The Covenant of Water

1959, Parambil

Big Ammachi sits in the glow of the oil lamp on the verandah in front of the ara as she feeds her eight-year-old granddaughter.

The lamp casts their shadows on the teak wall behind them, two ovals, one larger than the other. The pebbles in the muttam glitter after the evening shower, and here and there a stone seems to move. Grandmother and granddaughter hear Philipose call out, “Time for prayers!”

“Chaa! Your father!” Big Ammachi says. “I used to have to remind him about prayers.”

“My father says frogs come from pebbles.” Mariamma is perched on the edge of her chair, her legs swinging, as another pebble jumps, defying gravity.

“Aah. That means his head is still full of pebbles. I thought I shook most of them out.” The little girl’s laugh displays gap teeth, and Big Ammachi slides a rice ball into her mouth. “Maybe he got that from those English books he reads only to you,” she says, pretending to be jealous. Philipose even speaks to Mariamma in English, leaving the Malayalam to everyone else. “Is he reading you the one about the big white fish?”

Mariamma shakes her head, turning somber. “No. Another. This boy Oliver has no mother, no father. He’s always starving. The other children are mean and make him go ask for food. The man got angry and sold Oliver to another man who makes funerals.”

Big Ammachi wishes her son would choose stories without dead parents or children being sold off. “Molay, maybe it was just the poor boy’s fate. Maybe it was written on his head.”

“Like my ‘specialness’?” her granddaughter says, touching the white streak in her hair to the right of her center part.

“No, your specialness is just that. Special! A mark of your good fortune.” Big Ammachi thinks it gives gravity to everything little Mariamma says. “What I meant was that the boy’s bad luck was being born to the wrong family, on the wrong day.”

“What kind of day was I born on?”

“Aah! Have I not told you about the day you were born?” Mari­amma shakes her head, trying not to giggle. “I told that story yesterday. And the day before, I think. Well, I’ll tell you again because it’s your story, and so it’s better than that Oli or Olamadel fellow.” Mariamma laughs. “On the day you were born, I sent Anna Chedethi to drag the big brass lamp out. In all my years at Parambil, I never saw that velakku lit. Because your grandfather already had had a firstborn son. Every time I went into that room, I’d stub my toe on that lamp. But the day you were born, I said, ‘Who says we only light this lamp for a firstborn son? How about for the first Mariamma?’ See, I knew you were special!”

Philipose appears silently, his hair slicked back. Big Ammachi still marvels that the new Philipose is as punctual as the chimes on his BBC News. He lives by routine, writing at five in the morning, walking the grounds with Shamuel at nine, having his shave and bath at ten, then off to the post office at eleven . . . and a bath before dinner, then prayers. She isn’t entirely free of the worry that one day his routines will collapse like a hut in torrential rain, and he’ll go back to the wretched wooden box and his black pearls. It isn’t faith alone that brings him to evening prayers or to church; he needed such rituals to rebuild his faith in himself. If there were not a God, her son would have to invent one.

“Was the velakku my father’s idea?”

“Chaa!” Big Ammachi says, as though he isn’t standing there. Mariamma laughs. “Well, your father has many clever ideas . . . Maybe it was his idea. I can’t remember.” Philipose, eyes on Mariamma, keeps smiling.

Big Ammachi is gripped by memories of the harrowing birth, and of her son’s uncharitable response. She remembers the kaniyan having the nerve to show up as soon as he found out the child was a girl; the man retrieved a tiny rolled-up parchment hidden under the kitchen overhang, which he handed to Philipose. It read, “THE ISSUE WILL BE A GIRL.” He said he had put it there on his previous visit, because he had a strong suspicion the child would be a girl, but he had not wanted to disappoint Philipose. Big Ammachi had grabbed the parchment and tossed it at the kaniyan, saying, “Don’t try that nonsense with us! Caesar sees the future better than you do! God gave us a beautiful girl, and it’s a good thing, because more foolish men we don’t need. There are too many of those standing here already.” She remembers another observer, a silent old man who had held vigil outside the room where Elsie had labored, and who later looked on as the women lit the lamp; Shamuel was a stickler for tradition, but she thought he approved of the lighting of that velakku.

She’s brusquely returned to the present by her granddaughter shaking her shoulder, saying, “Ammachi! Tell me! The lamp that night when I was born . . . What happened? Tell me!”

“Aah, the lamp . . .” she says. Philipose listens with the dignity of a man who has come to terms with his past. He knows just where his mother’s thoughts had taken her. “I made Anna Chedethi polish that velakku until we could see our faces. It took three of them to move it over there, between the two pillars. She poured oil, put fresh wicks—four at the top, then six, eight, ten, twelve, fourteen, then sixteen. I carried you and I said to the ladies, ‘This is our night!’ Women came from the Parambil houses and beyond, from every direction, because they heard about it and because they saw that lamp from far away. They brought sweets, coconuts. It was your night but also our night. In the whole of Christendom, no one celebrated the birth of a girl the way we did the day you were born. I said to them, ‘There’ll never be another like my Mariamma, and you can’t begin to imagine what she’s going to do.’ ”

“What will I do, Ammachi?”

“God says in Jeremiah, ‘I knew you before you were born.’ God loves stories. God lets each of us make our own story with our lives. Yours will be unlike anyone else’s. Remember that. Because you are of Parambil and because you’re a woman, you can do whatever you imagine you can do.”

The little girl mulls over this story that she knows so well. But tonight she asks a question that surprises her grandmother. “Ammachi, when you were a little girl, what did you imagine?”

“Me? Those were ancient times. It’s so different now. I suppose I imagined what the times allowed. You know, I imagined exactly this: a home, a good husband, loving children, a beautiful granddaughter—”

“But, but, but . . . if by magic, right now, you were eight again, what would you imagine?”

“By magic, is it?” She doesn’t have to think long. “If I were eight today, I know what I’d imagine. I’d want to be a doctor. I’d build a hospital right here.” She has pestered Uplift Master for years about this: If Parambil can have a post office and bank, why not a clinic or hospital?

“Why?”

“So I could be more useful to others. Do you know how much suffering I’ve seen where I could do nothing to help? But in my day, molay, a girl couldn’t dream like that. But you, my namesake, you can be a doctor, or lawyer, or journalist—anything you imagine. We lit that lamp to light your path.”

“I could be a bishop,” Mariamma says.

Big Ammachi is too surprised to answer.

Philipose says, “Aah, speaking of bishops, it’s time for prayers.”