The Covenant of Water

1946–1949, Parambil

Baby Ninan arrives in the year of our Lord 1946, like a summer squall out of a cloudless sky, neither rustle of leaves nor ripple of clothes on the line to offer a warning.

That day, Big Ammachi and Odat Kochamma are in the kitchen, the palm spathe and dried coconut husks crackling on the red embers, and smoke seeping out from under the thatch roof as though emerging from hairy nostrils. “Yeshu maha magenay nennaku,” For you, Lord Jesus, son of God, Odat Kochamma sings as she stirs the pot. Philipose is gone to the post office.

“AMMACHI!”

The peace of that blessed morning is shattered. The terror in Elsie’s voice that is coming from the main house stops everything. They find her in the doorway to her room, as though trying to prop it up, her hands white as she clutches the frame. Her hair is uncorralled and spilling down to frame a face that is deathly pale. The light illuminating the house is so beautiful that day, so substantial, that one could lean into it, something Big Ammachi will forever remember.

Through gritted teeth, Elsie says, “Ammay! But it’s much too soon!” She reaches for Big Ammachi as a wave of pain folds her over. Big Ammachi feels something wet underfoot and sees a clear, reflective puddle: Elsie’s water has broken.

In a preternaturally calm voice, Big Ammachi says, “Saaram illa, molay. Veshamikanda.” It’s all right. Don’t worry. But it isn’t all right. A glance passes between Big Ammachi and Odat Kochamma, and without a word the old lady waddles back to find thread and needle, and thank goodness, water is always boiling in some pot in the kitchen. Big Ammachi walks Elsie to the bed, as though escorting a sleepy little girl and not the grown woman who towers over her.

As Big Ammachi washes her hands, she hears Elsie call out from the bed, “Ammay!” Not “Ammachi” but “Ammay” for a second time. Big Ammachi’s heart melts. Yes, I am her mother now. Who else is there? She rushes over in time to see a tiny head crown. Odat Koch­amma returns, lugging the pot of water.

Just then, with hardly any effort, the smallest baby either woman has ever seen lands in Big Ammachi’s palm, a wet, blue, limp mound.

The two older women stare in disbelief at this tiny form, this beautiful miniature boy, his life story still unwritten . . . Except, he’s too soon for the world. The baby is like a wax doll, chest unmoving. Once more, Big Ammachi and Odat Kochamma exchange glances, and the latter leans forward stiffly at the waist, her hands straight back behind her for ballast, her bowlegs planted wider than usual, and directs a hoarse whisper to the tiny curl that stands in for an ear: “Maron Yesu Mishiha.” Jesus is Lord.

With a start, arms flinging out, the baby cries. Oh, that sweet, sweet, precious, shrill mewl of the newborn, the sound that says there is a God, and yes, He still performs miracles. But it is the faintest of cries, barely audible. His color hardly improves.

Odat Kochamma ties and cuts the cord. The placenta slips out. Seeing Elsie propped on her elbows, peering down anxiously at the baby, Odat Kochamma says crossly, “Boys! Always in such a hurry!” Big Ammachi gently wipes off the baby—no time for the ritual bath. He weighs less than a small coconut. Husked. She eases Elsie’s blouse aside and places the naked child on her bare chest, up high, where he’s no bigger than a large pendant; she covers mother and child with a sheet. Elsie gingerly clutches her son and looks down with wonder, with fear, tears trailing down her face. “Oh, Ammay! How can he survive? His body is so cold!”

“He’ll warm up against you, molay, don’t worry,” Big Ammachi says, though she’s besieged with worry. She spots Baby Mol on her bench, unconcerned, chattering away by herself—or to the unseen spirits who let her peek into what is to come. Baby Mol’s calmness is either a good sign or a terrible one.

Baby Ninan—that was the name Elsie planned for a boy—looks like a newborn rabbit, his nails barely formed and blue, his eyes squeezed shut, his skin pale against his mother’s bare skin. It’s all wrong, Big Ammachi thinks. Too early, too small, too blue, too cold, and the father isn’t here. The words “Maron Yesu Mishiha” are meant to be spoken in the infant’s ear by a male relative or priest. She marvels at Odat Kochamma’s quick thinking: time was of the essence, and they had both been sure this one would be on his way back to his heavenly father before his earthly one came back from the post office.

Elsie’s lip trembles and she looks anxiously to the older women for some sign of what comes next. Big Ammachi says, “He’ll hear your heartbeat, molay. He’ll warm up.” Odat Kochamma wordlessly removes Elsie’s wedding ring, scrapes a fleck of gold from the inside, puts it in a drop of honey, and with her fingertip dabs it onto the child’s lip, for every child in the Saint Thomas Christian fold must have his taste of good fortune, if only briefly.

Odat Kochamma intercepts Philipose before he enters the house. He listens carefully then says, “Does Elsie know that the child might die?” Odat Kochamma pretends not to hear.

Elsie knows. He sees it in the way her face collapses when he enters. He presses his cheek to hers. He peeks at their son. The strength in his legs vanishes.

Three hours later, Baby Ninan is still of this world, his fingertips less blue and his breathing regular but rapid against Elsie’s body. She tries him at her breast, but her areola dwarfs the tiny face, and her nipple is too much for the slit of the mouth. Big Ammachi helps Elsie express first milk, thick and golden, into a cup. “It’s the concentrated essence of you. So good for him.” Elsie dips the pulp of her finger in, then rests it on Ninan’s mouth; a drop dribbles in.

Big Ammachi offers to relieve Elsie. “No!” Elsie says sharply. “No. He knows my heartbeat all these months. He’ll stay here hearing it.” Carrying him is effortless, like holding a mango to her breast. Still, a sling of soft muslin around Elsie and under the child helps. Big Ammachi caps the baby’s head with the same muslin.

That night, three of them hold vigil, Elsie propped up on the bed, Big Ammachi next to her, and Philipose on a mat on the ground. Elsie stares down at her son endlessly. “My body keeps him warm just as when he was inside me. His temperature is my temperature. He hears my voice, my heartbeat, my breathing, just as he did all this time. If he’s going to make it, this will be his best chance.” The oil lamp illuminates the nascent life in its womb-outside-a-womb.

Elsie sequesters herself from visitors for the next two months. She takes walks on the verandah, Philipose shadowing her. She does not care to read or be read to, or draw, instead bringing every bit of her concentration to bear on their fragile masterpiece. If a newborn normally pushes the father to the edge of the household orbit, this one draws Philipose into the heart of the family.

One night when mother and grandmother are feeding him by the laborious fingertip method, Ninan opens his eyes, the lids separating enough for him to look out and for them to see him for the first time. Big Ammachi thinks her grandson’s eyes are so clear, so luminous.

In ten weeks Baby Ninan signals that he has outgrown his nest by stirring his limbs, kicking his feet; when he’s awake, his eyes are now more open than closed. He can even suck on the nipple, albeit only for short periods. One day, Baby Ninan snuggles for the first time on a body that isn’t his mother’s but instead his father’s, with its comfortingly furry chest. They quickly oil and massage Elsie and scrub her down with coconut husk before she submerges herself in the stream, luxuriating in the flowing water. She hurries back, restored and renewed after weeks of washing her body in parts.

Big Ammachi gives Baby Ninan his first bath, then they dry him off, swaddle him, and put him down for the first time on the bed. He sleeps. Father and mother lie on either side of their son, getting used to the sight of him separate from his mother’s body. The baby suddenly extends his arms, as though he’s dreaming that he’s falling. Then, the index fingers stay extended, a benediction to his parents. They grin happily at each other.

Falling unabashedly in love with Baby Ninan allows the parents to renew their love. It thrills Philipose that Elsie has a special look for her child’s father every time he walks in. Their hands seek each other’s, and if no one’s around, he kisses her. The brushing of lips used to drive them both mad, but now it signals a new bond, and the patience to defer the other kind.

Whenever he recalls his churlish behavior over Elsie’s desire to visit her father’s estate, he cringes. “That wasn’t me,” he says one day and for no reason when Ninan is in his grandmother’s arms and the two of them are alone. He smacks the side of his head. “That was someone else, Elsie. A stupid, fearful child who took dominion of my body and my senses. That’s the only explanation I have.” She regards him indulgently.

Every now and then Philipose looks out the bedroom window and is reminded of his failed promise. The photographer came and went, and the Ordinary Man column is now graced by a grainy photograph of Philipose in front of the tree; Shamuel had no objection at all to the tree coming down. Yet somehow the plavu still stands. Thankfully, Elsie seems to have forgotten.

The lump of blue clay that came into the world so precipitously makes up for lost time. His incessant movements and precocious Malayali inquisitiveness leave them all convinced that he instigated his premature arrival; he must have scaled the walls of his confined watery jail, looking for the exit. Now on the outside, he resumes his exploration. Baby Ninan’s life mission is very simple: UP! When in their arms, he wants to climb onto shoulder or neck, using their ears, hair, lips, or nose for a handhold. He jumps readily into the hands of any suitor, but what he really wants is locomotion and height. His mother’s chest is home, but even the succor of the nipple is trumped by the thrill of being bounced, swung, or tossed up high, even if it makes him gasp and hold his breath. He laughs and kicks his legs to signal, “Again!”

One day, without fanfare, Elsie enters her studio and she’s back at her easel whenever the baby allows. Philipose notices her last landscape losing its connection to reality: How can the water in the paddy field be ginger colored, or the sky lime green? Toy clouds line up like boxcars. This exaggerated primitive style is somehow pleasing. Also, giving in to Decency Kochamma’s pleadings and her promises she will abide by the artist’s condition, Elsie embarks on her portrait. Whenever Philipose sees the formidable lady seated and posing, he is convinced she sees herself as a Mar Gregorios, missing only crosier, vestments, and sainthood.

Ninan is uninterested in walking except as a means to climb. Why use two limbs when we have four? is his philosophy. Four allow one to ascend. Soon, the dull thud of a tiny body landing on an unyielding floor is an all-too-common sound. A brief silence is followed by a short-lived wail, more indignation than pain, then the climber starts up again. Shamuel says, “He’s like his grandfather, part leopard.”

Big Ammachi knows that he’s like his grandfather and his father in another way: water poured over his head disorients Ninan, sends his eyes bobbing to one side then drifting back to the midline only to hammer sideways again. He has the Condition.

Big Ammachi summons both parents to her room and, mirroring the motions of her late husband, uncovers and spreads out the “Water Tree”—her name for the genealogy. At the time of their marriage, Philipose had told Elsie about the Condition. She hadn’t been concerned and besides, she’d heard a little bit about it already. “Every family has something,” Elsie had said. What was it in her family? “Drink. My grandfather. My father. His brothers. Even my brother.”

Now Big Ammachi guides Elsie through the genealogy. “You’ll just have to be careful with Ninan around water. You won’t have to teach him to avoid it. He won’t want anything to do with water. Unless he’s like your husband who kept trying to swim—thank goodness at some point he gave up.” Philipose says nothing. He worries about his son’s safety in a way he never worried about his own.

Nearing midnight on August 14, 1947, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s voice comes through the radio, the most exciting words to emerge from it in its existence to date. Earlier that day, Pakistan was born. “Long years ago,” Nehru says in an Englishman’s English, “we made a tryst with destiny. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”

But India’s awakening proves bloody. Twenty million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs are forced to uproot themselves from the lands where their families have lived for generations. Muslims stream to the newly formed nation of Pakistan, while Hindus and Sikhs who find themselves no longer in India, head there. Trains packed with refugees are set upon by gangs of the opposite religion. Bloodthirsty mobs crush infants’ skulls, rape women, and mutilate men before killing them. Life or death for a man and his family teeters on the presence or absence of a foreskin. Philipose remembers his train journey back from Madras and Arjun-Kumar-Railways, the snuff-sniffer, marveling at how all religions, all castes got on so well inside a railway compartment. “Why not same outside train? Why not simply all getting along?”

In South India, particularly in Travancore, Cochin, and Malabar, they do get along. The violence to their north feels as though it’s happening on another continent. Malayali Muslims, whose bloodlines reach back to merchants from Arabia who scudded to the Spice Coast in their dhows, have nothing to fear from their non-Muslim neighbors. Geography is destiny, and the shared geography of the Spice Coast, and the Malayalam language, unites all faiths. Once again, the fortress of the Western Ghats, which has kept invaders and false prophets at bay for centuries, spares them the sort of madness that leads to genocide. In his notebook Philipose writes, “Being a Malayali is a religion unto itself.”

Just before Baby Ninan is two, a wax-sealed envelope arrives for Elsie, forwarded from the Thetanatt residence. Portrait of Lizzi has been accepted for a National Trust exhibition in Madras. Her eyes light up with pride.

Philipose says, “I didn’t know you were competing!”

“There wasn’t any point to mentioning it. I’ve submitted since I was fourteen. My father’s tea broker and friend in Madras submits for me—he likes my work. But it’s always been rejected, till now.” She looks at him mischievously. “This year, instead of ‘T. Elsiamma’ I asked him to submit it as ‘E. Thetanatt.’ ”

“That made the difference?”

She shrugs. “The judges are all men. They think I’m a man. In any case I have to send more pieces to accompany the Portrait of Lizzi. I don’t have much time.”

“Well . . . Elsie, that’s wonderful. I’m so proud,” Philipose manages to say.

She hugs him, squeezing him so hard that it takes his breath away. Belatedly, he realizes that he should have hugged her first.

He’s happy for her, but ashamed to recognize that this news rattles him. Is it that she’s used her maiden name? But it’s not that. He thinks of all the rejected manuscripts he’s grumbled to her about, and the way he would mope around for a few days. Meanwhile Elsie doesn’t think her rejections are worth mentioning.

He sees her still gazing dreamily at him, her thoughts far away. Uncharitably, he tells himself that she’s picturing her work in the show and getting first prize. But he’s wrong.

“Philipose, there’s no requirement for the exhibitors to be there. But what if we go to Madras together for the opening. Spend some time, just the two of us. Big Ammachi can care for Ninan. Won’t it be exciting to take the train again in the other direction?”

He turns visibly pale, unable to conceal his distress. Sweat beads on his brow. She notices. He comes clean. “Elsie, I promised to come with you to the estate. Any time. Or any other city. Just say so. But Madras? My heart is racing just to hear the word. It affects me bodily. It’s the city where I was defeated, humiliated, sent packing.”

“Me too, Philipose. That’s why I was on that train. But this time we’ll be together.”

“My darling,” Philipose says. He wants to please her, but his throat feels as though it is closing, and sweat is pouring down his face. “I’m so proud of you. Please understand, I’ll go anywhere else with you. Kanpur, Jabalpur, Any-pur. Just not Madras.”

“It was just a thought,” she says. But the sad note in that husky voice catches in him like a fishhook, shaming him. The antidote to shame is indignation, righteous anger. Fortunately, this time he pushes it down; he knows those emotions aren’t justified. He’s fearful of returning to Madras, and he can’t hide it. But he’s more fearful of losing her, fearful that she’ll outgrow him.

That night, atypically, Ninan climbs onto his mother’s chest and stays put, glued there, his legs curled up till he falls asleep, reminding his parents of the time he lived bound to that spot. Elsie says, “It would have been a shock for him if I was away even for a night. I would have missed him too.” She looks up at Philipose mischievously. “Would you have missed me if I had gone alone?”

“Terribly! And I would have tortured myself with jealousy imagining you sniffing snuff with a stranger. I would probably have jumped on the next train to join you.”

She smiles. She looks down at Ninan. “Well, if we’d gone, at least we’d have missed him together. And we could have replaced painful memories in that city with new ones.”

Philipose says, “I know. But let’s visit some other city first. Save Madras for when I feel more resilient.”

Six weeks later, when he comes to bed and turns out the light, Elsie says, “My father’s driver brought a letter today when you went out with Uplift Master. The Portrait of Lizzi won the gold medal at the Madras exhibition. And the Decency Kochamma portrait got Honorable Mention.”

He sits bolt upright. “What? Only now you tell me? I must wake Ammachi, I must—” She puts a finger on his lips. She insists it can wait till morning.

The news is in the Indian Express the next day. The Express reporter asks why it has taken so long to recognize this artist’s skill. By using a name that didn’t reveal her gender, she won the gold medal. But was this not the same Elsiamma, and some of the same works that were rejected the previous year by the same judges? (The reporter’s source is Chandy’s friend and Elsie’s ardent champion: the head of the tea brokerage in Madras and the man who submitted her work.) Three of Elsie’s paintings sold on opening day. Portrait of Lizzi commanded the best price at the auction. The following day, the Malayalam papers quote the Express story.

When Ninan is three, Uplift Master speculates that the boy is a budding Congress Party politician because he regularly visits every house in Parambil. He loves pickled tender-mango preserves but eats whatever is proffered, his appetite so astonishing that others wonder if they starve him at home. Fortunately, he has no desire to swim. His eyes are on the heights: the top of the wardrobe, the top of the haystack, the center pole of the roof. His highest ascent to date is Damodaran’s back, lifted there by Damodaran, who handed him to a waiting Unni. The holy grail of all ascents is off limits for the prince: the fruiting top of the palm where the tapper makes his living. Emulating his heroes, he sports a cloth belt, tucked into which is a desiccated bone and a twig that stands in for a knife. He has a young pulayi in tow; her only job is to keep him as close to sea level as she can. On a memorable evening the family sits on the verandah and watches in astonishment as Ninan scales the verandah pillar, his soles flat against the smooth surface like a lizard’s feet, while his hands gripping the back of the pillar provide counterpressure. Before they can react, he’s grinning down at them from the rafters.

One morning, when Philipose returns from the post office, he finds Elsie in bed, an anxious look on her face, and her skin burning to the touch. He sponges her with cool cloths to bring the temperature down. For the next few days, the high fever doesn’t abate, which suggests to the family that it is typhoid. At some expense, Philipose hires a car and brings a doctor to Parambil from an hour away; he confirms that it is typhoid. There’s no specific treatment, he says, and reassures them that Elsie should get better.

Philipose alone nurses his wife, waving off help. He discovers that he’s at his best—they are at their best—when she depends on him as she does now. Shouldn’t love always be this way, like the two limbs of the letter A? When she’s absorbed in her work, and isn’t leaning against him, he feels off-balance, unstable.

By the third week of the illness, she rallies. Philipose helps her with a proper bath, after which she’s so weak that he carries her back to bed. She clutches his hand, doesn’t let go. Her finger runs into the depression at the back of his thumb between the wrist tendons. Her face breaks into a silly grin. “Sniiiiifffing only,” she says, stroking the hollow of the “anatomical snuffbox.”

“Exactly two sneezings will be there,” he says. “Unless it is more.” She laughs silently. He kisses her forehead. He feels a surge of tenderness and a strong urge to articulate his inchoate emotions. But that, he knows, is when he is most dangerous to himself.

She asks about Ninan, whom they have kept away from her for the child’s safety. “He climbed on top of Decency Kochamma’s goat shed and plucked her mangoes,” Philipose reports. “She was not happy. She said he was goat above the waist and monkey below. Not flattering to either of us.” Elsie laughs, then winces. Her belly is tender. She opens her eyes to look at him. He leans his head against hers so that they’re looking cross-eyed at each other, grinning like silly children.

What name can he give to this energy swirling in the room, binding them together. If only he could bottle this elixir that illness has made so potent. Is it possible to love her more? Or to feel as valued as he feels now? What to call it but love? A little later, tears well up in her eyes. Is she thinking of her mother, claimed by this same illness when Elsie was not much older than Ninan? He has a frantic need to comfort her.

“What is it? What can I do for you, Elsiamma? Tell me. Anything—”

Idiot! You did it again! He’s embarrassed. On the verge of speech, she gives up. He waits. The vitality that was in the room vanishes, leaving sadness in its wake.

She looks out the window.

“Okay.” He sighs, theatrically. “I promise. The tree will go. No more excuses.” Her eyes close. Was that what her gaze through the window had meant? In any case, he has made a promise. Again. He won’t let her down.

On the first of June that year, 1949, the household is tetchy. Raw, exposed nerves are a pre-monsoon symptom afflicting all on India’s west coast. Columnists write crotchety pieces that rework prior crotchety pieces about this irritability, whose only cure is rain. The monsoon always arrives on June 1, and here it is the fifth already. Farmers clamor for the government to act. Mass prayers are organized. In Mavelikara a woman cuts off the head of her husband of twenty-five years. She said that she found her husband’s cheeriness and talkativeness unbearable, that something in her snapped.

During this period, with little work for the pulayar, Philipose gives Shamuel the order to cut down the tree. The old man listens to the instructions and walks away puzzled.

Philipose sees Shamuel return with a pulayar crew, including a rare sighting of Joppan. Philipose often sees Joppan’s wife, Ammini, working alongside Sara, but little of Joppan. He heard that Joppan has remodeled his dwelling, bringing in timber to replace the thatch walls and putting in a cement floor that extends out to make a porch. The barge business is thriving again. Ammini works alongside her mother-in-law, weaving thatch panels, and she has taken over the muttam-sweeping and gets paid for it.

“First, remove the fruits. Each of you can have one,” Shamuel says to the crew. He squats to watch. Sara appears and hunkers beside him. The men lower the heavy, prickly orbs down. “Good thing these fruits grow close to the trunk,” Shamuel says to his wife after a while. “They’re like boulders! Falling coconuts are dangerous enough, but a falling chakka will kill you. Look at my toe if you think I’m joking! You know, don’t you?”

Sara acts as if she doesn’t hear him and leaves without a word. Shamuel was urinating behind a jackfruit tree, needing privacy as there were women around. He’d fished out his penis—his “Little-Thoma”—and looked down. At Shamuel’s age, to get flow going, he had to cough, spit, imagine a waterfall, lean a hand on something, or look up. His tale always finishes with “If I’d been looking down at my Little-Thoma, that would have been the end. If I hadn’t looked up, I wouldn’t be talking to you now!” He had time to pull his head back before the jackfruit landed on his toe.

As Sara walks away, she thinks, Why do men look down? Isn’t it always there? It won’t walk off. Just point and shoot! She rejoins Ammini to finish a thatch panel. She says to her daughter-in-law, “That man is my life. But if he repeated his chakka-landing-on-foot story today, I’d have finished off what the chakka left undone.”

Once the fruits are down, Shamuel directs the men to amputate every branch near its origins, “just beyond the shoulders.” They look puzzled. His nephew, Yohannan, asks, “Why not cut the whole tree down?”

“Eda Vayinokki!” Shamuel says. Busybody! “Who are you to ask? ‘Why’ is because the thamb’ran asked. Isn’t that enough?!”

What’s wrong with Yohannan? Shamuel thinks, annoyed. Did he wake up and forget what it means to be one of us? The truth is he himself doesn’t understand why the tree should be cut this way. So what? How many things has he done because the thamb’ran said so? What else matters?

The men chop off each branch with their sharp vakkathis by cutting a wedge on two sides until it weakens and crashes down, leaving behind a pointed spear, a sharp stump. Sap pours out at these cuts, and the men quickly collect it in gourds. Children use the sap as birdlime, a cruel practice as far as Shamuel is concerned. But it makes an excellent glue that he’ll use to caulk his old canoe. Who would think one could caulk a canoe this late in June? Flecks of white sap dot the men’s skin and stick to their vakkathis. It’ll take oil and scraping with coconut husk to get it off the blades and handles of these machetes.

“That’s good wood,” Shamuel calls out. “Just keep one branch for me to make an oar. It isn’t easy wood, but if you do it right it has a beautiful shine. Take what you want to make whatever you like. Sell it to the ashari if you’re too lazy, what do I care?”

Soon the air is thick with the sick, cloying smell of ripe jackfruit. Once the others are gone, Shamuel and Joppan stare at what’s left: a thick, tall trunk with dagger-like arms and fingers. A malevolent goddess. Joppan says bitterly, “This is stupid. People who don’t know what to do with the land shouldn’t be allowed to keep it.” He walks off before his astonished father can respond.

From the bedroom, Philipose watches the men as they finish up. Perhaps Elsie will consider what’s left to be a sculpture, a candelabra with a dozen pointy upturned limbs. But he’s deceiving himself and knows it. What’s left is an unsightly scarecrow clawing at the sky. This compromise was meant to give her a well-lit room while preserving his talisman, but the result is ugly and embarrassing, like an old man’s nakedness. They should just fell this tree. Shamuel is there alone and Philipose is about to call out, “O’Shamuel’O! Have them just chop the whole thing down,” when he spots Joppan next to his father. Pride stops the words from leaving his mouth. It will only make him look sillier.

The bedroom is brighter, the light revealing a cobweb in a corner. Elsie was right: the tree obstructed the view. And what’s this he sees? He leans to get a better look. A change in the sky? No clouds, but the blue fabric has a different texture. Also a new scent in the air. Could it be?

Philipose heads outside. Caesar barks. A gust blows his mundu back between his legs. A flock of birds wheels around, confused. If he were on the beach at Kanyakumari, he might have seen the great southwest monsoon rolling in the previous day retracing a path that brought the ancient Romans, Egyptians, the Syrians to these shores.

He averts his eyes as he skirts the amputated plavu. He crosses the pasture, until he comes to the high bund on the edge of the paddy fields that extends into the distance, offering an unobstructed view of sky and a palm-fringed horizon. Others join him from the nearby huts, their faces taut with anticipation. They’ve forgotten that the monsoon will confine them for weeks, drown these parched paddy fields, leak through thatch, and deplete their grain stores; all they know is that their bodies, like the parched soil, crave rainfall; their flaking skin thirsts for it. Just as the fields will lie fallow, so too the body must rest to emerge renewed, oiled, and supple once again.

High in the sky a raptor is motionless on outstretched wings, riding the steady draft. The sky in the distance is reddish, and darker. A flash of light sends a ripple of excitement through the observers. They relish these minutes before the deluge, forgetting they will soon be wistful for clothes to dry properly and not have that mildewed, musty, last-century scent; they’ll curse doors and drawers that are stuck like breech babies. For now such memories are buried. The wind blusters erratically and Philipose fights for balance. A disoriented bird tries to fly into the wind, but the gust lifts a wingtip and sends it cartwheeling.

Now Shamuel is beside him, his skin flecked with white sap, grinning at the sky. At last, the leading edge of a dark mountain of cloud approaches, a black god—oh, fickle believers, why did you doubt its coming? It seems miles away, but also already on them, because it’s raining, blessed rain, sideways rain, rain from below, new rain, not the kind you can run away from, and not the kind you ward off with an umbrella. Philipose holds his face up, even as Shamuel watches him, smiling, murmuring, “Eyes open!”

Yes, old man, yes, eyes open to this precious land and its people, to the covenant of water, water that washes away the sins of the world, water that will gather in streams, ponds, and rivers, rivers that float the seas, water that I will never enter.

He hurries back to the house, Shamuel on his heels, because there’s an even more important ritual that awaits them. From the other houses they come too. They’re just in time.

Baby Mol, after a last glance in the mirror, waddles to the front verandah, a short child, her shoulders back despite a spine that is getting more hunched each year, her trunk swaying from side to side like a counterweight to her legs. Once they smelled rain, Big Ammachi hurriedly braided jasmine and fresh ribbons into Baby Mol’s hair and hustled her into her special dress: the shimmering blue skirt with the gold border, and on top a silky half-sari that drapes over her gold blouse and is pinned to its shoulder. Elsie painted a big red pottu in the center of Baby Mol’s forehead and applied kajal eyeliner that makes her all grown up.

Baby Mol smiles shyly on seeing the audience gathering, her kith and kin, here to witness her monsoon dance. She feels the weight of responsibility, for if the rains are to continue, everything depends on her. This tradition began when Baby Mol was a child, and since she will always be a child, it will always continue. She stands in the muttam, the watchers packing the verandah, or, in the case of the pulayar, leaning on the verandah wall, just under the overhang.

She begins swaying, clapping her hands to beat out a rhythm and matching it with her shuffling feet. As she warms up, the miracle occurs: the inelegant, trundling steps become fluid, and soon all limitations—her curved spine, her short stature, her broad hands and wide feet—melt away. Twenty pairs of hands clap with her and cheer her on. She thrusts her arms skyward, beckoning the clouds, grunting from the effort, while her eyes dart from this side to that. It is Baby Mol’s own mohiniyattam, and she is the mohini—the enchantress—swaying her hips, telegraphing a story with her eyes, her facial expression, her hand signals, and the posture of her limbs. Her mohiniyattam is earthy, lower to the ground, unschooled, and authentic. Sweat mingles with raindrops in the seriousness of her dance. The message in her gyrations is one that each observer makes for themself, but its themes are hard work, suffering, reward, and gratitude. Lucky life, it says to Philipose as the rain pelts down. Lucky, lucky life! Lucky you can judge yourself in this water. Lucky you can be purified over and over . . . When she’s done, she has secured their covenant, the monsoon has pledged its loyalty, the family is safe, and all is well with the world.