The Covenant of Water

1949, Parambil

Yet the day after the monsoon begins, Baby Mol is inexplicably restless and unhappy, not sitting on her bench but pacing, not relishing the downpour the way she usually does. They fear that she’s ill, that her lungs and overburdened heart are troubling her. She lies with Elsie, who massages her legs while Big Ammachi cradles her head. No one can imagine that Baby Mol is now forty-one years old, not a baby at all yet always a baby. Big Ammachi pleads, “Tell me what is wrong,” but Baby Mol only groans and weeps inconsolably, at times talking back sharply to whatever phantasm is whispering in her ear.

At night, husband and wife lie listening to the heavens empty on Parambil, Ninan asleep beside Elsie, and Philipose holding his wife close, both of them troubled by what ails Baby Mol.

The next morning, there’s a strange lull and the skies clear. The sun comes out. People venture out cautiously, uncertain how long this will last. Uplift Master hurries over to get Big Ammachi’s signature on a tax appeal form. Georgie and Ranjan decide this is the moment to talk to Philipose about a land lease with deferred payments. Shamuel and others are clustered behind the kitchen too, coming to get paid and to be given stored paddy, as is customary at the start of the monsoon. Joppan wanders up from his hut. Odat Kochamma takes the clothes out to hang on the line, pessimistic about the prospects of anything drying. No sooner is her task complete than a fine drizzle of tiny needles comes down. She grumbles at the skies, saying it should make up its mind.

A scream shatters the calm, a sound so terrible it arrests the drizzle. Philipose, at his desk, knows at once that it comes from the adjacent room, from Elsie’s lips, even though he’s never heard such a sound from her before, a full-throated shriek of terror that chills his blood. He gets to her first.

Elsie clutches the bars of their window, still screaming. Philipose thinks she’s been bitten by a snake but sees no sign of one. He follows her gaze through the window to the naked plavu. What he sees brings bile to his mouth.

Baby Ninan. Suspended upside down, his face white, bloodless, frozen into a surprised expression, his body crooked in a manner that defies the senses.

A pointed, amputated branch of the tree grows out of his chest, blood congealed around its exit in a ragged fringe.

Philipose, screaming, charges outside and up the tree, feeling his legs slip on the wet bark, abrading his shins on the rain-soaked trunk, scraping his hands raw as he claws—how did Ninan get up at all?—but at last getting a handhold on one sharp stump. Fueled by adrenaline and desperation, he finds one foothold and the next till he has reached his son. He tries with one hand to lift him free. Shamuel, who was by Philipose’s room when he heard the screams, clambers up behind him now, defying his age, willing himself up behind the thamb’ran. Joppan arrives in time to see his father reach Philipose. The old man’s body, the color of the bark, is pressed against Philipose. He can smell Shamuel’s hot breath scented with betel nut and beedi smoke as together—and it takes them both—they grunt and pull at Ninan, needing first to lift him clear of the spike. They heave up, and with a sickening sucking sound, the torso comes away from the pointed stump.

The body slips from their hands to Joppan and the many hands waiting below, and Ninan is laid on the ground, limp and unmoving, his spine at a crooked angle, rain now falling on his inert body and on all of them. Shamuel clambers down, and when he’s clear, Philipose, not bothering to climb down, just pushes himself off the trunk from that height, and lands hard, yelling from the lightning pain that shoots through both ankles as his heels smash the ground, but in the next instant bending over his son, shouting, his voice carrying over the fields and through the trees. “Ayo! Ayo! Ente ponnu monay!” My precious child! He screams, “Monay! Ninan! Talk to me!” refusing to accept what his eyes show him, deaf to the cries of Elsie and Big Ammachi or the others hovering over him, deaf to the wailing, the beating of their breasts, the retching sounds. He hears none of it, because Ninan’s midsection is the world caved in, a dark pit of horror, the center of a universe that has betrayed a child; betrayed the mother, father, and grandmother and all who loved him. Everything that belonged to the small body—breath and pulse and voice and thought—is gone and is dead, is beyond dead.

He gathers up his broken boy. When hands try to restrain him, Philipose fights them off, beats them away. He cradles his son in his arms, a lunatic intending to run into the gathering darkness of monsoon clouds. And if not to those healing clouds, where is he running? For a man on broken, crooked ankles seeking help for his firstborn, the nearest hospital is farther than the sun.

Shamuel and Joppan trot behind this crazed figure, Joppan’s hand around his childhood friend’s waist, around the hobbling creature that shouts, as if rising decibels might rouse what can never be roused again, “Monay, don’t leave us! Monay, ayo Ninanay! Wait! Stop! Listen to me! Monay, I’m sorry!”

The men of Parambil—uncles, nephews, cousins, laborers—alerted by the wails, follow in the blood trail, falling in behind father and deceased son. Less than a furlong down the road, Philipose is still staggering forward like a drunkard on wobbly ankles, his left foot unnaturally turned inward, sobbing, and the men weep too, grown men, surrounding him but not daring to stop him, a measured march alongside a father who thinks he is running when he’s barely shuffling, and finally just standing in place, swaying like an ancient.

His ankles buckle and they catch him; the strong arms of Parambil lower their brother down, ease him to the earth, to his knees, while he still clutches the terrible load in his arms. Philipose, face upturned to the heavens, screams, beseeches his God, any god. God is silent. Rain is the best that heaven can do.

It is Shamuel, the eldest and the noblest of these men, squatting tenderly next to Philipose, who alone has the courage and the authority to gently disengage the father’s bloody hands. Shamuel covers the little boy with his own unfurled thorthu, and somehow this faded, utilitarian cloth transforms into a sacred shroud, the embodiment of the old man’s love. Shamuel gathers the little thamb’ran’s body into his arms, cradles him carefully, lovingly, his old bones creaking as he rises; Ranjan, Georgie, Uplift Master, Yohannan, and ten other hands help old Shamuel rise, brothers one and all, every barrier of caste and custom erased in the terrible solidarity imposed by death, while Joppan alone tends to the shattered father, lifts him to his feet, ducks his head under Philipose’s arm, encircles his waist, and supports him, half carries him as he limps on what are clearly broken ankles.

The wailing women have retreated to the Parambil verandah, crying, keening, or quietly weeping, cloths clutched to their mouths. Elsie is on her knees, her hands held to her chest, while Big Ammachi clutches a pillar and Odat Kochamma silently, rhythmically, strikes one fist, then the other to her breast, groaning, her face upturned, and they all wait. They’d last seen Philipose staggering down the road on feet that were grotesquely turned, his son’s limp form in his arms; the women had hoped against all hope that somehow once he was out of sight, the father, or God, or both, could work some miracle, make the broken boy whole, make what was crooked straight.

Then all hope is shattered for the women as they see the phalanx of fathers and sons returning, a wall of mustached, fierce men, arms over each other’s shoulders, brothers in heartbreak, walking as one, sobbing or clear-eyed, but every face distorted by pain, contorted with grief and anger and shock and rage. With them is the broken father, a madman, one arm over the shoulder of Joppan, held up by his childhood friend, whose muscles bulge and strain under the load until Yohannan slips under Philipose’s other arm.

In the center of the phalanx is Shamuel, all but naked, wearing only his mud-colored loincloth, his mundu lost on that cursed tree; Shamuel, walking with great dignity, his eyes straight ahead, his the only face that is composed, his bare torso squared to the unloveliness of what he carries in his arms, which his thorthu cannot fully conceal; Shamuel, slowly approaching the waiting women, his pace measured, as if every minute of his toil over his lifetime, clearing this land with his thamb’ran, the never-ending labor that shaped the sinewy biceps and plate-like pectorals, was leading to this moment, to this sorrowful duty: to bear in his arms with great solemnity his late thamb’ran’s last-born’s firstborn, who now joins his ancestors in the blessed hereafter.

After the burial, Philipose leans heavy on crutches, looking out the window to where the plavu once stood. Without asking anyone, Shamuel has cut down the remnant of the plavu. Shamuel vented his fury and his grief, savaging the tree with his axe, and Philipose only wishes he could have been there to take the place of the tree, so the old man’s axe might have torn into his own flesh. Joppan came uninvited to join his father, to help him—indeed, to take the axe from him as Shamuel’s blows became increasingly wild and reckless, and soon Yohannan was there too with others, and this time they spared none of it, attacking it viciously, digging out every last root and then filling the crater so that not even the scar of its existence showed, a brutal execution for a cursed tree. Philipose wishes they had finished him too, buried him in that spot, in that muddy soil where already the moss fed by blood and monsoon rain grows to conceal any trace of where a tree once stood in Parambil.

Shamuel tells Philipose later that they found a piece of Ninan’s shirt on the penultimate branch, twice as high as where his body was impaled. He says nothing more, but both men picture the little fellow getting his shirt caught on that high branch, dangling there momentarily before the fabric tore and he plunged down onto the pointed, upturned spear of the branch eight feet below. Philipose was in his study, working. He never heard the fall, only the mother’s subsequent scream.

There is far too much light in this bedroom now—obscene, hateful light. Philipose seethes with anger at himself. For not seeing Ninan begin his climb. For not hearing his son cry out. For not cutting down the tree altogether. Or leaving it be. This is all his fault. But . . . if Elsie had never bothered about the tree, his tree, if she’d respected his work as he had hers, then his Ninan, his firstborn, would still be alive. When Elsie stated her wish so many moons ago, if only he’d said “No!” Or said a true “Yes.” In a life, it is the in-betweens that are fatal; indecisiveness killed his son. But in his grief, in his bitterness, at this moment he thinks it all began with Elsie’s fateful wish: “You can cut down that tree.”

Why was it all so difficult? All he ever wanted to do was love her. Since the moment of his betrothal has he not been endlessly accommodating? Changing his practices so that hers can flourish? That is what has killed little Ninan—her stubbornness. Some part of him must know this is unreasonable even as he thinks it. But his mind can’t accept the alternative. If it’s all his fault, what earthly excuse does he have to be still breathing?

He hears footsteps behind him, and he knows without turning that she’s walked into the room. He and Elsie have not been alone with each other since the death. He turns to face her, hobbling on his crutches, ignoring the pain, his anger barely concealed.

He meets an anger that matches and exceeds his. Her eyes show rage, and something worse that he cannot abide: blame. Her face is as hard as the iron bars in the window and furrowed by dried tears that salt the skin.

The air between them is thick with the bile of recrimination and contempt. She dares him to accuse her, and he dares her to give words to what she’s thinking.

Then she looks over his shoulder and registers that the lethal, murderous remnant of the tree is gone . . . but it is much too late. Her eyes come back to him. He won’t forget her expression as long as he lives. Hers is the face of a vengeful god.

He senses her primal urge to launch herself at him, strike him, claw at his eyes, flay his cheeks with her nails. He can see the trajectory of this assault in his mind’s eye, and his own feral leap to block the charge with his hands, to shove her away, curse her for wanting what she should never have wanted, accuse her of killing his son, condemn her for coming into his life and bringing nothing but tragedy.

In the next instant she looks right through him, just as for years she looked through that plavu, pretended that its ugliness wasn’t there and that her view was unobstructed. At that moment she has made him vanish, wiped him off her canvas, so that what’s left is a smeared surface that holds the false lines, the figure that did not come out right, the erroneous strokes of a marriage, and a world botched beyond repair and not what she ever imagined. She brushes past him, bumping him aside with her shoulder—the hollow, invisible, less-than-ordinary man, the husband who isn’t there—as she gathers a few things.

He hears drawers opening and closing. Then he hears her say to someone, “Let’s go.”