The Covenant of Water

1971, Madras

The ladies’ hostel is deserted. Most students have gone home for the break. A few clinical students remain. Since the mess hall is closed, they must eat in the hospital canteen.

Mariamma writes to her father that she has passed Anatomy . . . but she must delay her return to Parambil for a month or so to finish an “incomplete project.” The incomplete project is herself. Outwardly, she has shrugged off the vile episode with Brijee. But her insides are still in disarray. She’s ashamed to face her father. The sight of the scar on her forehead and the explanation would distress him; he’d want to see justice done. She had justice in that they believed her story—Brijee was known for this sort of thing. But Brijee’s heart attack, his disgrace, his suspension from government service aren’t enough punishment. He should be jailed. But she has no appetite to draw more attention to herself by pursuing this cause. Already, some medico, a frustrated poet, has immortalized her shame in verse:

Doctor Brijee once gave an exam

Offering his willy as part of the plan

But to his dismay

She obliged in a way

That left him much less than a man.

In the mornings she tags behind a senior posted to the internal medicine ward. She’s excited by her first exposure to live patients and disease; it’s a reminder of why she’s here. In the afternoons she stays in her sweltering room, reading about the patients she encountered. Perversely, she misses the torture of a looming exam or a fat textbook to memorize—anything to distract her from what happened. She is adrift.

Three weeks later, when she returns from the hospital, she sees a man seated cross-legged on the bench under the oak tree in the hostel courtyard. A carpet-like beard runs up his throat and cheekbones and ends in curls on his crown. A scar across his left cheek is only partially concealed by his beard. His sunrise-orange kurta makes him look like a man on fire. With a parrot and playing cards he could pass for a fortune-teller. But for those soft, sleepy eyes, she wouldn’t recognize Lenin. He holds a hostel tea mug; soft-hearted Matron Thangaraj must have let him into this inner sanctum.

He certainly recognizes her, even though the Mariamma they both knew vanished inside the Red Fort a year and a half ago. On the inside she is someone else.

He puts the tea down and comes forward. “Mariamma?” His hands reach for hers, but she retreats.

“What’re you doing here? Did Appa send you?”

“It’s nice to see you too, Mariamma—”

“The hostel is off limits to men.” She can’t explain her outward hostility when inside she’s happy to see him.

“And yet here I stand,” he says defiantly.

“I’m surprised that Matron let you past the gate.”

“I told her I’m your twin.”

“In other words, you lied?”

“I was speaking . . . metaphorically. And Matron said, ‘How sweet! You must have felt Mariamma’s pain and decided to come!’ ”

“So, did you? Did you feel my pain?”

Lenin’s expression is that of the boy who “borrowed” the bicycle he crashed, and whose curse is to tell the truth, whatever the consequences. “No,” he says. “No, I didn’t. You didn’t reply to my letters. I assumed you were at Parambil. I just happened to arrive at Central Station a few hours ago. I looked across the street and there was Madras Medical College. I took a chance. I asked for the ladies’ hostel, and here I am.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be at your rural posting?”

“Aah. I had a . . .”

This isn’t the old Lenin. He’s missing the righteous indignation. He can’t even say that word he so often used to explain away his troubles.

“Me too, Lenin. I had a little ‘misunderstanding.’ ”

“Matron told me indirectly. She assumed I knew,” he says, eyeing her uncertainly.

“Yes, everyone knows. But they don’t know what to say. ‘Wishing you hearty, happy recuperation’?” Her laugh sounds strange even to her. Stranger still is that she’s dabbing her eyes.

Lenin reaches again for her hand. Then he gently pulls her to him. She clings to him like a drowning woman. His kurta feels like sandpaper scraping her face, but no cloth has felt more welcome. If Matron sees them . . . but then, he is her twin.

“I’m ashamed to go back to Parambil.”

“Why shame? I’m proud of you! The only shame is that you didn’t kill the fellow.”

“Let’s get away from here, Lenin,” she says urgently. “Let’s get out of the city. Please.”

He hesitates, but only for a moment. “Let’s do it.”

The ocean seems to be covered in glittering diamonds as the bus hugs the shore. With every mile she feels she’s shedding soiled garments, peeling off contaminated skin. The noisy diesel and the wind through the open windows discourage conversation. Lenin has nicotine stains on his fingers. He’s leaner, and his beautiful eyes have a hardness in them she’s never seen before. His thick scar is more extensive than she thought, running onto the pinna of his ear, a wound that clearly wasn’t sutured. They’re both marked.

At Mahabalipuram, a vendor slices off the tops of fresh coconuts for them to drink. Lenin buys cigarettes, biscuits, and a string of jasmine for her hair. The scent hovers like a halo around her as they approach the stone temples.

It’s not temples but the ocean that Mariamma wants most: the murmur of the waves, the restoration of water. She lets the surf wash over her ankles while Lenin holds back. The two of them are quite alone. Sanderlings line up like porters on a train platform, waiting for the next wave; they retreat smartly just ahead of the tongue of water, pecking at invisible creatures.

“Lenin, I must swim. I’ve never swum in the sea. The surf’s too strong at Marina Beach.” He looks worried. “Turn around, face away. Don’t look.” She sheds her sari, underskirt, and blouse, piling them by him. In just her underwear and bra, she plunges in. The ground falls off below her. The current is unpredictable, but she relishes being in the water. Lenin is still turned away. “Hey!” she says. “You can look.” He turns and looks nervously at her. He calls for her to be careful. She tries to swim but struggles to get the ocean rhythm. Her eyes are burning, and salt water goes up her nose. But she’s grinning. Immersion is mercy and forgiveness.

Lenin is relieved when she emerges. He turns away but hands her a thorthu from his cloth bag. She feels bold, reckless. After what she has been through, she’s entitled to be reckless, to be any way she wants. He shields her as she sheds her wet underclothes and puts her blouse, skirt, and sari back on. The water has broken down a barrier within her.

They sit on the sand. She tells Lenin about Brijee. Even if everyone knows her story, no one really knows how she feels. It pours out now: her rage, her shame, her guilt—it still lingers. But with the telling comes a sense of empowerment. She has no culpability in the Brijee matter. None, other than being naïve and being a woman. During the inquiry she had tapped into the righteousness that was her due; she slapped down the least suggestion that she might be at fault. She had learned a lesson: to show weakness, to be tearful or shattered didn’t serve her. One shouldn’t just hope to be treated well: one must insist on it.

She feels better when she’s done. She eats a biscuit. Lenin sits cross-legged, smoking, head down, tracing circles in the sand. He was visibly affected during the telling of her story, even holding her hand. Is she being self-centered by not asking about his misunderstanding, his scar, and why he is here? Or is she giving him room to decide? He can tell her when he chooses to. Or not.

The breaking waves sound louder as the light fades. The dark silhouettes of the stone temples against the sky make her feel they’ve slipped back in time. Her mother must have come here when she studied in Madras; she must have splashed in these same waves. This water connects the living and the dead. Perhaps the sculptures here inspired the Stone Woman. The sea breeze soothes and refreshes her. Madras feels a million miles away.

“The minutes we spend watching the waves don’t count against our life spans,” she says.

“Really? Maybe I should just stay here, then, if I’m to live to my thirties.” He’s smiling, but she doesn’t like what she hears.

It’s pitch dark when they leave, stumbling in the sand, holding hands. The last bus to the city has left. The old Mariamma would’ve panicked; this one couldn’t care less.

The hand-lettered sign on the narrow, three-story lodge reads MAJESTICHOTELROYALMEELS, the letters squished together. A lone seated figure jumps to his feet, brandishing his towel like a whip, flicking dust off the chairs and dining tables. He’s overjoyed to have customers. He leads the way up rickety stairs while Mariamma marvels at the steeple shape of his skull.

She lifts the thin mattress and scans for bedbugs. There’s nowhere to sit other than the narrow bed. A naked bulb on the ceiling provides light. A raised door leads to a tiny bathroom with a squat-toilet, a tap, and a bucket with a mug bobbing in it. Cockroaches scurry away when she turns on the light. She fills the bucket and bathes, washing off sweat, sand, and salt. Lenin lends her a mundu from his bag and she ties it under her armpits. Then it’s his turn.

The boy who delivers the food must be the chef’s son, because his skull is also shaped like a tower. “It’s called oxycephaly,” she says to Lenin. He’s impressed, but less so when she says there’s no treatment for it.

“Good that there’s a name, at least,” he says.

Unwittingly, his words deflate her. Just like with “the Condition,” a name cures nothing.

The banana-leaf packets of vegetable biryani exceed their expectations of RoyalMeels; the chef’s cooking is better than his spelling. Lenin, bare-chested, hardly eats. She’s seen him without his shirt often, but somehow this feels different. He’s bemused as she wolfs down her packet and the rest of his. When she’s done, he punches her on the shoulder.

“So, Mariammaye,” he says, “it’s the usual story with you. I turn around and you’re in trouble.” He lights a cigarette. She snatches the cigarette from his mouth. “Hey! You could ask!”

She draws in the smoke and lets it out; the lazy spiral that rises to the ceiling is like a living being. His grin has traces of the old Lenin, but it’s an effort. “So, twin brother. Spit it out. What’s going on with you?” So much for giving him room to decide.

He stares out of the window for a long time.

“I’ve gone down a path,” he says.

She waits, but nothing more is forthcoming. “A straight line, right? Can’t stop till you must?”

He nods. “But on this one when I come to the end, it will be the end.”

He has nothing more to say.

“So, how’s your tribal friend—Kochu paniyan, was it? And Raghu, the banker? See? I read your letters.”

He looks at her, his expression even more somber.

“They’re both dead.”

She feels a cold hand clawing at her throat. She wants to plug her ears. She should stop him from saying another word. She stands, unsure why. The naked bulb glares in her eyes and she turns it off. There. That helps. She paces the room, with measured steps, trying not to look frantic. Her eyes adjust. There’s faint light from the window. A woman’s voice drifts up from downstairs. She remembers as a girl how she hated the newly arrived Lenin for his antics, but she couldn’t stop herself from trailing him. Why? She had to see what happened next. It was a compulsion. Lenin’s face in the glow of his cigarette shows concern for her. And behind that expression, she sees despair. She settles back on the bed, cross-legged, facing him. She can’t help herself. The old compulsion won’t go away. She must know.

“When I got to Wayanad, I started remembering the strangest things,” Lenin says. “I don’t think I mentioned this in my letters. We had lived there when I was a young child, so my parents said, but I had no memories from then. It was only in getting to know Kochu paniyan, visiting his settlement in the forest, a place his family has been for three or four generations, that some of it came back. Memories of my beautiful mother. I remembered waiting for her outside huts like Kochu paniyan’s, shutting my ears to a woman’s screams as she delivered. I can see a man just like Kochu paniyan coming to our house with a giant carp to give my mother. Maybe as payment. And he cleaned it for us, then he came back with cooking oil and maybe paddy. Maybe he found us alone, the kitchen fire out, and my father gone—that would be a good guess. Surely, I didn’t imagine all this? What other memories are buried in my head?”

Tribals are suspicious people, Lenin said. They’d been used and abused by everyone who came. The British abolished slavery, yet they compelled the tribals to cut down their precious trees to build ships. If the British hadn’t discovered tea, the mountains would be bald. Instead, they made the tribals terrace the slopes they had lived on for generations. Then more recently, it was Malayalis from Cochin and Travancore who did the exploitation, a northern migration, Lenin said. Clerks, merchants, drivers. “People like my father.” The tribals didn’t use cash; they bartered for what they needed. The newcomers would encourage them to build pukka houses, and to help themselves to pickaxes, wheelbarrows, shovels, pulleys, cement, clothes—no cash needed, just a thumbprint. When they couldn’t pay, they forfeited land. The tribals learned painful lessons. “When you are robbed, you quickly become politically conscious. You have nothing to lose but your chains. That’s Marx, by the way, not me.”

“Good that you can quote Marx,” Mariamma says.

Lenin pauses. “I can stop if you don’t want to hear more.”

She doesn’t respond.

At Baby’s Tea Shop—“Moscow”—Lenin liked to sit with Raghu. Lenin would occasionally see him with an older man in his forties, Arikkad, who never stayed long. Raghu said if Lenin really wanted to understand the class tensions in Wayanad, then Arikkad was the professor. Arikkad was from a middle-class Christian family. He had been to prison for participating in the coir-workers strike. Raghu said there was no better education than being behind bars. Das Kapital and Stalin’s History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union circulated among the jailed for the simple reason that they were the only ones translated into Malayalam. One went in for public drunkenness and came out a sober Communist. Arikkad became a dedicated Party man, living with the tribals, advocating for them. That was something no Congress Party worker ever did.

Lenin says, “When I was introduced to Arikkad I found him humble. Inspiring. More than my old achen. Here was someone actually doing something to improve life for the tribals. He was far more interested in me, in my calling to be a priest.”

“Aah! You had a good story for that, didn’t you,” Mariamma says drily. It came out before she gave it much thought. “I’m sorry. Ignore that. Go on.”

“No, you’re right. I have a good story. That’s the trouble. I used to believe my own story. But I don’t now. I wasn’t spared to serve God. I was spared to serve people like the pulayi who saved me. But I wasn’t doing it, not as a seminarian. Anyway, I confided my doubts to Arikkad. He said, ‘So, you’re tired of dispensing opium?’ I didn’t get it till he explained. Apparently, Marx said that religion was the opium of the masses. It kept the oppressed from complaining or trying to change things. Arikkad also said the church didn’t have to be the way it is here. He said there were Jesuits in Colombia and Brazil who lived and worked with tribals, doing just as Christ taught. When the peasants began an insurgency against a government that oppressed them, these priests couldn’t help but be in solidarity with them. They joined the rebels. They disobeyed their church. One of the Jesuits had written about his cause. He called it ‘liberation theology.’ It was a revelation to me. I wondered if my seminary library had those texts. Probably not.”

Everything changed for Lenin when Kochu paniyan failed to show one day for work. He came the next morning, early, knocking at Lenin’s door, looking anguished, desperate. He said his younger brother had borrowed money from a businessman named C.T., then borrowed even more, pledging the family land. The loans were due. Rather than tell the family—and he must have had many warnings—the brother had disappeared. Kochu paniyan first knew about it when C.T. arrived with court papers saying the family had seventy-two hours to leave. Kochu paniyan wanted Lenin to come with him to ask Achen to talk to C.T., since he was a parishioner and on the church board. “People like C.T. are the opposite of Arikkad. They hate communism because exploiting the tribals is exactly how he became a rich and powerful man.” Achen reluctantly went to see C.T. and returned right away, shaken. He’d been abused for interfering. Achen said he would pray. “I tell you, Mariamma, never have prayers felt more worthless.”

Kochu paniyan had already been to see Arikkad, who was trying to get a stay order in court. “That’s good!” Lenin said. Kochu paniyan had looked pityingly at Lenin and said, “Good? Since when has court been good for our people? Court is all their people.” The day of the eviction Lenin had gone to Kochu paniyan’s settlement. Many tribal families had come to give support, along with Arikkad, Raghu, and other activists. Though Arikkad had filed for a stay, the judge was “one of theirs.” Soon three jeeps arrived, packed with tough-looking men carrying cycle chains and bamboo sticks. Behind them a police jeep pulled up and parked at a distance. C.T. called out that the family had five minutes to leave. On Arikkad’s instruction, all the assembled people sat peacefully on the ground.

“When the five minutes was up, C.T.’s goondas came at us. The police looked on. I saw and heard a cane break Kochu paniyan’s jaw. Arikkad took the second blow. A woman tried to shield her head and I heard the chain snap her forearm. I was in a trance. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Suddenly I felt terrible pain in my shoulder. I turned and grabbed the chain and punched my attacker—so much for Gandhian nonviolence. But they rained blows down on me. Mariamma, they beat me mercilessly. Then those thugs tossed petrol on the thatch and set the houses on fire. I had to crawl away, the heat was so intense.

“Kochu paniyan was in the hospital with a broken leg and jaw. Arikkad and Raghu were beaten badly too. A few others were treated in Casualty. Someone brought me to my room on a cycle because my knee was the size of a football. Achen hardly recognized me; my face was like a swollen mask. Poor Achen: he wept as he nursed me. He cried, looking to the heavens. He fell on his knees, calling to God to right what was wrong. Oh, Mariamma . . . if only God had answered Achen, who was as faithful a servant as any god might ask for . . . If only God had answered . . . my life might have taken a different path. If only God had answered . . . I was peeing blood. I couldn’t walk. I just lay on that bed, brooding, licking my wounds.”

A few Moscow acquaintances came to check on Lenin. They said that Kochu paniyan was gone from the hospital. “Self-discharge against medical advice,” the hospital claimed. With a broken leg and jaw, how do you “self-discharge”? What it really meant was the police or paramilitary took Kochu paniyan and tortured him for information. The poor man knew nothing! His family has not seen him. They probably dumped the body in the forest where the wild animals will make sure nothing remains. He learned it was not the first time. Meanwhile no one knew anything about Arikkad and Raghu’s whereabouts. The police were hunting them. They had gone underground. Rumor was they were Naxalites.

Naxalites.

A chill runs down Mariamma’s spine. The room is suddenly freezing. The very utterance of that word—“Naxalite”—feels dangerous. It’s enough to make her pulse race. “Stop, Lenin,” she says, rising. He is not surprised. “I need to pee.”

She tries to recall what she actually knows of the Naxalite movement. She knows its name came from a small village—­Naxalbari—in West Bengal. The peasants there, after slaving for the landlords, were given so little back of the harvest that they were starving. In desperation they took the harvest from the land they had tilled for generations. Armed police who were in the landlords’ pay arrived and fired on the peasants who had assembled for a dialogue, and a dozen or more, including women and children, were killed. That’s what she recalls. It dominated the news. Outrage at the massacre in Naxalbari spread like cholera all over India, and the “Naxalite” movement was born. It was about the time Mariamma was leaving for Alwaye. Peasants in many places attacked and even killed feudal landlords and corrupt officials. The police responded just as violently. There had been a palpable fear that the country was on the verge of a revolution. If peasant groups across India coalesced, they could seize power. The government responded by charging a secret paramilitary force to go after Naxalites with no oversight, no limits on their powers. They had dragged away two innocent boys in her college who had not been seen since. The Naxalite movement had been particularly strong in Kerala. She’d worried about her father becoming a target, but he reassured her that their holdings were tiny by comparison to those of the landlords further north, who owned thousands of acres; also, they had never had tenant farmers.

Mariamma returns to sit on the bed, wrapping the sheet around her shoulders because she’s shivering. Lenin asks if he should stop. “It’s too late for that,” she says. “Go on.”

“I was in pain. It took me a long time to heal,” Lenin says. “But I had another kind of pain. It was the injustice and cruelty I had witnessed. I kept thinking of Acca, the pulayi who saved me during the smallpox. What was her reward? To be driven away like a stray dog. The starving little boy—me—had promised her, ‘I’ll never forget you.’ I didn’t forget—that part was true. But what had I done for her? What would I ever do for her as a priest? I had ‘lived the question’ for a long time. In that bed, licking my wounds, I came to the answer. I had no choice.

“I told a Moscow regular that I wanted to contact Arikkad. Or Raghu. He was alarmed. He claimed not to know and left. Two days after that I had a note under my door telling me to be at a bus station at midnight. A motorcycle came. I was blindfolded and we rode away. When the blindfold came off, I was in a clearing. Three men approached, slinging rifles. One was Raghu. He tried to dissuade me. He said I could do other things with my life, if not seminary. ‘Like what, Raghu?’ I said. ‘Banking?’ There was no going back.”

Lenin’s voice comes from far away, it seems to Mariamma. She’s in a room with a Naxalite, not the boy she grew up with. She feels terrible sadness, despair. Her body and mind are numb, in shock. She listens.

“I met Arikkad and the others in the cell I was to belong to. We desperately needed more weapons. We had only five rifles, two revolvers, and some homemade bombs between a dozen men. You can’t be an armed struggle without arms. We planned two raids. One was on a police substation and armory, so we could be armed. The other raid was pure revenge. Our target was C.T., the man who took Kochu paniyan’s land. C.T. had an office in town, and a bungalow on his estate. The bungalow was isolated, with an unobstructed view onto any approach from below. But we had a way from the side, through thick jungle. C.T. was probably armed. But we were too, and there were more of us.

“Arikkad was to raid the armory at the exact same time that our group attacked C.T. Just as our group cut through the barbed-wire fence and entered his estate, we heard the roar of an engine and saw C.T.’s car tearing away, disappearing down the mountain. The front door of the house sat ajar. Dinner was on the table, half eaten. C.T. had clearly been warned. We found his stash of ‘black’ money behind paneling, only because he didn’t close it flush with the wall. This was untaxed money he could never put in the bank. He must have grabbed what he could on his way out. We took two guns, then we set the bungalow on fire. We went, as we had planned, to a sympathizer’s hut, stashed the weapons and money, and waited. Soon, we got word about the other raid. The police had been waiting, and they ambushed Arikkad’s group as they approached the armory. Poor Raghu died on the spot. They retreated, chased by the police. Arikkad tossed a homemade bomb at the pursuing jeep, and he wounded a constable, disabling the vehicle. They split up and disappeared. Our group did the same. We left carrying no weapons so we could pass through towns without being noticed. It was a total failure.

“I spent one night sleeping outdoors. At noon the next day, I reached the rendezvous spot on a trail high up in the mountains. I was hungry, scared, and angry. I knew this meeting place could be compromised. No one was there. Just when I thought I better leave, Arikkad appeared, looking so terribly weary. He asked if I had food. All I had was water. His skin was full of bites, worse than mine. He said the police were probably not far behind, but they wouldn’t leave the main road at night. Still, we couldn’t stay there. We had to eat, to sleep. He said he knew of a house, a few miles further up on the edge of a corporate plantation. Sivaraman was a friend from the ‘old days’—I assume, his prison days.

“It was one in the morning when we came to the edge of a clearing. When I saw Sivaraman’s house, something about it bothered me. I had a vision of ‘Manager’s Mansion’ with the bodies of my parents and sister inside. I could smell death. I tried to hold Arikkad back, but he said that if he didn’t get food or sleep, he was done for. He said he’d go first and signal me if it was safe, but I told him not to. That I’d stay outside in a tree and for him not to mention my presence. When Sivaraman opened the door for Arikkad, I was watching. Sivaraman was reluctant, but he let Arikkad in. I climbed the tree on the edge of that clearing. It took all my energy. I was ten feet above ground, wedged in a fork. I used my mundu to tie myself to the tree so I wouldn’t fall. Somehow, despite the cold, with my legs exposed and mosquitoes feasting on me, I fell asleep.

“One or two hours later, I woke up, suddenly alert. Crouching right under me was a constable with a rifle! He was unaware of me. He clicked his tongue—that was the sound that woke me. Two other constables appeared. Then I saw Sivaraman standing outside the house, waving them in.

“They dragged Arikkad out and clubbed him to the ground while Sivaraman watched. They bound his hands so tight that he cried out. I trembled with rage and fear. They marched him in my direction. I was sure my chattering teeth would give me away. They passed right under me. Arikkad kept his eyes on the ground. Something broke inside me.

“My legs had gone to sleep. It took forever for me to get down. I went to the house and pressed my mouth to the door. I called out, ‘Sivaraman, you betrayed a good man. You won’t live to spend the reward money. When you come out, we’ll be waiting.’ I heard him whimper. I hoped he would die of fright. Then on rubbery legs I went after the constables, staying far enough behind so they didn’t hear me. They raced down for the ghat road and an hour later, just as the sky turned lighter, they reached it and collapsed on the ground, exhausted. They gave Arikkad a banana. I got as close as I dared, concealing myself behind a neem tree growing back over a rock. If I sneezed, they’d have heard me. I thought of one plan after another to free Arikkad. But all were suicidal fantasies, Mariamma. I had no weapons. I was so weak.

“Soon after dawn two jeeps came. A DSP—big fellow—jumped out. He was so excited, congratulating the constables. He ran up to Arikkad and slapped him viciously. Arikkad grinned and said something. The DSP cursed him and kicked him. He ordered his men to shackle his ankles and put a sack over his head. Then I heard them arguing near the jeep. The DSP shoved the constable, the same one who’d been under my tree, and pulled out his revolver. Was he going to shoot his own man? I didn’t understand. But Arikkad understood, even with that hood on. ‘Edo, DSP?’ Arikkad shouted. ‘Be a man. Remove my hood first. Are you that much of a coward? Can’t you look me in the eyes before you do it?’

“The DSP marched up the slope to Arikkad, walking so deliberately. Mariamma, it was as though he knew that this wasn’t a clearing in the jungle but a world stage. Arikkad struggled to his feet, standing tall, despite the way his arms were wrenched behind him. The DSP snatched the hood away and spat words into Arikkad’s ear. Arikkad laughed.

“Then Arikkad shuffled with shackled feet to turn to face the spot where I was hidden! He knew I was there. He wanted me to bear witness. ‘Tell my comrades, tell the world,’ was what he was trying to tell me. The DSP took three steps to square off, his right arm ruler-straight by his side, the revolver pointed at the ground. I could see Arikkad’s face so clearly as he smiled at the DSP. That grin of his was more powerful than any weapon. The DSP planted his feet. Arikkad shouted, ‘OTHERS WILL CONTINUE THE STRUGGLE!’ I saw the DSP’s arm rise. ‘LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION—’ ”

Mariamma can hardly breathe, watching Lenin’s face, lit by the ghostly glow from the window.

“The shot was so loud. It echoed off the rocks behind me. I cried out. In disbelief. In rage. In anger. I was sure they heard me. My ears were ringing. Theirs must have been too. I saw them drag Arikkad’s body down the slope. None of the constables were happy. It was cold-blooded murder. They put his body in the back of a jeep. Even after they drove off, the ringing in my ears wouldn’t stop.

“I found the banana tucked under the rock where Arikkad had sat. I was sure he left it for me. I was weeping uncontrollably, I tell you. Somehow, I wrestled two stones of equal size to where the earth was stained dark with Arikkad’s blood. I found a flat, long rock and lifted it to straddle the other two. I stood there for so long before this memorial, this burden stone to my comrade in arms. It’s always the same answer, I thought to myself when I finally tore myself away from that place. Walk the straight path to its end.”