The Covenant of Water

1951, Parambil

They search the house and its surroundings. Shamuel walks along the stream and the canal; he hails the families of the blacksmith, goldsmith, and potter to ask if they’ve seen Elsie. Joppan cycles up and down the dark roads and to all the neighboring houses to inquire. Others walk the riverbank. By midnight, members of the extended family pack the verandah, the women’s high-pitched voices a contrast to those of the men, who murmur in low registers. Caesar races around, barking. Joppan discreetly inspects every well, holding a burning palm frond torch over the mouth and peering in.

The next day, at first light, Georgie heads by bus to the Thetanatt house in the plains. If neither Elsie nor her brother is there, he’ll hire a car and go up to the estate. Uplift Master assigns sectors so they can systematically scour the Parambil property in a one-mile radius of the house. Shamuel canvases all the boatmen and is assured that no one ferried Elsie the previous evening. Joppan, bravely pushing a long stick before him, wades into the tall grass of the sarpa kavu at the edge of the property, a spot where large rocks arranged by humans indicate an ancient temple devoted to the serpent God and where no one trespasses. Joppan establishes that there are wriggling forms aplenty, but no Elsie.

Only Baby Mol is unperturbed by Elsie’s absence. When Big Ammachi asks her if she knows where Elsie is, Baby Mol says, “My dolls are hungry.” Big Ammachi feels her throat tighten.

By early afternoon, Georgie returns: Elsie isn’t at the family home, and her brother had just come down from the mountains an hour prior. He was certain that Elsie wasn’t in the estate bungalow. Georgie said Elsie’s brother had been less than gracious to him, treating him like a servant and not an elder from Parambil. Furthermore, the brother appeared drunk and had choice things to say about Philipose.

The efforts to find Elsie halt. Only Shamuel persists, going back over ground that’s already been searched. Twenty-four hours after Elsie disappears, Big Ammachi, Philipose, and Uplift Master are on the verandah when Shamuel comes walking up the driveway. His somber, almost ceremonial pace gets their attention, as does what he holds in his hands like an offering. “From the boat jetty I walked along the edge of the river. I came to that place where the screw pine is so thick. I noticed one spot where it was bent back, flattened. I pushed through and came to a small clearing. Enough for one person to stand.” His voice catches. “There only I found these.” He extends his arms. A bar of soap sits atop a neatly folded thorthu, blouse, and mundu, and beneath those, Elsie’s slippers.

Uplift Master informs the police at the substation. The best they can hope for now is word of a body being discovered downstream.

With Anna Chedethi nursing the baby, a sleepless Big Ammachi makes her way alone to the spot where Shamuel found Elsie’s clothes. She stands there, feeling the soil between her toes as Elsie must have. She stares at the rippling brown surface of the river, whose every mood she knows, from a lifetime of giving herself to its embrace. The tethered canoes ride higher on the jetty, a sign of rain in the mountains, but a bobbing tree limb moves by leisurely. She shudders to imagine Elsie in her weakened state, disrobing here and stepping in. What got into the girl? Did she crave communion with water, a longing to be cleansed, and renewed? Elsie is a strong swimmer but that was before she nearly bled to death. The river is merciless to those who underestimate it, and it is never the same river twice. Standing here Big Ammachi feels such oppression in her chest. After a long, long time she tears herself away, but not before she kneels to kiss the soil where Elsie last stood.

Her feet carry her to Elsie’s nest. She feels she is approaching a shrine, a sanctuary closed off from the world. The moss on the outside is thick, and the found objects woven into the wall appear to have been imprisoned there for decades.

Entering she spots a white, rectangular paper on the ground, held down by a polished oval stone, a river rock of the kind that Elsie used as weights on her worktable. Her heart races. Whoever had searched here had been looking for a person, not a piece of paper, and they missed it. She bends down to pick it up. It is the thick, grainy kind Elsie used for drawing and painting. There was a time before Ninan’s death when such papers bred all over the house, spilling from Baby Mol’s bench to the kitchen. Since her return, Elsie’s strong hands had foregone charcoal and brush for the heft of the mallet and chisel before she turned to making the nest. Dew has curled the paper’s edges—it has been here overnight, but not longer, because it’s still pristine white. Her fingers tremble as she unfolds it. Big Ammachi sees a simple drawing, conveying with a minimum of lines on the page a familiar subject: mother and child. The faces and figures are not detailed, but with a curve here and a dash there they nevertheless allow her to see eyebrows, nose, lips . . .

“This is important, isn’t it, molay?” The paper shakes in her hands. She studies it. There’s the infant, of course. But the mother is far from young, judging by the slight stoop, by the forward thrust of the neck. “Molay, molay,” she exclaims, her heart contracting. “Ayo, molay, what were you trying to say? That’s me, isn’t it? If it were you, she’d be taller, younger, and the brow wouldn’t have that wrinkle. Are you telling me to care for your baby? You asked me that already. You know I will. But I’m sixty-three years old! Fathers might be dispensable, but a child needs its mother. Oh, Elsie, what have you done? Was this to say goodbye?” She’s overcome and must sit on the ground.

Her body tells her with certainty that Elsie will never return; that Elsie gave herself to the river deliberately. The thought of Elsie leaving this message here, moments before she went to the river and took her life, is wrenching. She clutches the paper to her bosom and gives in to her sorrow.

She hears the distant sound of Anna Chedethi calling out from the kitchen. “Big Ammachi-o?” From the rising, musical o at the end, she knows that whatever it is Anna wants, it isn’t urgent. But the melodic summons feels like a conclusion. It is a reminder that Parambil must go on. A householder, a mother, a grandmother has precious duties that don’t cease, that go on till her dying day.

She tells no one about her find. She guards it jealously; it’s a private message from her daughter to her. She stores the paper with the genealogy, in the same wardrobe where she keeps the snowy kavani bordered with real gold that she wears for weddings and funerals.

In the ensuing years, on Mariamma’s birthday, and on other occasions when Elsie enters her thoughts, she will pull out the drawing, but always at night in the soft light of her lamp. Every time she sees it, the economy of those lines startles her anew. It could be the Virgin Mary and child. It could be many things. But she knows it’s meant to be her, cradling her namesake. She never sees Elsie in it.

That rectangular sheet of paper holds the round world and its imagined corners, the remembrances of the disappeared and the dead, and the beating hearts of the faithful who pray each night that God’s will be done, not knowing what that will be.