The Covenant of Water

1968, Madras

On her first day, Mariamma and her classmates walk to the Red Fort, which sits apart from the rest of the medical school like the scary relative hidden away in an attic, but in this case behind the cricket grounds. Thick, muscular, gray vines form an exoskeleton holding up the crumbling red brick. The mosque-like turrets and the gargoyles staring down from the friezes remind her of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Madras has changed from her father’s brief student days, when the British were everywhere, their pith helmets bobbing on the streets and most of the cars carrying white people. Now, only their ghosts linger in buildings of fearsome scale, like Central Station and the University Senate Building. And the Red Fort. Her father said these structures had intimidated him; he resented them because they were paid for by smashing the handlooms of village weavers so Indian cotton could only be shipped back to English mills and the cloth sold back to Indians. He said that every mile of railway track they built had one purpose: to get their loot back to ports. But Mariamma has no resentment. It’s all Indian now—hers—whatever its origins. The only white faces around belong to scruffy tourists with backpacks who desperately need to bathe.

She takes a last glance outside, like Jean Valjean saying goodbye to freedom, as they pass under the arch that reads MORTUI VIVOS DOCENT. Inside the Red Fort, it’s unnaturally cool. The yellow-lustered lanterns hanging down from the lofty ceilings ensure it is as dim as a dungeon. The flanking glass cabinets at the portal are like sentries, one holding a wired human skeleton and the other empty, as if the occupant has taken a stroll.

Two unshaven, khaki-clad, barefoot peons, or “attenders,” watch them file in. One is tall and cadaverous, his mouth a slit, his eyes unfocused, like an abattoir worker watching the herd entering the chute. The other man is short, his mouth blood-red from betel nut, and he drools his lechery. Of the one hundred and two students, a third are female; the second attender has eyes only for the women; Mariamma feels soiled when his gaze falls on her face then drops to her breasts. The senior students warned them that in the caste structure of the school, these two, who look like the lowest of the low, have the professors’ ears and can determine a student’s fate.

“Stay close, Ammachi,” Mariamma silently says under her breath. The night Big Ammachi died, Mariamma was away in Alwaye College, at her desk, studying her botany notes. She had the curious sensation of her grandmother being in the room, as though if she turned around, she’d see the old lady standing in the doorway, smiling. The feeling was there when she woke up, and still there when her father appeared in a hired car to bring her home. Her grief over the deaths of Baby Mol and Big Ammachi is fresh. She doubts it will ever fade. But through it all, her sense of Big Ammachi accompanying her, being embodied within her has remained—that’s her consolation. Her grandmother lit the velakku the night of her birth with the hope that her namesake might shed light on the deaths of JoJo, Ninan, and Big Appachen, and the struggles of those like her father and Lenin who live with the Condition, that she might find a cure. The journey begins here, but she is not alone.

The pungent smell of formalin with an after-odor of slaughterhouse batters their nostrils even before they enter the dissection hall. The cavernous space is surprisingly bright thanks to floor-to-ceiling frosted windows and skylights that illuminate the rows of marble slabs. On the slabs, stained red rubber sheets drape static shapes that were once alive. Mariamma drops her gaze to the tiled floor. The formalin scratches her nostrils and her eyes water.

“WHO IS YOUR TEACHER?”

They come to a halt, a confused herd, panicked by this roar. Someone steps onto her heel.

The voice bellows again, repeating the question. It originates from thick lips floating under flaring nostrils. Swimmy, bloodshot eyes peer out of a fortresslike face and from under the overhanging slabs that form the brow; the cheeks resemble weathered, pockmarked concrete. This living, breathing sibling of the gargoyles atop the Red Fort is Professor P. K. Krishnamurthy, or “Gargoyle­murthy,” as the seniors refer to him. His hair is neither parted nor combed but instead sticks up like a boar’s bristle. But his long lab coat is brilliant white and of the finest pressed cotton, making their short, itchy linen coats look gray by comparison.

Gargoylemurthy’s fingers wrap around the arm of an unlucky baby-faced fellow whose prominent Adam’s apple makes him appear to have swallowed a coconut. This student’s thick, wavy hair falls into his eyes and he reflexively tosses his head back, a gesture that looks insolent.

“Name?” Gargoylemurthy asks.

“Chinnaswamy Arcot Gajapathy, sir,” he says confidently. Mari­amma is impressed—in his place, she’d have stammered or gone mute.

“Chinn-ah!” The gargoyle is amused and bares long, yellow teeth. “Arcot Gajapathy-ah?” Gargoylemurthy smirks at the rest of them, insisting they find the name as funny as he does. Like Judases, they oblige. “So, I’m now knowing who you are. But Chinnah, I ask again: Whooo-eh is, your-eh, teacher-eh?”

“Sir . . . you are our teacher? Professor—”

“WRONG!”

His fingers flex tighter around Chinnah’s arm, a python re­adjusting its hold. “Chinnah?” he says, but he’s surveying the herd, ignoring Chinnah. “By chance have you noticed the words over the entry as you firstly walked in?”

“Sir . . . yes, I noticed something.”

“Something, aah?” Gargoylemurthy pretends to look annoyed.

“It was some other language, sir. So, I . . . ignored—” Chinnah hastily tries to correct himself, “I think it said ‘Macku’ . . . or something.”

They gasp. “Macku” means dummy. Dunce.

“Macku?” The brows come together like thunderclouds. The squat neck retracts into the chest. The eyes bore into Chinnah. “Macku is what you are. That ‘some other language’ is Latin, macku!” Gargoylemurthy collects himself. He fills his chest. He shouts, “It says, ‘MORTUI VIVOS DOCENT’! It means, ‘The Dead Shall Inform the Living’!”

He drags Chinnah to the nearest slab, snatching off the rubber sheet to expose what they’ve been dreading. There it is . . . A fallen log, a petrified leathery object in the shape of a woman, but the face is pancaked flat, hard to recognize as truly human. Anita, Mariamma’s roommate, whimpers and leans against her. Mariamma prays she doesn’t faint. The previous night, homesick, Anita asked if she could push their beds together, and without waiting for an answer she’d huddled against Mariamma, the same way Mariamma had huddled against Hannah or Big Ammachi or Anna Chedethi. They’d both slept soundly.

Gargoylemurthy places Chinnah’s hand in the hand of the cadaver, like a priest uniting the bride and groom. “Here, macku, is your teacher!” A smile cracks Gargoylemurthy’s features. “Chinnah, kindly shake hands with your professor! The Dead Shall Inform the Living. I am not the teacher. She is.”

Chinnah shakes his new teacher’s hand readily, preferring it to Gargoylemurthy’s.

Mariamma and her five dissection mates perch like vultures on stools around their slab, with “their” body. They’re each given their very own “bone box”—a long, rectangular cardboard carton—to take home. It contains a skull, its pieces glued together, the calvarium coming off like a kettle top, and the mandible hinged in place; vertebrae strung together by a wire through the neural arch to make a necklace; one temporal bone; a sampling of loose ribs; a hemi-pelvis with a femur, tibia, and ulna from the same side; one sacrum; one scapula with matching humerus, radius, and ulna; one hand and foot, fully articulated with wire; and loose wrist and tarsal bones in two small cloth sacks.

Gargoylemurthy poses Chinnah in the “anatomical position”: standing with his hands by his sides, palms forward, slightly reminiscent of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

He says, “We are mobile, flexible creatures. But for anatomical descriptive purposes we must pretend the body is fixed in Chinnah’s standing position, understand? Only then can you describe any structure in the body by its position relative to adjacent structures.”

He spins Chinnah around and superimposes the scapula on Chinnah’s scapula. He then defines for them its medial (closer to the midline), lateral (further from the midline), superior and inferior (or cranial and caudal), anterior, and posterior (or ventral and dorsal) aspects. Anything nearer to the center or closer to the point of attachment is “proximal” (so the knee is proximal to the ankle), while things further out are “distal” (the ankle being distal to the knee). They need this basic vocabulary to begin. In Moore Market the previous day, her father’s old friend Janakiram gifted her a used but recent edition of Gray’s. “Mug it up, ma!” he said. “ ‘Memorization and recitation’ is the mantra!” When she ruffled through its pages, she heard the same mantra ring out, echoed in the meticulous underlining and margin notes of the previous owner, road signs to guide her on the journey. Gray’s was familiar to her. In high school, once she set her sights on medicine, she spent hours with her mother’s copy of Gray’s Anatomy. It was an ancient edition even if the illustrations were largely the same. Anatomy hasn’t changed but the terminology has. The Latin names are gone, thank goodness; the “arteria iliaca communis” is now the “common iliac artery.” She’d been fascinated by the illustrations in her Gray’s, and not just because they must have been useful to her mother. She didn’t have her mother’s artistic hand, but she’d stumbled onto something she did have. After staring at an illustration, she could close the book and reproduce the figure accurately (though not artistically), entirely from memory. She thought nothing of it, but her astounded father assured her it was a gift. If so, her gift was being able to translate a two-dimensional figure on the page into a three-dimensional one in her head. Then, like a child stacking blocks, she reproduced the figure by going from the inner layer out, till she had the whole. It had been entertaining, a parlor trick. Now she’ll need to know the names of each structure and memorize the pages of text that accompany each figure.

Two hours later they file out, all one hundred and two of them, to a lecture hall at the other end of the Red Fort. Just as in college, the ladies occupy the first few rows of the sloping gallery. The boys fill the rows behind. Glaring down at them from the walls are former Heads of Anatomy—HOAs—all of them white, whiskered, bald, unsmiling, and deceased, but memorialized in these portraits.

Dr. Cowper enters quietly, the first and only Indian HOA, appointed after Independence, a clean-shaven Parsi. Cowper is small-boned, with fine, pleasant features. When his portrait eventually goes up, he’ll also be the only one with a full head of hair. The two barefoot attenders and the assistant professor flutter about Cowper, but he doesn’t need or expect their fawning. As the assistant calls out their names Cowper stands to one side, regarding each face with paternal interest. When Mariamma rises to say “Present, sir,” Cowper glances in her direction, a welcoming look, just for her (or so she thinks, but later learns they all felt that way). She feels a stab of homesickness for her father.

The overlapping blackboards on pulleys behind Cowper shine like ebony. The shorter attender with the lecherous gaze (or “da Vinci,” as the seniors call him) lines up colored chalk and duster cloth, his former sluggishness gone, as is his paan cheek-bulge. The class waits, pens and color pencils in hand, ready to reproduce every drawing from this legendary teacher of embryology. The only sounds Mariamma hears are the groans and sighs of the ancient fort.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Cowper says, stepping forward and smiling, “we are merely renting these bodies of ours. You came into this world on an in breath. You will exit on an out breath. Hence, we say that someone has . . . ? ‘Expired’!” His shoulders shake silently at his own joke, his eyes glinting behind his wire glasses. “I know what happens to the body when it is no more, but not what happens to you, to the essence of you. Your soul.” He adds wistfully, “I wish I did.”

By confessing his doubt, he has won them over, this smiling, gentle professor.

“However, I do know where you came from. From the meeting of two cells, one from each of your parents—that’s how you came to be. We’ll spend the next six months studying that nine-month process. You could spend a lifetime and never cease to marvel at the elegance and beauty of embryology. ‘Abiding happiness and peace are theirs who choose this study for its own sake, without expectation of any reward.’ ”

While lecturing, Cowper draws on the boards with both hands as naturally as he walks on two feet. He swiftly diagrams the intricate fusion of ovum and sperm to form a single cell, then becoming the blastocyst.

Toward the end of the hour, Cowper spreads out the rectangular duster cloth on the demonstration table. Delicately, he pinches up a fold down the center of the cloth duster, down its long axis, carefully shaping a long ridge. “This is how the neural tube forms, the precursor to your spinal cord. And this bulbous end,” he says, fluffing up one end of the ridge, “is the early brain.”

Then comes a moment none of them will forget: he lowers his body so his eyes are at the level of the surface of the table and his pale fingers carefully—as though handling living tissue—raise the long edges of the duster cloth from either side so they arch over the central ridge to meet above it in the midline. “And that,” he says, pointing with his nose, and then peering at them through the hollow cylinder he has formed, “is the primitive gut!”

Mariamma has forgotten where she is, forgotten her name. She is that embryo. A cell from Philipose and a cell from Elsie. The two became one, and then divided.

Professor Jamsetji Rustomji Cowper drops the cloth. It’s no longer a three-dimensional embryo, but a flat duster. He brushes chalk from his palms. He comes around the broad desk. He raises his hands as though in submission, his voice quiet. “We know so little. What little we do know leaves me in awe. Haeckel famously said, ‘Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.’ Meaning, the stages of the development of the human embryo—yolk sac, gills, even a tail—echoes the stages of human evolution, from one-cell amoeba, to fish, to reptile, to ape, to Homo erectus, to Neanderthal . . . to you.” He has a faraway expression, his eyes full of emotion. Then he catches himself and returns to the present, smiling. “All right? That’s enough for your first day.”

He turns to leave, then stops and says, “Oh, and welcome to each one of you.”