The Covenant of Water

1943, Madras

When Philipose opens his eyes, it is morning and they’re tearing noisily past busy railway crossings on the outskirts of Madras, passing paved roadways and low-slung houses. The sky and the horizon are visible in every direction with not a coconut palm in sight. The palette of Madras is a single shade: the soil is brown, the tar roads are coated dusty brown, and the whitewashed buildings have a brown tinge. There appear to be no streams or rivers at all. The locomotive thunders through an urban tunnel, its whistle amplified, and then they crawl into the hangar-like space of Central Station, a city unto itself. Red-turbaned porters squat on the edge of the platform, their noses inches from the passing carriages, motionless. At the sound of a whistle, they leap like monkeys into the compartments, ignoring the passengers, attacking the luggage, and baring fangs at each other.

His porter’s white mustache pushes out like the cowcatcher of a locomotive as he weaves through the crowds on the platform with Philipose’s trunk and bedroll on his head. Noise batters Philipose’s eardrums: the shriek of metal-wheeled trolleys whose axles cry for oil; whistle blasts; vendors yelling; children squalling; brazen oversized crows squawking over remnants of rice on discarded banana leaves; the porters’ incessant cries of “Vazhi, vazhi!”—Give way, give way!—all of these drowned out by a thunderous voice from overhead speakers announcing an arrival on Platform something-or-other. Philipose’s head reels from the sensory assault.

The platforms converge on a cement-floored lobby bigger than three football fields and shaded by a five-story-high metal roof on steel girders. There are more soldiers here than there were at the platform in Cochin. The seething humanity swarms like ants on a corpse, moving in streams and eddies that curl around stationary islands of travelers camped atop their luggage. One such island is a family with shaved heads, sitting like eggs cosseted in saffron cloth—pilgrims from Tirupati, or Rameswaram. His porter detours around another static cluster of colorful gypsies, one of whom, a woman in a fiery-red sari, studies Philipose with her dark, kohl-lined eyes. She sits atop a crate, knees up, legs apart, as though seated on plush cushions, a slovenly maharani. He cannot look away. She deliberately hikes her red sari and flicks her tongue out at him, the beefy wet organ sliding over very white teeth, then she laughs at his shocked expression. This is just the station, country boy. Wait till you see what’s outside. In her gaze, his ambition to be a literary man feels like a joke. What his nose, eyes, ears, and body are experiencing is not something words can capture. If he could turn back, get on a returning train at this instant, he would.

“OY! OY! OY!” someone yells, and he turns to see a red-faced, stocky white man, a straw hat on his head, his face showing great alarm. The man points, still shouting. The buttons of his linen suit strain against his barrel-like torso. Philipose wonders if white people are cold-blooded creatures—how can he wear that many layers? The man yanks Philipose aside just as a cart loaded with metal boxes brushes past, a sharp edge ripping his shirt. The porters pushing it scream at Philipose in Tamil, which is close enough to Malayalam for him to gather they want him to take his head out of his anus so sound can reach his ears. They must have been yelling at him for some time, but with noise crushing him from every direction, how was he to know?

The white man points emphatically to his ears in a gesture that says, Use them!

A flustered Philipose trots behind the porter, through a gap in a three-story mountain of parcels stitched in jute cloth with purple writing on the sides. The sweat of machinery, the exhalation of locomotives, the steam of packed humanity violates his lungs. Outside at last, he looks back at the redbrick furnace of a building from which he emerged. The clock tower of Central Station is the tallest manmade object he has ever seen. He would rather walk home than step in there again.

He makes his way by rickshaw and electric train to the suburb of Tambaram, to Madras Christian College, and joins new students outside the bursar’s office to pay his fees. The other students are dreading something he hasn’t thought about: the monthlong hazing, or “ragging,” by the senior students. Uplift Master told him to expect it. He had forgotten about it.

Sure enough, at his assigned hostel, Saint Thomas Hall, a phalanx of seniors leads the freshies to the “bogs”—the common bathrooms—and has them shave their mustaches and raise their sideburns an inch above the top of the earlobe, a plucked-chicken look that serves to easily identify them. Then, while screaming at them like drill sergeants, they teach them to execute the freshie salute, necessary for greeting a senior: it involves clutching one’s testicles while jumping high. Philipose finds the whole thing shocking, and a bit comical. Some of his classmates are quaking in fear; one of them faints. Hours after moving into the hostel, he’s busy on errands for the seniors on his wing: he buys cigarettes for Thangavelu and washes the underwear of Richard Baptist D’Lima III.

On Sunday morning, the freshies shave the seniors, who are lined up in chairs on the verandah. Philipose wields the razor, a delicate task, since Richard D’Lima III is never quiet, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he shouts greetings to seniors passing by. Philipose and the other freshies are like the lowest caste, invisible as they conduct their masters’ menial tasks.

“I say, brothers, who’s coming to Madam Florie’s in Saint Thomas Mount?” D’Lima says. “Discount for virgins. You, Thambi, come start the year right!” Thambi and the other seniors ignore him. Philipose struggles to hold the razor steady. D’Lima notices and laughs. “Hey, Philipose. What use is education if you don’t know practical things?”

“Sir, yes sir,” Philipose stammers. He can feel his face getting flushed.

D’Lima gazes at him with something like compassion. He lowers his voice. “Listen, bugger, you haven’t lived till you go to Florie’s. If nothing else, you’ll know what to do on your wedding night. Ragging aside, I’m serious. I’ll take you. My treat. What d’you say?” Philipose is too tongue-tied to answer. D’Lima waits, then stands up, insulted at being rebuffed. “A Japanese plane bombed Ceylon two weeks ago, did you know that, Philipose? Just to show us they can come this far. If they bomb us tonight, you’ll die a virgin with your prick in one hand and your shag book in the other, shagging your way into the afterlife. Bloody idiot, you are passing on your chance.”

Philipose glimpses his face in the shaving mirror. He sees what the gypsy woman seated on the crate in the railway station saw when she stuck her tongue out at him: a flustered boy, now with a naked upper lip and shorn temples; a boy destined to die a virgin.

Their first class, “English Grammar and Rhetoric,” is for all first years, whether in the sciences or the arts. It is held in an old, dark auditorium, with rows of semicircular wooden seats sloping up to the rafters. The schedule says the lecturer is A. J. Gopal, but there is to be a short welcome by Professor Brattlestone, the principal. A handful of women fill the first row; the men leave one row empty behind the women, as though they were contagious, and they occupy the rows beyond. Philipose winds up in the last row at the very top. Two men walk in—one a tall, lean Indian, who must be Gopal, and the other a white man. Philipose recognizes him at once: it’s the man who saved him from being run over in Central Station. The man who told him to use his ears. He, like Gopal, now wears a black don’s cape over his suit! Philipose tries to make himself invisible.

His classmates are all writing down something that Gopal must have said. But what? He peeks at his seatmate’s notebook. “First review session, Friday 2 p.m.” As he’s writing this down, the same student nudges him, and points. “Hey! Isn’t that you? You’re Philipose?” Philipose looks up to find every single eye in the room on him. Gopal must have called his name. Philipose jumps up and says, “Yes, sir?”

“Just say, ‘Present,’ ” Gopal says in a stern voice. “Can you do that?”

“Present, sir.”

Professor Brattlestone looks at Philipose, for a long time. Once the man’s gaze moves elsewhere, a flushed Philipose whispers to his seatmate, “I didn’t hear Gopal!”

“It’s a small thing, not to worry,” the fellow replies, even though his expression, one of pity and slight amusement, suggests the opposite. It wasn’t a small thing. When everyone had turned to stare at him—Brattlestone too—Philipose had wished for a trapdoor to open under his chair. The class hasn’t really begun, and yet he feels marked, like a man with crow shit on his head.

Brattlestone’s welcome speech is lengthy. It must be funny because the audience titters at several points. Philipose can hear him, but curiously he can’t quite make out what he says except for occasional words here and there. Once Brattlestone leaves, Gopal pulls up his chair, takes out his lecture notes, and says, “Take down!” They sit poised, waiting. Then Gopal looks down at his notes, so from above Philipose sees only his bald spot. He begins to read his lecture notes, looking up occasionally to wag his head or emphasize a point. All around Philipose, pens scribble away; his doesn’t move. The next class, “Introduction to Poetry,” is in the same auditorium. He moves discreetly down to the first row of men, which is still three rows back. The lecturer, K. F. Kurian, seems to enjoy his subject, pacing up and down before them, cracking jokes. Philipose hears him very well, but only when Kurian faces him.

He survives the ragging in the hostel through the course of the week; it doesn’t bother him as much as his sense of dislocation in the classroom. He walks around with the feeling of being in a country where people speak a different language. He borrows class notes and copies them out. The textbooks he purchased from Moore Market—Elizabethan Poets and Medieval English Literature the fattest ones—are uninspiring. Other than Shakespeare: An Introduction, there isn’t a single book he would read for pleasure.

In his third week, a peon seeks him out. Professor Brattlestone wants to see him. Philipose waits in the reception area till Brattlestone beckons him in. He points Philipose to a chair. “How are things going in your classes?” Brattlestone says, still standing, and walking slowly to his desk.

“Very good, sir.”

“Forgive me for asking, but are you . . . struggling to hear the lecturer?”

Philipose pauses, surprised. “No, sir!” he says automatically. A shiver runs through his body. An ancient part of him recognizes that it is in danger and being cornered; it blinks out at its interrogator. Brattlestone studies him with clinical curiosity, if not empathy.

Brattlestone turns away and nudges a book on the shelf to line it up with the others. He turns back and looks at Philipose expectantly. “Did you hear what I just said?”

He feels himself sinking. He’s the boy who keeps trying to swim but invariably sinks to the bottom and has to be fished out, spitting mud, while boatmen fold over in laughter. “No,” he says quietly. “No, I did not.”

“Mr. Philipose, I witnessed you in some danger at Central Station. I trust you remember. A few, but not all, of your lecturers have noticed that you are struggling. That when a question is asked of you, either you fail to hear the question, or your answer falls short because you misunderstood what was asked. I’m afraid your deafness may be severe enough to preclude your continuing.”

“Deafness.” That word feels like a cudgel blow to the back of his head. Call him inattentive, say he’s unfit, unmotivated, but not that. I’m not deaf. The issue is volume. People choose to mumble, to speak in half sentences or whispers. He’s kept that terrible word at bay. He despises labels that take away. Can’t swim. Can’t hear. Can’t . . .

In the silence that follows there’s so much he can hear: the ticking of the big clock, the creaking of a chair as the principal takes a seat. This must be uncomfortable for him too.

At last, Brattlestone says, “I’m sorry. I will refer you to the college doctor. He might arrange for you to see a specialist. I don’t see how you can continue unless your hearing improves. Be prepared.”