The Covenant of Water

1933, Parambil

A ten-year-old boy who cannot claim the waters turns fiercely to the land. The potter lusts for blue alluvial clay on riverbanks, while the brickmaker submerges himself in shallow tributaries, basket in hand, filling his boat with river mud, not caring for any other kind. Philipose’s tastes are eclectic; with his prehensile toes he gauges the proportions of sand, clay, and silt. For feel underfoot, the pillowy sandy soil by the church is unsurpassed, a contrast to the unyielding red laterite near Parambil’s well. The granite-rich sod by his school is the color of altered blood and as cold as the headmaster’s handshake; yet this varietal, when ground and filtered and dried on paper, leaves vivid, chromatic stains. Tinkering like an alchemist, he arrives at a formula for ink that glitters on the page like no commercial brand and makes writing a pleasure. The final recipe includes crushed beetle shell, gooseberries, and a few drops from a bottle in which copper wire is suspended in human urine (his own).

Like his late father, he has become a prodigious walker. Let others be poled, rowed, or ferried to school. He will walk. Yes, call it a feud with water. He hasn’t lost his hunger to see the world. But he’ll skip the seven seas. A walker sees more and knows more, so he tells himself. Only a walker could befriend the legendary “Sultan” Pattar who is always seated on a culvert outside the large Nair tharavad. Pattar is the term for Tamil Brahmins who migrated to Kerala from Madras. His nickname “Sultan” comes from his signature style of wrapping his thorthu around his head, leaving a little peacock tail sticking up. What makes him a legend is his jalebi. Wedding guests soon forget if the bride was fair, or the groom ugly, but none forget Sultan Pattar’s dessert that caps the feast. Some mornings Pattar gives the young walker a piece of jalebi left over from the previous night’s festivities. For over a year, Philipose begged Pattar for the secret recipe. One day, without warning, before Philipose could write it down or memorize it, Pattar rattled off the formula like a priest reciting a Sanskrit shloka. It was hopeless, because Pattar’s measures for chickpea flour, cardamom, sugar, and ghee and whatnot were in buckets, barrels, and oxcart loads.

One afternoon, as the walker returns from school, a panicked voice behind him cries, “Out of the way!” A bicycle clatters by, bouncing off the ruts carved in the mud by cartwheels and now baked solid. The white-haired rider bails out moments before the machine flies into an immoveable object: the embankment. Philipose helps the old man up. His glasses are askew and his mundu is mud-streaked, but he’s comforted to find his pen still in his shirt pocket. This cyclist’s bushy gray mustache reaches his lower lip. “No brakes!” he says. Alcohol fumes accompany that pronouncement. He collects himself and his bicycle and straightens the handlebars. He taps the pen clipped to Philipose’s pocket and asks, but in English, “What model is that? Sheaffer? Parker?”

Philipose replies in Malayalam, “Nothing that fancy. But in any case, what matters is the ink, and this I call Parambil Copper River. It is handmade by me from a filtrate of laterite soil, copper, and urea.” He doesn’t volunteer the urea source. He draws on his notebook to demonstrate. The old man’s eyebrows, which match his mustache, shoot up. “Hrmphh!” he says, fluttering all three.

Half a mile later, Philipose sees the old man again, now shirtless, standing at the top of steep steps leading up from the road to a ramshackle house. He’s holding forth in a loud voice in English, as if addressing multitudes, though no one but Philipose is around. “Cannon to left of them, cannon behind them—” is all Philipose makes out. But to the boy’s ear this English is melodious and rings true, unlike Kuruvilla Master’s English, which is suspiciously similar to Kuruvilla Master’s Malayalam, with the words stepping on each other’s tails—“ThedogisalwaysfollowingtheMaster” or “Napoleon’sdefeatatWaterloo”—and interspersed with “nayinte mone” (son of a bitch) and other Malayalam phrases that suggest his pupils have coconut shells for brains. Philipose thinks the old man’s English is the genuine article, the language of progress, of higher education, even if it is the language of the colonizers.

“Ink-Boy!” the man calls down in English, while retying his mundu just below his nipples. “Good Samaritan! I say, identify yourself, my good fellow.”

“Is it me Saar is speaking to?” Philipose says in Malayalam.

“ENGLISH!” the old man roars. “We shall converse only in English. What is your good name?”

“MynameisPhilipose, Saar.” He hopes it’s the same as his good name.

“Sir! Not Saaaaar.”

Philipose repeats. The mustache flutters. “Good, come up, then. Let’s begin.”

“Ammachi!” Philipose says, bursting excitedly into the kitchen. “Koshy Saar has shelves on every wall that are full of books. And stacks of books this high on the floor!”

Big Ammachi digests this. Her “library” is two Bibles, a prayer book, and piles of old Manoramas. She knows of Koshy Saar because the fishmonger’s fresh catch includes the latest gossip. Koshy finished his pre-degree in Calcutta, then worked as a clerk for many years. But during the Great War, tempted by the sign-on bonus and pay, he enlisted. He returned a changed man. Then he attended Madras Christian College and stayed on as a lecturer. Now he’s back with a small pension and living in his ancestral home on a tiny fringe of property, enough for a patch of tapioca, and little else.

“Did you see the wife, monay?” Odat Kochamma pipes in, standing behind him. Philipose doesn’t hear the old lady, so she must tap him on the shoulder and repeat herself.

“Ooh-aah. Saw her. Saar sent me to get us tea. She asked where I’m from, what family, all that. Saar shouted from his room in English: ‘Is that woman holding you prisoner?’ She shouted back in Malayalam”—and Philipose imitates her—“You old bandicoot, if you speak English to me, you can make your own tea!”

“The old bandicoot!” Baby Mol says, bursting into laughter.

“The poor woman,” Big Ammachi says.

“You have it wrong,” Odat Kochamma interjects. “I knew Koshy when we were young. So bright . . . Ayo, and so good-looking too in uniform before he went overseas. Shiny boots and belt and athum ithuk okke,” she says, her hands fluttering over her body to suggest the this-and-that scattering of buttons, medals, and epaulets. She throws out her chest like a pigeon and stands at attention, but her bowlegs and dowager’s hump make it comical. Baby Mol imitates her, and they salute together. Odat Kochamma sighs. “When he was young there were better proposals for him . . . Why on earth he married her is beyond me.” A crow squawks on the roof. “Maybe God understands, I don’t.”

Noticing their stares, she snaps, “What? . . . I’m saying, if brains were oil, that one didn’t have enough to prime the tiniest lamp.”

“Have you met her?” Philipose says, puzzled.

“Aah, aah. No need to meet and all. Some things I know.”

Philipose says, “The British Army let him keep the bicycle. He says it’s worth more than a dowry. He fought in Flanders. He was annoyed that I’d never heard of it. Oh, and he lent me this book. He said all of life was summed up in it.”

Baby Mol, Odat Kochamma, and Big Ammachi all peer at it. “It doesn’t look like a Bible,” Big Ammachi says suspiciously. The text is dense and has illustrations, but its verses are unnumbered.

“It’s a story about a giant fish. I have to read ten pages by next week. I must write down all the words I don’t know. He loaned me this dictionary. Saar says it will improve my English and teach me everything about the world. Next time I must be ready to discuss what I read.”

Big Ammachi can’t help feeling jealous. Once her son abandoned his efforts to swim, he’d turned his curiosity with a vengeance to learning about everything else in the world. His hunger for knowledge long ago eclipsed what Parambil could offer. School hardly sufficed. Koshy Saar is no doubt more learned, more worldly than Philipose’s schoolteachers. She’s watching her starving son being fed, though not from her hands.

“Is he expecting to be paid?”

“With a regular supply of my Parambil Copper River ink,” he says proudly.

Odat Kochamma says, “Aah. Just don’t tell him what all you put in that ink, that’s all I’ll say.”

The following week, Philipose returns even more animated. “Ammachi, he can recite pages of that book from memory! ‘Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth.’ ”

She worries about such knowledge. “So what if he can remember that book. Odat Kochamma can recite the whole Gospel of John, even if she doesn’t read. That’s how they taught in days past, isn’t that right?” she says, turning to the old lady, and trying to defend the one book Philipose should be trying to memorize. But the old lady is too focused on what else the boy might report.

“Saar only asked me one question. ‘Who is telling the story?’ The answer is Ishmael! It says so in the first line. Ishmael is the ‘narrator.’ I know my English will improve because he won’t let me use a word of Malayalam.”

For many weeks to come, the family gathers to hear Philipose translate, or else summarize, the assigned pages of this Moby-Dick. When he says, “Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian,” they burst out laughing. Big Ammachi is scandalized by the tale but also enthralled. One morning, as soon as Philipose leaves for school, she decides she must examine again the illustration of the tattooed savage, Queequeg. She goes to his room only to find Odat Kochamma and Baby Mol huddled over the book.

“He’s a pulayan, that Kweek-achine!” Odat Kochamma says. “Who else sees his fate in dice? Who else will build their own coffin? Remember when Paulos pulayan was convinced a devil clung to his back? He could do nothing to get free. Finally he crawled into a slit in the rocks, a space so narrow the devil couldn’t follow—”

“And lost half his skin and almost died from ant bites,” Big Ammachi says.

“Aah, but he came out smiling! Devil was gone.”

Until now, the measure of the years at Parambil has been Easter and Christmas, births and deaths, floods and drought. But 1933 is the year of Moby-Dick. Halfway through the book, Big Ammachi wants Philipose to ask Koshy Saar if this Moby-Dick isn’t all made up. “It’s entertaining. But isn’t it one big lie? Ask him.”

Koshy Saar’s response is indignant. “It’s fiction! Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!”

Fittingly, the monsoon comes to Travancore just as the Pequod sinks. In Parambil they don’t notice the rain hammering down because Queequeg’s coffin has become a life buoy for Ishmael, while Queequeg is last seen clinging to the mast. Four heads huddle under the lamp and over a book that only one of them can read. “God keep their souls,” Odat Kochamma says when it is over; Baby Mol is despondent, and Big Ammachi crosses herself. She’s come to love Queequeg. She thinks of Shamuel, and how that word, “pulayan,” diminishes him when, like Queequeg, he’s superior to nearly every man she knows. The goodness in Shamuel’s heart, his industry and dedication to doing things well, would be fine qualities for the twins—Georgie and Ranjan—to have, for example. She’s past feeling guilty about being in the thrall of this lie-that-tells-the-truth that is Moby-Dick.

“Koshy Saar doesn’t believe in God,” Philipose confesses the night he returns from his lesson with a new book. Clearly he has been keeping his mentor’s atheism a secret till they finished Moby-Dick. He looks guilty, fearful his mother will put an end to his visits, but eased of his troubled conscience.

She hungrily eyes the new book in his hand—Great ­Expectations—the novel that will define 1934 just as Moby-Dick has defined 1933. “Well, Koshy Saar may not believe in God, but it’s a good thing that God believes in that old man. Why else did he send him into your life?”