The Covenant of Water

1960, Parambil

Without advance warning, Parambil receives a young visitor. The ten-year-old boy who steps onto the verandah and looks them all in the eye has a name equal to his precocious self-assurance: Lenin Evermore. It’s been a year since BeeYay Achen wrote to Big Ammachi with the shocking news that Lizzi, Manager Kora, and their baby daughter had died of smallpox. Only Lenin survived. Big Ammachi replied at once saying she would gladly raise Lenin as her own and that he was family: the boy’s father and Philipose were fourth cousins. But then BeeYay Achen wrote to say that Lenin felt God had spared him for one reason: to be a priest. BeeYay was sending him to board at the Kottayam seminary while attending a nearby school until he was old enough to be a seminarian. But he could spend his summer holidays at Parambil. Big Ammachi rejoiced at the thought of Lizzi’s son becoming a priest. She looked forward to his first vacation.

Now, seeing Lenin in the flesh, Big Ammachi is so thrilled that it doesn’t cross her mind that the holidays are far away; school is still in session. She embraces Lenin. The handsome boy has all of Lizzi’s best features. Word spreads to the other houses that “Lizzi’s boy, the Baby Achen, is here.” Everyone wants to see him and talk about his mother; no one mentions Kora.

Lenin, with little prompting, recounts the story of the pestilence that descended on Manager’s Mansion and took his family. His powerful voice and the vivid imagery in his speech will suit his priestly calling. Lenin says as the days passed and only his mother clung to life, he was sure he would die, but of starvation, not smallpox. His father’s last words on earth were “Follow the straight path.” His audience is moved by Kora’s repentance and contrition as he was about to meet his maker. Mariamma looks on, a little jealous of this newcomer, her fifth cousin, but as caught up as everyone else in his tale. In desperation, Lenin says, he determined to set out on a ruler line wherever it took him. A landowner in the big house he was approaching told him to stop or he would let loose the dog. At that point, a woman appeared. “I think it was the Blessed Mary appearing to be a pulayi. Just as it says in Matthew twenty-five, she fed me when I was hungry.” Another sigh from those listening, for who didn’t know that parable? “She sent word to BeeYay Achen and his monks. They were caring for those with smallpox in the village. I don’t know why God spared me. BeeYay Achen says that I don’t need to know. He says, for everything there is a season, and a time. God saved me. I am to serve God. I know that much.” Decency Kochamma is overcome by his testimony and hugs Lenin to her considerable bosom.

Someone asks how Lenin likes living in the seminary. For the first time the boy’s confidence falters. “I liked it better in the ashram with BeeYay Achen. I don’t like the seminary. I had some . . . misunderstandings with them.” Uplift Master asks if school isn’t in session now. “It is. I had some misunderstandings at the school. The principal of the seminary said it might be better for me to live here and go to school here. He only sent me.”

“By yourself?” Big Ammachi says.

“An achen traveled with me. We . . . had some misunderstandings,” Lenin says reluctantly. The answer is insufficient. “When we were on the bus, I saw we would be passing two miles from Manager’s Mansion. I wanted to visit. The achen said no . . .” Lenin’s face turns dark. “So I left him on the bus and I walked there. Then I walked here. I walked all day.”

There was a kappa patch where his family’s shack used to be, Lenin reports. The landowner from the big house—the same one who had threatened to turn his dog on him—came over carrying a stick. He had taken Lenin for a thief until Lenin explained. The landowner said the land was now his because Kora had borrowed from him using the land as surety. Lenin disagreed, saying it was his inheritance. The man said Lenin could file a case if he liked. Lenin asked to see Acca, the pulayi who had fed him; he wanted to give her the crucifix he was wearing, blessed by BeeYay Achen himself. The landowner told Lenin to keep the cross; he said Acca and her husband got big ideas from Party meetings, and felt that since they tilled the land, they had a right to it. He said they’d forgotten that the paddy in their stomachs and the roof over their heads was a result of his generosity; he said he chased the couple off his land and set fire to their hut. Lenin’s face is clotted with anger as he recounts this.

Philipose asks the question that’s on all their minds. Lenin says, “What could I do? If I were his size, I would have beat him with his stick. So I said, ‘One day I’ll find blessed Acca and give her all your land and your big house because you are a thief and one of her is better than a hundred of you.’ He came after me. But with that belly of his he had no chance.”

A few days later, they get a letter from the achen who had been assigned to escort Lenin to Parambil and had tried to stop him getting off the bus to visit Manager’s Mansion. Lenin had waited till Achen fell asleep and then tied his sandals together. Achen woke up when the bus stopped to let Lenin off. He stood up to give chase and fell on his face. Lenin shouted that the Achen had kidnapped him. Achen concludes, “No doubt Lenin made it to Parambil. Give yourself two weeks and you’ll be looking for a place to send Lenin, but kindly don’t send that devil back to the seminary.”

Lenin adapts to school and life in Parambil very quickly. But when he discovers that Decency Kochamma has razored out “indecent” pages from his favorite Mandrake the Magician comics in the lending library, Lenin substitutes the missing pages with drawings of naked men and women, labelled: ORIGINAL DIRTY PICTURES IN THE COLLECTION OF DECENCY KOCHAMMA. Once she finds out, the arthritic, rotund woman, now almost seventy, comes after him, moving faster than anyone thought was possible. The sight of her bearing down on him is sufficient trigger for Lenin to “follow the straight path.” He plows through rice drying on mats, tramples a paddy field, walks through nettles and into the young goldsmith’s hut, trying to exit through the back. The original goldsmith has passed away, and the son is middle-aged, but is still referred to as the “young” goldsmith. As Lenin later explains, once activated, his straight-line compulsion ends only when he meets an insurmountable obstacle or gets a sign from God. The young goldsmith is both, because he gives Lenin a sound thrashing. He drags Lenin back to Big Ammachi by his swollen ear. Lenin is covered with hives. The young goldsmith says, “This one is just as crooked as the father.” Mariamma has made her own observation: Lenin’s crookedness mostly happens in the daytime; at night he loses his cockiness, his steps become uncertain, and she has even seen him stagger like a drunk. While she often pleads to stay up later, Lenin can’t wait to get to his mat.

As punishment for the last escapade Lenin is confined to the house for two weeks. Mariamma says, “Why don’t you try climbing instead of this straight business? You might break your neck, but at least you won’t destroy property.”

“Aah, but the trouble with up is that too soon you reach the top.”

A few days into Lenin’s confinement, a fierce lightning storm descends on Parambil. The walls shudder as heaven’s thunderbolts hunt for prey. In the midst of this, the “blessed boy” is missing. They spot him outside, on the roof of the cow shed. It’s a terrifying sight: Lenin’s face upturned to the heavens, his arms raised, his hair plastered back, looking like Christ at Golgotha, deaf to their screams and swaying as the wind and rain buffet him. Thunder rattles the house as the clouds sparkle and glow. A lightning bolt strikes a palm twenty feet from him, its thunderclap instantaneous. It splinters the tree, and a branch knocks Lenin off his perch. The blessed boy wears the cast on his wrist like a medal. He claims to Big Ammachi that he was on the roof looking for “grace,” but to Mariamma he admits he wanted thunderbolts to enter his body and give him the power to unleash lightning from his fingers, just like Lothar in Mandrake the Magician.

A month after his arrival, Mariamma and Podi find it hard to remember life at Parambil before Lenin. Podi is Mariamma’s best friend, and about the same age. When they were boys, Podi’s father, Joppan, and Philipose were also best friends. Podi means “tiny” or “dust.” She and Podi agreed on most everything until Lenin came along. Mariamma resents Lenin for being “blessed” and for being fearless and for being a hero to all the children around, including Podi—though Podi denies it. Lenin is unconcerned about Mariamma’s opinion, which makes it worse. She can’t admit to anyone that though she detests him, she feels compelled to keep him in sight, in case she misses what he does next.

Mariamma overhears her father say to Big Ammachi, “The school sent for me again. Another fight. Because Lenin wanted to start a Communist Party chapter. He’s ten! Ammachi, don’t argue. Boarding school is what he needs.” Mariamma should be pleased to hear this, but somehow, she isn’t.

She dreams that night of Shamuel. He says, “Obey your father! He knows you break his rules. You’re no different from Lenin and he might have to send you away.” She wakes up troubled. What did it mean? If only she still shared a bed with Hannah she would have an answer. For Hannah, every dream had a meaning, just as for Joseph in Genesis. But Hannah has gone to convent school on a scholarship. Anna Chedethi doesn’t know that Hannah wants to be a nun, which is why she loves fasting more than eating; Anna Chedethi would be shocked to learn that her daughter “mortifies” her flesh with a belt of knotted rope under her clothes. Hannah said that was what nuns did. Mariamma has no desire to be a nun.

Without Hannah, Mariamma must puzzle over her dream alone. Why was Shamuel in it? Everyone talks about Shamuel in the present tense. Can a person really be dead when he is talked about as though alive? She remembers the day Shamuel went missing. He’d gone to the provision store, and when he wasn’t back well after lunch, her father went out looking. He retraced Shamuel’s route. At the burden stone, he was relieved to see Shamuel, squatting down, leaning against one of the uprights while his sack rested on the horizontal slab. His chin was on his chest, as if he were sleeping. But he was cold to the touch. Shamuel’s heart had stopped.

It was the first death in Mariamma’s young life. She remembers her father leaving on his bicycle for Iqbal’s godown, and returning with Joppan sitting sidesaddle on the horizontal bar. She’d never seen tears on the faces of grown men until that day. They laid Shamuel’s body outside his hut in a coffin that rested on top of the old trestle that he loved. So many came to pay respects—it was as though a maharajah had died. Big Ammachi’s grief had scared Mariamma; her grandmother wept by the casket, touching the forehead of a man who she said had watched over her from the day she arrived in Parambil sixty years before. They buried Shamuel next to his wife in the cemetery of the CSI church. Much later, her father and Big Ammachi had a brass panel set into the horizontal slab of the burden stone. Mariamma has made rubbings of the big letters with charcoal and paper. In Malayalam it reads,

“COME TO ME ALL YE THAT LABOR AND ARE HEAVY LADEN AND I WILL GIVE YOU REST.”

IN LOVING MEMORY OF SHAMUEL OF PARAMBIL

It’s nearly dawn and she is no closer to the dream’s meaning. She slips out of her room and ducks under her father’s window. He won’t hear her, but she can’t let him see her shadow. Once clear of the house she races to the stream and then on to the canal. She hears footsteps behind her: Podi. They share one mind: whenever Mariamma leaves her bed, somehow Podi knows. The rules say they’re not to swim without adults around. Rules are good for needle­point and for nuns. She dives in, the water roaring around her ears. Moments later there’s an explosion beside her as Podi plunges in. Swimming in the canal is their biggest secret and her greatest pleasure, even though if they’re discovered the consequences are . . . well, she doesn’t like to think about consequences.

Mariamma must get ready for school, but Podi lingers because Joppan is away. When her father is gone, Podi skips school and does as she pleases. If Joppan finds out, and he usually does, he thrashes her. Mariamma has heard him yell at Podi: “I was chased away when I wanted to study! Now they welcome you, and you’re too lazy to go?” Joppan fascinates Mariamma. She only knows this one canal, while he knows every canal. Some people, no matter what they do, just seem larger, more significant, more confident than others. Joppan is like that. Lenin too. She’s envious.

When she sees her father at breakfast, it hits her: the dream. Shamuel was telling her that her father knows about the canal! Maybe he always has. Before she heads to school, she goes to his room, where he’s reconciling bills, muttering to himself. Seeing her, he pushes the ledger aside and looks up, smiling. She stands by his desk, straightens his pencils, ready to confess. She has a rule: she always tells the truth . . . when asked. She opens her mouth . . . but blurting out the truth when not asked is proving hard. She has to say something. She’s committed. “Appa, I dreamed of Shamuel,” she says at last.

“Yes?”

She nods. “Appa? Joppan is gone a lot.”

“And?”

“All right, I’ll see you later.” Not confessing is much easier than confessing.

Shamuel? Joppan? Philipose sits there bewildered, then he shakes his head and chuckles to himself. Joppan is gone a lot. Had Mariamma stayed for more than ten seconds, and if she had really wanted to know, he might have told her that there was a moment when he thought he’d convinced Joppan to be around all the time. It was soon after Shamuel’s funeral. His mother had summoned Joppan. He remembers that she sat, puffy-eyed, on her rope cot outside the kitchen while he and Joppan sat across from her on the low stools, like schoolboys. Big Ammachi said that whenever she paid Shamuel his wages, he’d take what he needed and ask her to save the rest for him in the strongbox in the ara. When the bank first opened, she put his savings into a joint account. “Now this is yours, Joppan,” she said, handing him the passbook. Shamuel’s house and plot were Joppan’s too, to go along with Joppan’s own plot. She also told Joppan she was writing over to him the long, narrow strip of land behind his plot that connected to the road. It was his to do with as he wished. She blessed Joppan, and through tears said that Shamuel was family, and Joppan, Ammini, and Podi were too.

After that, Philipose asked Joppan if he had a minute to visit with him. They sat in Elsie’s old studio. Joppan lit a beedi and studied the passbook. After a while Joppan grinned and said, “How many cows you think are in here?” Philipose was puzzled. “Whenever I named a sum to my father that was more than a few rupees, he’d say, ‘How many cows is that?’ He knew what one cow was worth—that was his currency.” Joppan’s smile faded. “My father could have shown me the passbook before. You’d think he’d have appreciated that I know numbers and can keep accounts. If he saw me reading, he’d frown. It scared him for me to have that knowledge. He was a good man. But he wanted me to be him. The next Shamuel pulayan of Parambil.”

Philipose felt guilty hearing this, because Shamuel had been proud of Philipose finishing high school and going to college. It bothered him to think Shamuel held Philipose to a different standard than he did his son. Father and son were often going at each other. But they had come together to save Philipose when he was at his opium-addled worst. One morning, soon after Elsie’s drowning, with Big Ammachi’s blessing, and after enlisting Unni and Damo, they carried Philipose out of his room. Damo had snatched him up with his trunk and swung him up on his back, where Unni grabbed him, and he sat sandwiched between Shamuel and Unni, while Joppan rode alongside on Philipose’s bicycle. They went to Damo’s logging camp, Philipose screaming and begging the whole way. From there Damo headed up a trail into the interior to the hut where Unni kept his pots of pungent salve, huge metal files, and sickles to keep Damo’s nails and footpads from overgrowing. Whenever Damodaran decided to roam free in the jungle, that hut was where Unni waited, often drinking himself silly. Over the next six weeks, Joppan came and went, but Shamuel stayed with Philipose in that hut the entire time, putting up with his accusations and curses, nursing him through his cramps, hallucinations, and fevers until after two weeks his body was free of the grip of opium. Still they kept him there. He was ashamed. Long and heartfelt conversations with Shamuel allowed him to see how much the little wooden box had disrupted his life. The temptation never entirely vanished, but more than anything else, the thought of disappointing Shamuel, Joppan, and his mother was what kept him on the right path.

“Joppan, my mother and I want to make you an offer, though from what you just said, you will probably decline. But hear me out.” Philipose said he and Big Ammachi owed Shamuel so much. Shamuel had guided him in every way in the daily running of Parambil. Without Shamuel he was lost both as a human being and as the manager of their lands, not coming close to filling Shamuel’s shoes. “This is strictly a business proposition. It’s not stepping into Shamuel’s shoes. We’d like you to become manager of Parambil, make all the decisions in exchange for twenty percent of the profits from the harvest. We’d also pay a small monthly salary so that if we had a bad year, you’d still have income. If you choose to cultivate any undeveloped land, it’s more work for you but more profit.” Joppan was silent. “Twenty percent of the profits is substantial,” Philipose added, “but it’s worth it to me. I could write more. I’m not cut out for this.”

The silence was getting uncomfortable. Joppan seemed to hesitate before speaking. “Philipose, what I’m about to say to you, I couldn’t say to Big Ammachi. I have too much respect for her, for the love she had for my father and has for me. This will be hard for her or you to understand, but I’ll say it anyway. The money in this passbook . . . ?” He paused to study Philipose.

“It’s many cows?”

Joppan nodded. “Yes. But . . . also far fewer cows than my father deserved. If you think about how my grandfather helped your father carve out all these acres. Then consider how my father toiled here from when he was a child until the day he died. All his life! And at the end of it, what does he have? Yes, many cows. And his own plot for his hut—a rare thing for a pulayan. But just imagine if he were not a pulayan. Say he was your father’s cousin. Say he worked side by side with your father. Then, after your father’s time, say he continued working selflessly for Big Ammachi and for you for thirty more years. Every single day! What would be that cousin’s due for his lifetime of labor? Wouldn’t it be much more than what is in this passbook? It might be as much as half of all these lands.”

The saliva turned sour in Philipose’s mouth and glued his tongue to his teeth. “Is that what you’re asking?”

Joppan looked at Philipose with annoyance, or was it pity? “I’m not asking for a single thing. Your mother sent for me. I wouldn’t know of this passbook otherwise. And then you asked me to sit down, remember? I warned you this would be hard for you to hear. Your mother and you both said the same thing: how much you owed my father. He was family. I’m making a point to you as my best friend, as someone who speaks for the Ordinary Man. I thought you might really want to understand the truth. And the truth is that not everyone sees it the way Big Ammachi or you do. If you gave this relative of yours who worked his whole life here the same reward—a plot for a hut and his accumulated wages—everyone around would say he’d been exploited. But if it’s for Shamuel pulayan . . . then it’s generous. What you see as being generous or as being exploitation has everything to do with who you’re giving it to. It helped that my father believed it was his fate to be a pulayan. He felt he was lucky to be working for Parambil! He felt rich at the end of his life, his wages adding up, and a plot for his hut and one for his son and now one more.”

Philipose felt as though he’d walked into a hidden tree branch. The word “exploit” pierced him. It pained him to feel he’d taken advantage of Shamuel, a man he was willing to die for. He thought of himself and of Parambil as caste-free, above such considerations. Yet he had only to look at the face across from him and recall the thwack! of the kaniyan’s cane on Joppan’s flesh and remember the humiliation of the boy who’d shown up so earnestly for school for the children of Parambil.

“Because you loved my father, this is harder for you to grasp,” Joppan says. “You see yourselves as being kind and generous to him. The ‘kind’ slave owners in India, or anywhere, were always the ones who had the greatest difficulty seeing the injustice of slavery. Their kindness, their generosity compared to cruel slave owners, made them blind to the unfairness of a system of slavery that they created, they maintained, and that favored them. It’s like the British bragging about the railways, the colleges, the hospitals they left us—their ‘kindness’! As though that justified robbing us of the right to self-rule for two centuries! As though we should thank them for what they stole! Would Britain or Holland or Spain or Portugal or France be what they are now without what they earned by enslaving others? During the war, the British loved telling us how well they treated us compared to how the Japanese would treat us if they invaded. But should any nation rule over another nation? Such things only happen when one group thinks the other is inferior by birth, by skin color, by history. Inferior, and therefore deserving less. My father was no slave. He was beloved here. But he was never your equal so he wasn’t rewarded as one.” Joppan shook his head. “Some of your relatives here, in fact many of them, were given generous plots of two or three acres, more than a pulayan gets for a hut. It was enough land to do well. But honestly, other than Uplift Master and a few others, who has really made a success of it? Imagine if my father had been given one acre of his own to farm. Just think how well he’d have done.”

The sophistication of Joppan’s argument surprised Philipose. But even to think of Joppan’s argument as “sophisticated” was exactly the kind of blindness Joppan was talking about. “Sophisticated” implied that people like Joppan or Shamuel were not entitled to use history and reason and their intellect.

Philipose said, “I take it the answer is no.”

Joppan said, “I love Parambil. There’s not a field here you and I didn’t play on, or I didn’t help my father harvest at one time. But I can’t love it the way he did. Because it’s not mine. But there’s a bigger issue. Call me manager, reward me well, but for your relatives I’ll still be Shamuel pulayan’s son, Joppan pulayan. The one whose pulayi wife weaves ola and sweeps the muttam of Parambil. I can’t do much about being called a pulayan. But I can choose whether I want to live like one.”

Soon after their first conversation, Philipose had gone back to Joppan with a second offer: they would give Joppan twenty acres of rough-cleared land that had never been cultivated, land that would be his very own. The deed would be held in escrow for ten years, during which time he would manage all Parambil lands, getting 20 percent of profits but without a monthly salary. After ten years he could move on, or they could negotiate a new contract for more land. Joppan was shocked. Big Appachen had laid claim to over five hundred acres, more than half of it rocky and steep or consisting of sunken swamps. He’d rough-cleared about seventy acres closest to the river and half of that was under cultivation. Joppan would own more land than any of Philipose’s relatives.

Joppan had flashed his famous smile. “Philipose, if my father heard this, he’d call you mad.” Joppan said he needed a drink and he pulled out a bottle of arrack. “Your offer means that you listened. You understood, painful as it must have been. It’s very generous. I may regret this, but I’m going to say no.” He took a large swig. “I’ve worked so many years with Iqbal, weathering tough times. Countless nights sleeping in the barge, looking up at the stars and dreaming of a fleet that can move in a quarter of the time it takes now. Yes, we’ve run into a setback with the motorized barge. Not water hyacinths tangling the propeller, but the entire proposal tangled in red tape. But we’re getting closer. Even if I fail, I have to try. If I let go of my dream, something in me will die.”

Philipose had felt himself shrinking, recalling his dreams before he went to Madras, his dreams when he met Elsie, when they got married, when she left and came back. He gulped down the arrack to dull the pain. He listened dully as Joppan talked about “the Party”—which always meant the Communists. That word “communists” might be anathema in many places, synonymous with treason, but in Travancore-Cochin-Malabar, in Bengal, and in more states in India, they were a legitimate party, real contenders. In Malayalam-­speaking territories, the Party stalwarts were young former Congress Party members who felt betrayed once Congress came to power and gave in to the interests of big landowners and industry. The Party’s membership wasn’t just the disenfranchised and poor, but intellectuals and idealistic college students (often upper caste) who saw the Party as the only group willing to undo entrenched caste privilege. That year when Shamuel died—1952—the Party won twenty-five seats to Congress’s forty-four. The merger of Malabar with Travancore-Cochin to form the state of Kerala was imminent, and it would bring new elections.

“Mark my words,” Joppan had said as they had parted that night, “one day Kerala will be the first place in the world where a Communist government is elected by a democratic ballot and not by bloody revolution.”

As Philipose recalls this conversation of almost a decade ago, he’s humbled to think that Joppan had been right: only a few years later, the Party won the majority of the seats in Kerala and formed the first democratically elected Communist government anywhere in the world.