The Covenant of Water

1969, Madras

Every day the six of them saw and scrape at “Henrietta”—they’ve named her in honor of Henry Gray—beginning with the upper limbs. It’s shocking how quickly their initial reticence dissipates, and soon their dissection guide, Cunningham’s Manual of Practical Anatomy, is propped on Henrietta’s belly as they work, three on each side. They feel possessive of her—they can’t imagine working on any other cadaver. She’s an ally in their labors. When Henrietta’s shoulder is disarticulated, Mariamma carves their group number on a square of intact skin as the arms are thrown together in the formalin tank in the corridor. The next day, da Vinci fishes with his bare hands, hauls out a dripping limb, and shouts the number. Mariamma tries to carry it back with her thumb and index finger encircling Henrietta’s wrist but finds she needs to hold it with both hands, like a saber; fat drops of formalin seep between her slippered toes. It’s impossible to eat lunch after dissection, the formalin reek clinging to her skin. A brief letter from Lenin in the first week is a welcome sight.

Dear Doctor: May I be the first to call you that? But don’t call me Achen because I don’t know if I will ever be one. By the way, BeeYay Achen came to speak at the seminary. I told him that I am seriously thinking of leaving. After all these years, all I know is that my life was spared to serve God. But what if God meant for me to serve in some other way? BeeYay encouraged me to finish my rural student-service posting. He didn’t disagree that God may have other plans for me, but he said sometimes we have to “live the question,” not push for the answer.

They became pen pals when she entered Alwaye College, by which time he was well along in seminary. His letters switch back and forth between Malayalam and English. She’d never expected him to be such a faithful correspondent. What surprises her even more is how willing he is to pour out his feelings, to explore them at length, as though he has no one else to share them with. Before she came to Madras, he’d written to say:

I’m a boil sticking out on smooth skin here. If my fellow seminarians share my doubts, they’ll never admit to it. They’ll even pretend Judges, or Chronicles—surely the most boring books in the Bible—are inspiring. But we have one or two gems whose faith burns in their every action. I’m envious. Why can’t I feel that way?

The upper limb dissection takes six weeks to complete. After the exam on the upper limb, she writes to Lenin, celebrating this milestone. “I get depressed if I dwell too long on what remains. Thorax, abdomen and pelvis, head and neck, lower limb. One more year of this. If Alwaye College was like drinking from a hose, medical school is like drinking from the raging river—and there’s so much to memorize.”

A year and two months after Mariamma first met her, Henrietta looks like the remains of a man-eating tiger’s kill. At night, Mariamma and Anita take turns being examiner and examinee, practicing for the viva voce that follows the written exam. Anita tosses a bone into an empty pillow cover and says, “Reach in, Madam.” Mariamma is expecting a wrist or tarsal bone, which she must identify by feel alone.

“Easy-scapula-left-side.”

“Slow down, smarty pants! Has anyone else told you you speak too fast? Name the bony features.”

“Coracoid process, acromion, spine . . .”

“Take it out and show me the insertion of trapezius and the teres major . . .”

Soon she’s writing to her father to remind him to send the final exam fees: the year has somehow gone by.

It’s nice that Podi sends greetings through you but ask her why she can’t write. Tell her I won’t send another letter till she does. Please assure Anna Chedethi that I drink the Horlicks every night. I’m not surprised about what you heard about Lenin. He wrote to me that he’d rather be dissecting corpses than sitting with classmates who feel like corpses.

Appa, after over a year of studying the body, my passing or failing will come down to six essay questions. If I fail, I join the B batch and repeat in six months. Imagine, hundreds of pages that I’ve memorized, diagrams practiced, just for six questions that will all be like this: “Describe and illustrate the structure of X.” X will be the name of one joint, one nerve, one artery, one organ, one bone, and one topic in embryology. It’s unfair! Six essays to judge everything I learned in over 13,000 hours. (Anita added it up.)

By the way, I told you about Gargoylemurthy and Cowper. They both like my dissections and invited me to appear for the Prize Exam in Anatomy. Only a few students dare go for it. It’s a separate day, with one advanced essay and then an assigned dissection to complete in four hours.

During the study holidays she wakes from an afternoon nap to find a black-faced, wizened fellow with gray sideburns crouched on her desk, blinking rapidly. He must have reached through the window bars and worked open the bolt. When she tries to shoo him away, he bares his teeth and steps forward menacingly. The kurangu ransacks the desks for food and when he finds none, he pulls down the clothesline out of meanness before leaving. The monkey problem is truly out of control.

She seeks out Chinnah, their class president. He sighs. “I’ve pestered the dean and the superintendent for help. Hopeless! I wanted to wait till after exams, but the monkeys have declared war.”

Chinnah was their unanimous choice for president, perhaps because of his coolheadedness on their first day with Gargoylemurthy. While the rest of the class is feverishly studying, Chinnah begins the Indo-Simian Campaign. He enforces the rule of no food stored in rooms; violators are shamed on the mess blackboard. He pays street urchins armed with slingshots to sit on the upper balconies to meet the regular afternoon forays the monkeys make. Then, mysteriously, a pair of monkeys gets trapped overnight in the dean’s office and another in the superintendent’s office, destroying and soiling these rooms in their frenzy to escape. The next day, a work crew trims overhanging branches around the hostels and repairs window screens, and now garbage is collected twice a day. The blackboard in the mess hall proclaims NO MONKEY BUSINESS WITH CHINNAH. He’s a shoo-in for reelection.

But Chinnah confides to Mariamma that he’s unprepared for the exam. “I’ll tell you the truth. I got into medical school only because my uncle was DME.” The Director of Medical Education controls all the medical school faculty postings and admissions. “Uncle ‘put in a word’ even though I wanted to go to law school. The buggers in the law college don’t work this hard, I tell you.”

In the frantic weeks leading up to the exam she gets a letter addressed in Lenin’s hand but postmarked Sulthan Bathery. He’s in the Wayanad District, he writes, assigned to an ancient achen—a widower, a good and faithful man, but very forgetful. He’s at last freed from the seminary curfew, but he’s in a town that pulls the bedcovers over its head at four thirty in the afternoon. The church groundskeeper, a tribal named Kochu paniyan, is the only person Lenin has to talk to. They’ve become friends. Lenin says he’s still “living the question,” as BeeYay Achen suggested. “But my faith has vanished,” Lenin writes. “During the Eucharist, when Achen lofts the sosaffa to signal the presence of the Holy Spirit, he weeps! The poor man is overcome. Whereas I feel nothing, Mariamma. I’m lost. I don’t know what will become of me. I’m waiting for a sign.”

In the last days leading up to finals everyone in the hostel is glass-eyed, in a delirium of studying. They doze with lights on because collective wisdom says it’s a way to get by with less sleep. A few days before the final, Mariamma dreams that a handsome man leads her to a four-poster bed and traces her profile with his finger. He kisses a spot in front of her ear. “That,” he whispers, “is a ginglymoarthrodial joint.”

She wakes to discover she had fallen asleep on a fibular bone. Its imprint is on her cheek. She doesn’t recall ever hearing the word “ginglymoarthrodial” before. She looks it up and learns that “ginglymo” means hinge, like the joints between the bones of the fingers, while “arthrodial” means sliding, like the joints between adjacent wrist bones. But there’s only one “ginglymoarthrodial” joint, one that both hinges and slides: the TMJ, or temporomandibular joint.

She mentions her dream to Anita, saying, “It’s all because you left the fibula on the bed.”

At breakfast, Mariamma is greeted with kissing sounds in the mess hall; her classmates stroke their ears. Anita isn’t repentant, because her exploration of past exam questions tells her that the TMJ has popped up just once, seventeen years before. Never in the history of any medical school have more students memorized a certain two pages in Gray’s.

At last the big day arrives and they break the seal on the exam. The very first question of the six reads: Describe and illustrate the ankle joint.

Her eyes run down to the other questions. She must describe and illustrate the axillary artery, the facial nerve, the adrenal glands, the humerus, and the development of the notochord.

But the ankle joint? If her dream was a clue, they’d all missed the obvious: the fibula! It was part of the ankle joint. The fact that it dug into her cheek had been a red herring. She feels her classmates staring daggers at her.

The next day, Mariamma and six others compete for the prize exam. After the essay, her assigned dissection is to expose the median nerve as it innervates the hand. She does a decent job, managing not to snap the nerve or its branches.

Chinnah is certain he’s done poorly in the written exam; unless he can miraculously ace the viva voce in a fortnight, he’ll be held back six months. But he has a plan: for the next fourteen days, he’ll eat a kilo of masala-fried fish brains each day and have his cousin, Gundu Mani B.Sc. (failed), read select passages of Gray’s Anatomy to him while he sleeps. Chinnah hopes Gundu’s words will imprint themselves into his memory in a matrix of fish protein. The ladies’ hostel is separate from the men’s (“like the Virgin Islands are separate from the Isle of Man,” as Chinnah says) but from her balcony Mariamma hears Gundu’s chanting, like a priest reciting the Vedas.

Ten days before the viva, she receives a bulky letter from Lenin. She’s hesitant to open it. If he’s the victim of some serious “misunderstanding,” she’d rather not know. But she can’t resist. Lenin says things are better now that he’s stumbled on “Moscow,” otherwise known as Baby’s Tea Shop, which stays open well past midnight and serves tea and liquids stronger than tea. It’s a place where intellectuals gather, many of them with Party leanings. Lenin says he’s learning so much, particularly from Raghu, who is his age, and a bank officer. “Raghu says I’m the third Lenin he has met in Wayanad. He’s met more Stalins than Raghus. More Marxes than Lenins. No Gandhis or Nehrus. This place is the birthplace of communism in Kerala.”

Mariamma tries to study, but her mind comes back to Lenin’s letter. Northern Kerala—previously Malabar—is unlike the rest of Kerala. She never quite understood (till reading his letter) that in Malabar, sixty-five Nambudiri Brahmin landowners, or jenmis, held territories so vast they’d never seen them all. Their tenant farmers were the Nairs and Mappilas, who made huge profits and gave the jenmis their cut. When pepper prices tumbled, the jenmis taxed the tenant farmers and even taxed the tribals—people like Kochu paniyan. That, Lenin says, is why Kerala communism began in Wayanad. “At the seminary, we knew nothing about the real suffering of our own people. Call it communism or whatever you like, but standing up for the rights of the lowest caste appeals to me.”

On the day of the viva, her classmate Druva goes in first. He’s so nervous he trembles. Brijmohan (“Brijee”) Sarkar, the external examiner, points to a cylindrical jar of formalin in which floats a malformed newborn. “Identify the abnormality.” The baby’s swollen head, the size of a basketball, is typical of hydrocephalus, “water in the brain,” a fact Druva knows well. After he names it, it should lead to a discussion of the ventricles and the circulation of cerebrospinal fluid produced in them. In this infant, the exit of fluid is blocked, causing the ventricles, which are normally slit-like cavities in the depths of both hemispheres, to balloon out, pushing up on the surrounding brain. In the unfused, pliant skull of an infant, the head expands. But in an adult, with the bones of the skull fused, the brain would be sandwiched between skull and swollen ventricle and it would lead to unconsciousness. Druva, crippled by anxiety, manages eventually to speak, but the word that escapes his lips is “hydrocele,” and not “hydrocephalus.” He knows at once that he’s fatally misspoken. There’s a world of difference between fluid around the balls and fluid around the brain.

A stunned silence follows his utterance. Before Druva can correct himself, Brijee Sarkar bursts out laughing. It’s contagious, and soon Dr. Pius Mathew, the internal examiner, is also convulsed with laughter. (Chinnah and Mariamma, waiting outside, can only hope these are auspicious noises.) Tears roll down the examiners’ cheeks, and seeing Druva’s expression catalyzes more howls. Each time they try to resume the questioning, they crack up. Finally, Brijee, wiping tears from his eyes, waves Druva out of the room.

Druva bravely asks, “Sir, did I pass, sir?” Pius’s smile lingers, but Brijee’s vanishes.

“Young man, can a hydrocele cause swelling of the head?” Brijee Sarkar says.

“Sir, no, sir, but I—”

“And there you have your answer.”

“What, da?” Chinnah asks as Druva emerges.

“Buggered, that’s what!”

Chinnah is called in. In too short a time, he emerges. He’s followed at once by Dr. Pius.

“Five minutes, Mariamma,” Dr. Pius says, smiling sadly, heading for a bathroom break.

Once Pius is out of earshot, Chinnah says to Mariamma, “It’s B batch: brinjals, and bugger-all for Chinnah and Druva.”

“What’d Brijee ask?”

“Nothing! He said, ‘Your bloody uncle, the DME, blocked my promotion. And you can eat fish brain for a lifetime and perhaps grow you a dorsal fin and gills. But as long as Dr. Brijmohan Sarkar is examiner, it won’t help Chinnaswamy Arcot Gajapathy pass his viva.’ That bastard da Vinci must have told Brijee about my uncle. And the fish brains.” Before the exam, Chinnah had declined to “tip” the attenders for good luck. It was extortion, yet everyone but Chinnah complied. He says ruefully, “I tell you, nothing good happens when family pulls strings for you. Pull becomes plug.”

Before Dr. Pius can return, Dr. Brijee Sarkar pokes his head out and beckons Mariamma. She signals to Chinnah to wait. Her luck might not be any better than his.

“Madam,” says Dr. Brijmohan Sarkar once the door closes behind her, “your prize exam dissection was nice, very nice.” They’re both still standing. “You’re the only one who managed not to snap a branch nerve. Confidentially, your chances are, I’ll say . . .”

He doesn’t say, but he smiles and lifts his eyebrows up. Mariamma flushes, delighted.

“Ready for the viva?”

“Sir, I think so.”

“Very good. Please put your hand in my pocket.”

She stands before him in her cream sari and short white coat. Did she hear him correctly?

Dr. Sarkar has no sweat on his powdered face despite the oppressive heat. He stands between her and the door. Brijee Sarkar is tall, in his fifties, and his cheeks are hollowed by the loss of back molars. His thin limbs look discordant with the belly that pushes out. Rocking on his heels, his nose raised to the ceiling, his expression is now as severe as the crease in his linen pants. The sideways stance is to give Mariamma easy access to his right pants pocket.

She’s studied hard. She’s prepared. But not for this.

There’s a ringing in her ears. The ceiling fan shoves back the sweltering air rising off the concrete floor. On the table, the hydrocephalic baby who sank Druva looks on with interest. An open tray contains the side of a head sawed down the middle with the mandible removed. A cloth bag outlines the small bones it holds.

If only he’d sit down. If only Dr. Pius would return. If only he’d ask me about hydrocephalus, or ask me to reach in the cloth bag . . . But Brijee isn’t using the cloth bag, just his pocket.

A pulse flicks in Brijee’s neck, a sinuous, bifid wave like a snake’s tongue. “Either put your hand in my pocket or come back in September,” he says softly, looking straight ahead.

Mariamma stands frozen. Why doesn’t she just say no? She’s ashamed to even be debating her choices. She’s ashamed to see her left hand extend out, as though of its own volition—the way Brijee stands, using her left hand seems easier.

She puts her hand in his pocket. She wants to believe that whatever skeletal piece Brijee Sarkar has tucked in there—pisiform or talus—she’ll identify. She so wants to believe. She doesn’t want to fail.

She slides in deeper. For a fraction of a second, she’s unsure of what she’s feeling. Has her hand strayed? Is it her fault that she has hold of his penis? Is it her fault that no clothing intervenes? What’s in her hand is a firmer, less flexible, and bonier organ than she’d ever imagined it to be. Is she meant to name its parts? The suspensory ligament, the corpora cavernosa, the corpus spongiosum . . . ?

Her brain struggles to stay in the examinee mode in the face of an organ with which she has no direct experience, engorged or otherwise; but her thoughts slip from the realm of anatomy and regress into painful memories that make the bile rise in her throat: a boatman in the canal, flashing her and Podi from his barge as they swam; the stranger pressed up against her in the bus; a turbaned snake charmer who materialized across the street from the ladies’ hostel and, on noticing Mariamma studying him, made as though to remove the cloth covering his basket, but it was his lungi he had hiked up and a different sort of snake sprang up from his groin.

Why do men subject her and every woman she knows to this kind of harassment and humiliation? Is it only by forcing touch or by having an audience for their display that they know the organ exists? Earlier that year, when the ladies’ hostel bus brought them back from a sari exhibition, a closed section of road forced the driver to detour through a narrow lane behind the men’s hostel. A male student sat reading the paper while stark naked on the balcony. In an instant, he covered his face rather than his base. That was ­understandable—he wanted to spare himself the embarrassment of being recognized. But what she could not understand was his decision to stand up, face still covered but all else on display, while the bus and its passengers crawled by.

What she does next is difficult for Mariamma to later explain to herself or anyone else. It is a cornered animal’s desperate instinct to survive, but also the unleashing of a primitive anger. She’s reliving a familiar nightmare of a viper baring its fangs and spitting at her while she desperately clutches it under its hood, keeping it away from her face, holding on as it whips and saws and tries to strike . . . and so her fingers instinctively clamp down with murderous intent on Sarkar’s penis. Her right hand leaps into the battle, coming to the left’s aid, slamming into Brijee’s groin from outside, buttressing her hold by grabbing anything that dangles—scrotal sac, epididymis, testis, root of penis and . . . anatomy be damned—and squeezing for dear life.

For a brief moment, Brijee’s vanity permits him to think she’s fondling him. He wants to speak, his eyebrows going up, but he gags on his words and turns pale. Then he steps back, the veins on his temples filling out, staggering against the table, sending the specimens crashing, the glass breaking, the hydrocephalic fetus slithering across the formaldehyde-slicked floor. Brijee drags Mariamma with him in his retreat, because whatever happens, she will not, must not let go of the snake’s head. Brijee manages a scream, and she screams too, hers a bloodcurdling sound, as they tumble over the table. Her forehead meets broken glass, but nothing will distract her from choking the life out of the serpent even if she succumbs from the effort.

The door to the room bursts open, but she can’t look or let go. Brijee Sarkar’s face is inches from hers, the perfumed paan on his breath registering in her nostrils, his scream becoming silent, and his skin turning ashen. Too late, he grabs her forearms, but his strength is gone, and his touch feels gentle, pleading. Then his body sags, his hands fall away; he becomes floppy, and his eyes roll back. She can hear Chinnah pleading with her to let go, while da Vinci and Pius try to tug Sarkar free, but she cannot let go, nor can she silence her war cry. Brave Chinnah dives in to peel her fingers off one by one.

Chinnah drags, then carries Mariamma away as blood pours from her forehead. He sets her down in an empty lab room and presses a hanky over the wound. She pushes her way to the sink and scrubs furiously at her hands, then she throws up as Chinnah supports her, still compressing the wound.

Sobs and rage commingle like blood and water as she clings to Chinnah. Then she remembers—he too is a man. She strikes him on the chest, then the ears, and he suffers her blows, offering himself, willing to be wounded, while bravely keeping pressure on her cut even though it leaves him exposed, waiting till she is spent.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers.

“What’re you sorry about?”

“I’m ashamed for all men,” he says.

“You should be. You’re all bastards.”

“You’re not wrong. I’m so sorry.”

“I’m sorry too, Chinnah.”