The Covenant of Water

1936, Saint Bridget’s

Digby’s new therapist walks over in the afternoon from the Thetanatt house, her ink-black pigtails bouncing off her shoulders, art supplies in her schoolbag. The maid accompanying the nine-year-old squats on Rune’s verandah, keeping her thorthu over her nose, her gaze darting around like a sentry’s. Rune introduces the young surgeon to his even younger therapist; he’s amused to find Digby the shyer of the two.

Rune fusses over Elsie, with hot chocolate and toast and plum jam. Leelamma’s death had stripped the playful, outgoing girl of the innocence she should have enjoyed for a few more years, Rune thought. She was lost, like a flower whose petals turned inward. In her grief she discovered a solace and a gift, all thanks to Rune’s present of a sketchbook, charcoal, and watercolors. Elsie felt no need to proclaim it, but she was going to be an artist.

Elsie sets out paper, hands Digby a charcoal stick, and sits beside him to do her own work. Soon figures populate her paper. Watching her, Digby is reminded of his compulsive sketching in the days when he kept vigil over his depressed mother. Elsie has captured Rune in mid-stride, leading with his beard, his juba’s baggy tail like a sail behind him as he sallies out. The sketch is astonishing for its speed and accuracy. His paper remains blank.

Elsie sets out a new sheet for herself. She pulls down a squat book from Rune’s shelf. Digby recognizes Henry Vandyke Carter’s distinctive illustrations that made Gray’s Anatomy such a classic, by coupling clarity with artistic skill. The text has faded in Digby’s memory, but the figures remain. Does Elsie know that the Londoner, Henry Gray, cheated Henry Vandyke Carter of royalties and acknowledgment? Embittered, Vandyke Carter joined the Indian Medical Service, where he spent the rest of his career, seeing his name vanish from subsequent editions of the iconic textbook, though his illustrations remained. Henry Gray died at thirty-four of smallpox, his name immortalized by his eponymous book. Which Henry’s fate was worse, Digby wonders: Dying young but famous? Or living a full life with one’s best work unacknowledged?

By the time Elsie leaves, Digby’s paper has a few lines and many divots where the charcoal stick, grasped clumsily in his right hand, dug in too far. The image he had in mind, a Vandyke Carter–inspired profile of the muscles of the head and neck, met a roadblock on its journey from his brain to his fingers.

Digby picks up the sketch Elsie left behind. At first he thinks she’s drawn a leper’s hand. But those square nails, the puffy, discolored skin on the back, the suture marks—it’s his hand. He stares in horrified fascination. The stiff, leaden, and bony appendage grasping a charcoal stick is the inverse of the hands in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. The gift Elsie possesses is breathtaking. The young artist shows no revulsion, no recoiling from the subject—quite the opposite. With devastating accuracy and without judgment she has rendered Digby’s hand the way it appears, and accepted it for what it is. He has yet to.

That evening, a letter comes from Honorine; his clumsy efforts with the letter opener wind up tearing it down the middle. The commission ruled that Claude Arnold be dismissed from the Indian Medical Service. Jeb’s family will be compensated generously for his wrongful death. “God knows what Claude will do next,” she writes.

It is little solace. Claude could operate again in private practice anywhere in the world. A murderously incompetent surgeon lives to kill again. And what are you, Digby? Something less than a murderer? The torn halves of the letter remind him that his own hands are better at destroying than anything else. Thoughts of Celeste, never far away, engulf him. If she hadn’t come that day, if . . . So many ifs. His guilt is carved on him as permanently as his Glasgow smile.

The next day, when Elsie arrives, Digby points to her sketch. “That is so very good!”

“Thank you kindly,” she says in formal schoolgirl English, smiling ever so slightly. Digby senses that he has merely articulated what she already knows. She sets fresh paper out for Digby, but then says, “May I please . . . ?” She wedges the charcoal between his stiff thumb and fingers, where it wobbles. He struggles to find the right amount of pressure that won’t snap the stick and yet will keep it firm on the page, something that was once effortless and unconscious. Removing a ribbon from her plait, and biting her lips in concentration, Elsie secures the stick with a few turns. She carefully lowers his hand to the paper like a gramophone needle meeting vinyl. “Now please try?” A dark, jerky line emerges. The movement originates in his shoulders, it seems. The point catches and stops. She nudges his forearm, hoping to jump-start it. Another stuttering line emerges but the charcoal swivels—the gramophone needle is bent. He looks up and meets her gray eyes, slanting at the corners, the irises paler than those of most Indians he has met. There’s compassion in them, but no pity. She won’t give up.

She unwraps the ribbon, hesitates, then places her hand on top of his and binds their hands together, her fingers buttressing the charcoal stick. She makes a “try it now” gesture, her chin leading the head shake. He doesn’t understand Malayalam, but he’s getting better at this shorthand.

The movement of his hand (or is it hers?) over the paper feels smoother, the machinery gliding on new bearings. His hand carries hers on piggyback as it zooms around the paper, making big, liberating circles—a warmup, a reckless frolic. She slips in a fresh paper and they race effortlessly around the new sheet, the tires warm, turning the sheet dark with loops and sinuous S’s, then, on a fresh sheet, triangles, squares, cubes, and shaded pyramids.

He’s mesmerized by the sight of his hand carousing on the page, by the fluid movements that it now seems capable of. Seeing it this way rouses his brain, pushing out images, memories, sounds: a kali pod bursting in the forest at the Mylins’ estate, a flock of mynah birds startled and scattering, the sound of surf on wet sand, skin parting under an eleven-blade scalpel.

A shaft of light from the window falls onto the paper. Has it been there all this time? Dust motes twirl inside like acrobats in a spotlight, freed from gravity, a sight so beautiful he feels a catch in his chest. Fresh papers replace used ones, as if Elsie recognizes that movement is salutary and must not cease, and indeed, the flowing charcoal lines are overcoming the spasm in his wrist and palm, thawing a frozen part of his brain, generating a rush of ideas that travel down his arm to the paper. He laughs, a sound that surprises him, as his hand—their hands—now moves with deliberation, finesse, and purpose.

A woman’s face inexplicably emerges on the paper. It’s not Celeste—he has drawn her face hundreds of times. No, it’s his mother, her beautiful features evolving: the sleepy eyes, the long nose, the pert and pouting lips—a triad that was her signature. To signal the hairline, the charcoal produces a puff, a smoke plume at the top of her forehead, and then long, wavy tresses framing her cheekbones.

This is his mother in happier times, his maw on Wednesdays when they had tea at Gallowgate. She’d have loved this drawing. She’d have said, “Weel done, Digs. That’s a fair braw giftie ye’ve got there!” The alchemy of shared hands, this pas de deux, has reached back through his fingers, up through his nerves, to liberate a portrait from his occipital cortex, pry it out of memory, tagging it with love and laughter.

In medical school he memorized the diagnostic facial expressions, or facies, of disease: the masklike facies of Parkinson’s; the Hippocratic facies of terminal cancer, with its gaunt, hollowed-out cheeks and temples; the risus sardonicus—sardonic smile—of tetanus. Bound to this young girl, his hand has produced function and form, spun out a loving portrait. He glances up at his partner. Elsie, little fawn who has also suffered the loss of a mother, do you know that somehow we managed to do what time could not? For all these years, the only image I carried of my mother, the facies that superseded any other, was of her obscene, monstrous death mask.

His mother rises off the paper. He smells the lavender she placed in her folded cardigans; he feels he is in her arms again. Forgive her, he hears a voice say. “I do,” he says aloud. “I do.” Helpless tears trickle down his cheeks. Elsie presses her lips together in alarm . . . the living, moving sculpture of their two hands stutters and then stops. With his awkward left hand, Digby tugs the ribbon loose and sets her free; he tries to give her a reassuring smile.

On a day that none of them at Saint Bridget’s will forget, Rune’s voice rises over the compound as it does each morning, coming from the outdoor bathing platform behind his bungalow, where the big man booms out “Helan Går,” a rousing Swedish drinking song, Rune had said. Digby, in the orchard, is astonished to hear his three workmates sing along. They don’t know the meaning but they recognize the emotion: a call to the day’s labor. The tune is accompanied by the slosh of water as Rune dips his bucket into the tank and dumps it on his head.

But the song breaks off suddenly in mid-verse, followed by a metallic crash. All over the compound the flock pauses. Digby drops his hoe and runs. The bathing platform is screened on three sides with thatch panels. He finds Rune on his back, unmoving against the concrete, a hand clutched to his chest, a bar of Saint Bridget’s homemade soap still in his fingers. The heart of the beached Goliath, the great Nordic heart is still. Despite Digby’s ministrations it will not restart.

The leprosarium is usually a dark and quiet place once the sun sets, but that evening it is ablaze in lamplights, the gates wide open. The tapper, the Mudalali, and others from the village who knew and loved the giant Swede come to pay their respects, even if it means crossing the threshold of the leprosarium for the first time. Cars drive in from the estates: Franz and Lena Mylin, the Thatchers, the Kariappas, the entire Forbes crew, the club secretary and the club’s cook and two bearers—all friends of Rune—drove for hours to be there. The visitors stand respectfully outside the tiny chapel while the weeping flock fill the hand-hewn benches, one of their own conducting a service. The chapel air is redolent with the scent of fresh-cut jackwood, shaped in their own sawmill for the casket.

Rune’s pallbearers are his flock, Sankar and Bhava at the head, limping, on crutches, swaying, shuffling forward in ungainly procession as they carry him to the cemetery in the clearing just within the front wall. Hands that are missing fingers, hands curled into claws, and hands that are not hands but clubs of flesh ease out the ropes so as to inter the mortal remains of the saint who dedicated his life to making theirs better. The laments of the flock tear at the firmament and break the hearts of the onlookers who, for the first time, can see past the grotesque disfigured faces and recognize themselves.

In the ensuing days, the shell-shocked residents turn to Digby as they once did to Rune, while he leans on Sankar and Bhava. Digby, using Basu, who has some English, as his translator, encourages them to go on as they did before, tending the crops, the orchard, and the livestock. At night, in the privacy of the bungalow, Digby’s grief spills out. Rune was not just his surgeon, but his savior, his confessor, and the closest he’d ever had to a father.

Perhaps Rune had a premonition of his end. He must have known better than anyone that he had angina because his will is recent. The sizable sum in his savings account goes to the Swedish Mission, with instructions that the principal be maintained, while the interest be used to support the leprosarium.

Digby informs the India Swedish Mission by telegram. The reply comes promptly.

DEEPEST SORROW STOP A BETTER MAN NEVER LIVED STOP OUR PRAYERS CONTINUE STOP AWAITING INSTRUCTIONS FROM UPPSALA

He follows up with a letter to the India bishop in Trichinopoly who heads the mission, copying out the relevant part of Rune’s will. He ends with:

I am a surgeon presently on indefinite medical leave from the IMS because of hand injuries that are not leprosy related. Dr. Orqvist completed two surgeries on me. I cared deeply for him and I care for the residents here. I am doing my best to keep St. Bridget’s running and to provide basic medical care. If it meets your requirements, I can continue here. However, my hands won’t ever be capable of the kind of surgery Rune carried out.

His answer comes in ten days. The Mission is sending two nuns to run Saint Bridget’s; they hope to recruit a doctor in the future. Digby gives a wry laugh and crumples the letter. “You made enquiries, didn’t you?”

For now, Digby’s medical leave remains indefinite. What will the Indian Medical Service do when that period concludes? Press him back into some sort of medical duty? Dismiss him without pay?

Is there no home for him in this world? Not even in a leprosarium?