The Covenant of Water

1936, Parambil

On a stormy weekday, Big Ammachi is full of misgivings as her teenager slouches to school and into the early-­morning darkness. In his sleepy shoulders, she sees no hint of his father. The son is more delicate—more sapling than tree trunk. She stifles an urge to call him back because he stepped over the threshold with his left foot as he departed—why invite bad luck? But then to summon a person back once they have embarked on a journey is worse luck.

“Ammachi?” she hears from behind her, as her daughter stirs. She waits anxiously for what Baby Mol says next. Her daughter’s gift of announcing visitors ahead of their arrival extends to predicting bad weather, disaster, and death. “Ammachi, the sun is coming up!” Big Ammachi lets out her breath in relief. For twenty-eight years of Baby Mol’s life, the sun has never failed to come up, yet every morning she’s ecstatic at its return. To see the miraculous in the ordinary is a more precious gift than prophecy.

After breakfast Baby Mol holds up her broad palm and Big Ammachi counts out three beedis. No self-respecting Christian woman smokes, though some chew tobacco and old women treasure their little opium boxes. No one knows who got Baby Mol into the beedi habit and Baby Mol won’t say. But the joy it gives her makes it hard to object to her daily three-beedi allotment. Her mother can’t imagine a world where her daughter isn’t on her bench, her wizened face smiling as she sings to her rag dolls. The muttam is the stage that entertains her. When parboiled rice is left out to dry, no scarecrow can match Baby Mol’s vigilance.

“Where’s my pretty baby?” Baby Mol asks. Her mother reminds her that he’s gone to school. “What a pretty baby he is!” Baby Mol says, giggling.

“True. But not as pretty as you.”

Baby Mol laughs aloud, a hoarse sound of delight. “I know,” she says modestly.

But then, out of nowhere, a shadow falls across Baby Mol’s face. She says, “Something has happened to our baby!”

The sky is low and as heavy as wet sheets on a sagging clothesline as Philipose walks to school. The high, mossy embankments on either flank form a dark tunnel. A lightning flash outlines a sinuous, ropelike object on the ground ahead. He freezes until he’s satisfied it isn’t alive. Just a stick.

His thirteen-year-old brain still carries the memory of being seven and running with Caesar through the rubber trees. (“Caesar” and “Jimmy” are the only dog names in Travancore, no matter the dog’s gender.) The little pye-dog spun around, crouching on his front paws, grinning and daring Philipose to catch up, his tail wagging so vigorously that his hind end was in danger of coming loose, before he took off again, delirious with joy. Suddenly, the little fellow shot up in the air, as if he’d stepped on a spring; Eden was no more. Philipose caught a glimpse of a hood and heard a rustle in the undergrowth. It was an ettadi moorkhan, or “eight steps serpent.” Eight was all you had once bitten, but only if you didn’t dawdle. Caesar managed four. “Dogs have names,” he says bitterly, feeling the pain of Caesar’s death just as if it happened yesterday, and continuing an earlier dialogue with the cat who’d wandered into the kitchen and eyed the karimeen his mother packed for his lunch. “A dog lives for you. A cat just lives with you.”

His collar is damp, and his shirt sticks as he walks parallel to the swollen waterway. He feels a presence behind him; a wave of gooseflesh spreads up his arms. Don’t let Satan mount your will because he will ride you to perdition. He says aloud what his mother has taught him: “God is in charge!” He turns to see a sinister shape in the water, blocking out the sky. A hulking rice barge, slowing to a stop. It is mooring. According to Joppan, the debauched bargemen he oversees have secret mooring spots where women sell them companionship and country liquor, relieve them of their wages, and pilfer from the load. He’s envious of Joppan, who instead of the drudgery of school enjoys sunsets on Lake Vembanad and movies in Cochin and Quilon. Joppan has dreams of motorizing these barges and revolutionizing the transport of goods; he says no one has considered this because the canals are shallow and the barges ancient, but Joppan has detailed drawings on how an engine could be mounted.

The waterway broadens and forks around a small island, the water reaching the steps of the two new churches built on it. What had been one Pentecostal congregation split into two when tempers suddenly flared like flames on thatch. After fisticuffs the splinter group built their church on their share of the land. The churches are so close together that the Sunday sermon in one tries to drown out the other.

Now he hears the roar of the main river ahead into which this canal feeds, much louder than usual; he feels a rumble underfoot. He recalls Shamuel saying that flash floods have chewed up the river banks. It explains why the barge chose to tie down. Fat raindrops kick up bullet-craters in the red soil and beat a tattoo on his umbrella, while the wind tries to claw it away. He shelters under a cluster of palms. He will be late for school. He has two choices: he can stay dry and be caned for tardiness, or be punctual but wet to the marrow. Either way he will get his knuckles rapped by Saaji Saar, who is mathematics teacher and football coach at St. George’s Boys High School. Saar’s athleticism shows in the force and accuracy with which he flings chalk or smacks a head. As Philipose can testify, having borne the brunt of it, one doesn’t see it coming. “I wasn’t inattentive,” he says to Big Ammachi. “Saar mumbles! When he’s facing the blackboard, who can tell what he says?” Big Ammachi visited Saar and insisted that Philipose be seated in the front, because he struggles to hear from the back. His grades soared, even topping Kurup, who usually tops everything, but now he is an easy target for spitballs from the rear and Saar’s frontal assaults. He is getting known in school, but not for the best reasons.

There is a third choice. “Fill your stomach, then decide!” He unwraps his lunch packet. “I was led into temptation,” he says aloud to his mother. He meditates on the delicious blackened crust and the flavors of pepper, ginger, garlic, and red chili. His tongue probes for the karimeen’s fine bones that are nature’s way of saying, Slow down and savor.

A terrifying but human sound assaults his ears. The morsel on his tongue turns to clay. His hairs stand on end. It’s a man’s voice, a keening.

A figure in a loincloth is beating its chest, crying out to the heavens. Philipose recognizes the scissored front incisors that raise the upper lip like a tentpole. It’s the boatman from the jetty, a man who still teases Philipose, calling him “Swimming Master.” He hesitantly walks in the man’s direction. The boatman’s dugout, a hollowed-out matchstick, sits dragged up to the bank. On it he ekes out a living, transporting only solitary passengers like the fishmonger and her basket. But when the river is like this, the man must be hard-pressed to fill his belly— Wait, what is the bundle of rags at the man’s feet? A baby! Philipose sees the tiny, bloated, immobile face and eyes just like those of the dying Caesar. Was the baby bitten by an ettadi?

The shrieking boatman pounds his head on the palm tree until Philipose restrains him. He spins around, his black face staring up in fear, his crazed eyes bloodred like a mongoose’s, as he looks at the figure who towers over him, a boy who is half his age. Recognition dawns.

“A snake, was it?” Philipose says gently.

The boatman shakes his head and resumes wailing. “Monay . . . please do something! You have education . . . save him!”

Philipose squats down to get a better look, wishing the man would stop screaming. Education? What good will anything he learned in school do here? He gingerly touches the baby’s chest. He’s shocked when it heaves effortfully. Despite that, no air seems to get past the lips. The baby’s neck is strangely swollen. Something white, like the coagulated latex from a rubber tree, peeks out behind the froth of saliva.

“Stop it! Please!” he commands the keening boatman. Overcoming his revulsion, Philipose probes the baby’s mouth with his index finger. The white rubbery peel is bloody at the edges. He tugs and it comes easily at first; he must rip the last bit free. The tiny chest heaves and now there’s a rattle of air—the sound of life! That was common sense, not education. Just a matter of removing what clogged the mouth. But after a few breaths, the baby makes a strangling sound, the chest heaves hugely, the mouth opens and shuts like a fish’s, but air isn’t going in. The sight is agonizing, distressing—Philipose’s own breathing feels painful. He reaches in deeper this time and pulls free a big, chunky, bloody rubber peel. Air enters with a honk, like the cry of a gander, rattling in its passage, as if pebbles are loose in the windpipe.

“Saar! I knew it! I knew you could save my child!”

No more “Swimming Master”? I’m Saar now? He says to the boatman, “Listen. We must take the baby to some clinic.”

“How, with the river like this?” the boatman wails once more. “And with no money and—”

“Stop!” Philipose interrupts, shouting. “I can’t think with you screaming.” But the boatman doesn’t stop. That maddening sound and the baby’s desperate battle for air drive Philipose into a frenzy. In the next instant, forgetting his feud with the river, Philipose snatches the baby in his arms, then shoves the boatman so hard that the man topples back into his dugout. Before he can rise, Philipose tosses the baby into its father’s lap, then shoves the boat into the river. He jumps in at the last moment. “Come on!” Philipose cries. “Paddle!”

“My God! What have you done?” the boatman yells. Philipose relieves him of the baby, and the boatman automatically scrabbles in the canoe’s bottom for his paddle as the powerful current rocks the dugout and threatens to capsize them. The boatman reflexively does the only thing that he can to keep them afloat: he points the prow into the current. Just like that they’re in the clutches of the river, sailing down the center at breakneck speed. Glancing to the side, Philipose sees the river churn white on the shore, tearing out a new bank. “We’re doomed!” the boatman wails.

Philipose screams, “Paddle! Paddle!” Water hammers down from the sky. The river’s roar is impossibly loud and it makes human groans. The canoe rises and drops, and Philipose feels his stomach fly to his mouth and he must clutch the baby tight to keep it from being flung free. Is it really possible to travel at this speed? A broad wall of water rises up on one side of them and the swell casually pours into the canoe. What was a roar has turned into an even louder hiss, as though she laughs at their folly. Philipose is experiencing true terror for the first time in his life.

“Shiva, Shiva!” shrieks the boatman. “We are going to die!”

Ammachi, I broke my promise. True, he didn’t enter the water alone, but a useless boatman doesn’t count. But I’m not in the water, just on it. The useless boatman is beyond paddling, letting the boat twist and turn and be carried wherever the river chooses. The sight of the man infuriates Philipose. He is too proud to confess his fear, or acknowledge his mistake. He reaches forward and slaps the boatman’s face as hard as he can. “Show some real courage, idiot! Keep us straight! Are you only good for making fun of my swimming? Don’t you want to save your child? Paddle.”

The boatman digs his oar into water that is as thick and angry as boiling paddy. Philipose bails frantically with one hand. He glances down and the baby has stopped breathing again. Blindly he shoves two fingers down the small throat, feeling milk teeth scrape on his knuckles. He claws at rubbery material until he feels air fluting past his fingers. The chest moves again.

It should end any second, yet somehow, second after second, they race on. They are flying past the stationary trees, moving faster than a speeding train. He bails for his life. How long can this go on? How long have they been in the river? How soon before they capsize?

The nightmare feels like it cannot end, then, suddenly, at a sharp curve in the river, the dugout is spun away from the center and shoots backward into a churning, flooded canal. With a splintering of wood, they slam into a hidden obstacle—a submerged boat jetty—sitting under stone steps. Philipose leaps out, holding the gasping baby aloft. At the last second, the dazed boatman jumps to shore, the recoil of his leap propelling the canoe out like a dart into the waterway and then into the boiling confluence, where it is immediately pulled under. On seeing this, Philipose shakes uncontrollably. Not from cold, but from anger at his own stupidity. He could have died! He recalls Queequeg’s floating casket: it buoyed life. Just not Queequeg’s.

Clutching the baby, his legs wobbly, Philipose scrambles up the steep, slippery laterite stairs cut into the bank, the boatman breathing heavily behind him. The steps end at a wooden gate.