The Covenant of Water

1938–1941, Parambil

The arrival in Parambil of the man who would be known as Uplift Master, along with his wife, Shoshamma, goes unheralded. Could anyone have predicted that one person would so uplift their community? Soon no one can recall his baptismal name. The couple were happily settled in Madras when Shoshamma’s brother died suddenly—of drink. He was unmarried, without children, and so, quite unexpectedly, Shoshamma inherited the property. That house plot and surrounding two acres is on the far west edge of Parambil, well away from the river, one of a dozen that Philipose’s father sold or gave away to relatives in the last decade of his life.

In Big Ammachi’s opinion, Shoshamma’s deceased brother had less initiative than a washing stone. The house he leaves behind is in bad shape, but the timber and coconut palms on the land are good. When the couple first call on Big Ammachi, she’s impressed by their two well-behaved young children, a boy and a girl, of seven and nine. Shoshamma has a pleasing face, a ready laugh, and seems full of energy. Her husband, despite his years working in a prestigious British company, is modest and unassuming. Big Ammachi introduces Philipose, saying her dream is that he will study medicine in Madras. Uplift Master speaks up: “That’s wonderful! Madras Medical College is the oldest in the country. I visited once. I saw a British professor and all the student doctors around a bed . . .” He trails off, because something about the boy’s forced smile tells him that Philipose has no desire to study medicine but is too polite to contradict his mother.

Soon after they move back, Uplift Master gets a loan from the Government Development Office—who knew such a thing was even possible? He purchases a cow, puts in a new approach road, and rebuilds the house. His invitation to his neighbors to join his appeal of the property tax assessment is met with ridicule; Decency Kochamma says, “What nerve! The fellow returns from Madras and thinks the government should tax him less!” Only Big Ammachi joins his petition, sharing the cost of the survey and stamp paper. The appeal succeeds. When the naysayers understand just how much money they could have saved, they clamor for Uplift Master’s help. “With pleasure,” he says. “Next assessment in two years, so we have plenty of time.”

Uplift Master and Shoshamma’s arrival coincides with a change in the entrenched attitudes of the good people of Travancore. There are more newspapers to choose from and more readers. The illiterate can always find a tea shop where the paper is read aloud. News of the mounting opposition to British rule, and of a world on the brink of war, filters into the smallest village. Literacy alters patterns of life that have gone undisturbed for generations. The proof of this, as Uplift Master recounts to Shoshamma, is his encounter in the tea shop. “This shirtless fellow on the bench says, just to impress me, I think, ‘The maharajah is a British stooge. I’m with Gandhi! Last week when Gandhi marched to the sea, why no one told me? I’d have gone with him! Why pay tax for salt when it’s there for the taking?’ Poor fellow. I didn’t have the heart to tell him Gandhi’s Salt March was eight years ago. But the fact that he knows of the march is progress!”

When Uplift Master discovers Philipose is a voracious reader, he congratulates him and explains to him his own passion for literacy: “Reading is the door to knowledge. Knowledge raises the yield of paddy. Knowledge combats poverty. Knowledge saves lives. Is there a family around here that hasn’t lost a loved one to jaundice or typhoid? Sadly, few understand that contamination of food and water is the cause, and better sanitation might prevent it!”

Master’s enthusiasm for such social causes makes him a magnet for Philipose and his peers. The teens adopt Uplift Master’s motto as their own: Each one must teach one. The newcomer encourages them to organize a YMCA and a YWCA, and the Parambil Lending Library and Reading Room, all of which meet in one half of a shed on his property, which sports a signboard proclaiming the existence of all three. Philipose, now thirteen, leads his YMCA mates in drilling borehole latrines for every dwelling, aiming to eliminate night soil and, thereby, hookworm infestation. The YWCA girls give lessons on food handling and storage.

The other half of the shed is Uplift Master’s office. Next to a tall filing cabinet is a small table on which sits, like a deity, his precious typewriter. With this instrument he peppers the branches of government with petitions for roads, sanitation, health educators, a bus stop, and other improvements, all in the most officious Raj English. “Monay,” Uplift Master says, explaining his philosophy to his most devoted acolyte, Philipose, “to bring about social change, you must understand the first principle about money: no one wants to part with it. Be it husband giving to wife, or you paying the barber, or the maharajah paying his tithe to the British, or his government giving money to us—who gives willingly? My word for this is ‘resistance.’ Our villagers don’t understand that our government is supposed to fund civic projects to better our lives. Why else pay taxes? The money is in the budget! But the clerk in the Secretariat has resistance when he sees our grant application. The fellow thinks, ‘Aah, those Parambil families survived all this time without a bridge. If my cousin gets the grant and the bridge comes to my village, won’t our property value increase?’ Monay, that’s why I type ‘c.c. His Excellency the Maharajah’ in all my correspondence. And ‘c.c.’ to any other functionary who sits above the person the letter is addressed to. Makes the fellow think twice, does it not?” Philipose is intrigued and asks Master if he files the carbon copies. “Aah,” Master says, with a glint in his eyes, “actually, there are no copies. But they don’t know that.”

When Uplift Master invites the maharajah (this time sending genuine carbon copies to a legion of officials) to inaugurate the “First Annual Parambil Exhibition of New Advances in Fertilizing, Irrigation, and Animal Husbandry,” even Big Ammachi wonders if he’s gone too far. Master assures her that he doesn’t imagine for a moment that the maharajah will come—he’s only seeking the cooperation of the officials he carbon copied to bring about the exhibition.

No one is more astonished than Uplift Master when the maharajah accepts! On that unforgettable day, people come from all around, dressed in their finest; invalids crawl out of bed to witness this once-in-a-lifetime royal visit by His Excellency Sree Chithira Thirunal. They all expect the maharajah to look exactly like the ubiquitous tinted photograph displayed in schools, stores, and government offices: a placid face with ghee-fed cheeks, the head dwarfed by a bejeweled turban, and the chest full of medals and crossed by a sash. They’re shocked instead to see a smart, self-confident, turbanless young man in his twenties spring out of the royal car, dressed in a spotless black jacket with a band collar, khaki jodhpurs, and polished brown shoes. His genuine curiosity and interest in every detail of each exhibit shames the audience into actually paying attention to what is displayed. The maharajah’s affection for his people shows in those soft, friendly eyes and his shy smile. This same maharajah, just two years before, defied his relatives and advisors by bravely enacting the Temple Entry Proclamation, allowing all Hindus of all castes to enter temples. This revolutionary act angered the Brahmins; it moved Gandhi to say it was the maharajah, not he, who deserved the title “Mahatma,” or Great Soul.

The young maharajah ensures that Uplift Master is by his side the entire visit, leaving the district functionaries to jockey with sharp elbows to get closer; His Excellency in his speech acknowledges Master by name, and hails Parambil’s progressive spirit of village uplift as a “model for Travancore.” The photograph of His Excellency with Uplift Master that runs in the paper is framed in the lending library/clubhouse. That is the day when the man who had the idea, did all the hard work, and brought the maharajah to their little corner of the world gets the name Uplift Master. Now, no one can recall his baptismal name.

Four years after his arrival in Parambil, three years after the maharajah’s historic visit, Uplift Master presents Big Ammachi with his boldest idea: if they take a head count of all the families, including the pulayar and the craftsmen, and if they list the rice mill, sawmill, one-room pre-primary schoolhouse, the tea shops, tailors, and other establishments; and if they count the total number of livestock, then Parambil might just qualify as a “district village.” He explains to her the advantages of that designation. Big Ammachi gives her blessing at once. She sees Uplift Master as the one person carrying forward her husband’s vision for the land he settled. Master gets the required signatures from all the families, invoking Big Ammachi’s name if they balk. The skeptics say, “What for? Will being a district village make the rooster crow on time? Will the paddy harvest itself?”

It takes a forest’s worth of paper, many bus trips by Master to the Secretariat in Trivandrum, and seven months and six days before Parambil achieves the “district village” designation, and with it an infusion of funds from the maharajah’s coffers for “Village Uplift.” The doubters are silenced. Government-paid laborers build culverts and drains so the new roadbeds will not wash away. The nearby canal is extended, widened, desilted, and shored up with new masonry walls, increasing barge traffic. The new designation brings an Anchal post office and a postmaster on government payroll. For generations, the Travancore maharajahs sent their mail through the Anchal system: the runner, carrying a staff with bells on it, has the right of way by royal decree, though these days the runners use bus, rail, and ferry too. An Anchal P.O. also connects them to the British Indian Postal Service; a Parambil resident can send letters anywhere in India or overseas—no need to trouble Achen to carry letters back and forth from the Kottayam diocese.

The day arrives to inaugurate the one-room office building, whose board reads, PARAMBIL P.O. Uplift Master insists that Big Ammachi, as the matriarch of Parambil, cut the ribbon. The only photograph ever taken of Big Ammachi appears in the paper the next day. At first glance, there appears to be a smiling girl standing in the center of the photograph, holding scissors, and dwarfed by taller adults clustered behind her. But it’s none other than Big Ammachi, and there’s no mistaking the pride that illuminates her face.

The night the photograph appears, she clutches it in her hand when she converses with God. “My late husband couldn’t read or write, but he had a vision, didn’t he? And it has come to fruition in ways that he never imagined.” She tears up. “I so wish he could see it.”

Generally, God is silent, but on this night she hears God speak to her as clearly as he did to Paul on the road to Damascus. Your husband does see it. He sees you. He’s smiling.