of the alphabet in a thali filled with rice grains. This school is her creation, a place to keep the children out of trouble for a few hours, teach them their letters. The pupils—the children and grandchildren of the Parambil families, as well as those of the ashari, the potter, the blacksmith, and the goldsmith—will learn their alphabet.

The kaniyan is a small, fussy, bald man with a shiny wen, or cyst, on top of his dome that Baby Mol labels a “Baby God.” The kaniyan scrapes by reading horoscopes for prospective brides and grooms. Teaching gives him some welcome additional income. Some Brahmins think of the kaniyan caste of astrologers and teachers as pretenders or pseudo-Brahmins, but this kaniyan doesn’t let such prejudice bother him.

As soon as Big Ammachi is out of sight, Joppan, the son of Shamuel pulayan, emerges from the plantain grove where he’s been hiding. He winks at Philipose and walks into the classroom. The two are playmates and best friends. Since Joppan is four years older, he’s also Philipose’s official minder. Whenever they march about with arms around each other’s shoulders they look like twins, especially from a distance, because Joppan is short for his age.

Joppan carries a leaf that isn’t really a betel leaf, a stone that’s meant to stand in for an areca nut, and a coin he carved out of wood. He steps inside the classroom, bare-chested, holding out his gifts, displaying his strong teeth, his hair slicked back with water but already springing up like trampled grass.

The kaniyan says, “Ah ha! So you want to study, is it?” The kaniyan’s smile is unnatural, the wen on his scalp getting turgid. “I’ll teach you. Stand there behind the threshold. Aah, good.” The kaniyan turns away then whirls back to crack his bamboo cane across Joppan’s thighs. Philipose’s cries of protest are drowned out by the kaniyan’s screams of “Upstart pulayan! Filth! Polluting dog! Don’t you know your place? What’s next? Would you like to bathe in the temple tank?” Joppan races out of reach, but turns around, disbelieving, his expression one of hurt, and shame. The others cringe to witness this. Joppan is their hero. No other boy has his self-confidence, or can swim across the river and back, or fearlessly kill a cobra. Some of the children (being little adults in the making) are secretly pleased by Joppan’s humiliation.

Joppan’s chest expands, and he bellows out in the loudspeaker voice of his for which he’s notorious: “TAKE THAT EGG ON YOUR HEAD AND EAT IT! WHO WANTS TO LEARN FROM AN IDIOT LIKE YOU?” This blasphemy carries to the paddy field and Shamuel raises his head. The kaniyan lunges, swinging his cane. Joppan feints one way and jumps in the other and the kaniyan stumbles. Joppan’s amplified guffaws as he struts off have the other children grinning. The teacher has a moment of doubt: Could Big Ammachi have sent the pulayan child? Parambil is known to give land to its pulayar, but does such eccentricity extend to educating them? She may pay my wages, but I’ll starve before I raise up children of the mud.

At home Philipose spills angry tears and tells his mother all. The world’s hypocrisy burns on his face. Big Ammachi holds her little boy and rocks him. She’s ashamed. The injustice he witnessed isn’t the kaniyan’s fault alone. Its roots are deep and so ancient that it feels like a law of nature, like rivers going to the sea. But the pain in those innocent eyes reminds her of what is so easy to forget: the caste system is an abomination. It is against everything in the Bible. Jesus chose poor fishermen and a tax collector as his disciples. And Paul said, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” They are far from being all one.

She tries to explain the caste structure simply to Philipose, conscious of how absurd it must sound: The Brahmins—or Nambudiris, as they are called in Travancore—are the highest caste, the priestly caste, and like European monarchs they owned much of the land by divine justification. The maharajah is of course a Brahmin. A Nambudiri has the privilege of free meals at any temple because there’s honor in feeding a Brahmin; they stay free at guest houses maintained at state expense. Only the oldest son in a Nambudiri joint house, or illam, can marry and inherit the property; he alone can take multiple wives and often does, well into his dotage. Sons who are not firstborn are only allowed informal unions with Nairs, the warrior caste who are just below the Nambudiris. Children of such unions are Nairs. The Nairs are upper-caste, and like the Nambudiris consider themselves polluted by contact with lower castes; they are the overseers for the vast Nambudiri holdings, but these days they are landowners themselves. On a lower rung than the Nambudiris and Nairs come the Ezhava—the craftsmen who were traditionally toddy tappers but increasingly are in the coir business, or are landowners. The lowest caste are the landless laborers: the pulayar and the cheruman (also called adivasis, parayar, or “untouchables”). The “tribals” in the hills are outside all caste hierarchy; their traditional bond with the land on which they lived, hunted, and farmed was never recorded on paper, a fact that newcomers from the plains easily took advantage of.

“As for us Christians, monay,” Big Ammachi says before he asks, “we slide between these layers.” Legend has it that the original families converted by Saint Thomas were Brahmins. Hindu rituals remain embedded in the Christian ones, as in the tiny gold minnu, shaped like a tulsi leaf, that her husband tied around her neck at her wedding; or the Vastu principles followed in building their houses. Christians haven’t rid themselves of casteism. In Parambil, just as in every other Christian household, a pulayan never enters the home; Big Ammachi serves Shamuel in a separate set of vessels—but surely, Philipose has already observed this.

What she doesn’t tell him is that the Saint Thomas Christians never tried to convert their pulayar. The English missionaries who arrived centuries after Saint Thomas knew only one caste in India—the heathen who had to be saved from damnation. The pulayar converted willingly, perhaps hoping that by embracing Christ they’d become equals with households like Parambil where they were employed or bonded. That never happened. They had to build their own churches with Anglican, or Church of South India (CSI), rites. “Ideas about caste are centuries old, so hard to change,” she says.

Her son’s face shows his disappointment in his mother, his disillusionment with his world. He walks away. She wants to call after him. You can’t walk across a lake just because you change its name to “land.” Labels matter. But he’s too young to understand. She thinks her heart will break.

The ashari, the potter, and the goldsmith call Shamuel out of his hut. “Your son needs a thrashing,” the potter says. “What made him think he can go to school? Don’t you teach him anything?” Shamuel stands there, mortified. He begs forgiveness, crossing his hands to tug at both his earlobes while bending his knees, a gesture of obeisance to make the Baby Ganesh smile. Later, Shamuel canes Joppan harder than the kaniyan did, shouting that Joppan has brought shame on the family—he wants those living upstream to hear. The only crying heard is that of the boy’s mother; the nine-year-old takes the hiding silently, and isn’t the least penitent. He retreats just like a wounded tiger slipping into the overgrowth. Joppan’s resentful eyes make Shamuel fearful. He isn’t afraid of his son, but afraid for him.

Big Ammachi could insist the kaniyan take Joppan as a pupil. But she knows he will quit, and even if he agreed, the parents of the other children would pull them out. The next day the kaniyan’s lessons begin in earnest, using the sandy ground as a blackboard. Big Ammachi sends for Joppan, but Shamuel says the boy is probably swimming somewhere. When Philipose comes home, he shows his mother the palm-leaf “book” in which the teacher wrote the first letters—a and aa, e and ee (അ and ആ, and എ and ഏ)—with a sharp nail. The next day another leaf will be bound to the previous ones with a string.

Later, she spots Philipose with Joppan, threading leaves to make Joppan his own book, and tracing letters in the sand for him to copy. Her joy vanishes when she sees the welts on Joppan’s back that are Shamuel’s doing. Why punish Joppan for a system he didn’t create? She tells Joppan she will be teaching him herself while the others are in school. She can’t undo the evils of casteism, but she can do this. In a year, the children will be ready to go on to the new government primary school near the church, where all will be allowed. A high school is going up behind it, and it will serve several surrounding towns and villages in the district.

Joppan is punctual, a quick learner and a grateful one. His swashbuckling demeanor is unchanged despite his beatings. But she can tell he yearns to be in class with his playmates. The day will come for both her son and Joppan when their studies end, and they will have to face the world, with all its duplicities.