The Covenant of Water

1950, Gwendolyn Gardens

The scrape of Cromwell’s knuckles on the kitchen door and the wet smack of gumboots being shed begin their nightly ritual. Digby’s trusted comrade pads barefoot into the study, always in khaki shorts and short sleeves. And always smiling.

“Make mine a double,” Digby says as Cromwell pours. Cromwell’s grin widens.

One drink, and never alone, is Digby’s rule. “A matter of self-preservation. An estate hazard,” he might say if asked. It has been fourteen years since he acquired Müller’s estate for the consortium that consisted of the friends who had gathered around the Mylins’ dinner table on a New Year’s Eve. Thirteen since he earned a portion of it, which he named Gwendolyn Gardens after his mother. Over that time he’s witnessed the fall of three assistant managers at neighboring Perry & Co., young men who knew their way around a pint back home. It was a grand adventure at first: bungalow, servants, company motorcycle, and being the laird of more tea, coffee, and rubber than they knew existed. But they’d underestimated the loneliness and isolation of the first monsoon and found the antidote in the bottle.

His only regret about his estate is its distance from Franz and Lena. Even in fair weather it’s an all-day drive south, past Trichur and Cochin, to reach the vicinity of Saint Bridget’s and then several hours’ climb to get to AllSuch. His family, such as it is, consists of Cromwell, the Mylins, and Honorine, who comes every summer for two months. When she leaves, a melancholy descends on him. Without Cromwell, without this nightly ritual during the monsoon, he might be lost.

Cromwell disdains chairs and hunkers near the fireplace, the glass under his nose, whisky to be breathed as much as sipped. That mix of deliberation and pleasure is in everything he does. Digby thinks of him as ageless, so he’s perversely pleased to see gray creeping over his friend’s temples. Digby keeps his own hair closely cropped, which makes his graying less evident. He’s forty-two, but looks considerably younger; Cromwell, he guesses, is slightly older.

In this nightly ritual, they “walk” through Gwendolyn Gardens’ nine hundred acres. If it were all coffee, it’d be easy, as coffee needs little labor—even less labor after they switched to robusta when leaf rust wiped out their arabica plants. On a magical morning in March, a hundred acres of Gwendolyn Gardens will look blanketed in snow because of an overnight explosion of the glorious white coffee blossoms. But competition from Brazil has driven down prices. Tea is very profitable and forms the bulk of the estate, but it’s the delicate child that demands the most laborers. Being closer to the equator, their tea can be plucked all year round, unlike Assam and Darjeeling. The demand is insatiable. In the warmer, lowest reaches of the estate are the many acres of rubber trees.

“On eleven ’arpin. Sliding. Same place as before,” Cromwell says at the end of his report.

I knew there was a reason I wanted a double. A landslide on the eleventh hairpin bend is a disaster. They’ll run out of their stock of paddy in a week; for their laborers, the provision of rice is more critical than giving them their wages. Digby pictures the spot, the road ending abruptly in a crevasse of mud, boulders, and uprooted trees. Just above it, water springs mysteriously from the flat mountain face. A stigma. The tribals place cairns there, offerings to Varuna or Ganga, but the gods are not appeased. The treatment is painful: they must hack down parallel to the landslide through dense forest till they get below it, then cut across and back up to join the ghat road again. Every estate will pitch in. Workers will carry headloads along this U-shaped detour till the road is rebuilt. The detour could become the new road.

The next morning the monsoon ceases as though a switch was flipped, the incessant drone of rain on the roof silenced. For so many weeks, Digby’s view was of swirling mist or, rarely, when the clouds settled in the valley, he’d be staring down like Zeus at the tops of cumulus and thunderheads. When he steps out, it’s bright and sunny; the processing sheds and the thatch of the clinic have the soaked, bedraggled look of a pariah dog caught without shelter. Despite the landslide, his spirits soar.

Skaria, the compounder, scurries to the clinic, sporting a sweater the color of bilious boak. Tobacco smoke pours out of his nostrils and thickens in the chilly air. The man is so addicted to nicotine that he sucks on vile cheroots as though they were beedis. Seeing Digby, he holds his breath to conceal the smoke as he salutes. The jumpy Skaria can manage a routine sick call, but in an emergency he’s worse than useless, he’s an impediment.

Cromwell brings the horses around. He’s bleary-eyed but grinning. Somehow he has already visited the landslide, taking every able-bodied person with him to start on the bypass. He reports that a cow is about to calve, while the polydactyl cat in the same barn has given birth to kittens. “Babies also six fingers! Good luck only!”

Digby mounts Billroth. The mud embankments flanking the driveway are green with “touch-me-not” and twitch in response to a sudden breeze, just like the skin of his colt. He gets goose bumps at the sight. He could drop a toothpick in this sod and it would soon be a sapling. From city boy to surgeon to planter. The fecund soil is what keeps him here; it is the salve for wounds that never close.

Billroth suddenly pulls back his ears and whinnies, well before the sound reaches Digby: the rattle of a bullock cart moving at breakneck speed, and contrary to the physics of wooden wheels, fragile axles, rutted roads, and bovines. Then it comes into sight, the bullocks wide-eyed, trailing ribbons of saliva, while the driver whips them as though the devil is on his tail.

Cromwell trots forward to meet the cart. After a brief exchange, he points to the bridle path. It ends in a squat building with the thatch pulled down over its ears like a bonnet. The clinic.

“They coming from other side of mountain,” he says. “Landslide there also. Turning and come this way. Someone told doctor is here. Not good.”

Digby experiences only the fear, not the heady excitement he once felt in Casualty at engaging with human life reduced to its core elements—breath, a pumping heart—or their absence. He knows what should be done for most emergencies, but he doesn’t have the means. For things that aren’t emergencies . . . well, more than a few estate managers have discovered that if they’re looking for the friendly GP willing to drop by because Mary or Meena is off her porridge, Digby’s not their man. He has furnished the dispensary well enough to care for his laborers, but he’s a planter first. In an emergency he’ll do what he can, but he can’t help feeling resentful and apprehensive about what he might see.

“SIR, DIGBY, SIR!” Skaria shouts, emerging from the clinic, waving his arms in that ghastly sweater. Billroth trots toward the clinic; the colt knows where duty lies even if his master is conflicted.

A baby’s fist sticks into the air.

What confuses Digby’s senses is that it emerges from a slit of a wound in the belly of its very pregnant and utterly frightened mother.

The tiny, clenched hand looks intact, uninjured. The mother, in her twenties, lies on the table, conscious—quite alert, in fact. She’s striking, with curly black hair framing a fair, oval face. Her blouse is green, and her sari and silky underskirt white. This is no estate laborer. The small pendant at her throat—a leaf with raised dots forming a crucifix—marks her as a Saint Thomas Christian. Her face is hauntingly familiar, beautiful in a generic way, Digby thinks. Perhaps it’s her resemblance to the calendar image of Lakshmi so ubiquitous in the laborers’ quarters and in shops, a print of a Raja Ravi Varma painting. His mind can’t help registering these details: the wedding ring, the dark circles of fatigue around her eyes, and her admirable composure, as though she’s wise enough to know the alternative is not helpful. Behind that façade, this lovely woman is terrified. And embarrassed.

The skin over her pregnant belly is stretched taut. The two-inch incision is slanted just to the left of the navel, too neat to have come about except by a knife or a scalpel. Blood trickles slowly from one edge; she’s not in danger of exsanguinating. Digby pictures the blade passing through skin, then the rectus muscle . . . and then straight into the uterus, which, since she is close to term, has grown out of the pelvis, pushing bowel and bladder back and out of its way as it reaches the ribs, completely occupying the abdomen. It’s the only reason she will have been spared torn intestines: the blade simply pierced the abdominal skin and muscle and encountered a bigger, thicker, and stronger muscle: the uterus. It made a slit, a porthole in the womb, and the baby reacted like any prisoner: it reached for daylight.

The infant’s fingers are curled into a fist, the gossamer nails shining like glass. Digby swabs the wound and the fist with antiseptic while making these observations. The iodine stings the mother but doesn’t seem to bother the baby. Had she presented to a hospital, they’d certainly have done a caesarean. In theory, Digby could do one. He has chloroform stored somewhere, if it hasn’t evaporated. But lacking good abdominal retractors and with no capable assistant, a caesarean in his hands could easily endanger mother as well as baby.

He ponders his options. But he’s distracted by a compost-heap, cheap-tobacco stink that reminds him of the Gaiety in Glasgow, a memory better buried. He turns to see Skaria at the window ledge, the vile cheroot on his lips. The man knows better than to smoke indoors or around Digby. But the flustered compounder couldn’t help reaching for the soggy stick, like a baby seeking a nipple.

Digby’s left hand, now his dominant one, moves with the precision of a pickpocket on the Saint Enoch railway platform. He snatches the cheroot from Skaria’s lips and—

—in the same sweep, brings its glowing end to those infant knuckles, the red-hot tip a tenth of an inch from its skin.

The universe teeters in indecision. Then the tiny fist makes a slithery retreat into its watery world, snatched back in response to the noxious insult. The space where the fist hovered is now just shimmering air, charged by what’s no longer there. In Digby’s brief surgical career he’s seen round worms crawl out of gallbladders; seen germline tumors containing hair, teeth, and rudimentary ears; but never anything like this.

Digby flicks the cheroot in Skaria’s direction and grabs a sterile bandage, pressing it down onto the wound. “Custody of the hands,” he says aloud, addressing the fetus. (He imagines the bairn raging in the womb, blowing on singed knuckles, cursing Digby and plotting revolution.) Custody of the hands. In his Glasgow schooldays, Sister Evangeline punctuated those words with a ruler to the knuckles.

“That baby’s fist will get it into trouble one day,” Digby mutters. Skaria has fled, and so he takes the mother’s hand and places it over the bandage, has her apply pressure.

Outside he hears a man groaning, muttering, then letting out a bloody yell; whoever that is sounds drunk or delirious. He hears Cromwell intervening.

Digby mounts the curved needle and suture on a long holder, and signals for the mother to remove her hand from the wound, praying the baby doesn’t try another escape. He spreads the wound edges just enough to see the uterine wall pressing up. Thankfully, the uterus, with its visceral nerve supply, isn’t sensitive like skin. As quickly as he can he passes the needle through the wall of the womb on one side of the rent, and then through the other side, ties the knot and cuts the thread. The mother doesn’t flinch. He puts in two more uterine stiches. Now the baby’s only way out is the front door. He closes the skin with two stitches. She winces once but says nothing. If he used local anesthetic for every skin laceration he sutured he’d use up his precious tetracaine in a week.

“Right, then. All done,” he says, looking around for Cromwell to translate. The mother is pale, exhausted, but still calm.

“Thank you so much, Doctor,” she says, in English, startling him. He studies her anew: the gold earrings, the carefully trimmed fingernails. He asks for her name. Lizzi. He introduces himself.

“Are you having any contractions, Lizzi?” She shakes her head. “How far along are you?”

“I think I’m having two more weeks.”

“Good. I hope you’ll deliver normally. But best to be in a hospital when labor starts, all right?” She signals yes with an earnest, childlike movement of her chin. The shouting outside is distracting. Who can be drunk this early? “For now, stay here. It could be a few days before the road opens.”

He turns to prepare the dressing. “Doctor,” she says. “It was an accident.”

How many women have said that before? And how many doctors, policemen, nurses, and children have heard those words and known differently? It’s a mystery why a woman would protect a man so unworthy of it. Celeste’s face flashes before him.

“That’s my husband. His name is Kora,” she says, pointing in the direction of the racket. “He is an estate writer.” Such men are brokers who contract with the village headman down in the plains for estate labor; the appellation comes from the broker’s act of writing each laborer’s name in a ledger. Unscrupulous headmen often sign with several writers, leaving an estate high and dry when the season starts. Digby is lucky to have workers who return faithfully every year, because he’s taken pains to ensure they have the best quarters, medical care, a one-room school, and a nursery for infants. “My husband lost his mind suddenly last night, Doctor. He thought I was the devil.”

“You mean he was fine before that?”

“Yes. But having severe asthma only. Here in mountains his asthma is very bad. He takes asthma cigarettes usually, but three days it didn’t help. Yesterday he ate one cigarette. Maybe ate more. His eyes became big. He cannot sit down, hearing voices. Devils are coming to get him, he says. When I brought him food, he was hiding behind the door and attacked me. Then he is very sorry.”

Digby’s grandmother smoked pre-rolled stramonium cigarettes. In India he knows asthmatics roll their own using dried stramonium or datura leaves. The atropine in the leaves dilates the bronchi; but in excess it produces a characteristic poisoning with dilated pupils, dry mouth and skin, fever, and agitation. Every medical student knows the aide-mémoire to recall the signs: “Blind as a bat, hot as a hare, dry as a bone, red as a beet, and mad as a wet hen.”

“It could be atropine poisoning. I’ll take a look. He should get better as it wears off. Are you from around here?”

The question seems to make her sad. “No. We are from central Travancore. We used to have a house and property and loving family. But he . . . we lost it all. He borrowed from dangerous people. Much trouble. He ran away. I could have stayed. Sometimes I wish I had.”

This is more information than Digby sought. He forgets that she views him not as a planter but as a physician, someone she can confide in. After her ordeal, talking about it is cathartic for her. It’s no effort for him to stand there and gaze at her classical features, the idealized Malayali beauty.

They’re both silent. Then, and for the first time since she arrived, her composure wavers. Her lip quivers. “Doctor, will my baby be all right?”

He regards the lovely face that looks at him so earnestly. His thoughts are interrupted by another wild yell from her husband outside. In that moment Digby has a glimpse into her future, a disturbing premonition of doom, something he has never experienced. “Baby will be fine,” he says to her reassuringly. Relief washes over her features. “Just fine.” He hopes that’s true. “Your baby has great reflexes—that we know. He had his fist out there like Lenin,” he says, trying to lighten the mood. He extends his hand over her belly, his palm down in pastoral blessing. He leans over to speak directly to the baby: “I proclaim you Lenin, evermore. If you’re a boy, that is.” He grins, though his scar still gives a slight snarl to that expression.

“Lenin Evermore,” the beautiful Lizzi repeats, her head moving from side to side, emphasizing each syllable as though she’s memorizing it. “Yes, Doctor.”