The Covenant of Water

1951, Parambil

Elsie is conscious but confused, and so very weak from blood loss. It is three days before she can sit up without feeling dizzy. Her recovery is painfully slow. She’s in no condition to breastfeed. The smiling, gap-toothed Anna Chedethi nurses the baby, which to Big Ammachi is proof that Hannah is still suckling at night for comfort. If Big Ammachi had known, she’d have scolded them both. Now she says a prayer of thanks.

Only on the fifth day does Big Ammachi bring Mariamma to her mother. She’s startled to see the same haunted, wretched expression on Elsie’s face that she’d puzzled over before labor. Elsie looks at her daughter with great tenderness, but that sentiment is overshadowed, drowned out by inexplicable sorrow. Her hands are like floppy leaves, and she makes no attempt to reach for the child. After an eternity, Elsie closes her eyes, as though she can no longer bear to look, while tears stream out from under her lids. She turns away, her shoulders shaking, sobbing inconsolably.

The child’s father sequesters himself in his room, marooned in his own home, unable to do more than observe through his window the comings and goings from the old bedroom. He doesn’t come out, or if he does it is when the household is fast asleep.

Parambil is transformed once more by a newborn and the industry around it. Diaper cloths flutter on the line and Baby Mol patrols outside, shushing everyone who comes by. Big Ammachi delights in her granddaughter, her namesake. But a new baby should bring joy to its parents. This one has done just the opposite.

Big Ammachi focuses her energy on Elsie, feeding her broth, then fish and meat, to restore her blood, along with the vaidyan’s restorative tonics. After a week, Elsie can walk. Big Ammachi supports her as they pace the room in tandem. By the third week Elsie shows color in her cheeks, taking longer and longer walks on her own, even bathing in the stream. Though she looks in on the baby, she doesn’t try to hold it, just gazes at it in Anna Chedethi’s arms. Big Ammachi cannot understand this, cannot shake her sense of foreboding, the sense that after all they’ve come through, there’s one more thing waiting to happen.

Three weeks after the birth, Elsie steps outside in the early evening, in the gloaming, to bathe in the stream. Before she leaves, she asks Big Ammachi if she could please make her the sardines steamed in banana leaf again, just as she did the previous day, with no spices save for a bit of salt.

It’s almost two hours before anyone realizes that she hasn’t returned.