The Covenant of Water

1951, Parambil

An uneasy truce abides during the rest of Elsie’s ripening. Big Ammachi sees her avoid her husband. Who can blame her? Ever since the kaniyan’s visit, Philipose’s behavior has grown more erratic.

In Elsie’s seventh month, Big Ammachi sends for Anna, a young woman she knows from church because of her beautiful singing voice. She’d heard that Anna’s husband had vanished, and that she and her daughter were struggling. Big Ammachi is sixty-three and feels every bit of it. With a new baby coming she could use some help, and if Anna is willing, the arrangement could be mutually beneficial. She misses Odat Kochamma terribly; the old lady’s unflappable presence would have been a blessing during Elsie’s delivery. She has no photograph of her beloved companion and so she keeps Odat Kochamma’s wooden false teeth in a jar in the kitchen. The old lady “borrowed” them from her daughter-in-law’s father and wore them when the mood struck her. Big Ammachi smiles whenever her gaze falls on the leering teeth. Every night in her prayers for the departed, she cries when she comes to Odat Kochamma.

Anna shows up after lunch, just as Big Ammachi sits on the rope cot with the newspaper and her plug of tobacco; other than the breezeway flies, no one is around to scold her about her habit. Anna is in her late twenties, with a wide forehead, wide hips, and a smile that looks wider than both those together. For a big woman, Anna’s cheeks look unnaturally gaunt since Big Ammachi last saw her in church. Hiding behind her is a frail little girl wearing oversized shorts tied with shoestring; her eyes are larger than her whole face.

“So, who’s your little tail there?”

“That’s my Hannah!” says her mother proudly, showing more teeth than a mouth should be able to hold. The dried stains in a concentric pattern on Anna’s chatta do not escape Big Ammachi’s notice. So it’s breast milk that keeps the little bug-eyed angel from starving.

“Aah, I’m thinking Hannah might want to eat something,” Big Ammachi says, dismissing Anna’s protests and stepping into the kitchen. While the two eat, Big Ammachi asks about the absent husband.

“Ammachi, bad luck followed my poor husband like cats behind the fishmonger. He fell asleep under a palm after drinking toddy and a coconut cracked his ribs. Such bad luck.” Big Ammachi ponders Anna’s charitable view of her husband. “Then he lost his job and couldn’t find work. He was frustrated. One morning he decided he was going to sneak onto a train going to Madras, Delhi, or Bombay, and find work. That was three months ago. There’s no paddy in the house,” says Anna still grinning, as if describing yet another comic turn in her marital adventure, even as her eyes get wet. “I want to find him, but how?” She dabs at her cheeks. “When Hannah grows up and asks me if I did everything to find her Appachen . . .”

Big Ammachi acts annoyed, but she squeezes Anna’s hand. “You can’t search the whole land!”

From the first moment, Anna is like four extra pairs of hands. Big Ammachi wonders how she managed before Anna Chedethi. That suffix gives Anna the stature of a relative, not a hired servant. Hannah trails Big Ammachi just the way JoJo once did. Lord, I came here as a child myself, missing my mother and without a father. Now I’m mother to so many. Hannah looks three but holds up five fingers when asked her age. It isn’t long before Hannah’s cheeks rise like leavened bread. Big Ammachi helps Hannah to read, using the Bible as her text. The little girl sits absorbed with the Bible long after her lesson is over.

Big Ammachi and Anna Chedethi ready the bedroom in the old section of the house for Elsie’s delivery. It sits beside the ara, and above the cellar, so one could keep a close eye on the treasures of the house. The raised platform bed with corner posts that rise like church spires is cluttered with bolts of cloth. Big Ammachi delivered her children in this bed. Her mother used this bedroom in the last months of her life when she found it difficult to rise from the mat on the floor. The room has brass-studded, dark, teak-paneled walls and a decorative false ceiling. It is a museum of old Parambil artifacts, each with its own history, and she cannot bring herself to give any of it away. There’s a family of long-spouted brass kindis, and ornate oil and kerosene lamps that sit tarnishing since electricity arrived. In one corner of the room is a ceremonial seven-tiered oil lamp as tall as Big Ammachi. They clear almost everything but the bed. Anna Chedethi wipes down the walls and ceiling and polishes the red oxide floor until she can see her reflection. Elsie will deliver here in this room of memory, ceremony, and transition.

Big Ammachi, in the kitchen, hears a crash and runs back to the old bedroom; she finds Philipose up a ladder, pulling down objects from the crawl space above the ara, which is accessed from the old bedroom.

“I’m looking for Ninan’s wooden cycle,” he says. “The one without pedals. Isn’t it up here?”

“Are you mad? Get out!”

Later she hears him instructing Shamuel. “Elsie will deliver on the sixth. I want Sultan Pattar to make biryani—”

Big Ammachi pounces, furious. “What nonsense! You think this is a wedding? The moon keeps to that kind of schedule, not babies. Shamuel, you can go. No Sultan Pattar, nothing.” Shamuel retreats slowly, so that he might hear the rest. “What’s wrong with you, Philipose? Such inauspicious behavior! No celebration till we have a healthy baby.”

His eyes are those of a man who has lost all reason. She might have shared with him her anxiety about Elsie’s pregnancy, but this specter would not understand. What madness possessed him to drag Elsie’s stone away? Big Ammachi had commiserated with her daughter-in-law, but Elsie said, “It’s all right. The ideas in my head are inexhaustible. No one can move those.”

Big Ammachi knows something Philipose does not: Elsie is building another sculpture out by her old bathing spot, a place her husband never visits. It began as a bundle of twigs, then grew into a curved wall, and slowly it became a giant bird’s nest. Elsie roams the property relentlessly, breaking off green, malleable boughs, and dry twigs, weaving them into the nest along with found objects including rag cloth, strands of cane from the seat of an old chair, ribbons, a rusted pulley, coir rope, a doorknob. After a churchman pays a visit, Big Ammachi finds his prayer beads plaited into the nest. Elsie is like a tailorbird, swiveling her head this way and that, scanning the ground as she walks barefoot through brush and undergrowth. Her hands are blistered from the work. Big Ammachi wonders: Is a nest really art? Has this pregnancy affected her judgment?

One morning she notices Elsie walking stiffly, as though on stilts. She forces her to lie down. “Look at your feet! They’ll be like Damodaran’s soon! No more walking.” Elsie’s ankles have disappeared. Her toenails are dull, and her heel fissured like a dry riverbed. Yellow calluses crowd the ball of her foot. “Why aren’t you wearing your slippers? I should have paid attention.” But Big Ammachi has been focused on the shape of Elsie’s belly, looking for the loss of height that tells her the baby’s head has entered the ­pelvis—she has just seen that change. She hopes she’s wrong because it’s early. “I’m not letting you out of my sight,” she says sternly. “Sit with me. Draw or paint instead of collecting kara-bura,” she says, inventing a word on the spot.

She and Elsie move to the old bedroom, Elsie on the bed, while Big Ammachi sleeps on a mat on the floor. The first night she hears Elsie tossing and turning, her restlessness a sign of imminent labor. The waiting is over, even if it’s earlier than she expected. Near dawn, when Big Ammachi opens her eyes, she finds Elsie staring at her. For an eerie moment she feels some other person occupies Elsie’s body and wants to tell Big Ammachi something that she wouldn’t want to hear.

“Molay, what is it?”

Elsie shakes her head. She admits to having intermittent warning cramps. When the sun is up, Elsie says, “Ammachi, please walk with me to my nest.” They head out, Elsie’s arm around the shorter woman’s shoulders. They slip in through the nest’s overlapping entrance that at first glance is invisible. The top of the nest reaches to Big Ammachi’s chest. “I hope I can do more big pieces like this. Outdoors. That is, if I survive this labor.”

“What nonsense is that? ‘If I survive’?” Big Ammachi says, pretending to be annoyed.

Elsie stares at the older woman and seems about to unburden herself. Then she turns away. She sighs.

“What is it, molay?”

“Nothing. Ammachi, if something happens to me, please care for this baby. Promise me?”

“Chaa! Don’t talk like that. Nothing will happen. But why even ask? Of course I will.”

“If it’s a daughter I want her to have your name.”

By way of answer, she hugs Elsie, who clings to her. When they separate, Big Ammachi is taken aback by Elsie’s grief-stricken expression. She soothes her with words, with touch. She remembers the intensity of her own emotions, her fears as labor drew near, and for Elsie it is imminent. This fragility is a sign.

Big Ammachi goes to Philipose. “Now, listen to me. Elsie has been adamant that she delivers in the house. But I don’t like what I’m seeing. I can’t explain. She will deliver any moment. Arrange a car for us—”

He leaps up from the bed, alarmed. “Now? But my calendar—”

“What did I say about your calendar? We can go to the mission hospital in Chalakad. I really thought we had more time. Dear God, if only a hospital were closer.”

But just then, Anna Chedethi calls out for her in a tone that cannot conceal her anxiety.

“Never mind,” Big Ammachi says. Elsie’s water must have broken.

Anna Chedethi has strung white bedsheets over the lower half of the windows of the old bedroom. Philipose standing outside looks uncomprehendingly at this sight. He corrals Shamuel as he walks by and says, “Looks like our Ninan is in a hurry to land, just like last time. We must slaughter a goat. And arrange for toddy—” His mother, inside the room with Elsie, overhears him and is about to go out and scold him when she hears Shamuel’s voice, but not sounding like Shamuel at all.

“Chaa! Stop! Just keep quiet. Don’t talk to me. If you want to help, go to church and pray. Take a vow not to visit Krishnankutty’s shop. That’s what you can do.”

Silence follows.

Elsie’s moans are rhythmic. Big Ammachi prepares herself, gathering her hair into a tight bun, glancing at the mirror. Her locks are thinner, and more gray than black. Just yesterday, she was the young bride writhing in pain in this very room with her first child. But it wasn’t yesterday. It was the year of our Lord 1906. It feels as though she’s just glanced away from this same mirror . . . and it’s 1951 and she’s in her seventh decade! Her earlobes are so stretched now. But the look she yearned for as a young woman means nothing to her now. She straightens her back; if she’s not careful, soon her shoulders will float up to meet her ears. Already, she’s tilted like a crooked palm from all the years of carrying JoJo, then Baby Mol, then Philipose, then Ninan, always on her left side so that her right hand was free to stir the pot or twitch the kindling. She sighs and crosses herself. “Lord, my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer . . . be with us now.”

Elsie cries out, “Ammay—?” A contraction must be coming on.

“There, there, molay, don’t worry,” she says reflexively, teeth clamped around the last hairpin. “I’m coming.”

Anna Chedethi straightens sheets that don’t need straightening. The contraction is like a distant cloud, visible over treetops, then casting its shadow on Elsie’s face as cramping pain twists her body, wrings it out like a washrag. Elsie grips Big Ammachi’s hands so hard that her knuckles could crumble to powder. “There, there. Just breathe. You’ve been through this before,” she says. But the truth is Elsie hasn’t. Baby Ninan slipped out like a kitten squeezing through window bars.

The contraction passes and Elsie desperately sucks in air. Big Ammachi is startled to see in Elsie’s eyes not fear, which would be natural, but that terrible sadness again. “Ammachi, take me to the nest.”

“But we went there an hour ago, remember? Let’s walk in this room if you like.”

She strokes Elsie, waiting, reliving her own blessed and terrible ordeal of giving birth. She remembers she had ceased to exist anywhere but in this room. Who but a woman would understand? Just when you thought the pain couldn’t get worse, it did. The thread between her and the world snapped, and she had been utterly and completely alone, battling God, battling the miraculous creation that He had allowed to grow inside her, and was now ripping her—also his creation—in two. Men like to think that women forget the pain upon seeing the blessed baby. No. A woman forgives the child, and she might even forgive the father. But she never forgets.

With the next contraction, Elsie is already bearing down. “Hold Anna Chedethi’s hands.” Moving to the foot of the bed, Big Ammachi spreads Elsie’s legs and pushes her knees toward her belly.

She doesn’t understand what she’s seeing. Instead of the dark, glistening hair of the baby’s head framed in that oval, she sees pale flesh. And a dimple. It’s the baby’s bottom! That dimple is the anus. Hearing a pounding, she’s distracted, wondering who’s hammering at the door, until she realizes it’s her own heart. This baby is upside down. This is trouble. The contraction passes and the bottom retreats, gaining no purchase. Maybe the birth canal hasn’t fully softened, so perhaps if they give it time—

Suddenly, Elsie’s legs shoot straight out as though unseen pulleys extend her limbs. “Elsie, don’t! Bend your knees again!” But Elsie is past hearing, her legs rigid, toes pointing at the door, her arms curled against her chest in a strange posture. Atavistic grunts come through her clenched teeth, along with frothy blood-tinged saliva. “She’s bitten her tongue!” Anna Chedethi says. Elsie’s eyes roll back, showing only the whites. And then she convulses, her limbs flailing, her body rattling the bed. Big Ammachi gathers Elsie’s head to her bosom, as though to deny whatever spirit is taking possession, to keep it from whipping Elsie to and fro. After an eternity, the intruder retreats. But it has taken Elsie with it: she is limp, her breathing coarse, her eyes half open and gazing to the left. She is unconscious.

Big Ammachi folds Elsie’s legs once more so that her heels rest on her buttocks. To her dismay, the view hasn’t changed. She washes her hands in hot water, thinking through what she should do. She removes her ring and smears coconut oil on her right hand, past the wrist.

“Anna Chedethi, kneel on the bed. Put your hand here on her belly and push when I say so. Lord, my rock, my fortress, my—well, you heard me before,” she says in the same stern voice she used with Anna Chedethi. But for the convulsion, they might have waited for nature to take its course, for the baby’s bottom to stretch the canal, for Elsie to push . . . but the passage looks as wide as it is going to get, and an unconscious Elsie can no longer bear down.

She gathers her gnarled fingers into a bird’s beak, then insinuates them into the birth canal. Her fingertips ease past the baby’s bottom, spreading out, worming their way up, the space so tight that her joints scream. She closes her eyes as if to better see in the womb’s darkness. She sweeps around and stumbles onto soft stubs. Toes! And the back of an ankle? Yes! With a fingertip, she pulls on that foot, keeping its angle with the shin as she found it. Just when she thinks it might snap, the foot slips down past the baby’s buttocks and is outside. She finds the other foot higher up, and eases it out, and now, with no fuss, the buttocks slip out as well, along with a loop of umbilical cord. Anna Chedethi looks on, her mouth gaping.

The legs dangle from the birth canal, wet and slimy, one knee flexed and the other straight, as though the baby is in mid-stride, trying to climb back inside. Its spine faces them, like a string of tiny beads under the skin. She wraps a towel around the sagging infant torso and pulls. The trunk doesn’t budge, but rotates glacially, like a water wheel. She probes within once more and hooks down the crook of an elbow, and as a bonus, both shoulders deliver. Only the head remains collared by the neck of the womb. She glances up at Elsie, who hasn’t moved. The froth on her lips bubbles with her rapid, shallow breaths.

She pulls, but the head is planted as if in stone. She fantasizes that if she calls the baby it will say, “Yes, Ammachi?” and come to her as so many little ones have. The sweat dripping into her eyes blinds her. Anna Chedethi wipes her face for her and flutters the bamboo fan. The umbilical cord dangles below the child like a white serpent, pulsating and twitching with Elsie’s every heartbeat, the knots of veins under the gelatinous surface distended and angry. Seeing all of the baby but its head makes her think of Elsie’s statue. Before Philipose defaced it.

“Anna, push when I tell you,” she says irritably, even though it’s her own wandering mind that annoys her. She squats as the next contraction begins, her knees creaking. Anna Chedethi presses down on the swollen belly, while Big Ammachi pulls down in the direction of the floor. But the awful angle between neck and body frightens her. “Stop! Pull up, not down,” a voice clearly says. Anna Chedethi hasn’t spoken. Who was it then? Is the long-standing resident of the cellar below them trying to offer advice? She eases a finger inside to find the baby’s mouth; then, with the next contraction, while keeping the head bent, she stands and pulls the baby’s torso up and toward Elsie’s belly, because something or someone told her that was the way. “Push, Anna!” The head comes free with a gurgle, the sound of mother and baby surrendering to nature’s rule that no soul can linger betwixt and between, not if it wants purchase in this world.

Anna Chedethi expertly ties and cuts the cord while the newborn lies blue and lifeless in Big Ammachi’s arms. She blows gently on the tiny nostrils. “Come on, precious! You’re out of the water and in Parambil!” Nothing happens. She has a clear memory of Odat Kochamma, bending forward on her bowlegs, her arms behind her for ballast, and saying into Ninan’s tiny ear, “Maron Yesu Mishiha.” Jesus is Lord. She looks up to the false ceiling and beseeches her, certain that her companion of so many years is looking down. Say it, Kochamma! Do you want me to do it all?

—and the child fills its lungs and squalls, a glorious sound, a universal language, the first utterance of a new life. Big Ammachi’s clothes are drenched in sweat, her very bones hurt, her eyes burn, but her joy is overflowing.

There are happy noises outside the door: those waiting have heard the baby’s cry.

Big Ammachi sinks to a squat with the baby. She feels she’s born again. What a perfect child! She exults in the peculiar, shrill, high-pitched newborn cry, a sound that signals the end of the solitude, the return of the mother to the world, the passing of mortal danger. What was within is now without, still just as fragile, just as connected to the mother, but for the first time, separate.

“Such a good-sized child, aren’t you? Praise God. I was worried that you’d be a tiny kitten.” She’s used to newborns squinting at the unaccustomed brightness, barely opening their eyes and if so only to peek out with an unfocused gaze. This baby stares directly at her grandmother with a serious expression.

Elsie’s breathing is regular, her eyes now gazing right. Still unconscious, but alive. The afterbirth emerges, soggy and heavy, its job done. Anna Chedethi replaces the soiled sheet under Elsie with a thick white towel. She wraps the afterbirth in newspaper.

Anna Chedethi comes over to squat by Big Ammachi, both of them grinning over the new arrival, their backs to Elsie. A shattering sound comes from beneath their feet. From the cellar. It startles them, makes them look down, then turn around. They both see it at the same time: a cherry-red stream of blood pours from the birth canal, soaking the white towel and dripping to the floor. Big Ammachi hurriedly swaddles the infant and eases it down onto the mat. Anna Chedethi spreads Elsie’s legs once more while Big Ammachi wipes away the clot at the opening, only to see another vile clot—the face of Satan—carried out in a steady, gushing river of red that joins the bloody lake under Elsie’s buttocks.

Big Ammachi has never seen anything like this, but she’s heard of it. So many ways for us women to die, Lord. If it’s not a labor that stalls, killing mother and child, then it’s this. It’s not fair! She massages the belly, because she’s heard it can help the flabby uterus get back its tone, and contract down, and stop the bleeding. But if anything, it makes the gushing of blood more pronounced. Big Ammachi staggers back, defeated, watching Elsie’s life slipping away.

Philipose’s voice calls from outside: “What’s happening? Is my son all right?”

They don’t hear him. They stare helplessly at the torrential hemorrhage. Anna Chedethi says, “Ammachi, let me try something.”

Anna Chedethi oils her broad hand and eases her fingers into the birth canal. Once she is inside, in the womb, she gathers her fingers in a fist and pushes up. Her other hand on the abdomen pushes down, so that between fist within and palm without, she sandwiches the flabby womb, compressing it. Blood runs down her arm, but then it slows . . . and stops.

Speaking in short bursts, her face congested from the effort, yet somehow grinning, Anna Chedethi says, “This white nun . . . up past Ranni . . . she was a nurse . . . She saved a pulayi bleeding like a river . . . by pinching the womb like this.”

“Were you there?”

“No . . .” she says, meeting Big Ammachi’s eyes. “But I heard of it . . . and it just came to me.”

Anna Chedethi’s arms quiver, the veins on her temples look ready to burst. Big Ammachi is the helper now, mopping her sweat. It’s a blessing that Elsie feels nothing. But her face is as white as a bleached mundu. Big Ammachi glances over at the swaddled newborn; the baby looks on as its mother fights for life.

“Ammachi,” Anna Chedethi says, “what was that sound we heard . . . from below?”

“A pickle jar must have fallen over,” Big Ammachi says. “Those old shelves are tilting.”

But Big Ammachi knows who it was and she’s grateful. Had they kept cooing over the baby, Elsie would have been dead when they eventually turned to her. “Anna, what if you let go now?” She’s worried that Anna Chedethi will pass out from the strain.

At first, Anna Chedethi seems not to have heard. Another minute goes by. Then she slowly releases pressure on the belly but keeps her balled-up fist inside. They hold their breath. There’s no new trickle. After another minute, ever so gently, Anna Chedethi eases her hand out, cloaked dark red from fingertips to elbow. Their lips moving, both women pray silently, eyes glued to between Elsie’s legs. Five minutes. Ten. Ten more. Gradually Big Ammachi feels she can breathe again.

She calls Elsie’s name. She is in a deep, unnatural sleep. But she’s alive. Dear God, can the poor girl survive after losing all this blood? Still the two women wait. They wait some more, now with the baby in her grandmother’s arms. At last Big Ammachi places a hand over Anna’s head, blessing her while looking to the heavens. “Thank you, Lord,” she says. “You saw this coming. You sent me this angel.”

Big Ammachi emerges from the bedroom, looking unrecognizable, wrung out, flushed and pale as if she, not Elsie, had just been through the ordeal. Her hands are clean, but her elbows are bloody, the front of her chatta and mundu is blood-soaked, and there’s a blood smear across her cheek. But she is smiling dreamily, holding the new baby. She looks up, surprised to see a small crowd come to their feet. Baby Mol, Shamuel, Dolly Kochamma, Uplift Master, Shoshamma, and the child’s father, Philipose.

“We almost lost our Elsie. Thank the Lord for bringing us through this. Such a difficult delivery,” she says to those gathered, her voice hoarse. “The baby came buttocks-first. Then Elsie had a convulsion. Somehow, we got the baby out. But then suddenly Elsie was bleeding, so much bleeding . . . We almost lost her. We still might. She’s very weak. Please pray she doesn’t bleed again. But the baby is well. Praise God, praise God, praise God . . .”

She takes small, tired steps to her son, smiling. He’d looked dazed as she spoke, but now as she approaches, his face lights up, and he extends his arms. Big Ammachi says, “We already have a name for your daughter.”

He blinks, drops his arms.

“Your daughter,” Big Ammachi says.

He stumbles back. Shamuel slides a chair under him. Philipose can only stare at his mother in disbelief, his mouth open, a stupefied expression on his face. He mumbles, “God has failed us again.”

She takes her time. She comes right up to his chair, standing over him. When she speaks, her words spark off her tongue, falling on him like hot oil onto water: “After the ordeal Elsie has endured . . . After what Anna Chedethi and I went through, that’s what you have to say? ‘God has failed us’?” Her voice rises. “A woman risks her life to give birth and at the end a man who’s done nothing—less than nothing—in nine months says, ‘God has failed us’?” If it were up to Big Ammachi, any man who said what her son just did should by law merit a caning. “Yes, God failed us,” she says. “When he was handing out common sense, he overlooked you. If he’d made you a woman, then maybe dung wouldn’t come out of your mouth in place of words! Shame on you!”

Nothing stirs in Parambil as her words hang over his head. Philipose looks up, bewildered, the disappointment now changing to hurt. But he doesn’t dare speak.

Big Ammachi glares at her son. He was once a baby like the infant she holds. Does she not bear some responsibility for what he has become? “Look, an hour ago I could have come out to tell you that Elsie had convulsions and died. Forty minutes ago, I could have told you that the child was stuck upside down and mother and child had died. And ten minutes ago, I could’ve walked out to say Elsie bled to death. Do you understand? But I said none of those things. I said your wife lives, but barely. And what you see here is God’s grace manifest in this perfect, perfect child.”

Philipose doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t look at the baby, his face so anguished that it’s as if Baby Ninan has died once more, the bloody corpse with its horrible entrails still in his arms.

“Mariamma,” Big Ammachi announces in a strong voice. Elsie wanted that name. She’s not waiting for her son to express an opinion. “The baby’s name is Mariamma.”

Yes, it is Big Ammachi’s very own Christian name. Mariamma. A name no one has called her in the memory of anyone present, a name that hasn’t been uttered since she came here as a twelve-year-old bride.

Mariamma.