The Covenant of Water

1964, The Maramon Convention

Malayalis of all religions doubt everything, except their faith. Each year the need to renew it, to be reborn, to drink again at the source, draws Malayali Christians to that great February revival meeting, the Maramon Convention. The Parambil family is no exception.

Ever since the first convention in 1895, held in a tent on the dry riverbed of the Pamba, the crowds have come in greater number every year. Not till 1936 did they acquire a microphone, a gift from the missionary E. Stanley Jones of America. Before that, “relay masters” stood like tent poles at intervals, stretching into the satellite tents and into the crowds on the riverbanks, repeating what the speaker said. But it is the Malayali nature that the relayers felt it their Christian duty to question and improve the translated message. E. Stanley Jones’s admonition that “worry and anxiety are sand in the machinery of life, and faith is the oil” arrived at the crockery stalls as “Oh ye of little faith, your head is full of sand and there’s no oil in your lamp.” It nearly caused a riot.

From human relay, the Maramon Convention has gone to amplified excess, or so it seems to the Right Reverend Rory McGillicutty of Corpus Christi, United States of the Americas, as men shinny up palms, hauling up more speakers. As he waits offstage, his eardrums are threatened by hellish feedback and rifle-like pops that send the pariah dogs fleeing, leaving urine trails in the sand. The electrician lisps, “Teshting onetoothree, kekamo?” Yes, he can be heard at the back and even across the Palk Strait in Ceylon.

Reverend Rory McGillicutty’s eyes are as overwhelmed as his ears. It began with his first glimpse of the mass of humanity and the sprawling tent city. He felt like a single locust in a plague as he struggled to keep up with the earnest chemachen escorting him. This crowd dwarfed anything he’d seen at the Tulsa State Fair or even the State Fair of Texas. They clutched their Bibles against their white clothes and were as serious as the business end of a .45. They were here to hear the Word, and the majority were not distracted by the food and bangle stalls, the magic shows, or the “Bowl of Death”—a huge hemisphere carved into the ground, its walls smoothed out, in which two motorcycle riders with kohl lining their eyes chased each other around at terrifying speeds, their motorcycles, defying gravity, climbing to the bowl’s rim, almost parallel to the ground on which the observers stood looking in.

The biggest shock for McGillicutty was the crippled honor guard lining the approach. The lepers were on one side and the non-lepers on the other. For the latter, there was no common denominator other than misery. He saw children barely recognizable as such: one had fused fingers, a face like a pancake, and eyes where his ears might be, like an exotic fish. The chemachen said that these children were mutilated in infancy by their minders, who displayed them the length and breadth of India. “But,” he said reassuringly, “they’re North Indians,” as though that mitigated the horror. Now, waiting backstage, McGillicutty is as nervous as a fly in a glue pot. It doesn’t help that he’s a last-minute replacement for Reverend William Franklin (“Billy”) Graham, whose fame extends to the Maramon Convention; his hosts are less enthusiastic about the stand-in. All the same, Rory McGillicutty’s biggest worry is his translator.

His worry is legitimate. If the measure of English fluency is the ability to trot out a poorly recalled phrase from a third-form primer, like Why ees the doug fallowing the mushter? then many feel qualified. After all (they argue), to translate one only needed to speak Malayalam fluently, not English. Even the achen trained at the Yale Divinity School proved a disastrous translator, because he acted as though the speaker’s words were not faithful to his translation.

Rory needn’t worry; the convention has a proven translator, discovered by Bishop Mar Paulos at a Village Uplift event years ago when he saw him interpret for a grain expert from Coralville, Iowa, America. He translated just what the speaker said, while calling no attention to himself.

On the morning of the convention, this veteran translator sat before his mirror, trimming the caterpillar mustache that trekked below his nose and a quarter inch above his upper lip, owing allegiance to neither, emancipated from both. For a Malayali male past puberty, it’s unmanly to be without one. The forms to choose from are legion: bottlebrush; upturned Sergeant-Major; downturned Brigadier; bushy, fascist nub . . . The secret to the translator’s caterpillar is to cozy up to the mirror, balloon out the upper lip, and use the naked razorblade pinched between right thumb and index finger, while the left hand pulls the skin taut. With miniscule downstrokes, one defines the upper and then—most critical—the lower margins. If he were to write a manual, the translator would say the strip of shaved skin below the mustache, the separation from the vermilion border of the upper lip, is the key.

Shoshamma watched her husband’s punctilious edging. She said teasingly, “Uplift Master’s mustache has a downlift on the left”—causing him to nick himself.

“Woman, why mock me? See what you’ve done?” She said sorry, but she was giggling. He struck his chest. “You’ve no idea of the passion burning here! Passion!” Her shoulders shook as she retreated. Passion without the normal conjugal outlet because of your stubbornness! That was his fault. He’d sworn to wait till she initiated things. He was still waiting.

The bus they took was so packed that it skipped its usual stops. Near Chenganur, a familiar figure made a death-defying leap onto the running board and pushed inside, saying, “My ticket is as good as yours! No caste system here!” Lenin was fourteen. He’d been packed off to a strict religious boarding school at ten. They’d seen him the previous holidays but already he was taller, with a faint mustache and an Adam’s apple jutting as far forward as his chin. But his scalp looked as though a goat had grazed on it, and his face was bruised. He was thrilled to see them.

“A misunderstanding with my classmates,” he explained. “I’m the hostel mess secretary. I decided to give our Sunday biryani to the hungry ones outside the church.”

“Aah. And your classmates weren’t prepared to fast?”

“The Sunday sermon was Matthew twenty-five. ‘I was hungry, and you fed me.’ Very meaningful to me. Then in Bible study my pious classmates swore to live by those principles. So . . .”

Shoshamma said, “Monay, you’ve heard the saying Aanaye pidichunirtham, aseye othukkinirthaan prayasam.” Easier to control an elephant than to control desires!

Uplift Master stared at her. Was this meant for him?

“True, Kochamma. Still, they’re such hypocrites! What would Jesus say when there’s food in one house and the neighbors starve. If Jesus returns, don’t you think he’ll vote Communist?”

A man behind Lenin shouted, “Bloody blasphemy! Christ voting for Communists?” The Party had made history and had many voters, but few would be on a bus heading to the Maramon Convention. In the ensuing scuffle, the bus lurched to a stop, and Lenin escaped through the driver’s exit. He was laughing, arms pumping and pelvis gyrating like a Bollywood hero’s, before he took off on a dead run.

Rory McGillicutty’s face is pitted like a jackfruit from the acne of his youth, and he’s as stocky as a plavu. He has a thick head of hair with each follicle looking as if it were hammered in like a railroad spike, but he has not been introduced to Jayboy’s Brahmi Oil, so his hair is wild and unruly. It’s a miracle that a man who grew up fishing in the flats of Aransas Bay could wind up as a fisher of men in the village of Maramon, in Kerala, India.

Uplift Master, meeting Rory backstage, is concerned: the man has no written speech, no notes, no verses bookmarked. Rory has a different concern. He has just watched a bishop deliver his speech in a monotone, his only gesture the tentative raising of a finger, like a child feeling a mastiff’s nose, yet the unsmiling audience didn’t mind. Rory’s style, as he now explains to his translator, is the opposite. “I want my listeners to smell the singed hair, feel the heat of the eternal fires of damnation. Only then can one appreciate Salvation—you understand?”

Uplift Master’s eyebrows shoot up, alarmed, though his head movement—like an egg wobbling on a counter—could mean yes or no. Or neither of those.

“I can testify to these things,” McGillicutty says, “because I’ve been there. I’d still be in the gutter if I hadn’t been saved by the blood of the Lamb.” McGillicutty’s fire-and-brimstone style plays well in the Deep South and as far north as Cincinnati. It was a winner in Cornwall, England, and the basis for his last-minute invitation to India. Rory has no fallback: his style is his message. He clutches Uplift Master’s shoulders, looking him earnestly in the face. “My friend, when you translate you must physically convey my passion. Otherwise, I’m doomed.”

Master has misgivings. “Reverend, please to remember, this is Kerala. We don’t speak in tongues at the Maramon Convention. That and all is the Pentecostals. Here, we’re . . . serious.”

McGillicutty’s face falls. He’s not one to speak in tongues, but when the Holy Spirit makes the impressionable babble, who is he to object? Such a sight can transform a tentful of sinners.

“Well . . . Give it your best? Try to match your tone, your gestures with mine. Passion! Passion is what I am after!”

A chemachen alerts them that they’re on after the choir. McGillicutty retreats to a corner.

Uplift Master watches him walk away. The hubris of this jackfruit-face with no script! But then he’s humbled to see Rory get on his knees and bow his head in prayer. It should neither surprise Master nor soften his heart, but it does both. He feels like a hypocrite—didn’t he just lecture Shoshamma about passion? When McGillicutty rises, Uplift Master puts his hand on the white man’s shoulder—something he’s never done in his life. “Not to worry. My best only I will do. Passion will be there. Mostly there. As much as possible it will be there.” McGillicutty’s relief makes Master feel he’s done the Christian thing. McGillicutty thumps him on the back and then the reverend pours from a steel flask into its cup, offering it to his translator. Uplift Master sips and comes to a new understanding of the visitor, who motions for him to finish it. Then Rory downs a cup and sucks air between his teeth. Uplift Master feels the fiery whatever-it-is light up his chest. The passion within swells. He’s a bit hungover, truth be told, and the reverend’s flask is divine intervention. They have another cupful each. Uplift Master feels better than well. In fact, he has never felt better. His earlier trepidation has vanished. He loosens his shoulders. He tells himself, If McGillicutty fails, it won’t be for want of a good translator.

The crowd murmurs with anticipation: a white priest from afar is always of interest, even if it’s not Billy Graham. We are enslaved even after we are free, Uplift Master thinks. We assume a white man’s message is better than what our own might say.

McGillicutty is announced, and they both walk on stage. There’s pin-drop silence.

The reverend opens with a long, involved joke. When he comes to the punch line, he belts it out, one hand reaching to the sky, looking expectantly at the crowd. Several thousand smooth and expressionless faces look back at him. A red flush spreads above his collar. He turns to his translator, his eyes pleading.

Uplift Master flattens his oiled hair with his palm. He scans the crowd confidently, contemptuously, even. He holds their gaze for a long time. Then he addresses them as intimates.

“My long-suffering friends. Do you want to know what just happened? The Right Reverend Sahib Master-Rory Kutty just cracked a joke. To tell you the truth, I was so surprised I can’t give you the details. Who expects a joke at the Maramon Convention? Let me just say it involved a dog, an old lady, a bishop, and a handbag . . .” Someone in the women’s section giggles, a high-pitched ejaculation. There’s shocked silence, and then the children laugh. Now ripples of laughter spread in response to Uplift Master’s audacity.

“The joke isn’t as funny as the reverend thinks. Besides, do any old ladies in Kerala carry handbags? At most, some coins wrapped in the kerchief, is it not? But please, let’s not disappoint a guest from far, far away. Blessed are those who laugh at a visitor’s jokes. Isn’t that in Beatitudes? Aah. So, when I count to three, please, everybody, laugh—and I’m especially talking to you rowdy children sitting here in front, you masters of conniving and pretending holiness for your parents, because here’s your God-given opportunity. Do it now, with the Lord’s blessing. One, two . . . three!”

McGillicutty is thrilled. The old lady, the bishop, and the handbag has worked everywhere from McAllen to Murfreesboro—and now, Maramon. And better in Malayalam than in English!

The reverend turns serious and holds up his hand for silence. Uplift Master, his dark shadow, imitates his posture.

McGillicutty bows his head, hand still in the air. “My brothers and sisters, I stand before you as a sinner . . .”

Uplift Master translates: “Joking matters are now over, praise the Lord. He says, I stand before you as a sinner.”

A murmur of appreciation ripples through the crowd.

“I stand before you as an adulterer . . . A fornicator.”

“I stand before—” Uplift Master’s voice stalls. His stomach feels just like that time in Madras when he had dysentery. If he uses the first-person pronoun to translate what McGillicutty said, won’t everyone think he is the fornicator, the adulterer? He looks for Shoshamma in the crowd.

The reverend, glancing anxiously at his silent translator, says, “Friends, I’m not one to mince my words. A fornicator, I say. A man who slept with every loose woman and some who weren’t till I pried them loose. That’s who I was.”

The bishops and priests in the front rows, who understand English all too well, glance nervously at each other.

Uplift Master smiles insincerely at McGillicutty, then at the crowd, while trying desperately to collect his thoughts. “The reverend says: Friends, my church across the sea is a big one. A huge one. Yet I’ve never seen as many people of faith as I see here today. And I’m proud that Uplift Master is the one to translate for me. His reputation extends from Maramon to my hometown. That’s who I asked for. Thank you, Uplift Master.”

Uplift Master bows his head modestly. Then he glances at McGillicutty with trepidation, trying to anticipate what might come next. When the man gets going, his mouth opens wide enough to swallow his own head.

“The number of people I need to make amends to, the number of people I led astray,” McGillicutty says, sweeping his hand out, “extends from this side of the crowd to that one.”

Uplift Master’s eyes follow the reverend’s hand, and he sees a woman in the third row keel over, overcome by humidity and the heat; he recognizes Big Ammachi as the first to minister to her, lowering her to the ground, fanning her with her program. And just outside the tent, it appears a child is having a convulsion. Adults cluster around the child.

Uplift Master sweeps his hand like Rory did: “When I look from that side of the river to this side of the river, I think of all the people here in this beautiful land who suffer from rare illness, or cancer, or need heart surgery, and have nowhere to go . . . Well, it troubles me, and I must speak openly about it.”

“I broke my mother’s heart when I lay in carnal knowledge with my own nanny!” the reverend says, clutching his chest. “An innocent country woman. I snuggled at her breast, and yet at thirteen I took advantage of her.”

Uplift Master, barely waiting for Rory to finish, clutches his own chest and says, “If some child is born with a hole in its heart like our Papi’s little child and needs an operation, where can they go?” He’s inventing Papi and child, but it’s in service of the Lord. “That poor boy was ten and bluer than he was brown before Papi raised the money to take him to another state, all the way to Vellore, to the Christian Medical College . . . By then, it was too late!”

Now McGillicutty catches his translator off guard by stepping off the low stage to where all the children sit cross-legged. He grabs one child. The gangly fellow he pulls up is all ears, knees, and elbows and has a gap in his teeth big enough for a tent peg to pass through. Uplift Master recognizes him as an unfortunate, a potten—born deaf and dumb—who always gets a choice place at the very front. Earlier, this boy laughed loudest and was last to stop. Uplift Master sees him at the convention year after year because his parents hope for a miracle. This child has never spoken an intelligible word. What misfortune for the reverend to pick the potten out of all the children!

“When I was a father,” the reverend says, now back onstage with the grinning potten, “I abandoned my own boy, no bigger than this angel. He went hungry. My in-laws had to bring food because I spent my wages on gambling and on women!”

The woman who fainted is carried out. Uplift Master sees Big Ammachi looking directly at him with excitement and anticipation. He says, “Why is it that a child who is seriously ill must travel to Madras and beyond for care? What if help were available here? I’m not talking about a one-room clinic with one doctor, and one cow by the gate. I mean a real hospital, many stories tall, with specialists for the head as well as for the tail and all parts in between. A hospital as good as any in the world. If one white missionary woman, Ida Scudder, God bless her soul, could build a world-class institution in Vellore, in the middle of nowhere, can we Christians in this land of milk and honey not do the same?”

“Only a devil can neglect a child like this to whisky and whoring,” says the reverend, his voice breaking. “But then one day when I was lying in the gutter in Corpus Christi, Texas, the Lord called out to me. He said, ‘Say my name!’ and I said, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!’ ”

Uplift Master translates: “Friends, this isn’t the message I meant to preach, but the Lord seems to have brought me all the way here from Body of Christ in Texas and has put these words in my mouth to convey to you. He says, behold the suffering around you! He says, isn’t it time to change it? He asks, do you really need another church? He says, glorify my name with a hospital worthy of me. I hear his voice just as I did so many years ago when I was a broken, sinful man, lying in the gutter, and the Lord appeared to me and called out, ‘Say my name!’ And I said, ‘Yesu, Yesu, Yesu!’ ”

The crowd is deathly quiet. The only sound is the cawing of crows near the food stalls. Rory McGillicutty and Uplift Master wait, both hoping the audience will respond with “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” But call-and-response is simply not the Malayali style. Uplift Master thinks the crowd looks at him without sympathy. They want me to fail. Shoshamma will find this so funny. Only Big Ammachi looks up at him with hope, nodding to encourage him. I’m trying my best, Ammachi! He feels terrible about letting her down.

All at once the potten shatters the silence: he says in the loud, unmodulated voice of the deaf, “Yesu! Yesu! Yesu!”

McGillicutty is lightning quick to put the microphone before the boy’s mouth so that the potten’s “Yesu” reverberates in the tent and beyond. Rory bends down to the boy, dispensing with his translator. “Say it again, son, say, Yesu, Yesu, Yesu!” he shouts.

“Yesu! Yesu! Yesu!” cries the potten, thrilled when his words turn into sound waves that buffet his body. He hears! He speaks! He dances with joy.

There’s a crescendo of murmurs from the crowd as word spreads from front to back, then to the satellite tents and to those standing outside, to the bangle sellers, the beggars, and the daredevil motorcyclists: A potten has just spoken for the first time! A miracle!

“Say it with him, my friends,” McGillicutty yells, his face red with effort, trying to flog life into the docile multitude. “SHOUT from the rooftops: Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” But only the potten heeds him, shouting, “Yesu! Yesu! Yesu!”

“Aah,” Uplift Master says, incensed by this Malayali reticence. “So God just gave voice to the dumb. A miracle! Now, through His messenger, this plavu stump from Body of Christ, Texas, God asks you for a sign of your attentiveness. He asks, are you listening? Are you here to receive the Holy Spirit? To be cleansed and renewed in faith? Or are you embarrassed to call the Lord’s name? Are you here to sight and gossip and see who’s pregnant, and which young man is being proposed for which young lady?” There’s tittering from the children’s section. Uplift Master senses an opportunity and turns to them. “Then you just sit there. Let your children show you what faith and courage look like. Blessed children, please show these adults how it’s done. You saw the courage of one of your own who stands up here. Give him your support! Say, ‘Yesu, Yesu, Yesu!’ ”

Blessed indeed are the children, for they will never pass up sanctioned invitations to show up their parents. They jump to their feet, and hundreds of young voices shout, “Yesu, Yesu, Yesu!” a sound that goes straight to God’s ears. Uplift Master extends his hand, palm up, pointing to the children’s section, while staring at the adults with a meaningful look. Do you see? Then he says, “That’s why Christ said suffer the little children, forbid them not unto me. Now can you say it? Yesu, Yesu, Yesu!”

The women, the mothers, rise and lend their voices: “Yesu, Yesu, Yesu!” What alternative do husbands have? The men rise: “Yesu, Yesu, Yesu!” The bishops and priests, models of Christian reticence and propriety, are in a bind, because there’s something unholy about such unbridled passion, not to mention the bizarre translation. But how can they keep quiet when their Savior’s name is being sung out? They join in. “Yesu, Yesu, Yesu!”

Chanting like this has never before been heard at the staid convention. The crowd is drunk with sound and cannot stop. Uplift Master feels the hairs rise on the back of his neck. Glory, glory, glory! Surely the Holy Spirit is here. He scans the crowd for Shosh­amma’s face. Now do you see the passion?! Rory winks at him.

After a long time, the chanting finally gives way to thunderous clapping, the crowd applauding itself. The potten is received back in the children’s section like Jesus entering Jerusalem, and his cheering friends lift him off the ground. The audience take their seats, smiling at each other, shocked at having broken their self-inflicted decorum.

“My friends, my friends,” McGillicutty says. He takes Matthew 25:33 as his text, pointing it out to Uplift Master. “The Lord will measure our lives on Judgment Day, and my dear friends . . .” McGillicutty holds the open Bible to his chest and comes to the edge of the stage, looking as if he might cry. He falls to one knee and points his trembling finger heavenward. “Mark my words, we’ll have to ANSWER to him!”

Uplift Master thinks this is proof that the Holy Spirit is indeed present, as McGillicutty came up with the same verse as Lenin. Master, also clutching his Bible, falls to one knee, but artfully hiking up his mundu first. He translates: “God sits in a gold kasera like the one on your verandah, only a hundred times bigger. He will measure our lives on Judgment Day. If the Lord lets you enter His kingdom, it will be kappa and meen curry for all your days. But if not, you’ll go to the other place. Do you remember the abandoned well on that property where what’s-their-name fell in, and no rope was ever long enough to go that far down?” (He’s confident that everyone has some version of that tragedy.) “Those depths are nothing compared to where you’ll be going. The serpents that live down there have bred with fallen humans for so long that the place is populated by creatures with fangs, human hands with claws on the ends, and a serpent’s body.”

He has no idea where these words are coming from other than the Holy Spirit. He spots Coconut Kurian in the audience, glowering at him, arms locked across his chest, and Master continues before McGillicutty can go on: “Let’s say you’re there because you hoarded coconuts and jacked up the price, think of how it will feel to live with those creatures biting and clawing you and coiled around you for all eternity.”

There are gasps—he’s gone too far. No one’s ever spoken in such graphic fashion at the Maramon Convention. On the other hand, there’s little love lost for hoarders.

“Let Him in, my brethren. He is knocking,” McGillicutty says in an impassioned voice, tears in his eyes. “Open your hearts to the Lord. Clothe your neighbor. Comfort him when he is in sorrow. Remember in Matthew, ‘I was ill, and you cared for me, I was hungry, and you fed me . . .’ ”

Uplift Master, for once, translates word for word then adds: “Year after year, when our loved ones are sick, we take them by bus and train far, far away for help, and only if we have the money. Year after year, our loved ones give up the ghost for lack of a hospital like Vellore here in Kerala! Together we could build ten first-class hospitals, but we spend the money enlarging our cow sheds! The Lord says, ‘Build my hospital!’ Did you not hear it? Did you not call out His name? Let’s make history. Each of you, take those notes out of your pocket.” Uplift Master pulls out a bundle of notes from the tuck-in fold of his mundu. It’s money from the sale of their paddy, money that he was supposed to deposit. “My wife has bid me to give generously!”

He puts the notes one by one into the donation basket on the stage, so people can see the color. Somewhere in the crowd, he’s sure he hears Shoshamma gasp. The ushers jump to life, passing baskets left and right, and even those faithful outside the tent on the riverbanks find they cannot retreat, because ushers with baskets block their way.

“What are we waiting for?” says McGillicutty, who understands this phase of a meeting all too well, though he’s puzzled at how his translator has gotten ahead of him. “Remember Luke 6:38. ‘Give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap.’ ”

Uplift Master translates the verse, while McGillicutty pulls bills out of his own pocket to put in the hamper.

Uplift Master can hear the workings of the crowd’s mind, the influence of Doubting Thomas. Aah, where will such a hospital be? Aah, what is the hurry? Why not the government do this? Why not?

The parents of the potten come on stage with their son. The wife takes off her bangles, then the gold chain on her neck, and puts them into the basket that Rory holds out. The father gives his chain. McGillicutty cries, “God bless you!”

Then, to Uplift Master’s astonishment, comes Big Ammachi, all by herself, surprising her family who are still in their seats. She stands there, a tiny figure on the stage, and unscrews her kunukku from each earlobe. Then she unfastens her chain. Now her thirteen-year-old granddaughter, Mariamma, as well as Anna Chedethi rush up to join her, slipping off their bangles and necklaces.

Uplift Master says, “For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you. Do you understand? The Holy Spirit is observing! Put nothing now and reap nothing forever. Nothing!”

Now a line forms to go onstage, as if gold is being handed out and not handed in. To the astonishment of the clergy, men and women are peeling gold from ears, fingers, wrists . . . It’s a day when no one holds back. Because if there’s one thing Malayalis fear, it’s missing out when there’s reaping to be done.