The Covenant of Water

1959, Manager’s Mansion in the village of M____

Lenin Evermore is a week short of his ninth birthday when the pestilence descends on the one-room shack that is their home. It comes with the suddenness of a lizard falling from the rafters. When his mother, Lizzi, said one morning that school was closed, he rejoiced, too pleased to ask why. The next morning, instead of waking to the sounds of his mother puttering in the kitchen, there is silence. His parents are still on their mats, his baby sister between them. Their faces glisten with sweat. He recalls they felt unwell the previous night.

His mother’s skin is hot. When Lenin touches his baby sister, Shyla, who is just five months old, she screams as if he’s pricked her with a needle. The crying rouses his father, who clutches his forehead, grimacing. Kora struggles to his feet, but sways. Lenin wonders if his father is hungover. But Kora had returned sober the previous night, unable to find food. They had filled their bellies with kanji water, only a trace of rice in it, and gone to bed.

“I must feed the cow,” Kora says, his voice wheezier than usual and hoarse like stone scraping on stone. But he cannot stand up. He shakes his wife’s shoulder but she only moans. Father and son stare at each other. Lizzi is the backbone of the family.

“Are you with fever too, monay?” Lenin shakes his head. “Then get water for us. And give hay and water for the cow. Please.” As an afterthought, Kora says, “Everything will be all right.” Then his father tries to flash his winning smile, the kind “Manager” Kora uses to persuade a headman that milk and honey will flow if villagers sign with him, and no, no, there’s no malaria up in that estate—who said?—just palatial quarters, and milk and honey—did I mention? But his smile cannot be sustained this morning. “I’ve seen this before,” his father says, rubbing the bumps on his skin. “If people know we have it then no one’s going to help us. They won’t come near.” He puts his hand on his wife’s cheek, also showing bumps. “Your blessed mother. What all I put her through.” Lenin is surprised; this admission is unlike him. Then his father says, “Everything will be all right.”

Lenin wasn’t really scared till his father uttered that reassurance for a second time. It meant things were not all right. That bad things were about to happen because of something his father had done. There was a time, before Lenin was born, when they had a house in Parambil, a place Lenin has never seen but from his mother’s stories he pictures as Eden, with loving family all around. From overhearing his parents, he knows that Kora’s troubles forced them to flee Parambil. After that, his mother took complete charge. She helped her husband find employment as an estate writer in Wayanad in Malabar. Lenin has faint memories of those times. But when he was four or five, his father had got into trouble. Lizzi sold her last pieces of jewelry to buy a shack on a tiny plot; it was to ensure she was never again homeless. She forbade Kora from borrowing or doing anything but working for a wage. The shack is where they had lived ever since, the place his father calls “Manager’s Mansion.”

Lenin feeds the cow and brings water back to the family. He tries to get his mother to drink, but she cannot. His mother lives by “Tell the truth and tell it early,” not “Everything will be all right.” Her husband cannot find work or hold down a job. It is Lizzi’s skill as a midwife that brings in coin, or meat and fish. She learned from a woman in the Wayanad estates. Two weeks ago, Kora came home late at night with the cow, saying he’d won it in a game of chance. Lenin had never seen his mother so angry. She insisted he take it back. His father looked frightened; he would be beaten up if he tried, he said. The cow isn’t allowed to leave the vicinity of their shack. And after all that, its udders are empty.

Lenin stays outside the house most of the day because it’s disturbing to look at the family. At dusk he searches the kitchen but finds nothing but spices; he chews on a clove. His hunger is an ache. He tries smoking a beedi nestled in his father’s box of asthma cigarettes. Before Lenin sleeps, he tries giving each of them water. He still cannot rouse his mother. Her beautiful face is marred by small swellings. Her curls are plastered down on her forehead. His father cannot raise his head; he takes one swallow, then grimaces in pain. His eyes lock urgently on Lenin’s, and he squeezes his son’s shoulder. The terror on his face is unlike anything Lenin has seen before. “Listen!” he whispers. “Don’t do what I did. Follow the straight path.” Those are his last sensible words.

Follow the straight path. There’ve been times when Lenin hated his father, wished terrible things on him. But he doesn’t now. The lingering feel of his father’s hand on his shoulder makes him sad. He’s very scared now. He’d suffer school without a complaint if it would make everyone well.

The next morning, before he opens his eyes, he thinks, Let this be a bad dream. Let me see my mother moving about, and my father holding the baby. But his father’s skin is as cold as stone. He has forgotten to breathe. His features are distorted from the blisters, and a puzzled expression is frozen on his face. His sister’s mouth moves like a fish out of water, her chest heaving sporadically, and as he watches, it comes to a stop. Lenin has never seen a dead body, but he knows he’s looking at two. His mother still breathes. Something breaks inside him. He flings the empty water vessel against the wall. He shakes his mother violently. “How can I manage if there’s no one to care for me?” He falls on her, weeping. “I’m your baby. Please, Amma, don’t leave me.” Her eyes are rolled back, unseeing. She’s beyond hearing.

It is hot outside, but he shivers with hunger and fear. Follow the straight path—that was the last thing his father said. He will do that. He will walk in a straight line till he gets food or drops dead. Nothing will stop him. If he comes to water . . . well then, he’ll drown.

The straight line brings him over a fence, past a menacing bull, through a field, and soon a large whitewashed house comes into view. The Christian family living there owns much of this area. They have wanted nothing to do with Kora and Lizzi. Their house looks different to Lenin. It’s because every door and window is bolted. A man’s voice yells from inside: “DON’T YOU DARE COME CLOSER! GO AWAY BEFORE I UNCHAIN THE DOG!”

Lenin pauses, shocked. This family has coconut trees, kappa, chicken, and many cows. Can they not share? Do they not have pity? Tears stream down his face. He is committed. Follow the straight line. He stumbles forward. Send the dog. If it doesn’t eat me, maybe I can eat it. Either kill me or give me food.

A face thrusts itself from the rushes on his right side, startling him. It’s a thin pulayi woman, his mother’s age, a thorthu covering her breasts. Does she mean him harm?

“Monay, move over here where they don’t see you,” she says. The rushes conceal her from the big house. He does what she said. “I’m Acca, from over there,” she says, pointing to a tiny hut he now sees. “You’re Lenin, aren’t you?” She diagnoses his condition in one glance. “Wait there. I’ll bring you some food.”

He trembles with anticipation. She returns with a banana leaf packet and two bananas, setting them down short of him and retreating to squat twenty feet from him. Fried fish! Rice! He gobbles it down, then finishes the bananas.

“Monay,” she says, “you don’t have any sores?” Hearing her say “monay” brings tears to his eyes. He wants to run into her arms. He raises his arms to show he’s unaffected. “And the others?” she asks.

He brushes at his wet cheeks. “Appa and the baby are dead. Amma can’t see or hear me.”

He hears her sharp, sucking intake of breath. “Your mother . . . you can live many lifetimes and not meet one as decent as Lizzi Chedethi. A heart like gold. And beautiful too.” She dabs her eyes with her cloth. “Monay,” she says, “this is smallpox. It’s bad. That’s why they say, ‘Don’t count your children till the smallpox has come and gone.’ My husband and I had it. We can’t get it again. Many have died around here.”

“I wish I had it,” Lenin says. “Then when my mother goes, I can go with her.” His tears fall into the dirt.

She sniffles. “No. Don’t say that. God spared you for a reason.” She stands. “I’ll send word to get you help.”

“Acca! Wait.” She turns. For a pulayi to give him fish and rice when they live on kanji and pickle is generous beyond belief. “Acca, you saved me. I promise you, if I live, I’ll find a way to give back to you what you gave me many times over. Those people in the house wanted to set the dog on me. Are they not Christians?”

Her laughter has an unpleasant edge to it. “Christians, is it? Aah. My grandfather became a Christian, so we are too. My grandfather thought surely now his landowner will invite him inside the house to eat with him! No one told him that the pulayar Jesus died on a different cross. It was the short, dark cross behind the kitchen!” She laughs again.

He doesn’t know what to say. “I think you are a saint.”

“Listen, if it makes you feel better, they only sent me to market to get fish and mutton two days ago. When I returned, they were scared for me to come near. What if I carried smallpox? Or what if it was on the food? They told me to keep it. So we cooked and had a feast! You’re lucky there was any left.” Her expression is serious. “No, I’m no saint, monay.” She rises. “And I was teasing. It’s the same cross. Same Jesus. It’s just that people don’t treat each other the same. You’re praying, I hope? I’ll send word for help.”

As he walks home, he realizes that all this time he hasn’t once prayed. It never occurred to him! Would it have made a difference?

The rancid smell reaches him even before he opens the door. His mother breathes noisily. His father’s face is sunken, and almost unrecognizable. His sister is stiff, like a wooden doll.

He drags his mother to the door, toward the fresh air, by pulling on her mat. He lies next to her. Her breath is unpleasant. The mother he knows is gone, but he wants to be close to what’s left of her. One last time, Amma, hold me. He drapes her arm over him. It exposes her belly, and he sees the scar where his father, crazed on asthma cigarettes, stabbed her, and where Lenin’s hand pushed out. Doctor Digby put it back and christened him Lenin Evermore.

Lying there next to his mother, he tries to pray. Acca’s face comes to him. It soothes him. Perhaps that was his Mary. A pulayi Mary. “God, please send another angel to save Amma. If you don’t, then when you take my Amma take me too.”

In the morning, the angel comes wearing a white cassock with a belt around the waist, and the black cap of a priest. His sandaled feet are white to the ankles with dust. He’s rail thin, with piercing, kind eyes and a flowing gray beard. The angel looks about the shack, troubled. The smell is something one can reach out and touch. When he looks down at Lenin’s mother, from the expression on his face, Lenin knows she is dead. When he fell asleep her body was warm. She’s so cold now.

“Lenin Evermore? Isn’t that your name?” The angel holds out his arms.