The Covenant of Water

1973, Madras

With the negative pregnancy test, her “morning sickness” vanishes. Mariamma feels like a condemned prisoner given a pardon. She’d been paralyzed by the prospect of being an unmarried mother to a child whose father was a Naxalite who’d never be seen alive again.

She’s too ashamed to make a second confession to Staff Akila: that she feels let down. Why didn’t she get pregnant? Is something wrong with her? Did her night with Lenin fail to impress the universe? Surely a love like theirs, a first intimacy, must leave its mark. It’s unreasonable, she knows, but the thought lingers, even as she packs for the Christmas holidays. She’s heading home at last, a visit that is long overdue.

When she gets her first glimpse of Parambil, she’s struck by its serenity, so removed from the chaos of her two years away. Smoke curls up from the chimney, from a hearth that never burns out. And there stands her father, framed by the pillars of the verandah, Anna Chedethi next to him, as though they’ve been standing there keeping vigil from the day she left. He holds her so tight she can hardly breathe.

“Molay, without you a part of me was gone,” he whispers. There’s security in his embrace, just as when she was a young girl. Then it’s Anna Chedethi’s turn to smother her. They both notice the scar on her face, even though it is fading. She blames a fall on a slippery lab floor and being cut by shattering glass. It’s true enough, even if the context is missing.

The ghosts of her grandmother and Baby Mol hover close by, reminding her once more of her purpose, of why she left. Everything she is, and all that she aspires to, began in this house and its loving inhabitants. After coming home from Alwaye College for the funeral, she’d been back just once more, shortly before she started medical school. On those previous visits, the household still felt shattered from the deaths. But now she senses that her father and Anna Chedethi have learned to live with the loss; they’ve settled into a new routine. For Mariamma, this only makes the absence of those two beloved pillars of this house more glaring—like a tear in a fabric that no one else sees.

Anna Chedethi has made her favorite, meen vevichathu, the crimson liquid so thick a pencil would stay upright in it. “The fishmonger showed up yesterday. The old lady herself—not her daughter-in-law. The only thing in her basket was this avoli. She said, ‘Tell Mariamma I brought this fellow just for her. Tell her I’ve a terrible ache in my neck and down my arms. The vaidyan’s pills are useless. If I toss them in the river, it’d be better for me, but bad for the fish.’ ” Mariamma pictures the old woman, her forearms dry and cobblestoned as though engrafted by the fish scales that shower down from her head basket. Now the old woman’s gift sits in Big Ammachi’s clay pot, transformed into a red-coated fillet, its white flesh melting on her tongue, the curry staining crimson the rice, her fingers, and the porcelain plate.

Her father is anxious to share news that isn’t news to her. She feels it hover over the table, exaggerated by his efforts to pretend it isn’t there. He waits till she finishes.

“Molay, I’ve to tell you something that will upset you. God knows, it’s all we talk about.” Anna Chedethi, who was clearing the dishes, stops and sits down. “Lenin has disappeared,” he says. “Did you know?”

“I’ve been worried. He hasn’t written for a while.” Another half-truth.

“Well . . . believe it or not, he’s joined the Naxalites,” her father says.

The price of deceit is to feel like a cockroach. She listens as he recounts the newspaper stories of the raids, and of Arikkad’s death while trying to escape. “The Naxalite business seemed so far away to us till now,” he says. “Up in Malabar, or Bengal. Suddenly it’s here in our laps.”

Her father has always been a handsome man. But for the first time she notices the permanence of the dark pigmentation under his eyes, the worry lines on his forehead, the sag of his cheeks, and the shiny scalp peeking through his thinning hair. He’s fifty, she realizes. A half century of living. But even so, has time sped up at Parambil since she’s been gone?

When a daughter falls in love, a distancing from the father is perhaps inevitable; the first man who had her heart must now compete with another. But in Mariamma’s case, it’s her secrets that create the distance. Anna Chedethi looks at her anxiously, worried that this revelation might shatter her.

“It’s terrible,” Mariamma says, because she must say something. “If he joined the Naxalites, then he’s more stupid than I thought. If he wanted to help the poor, why not join the Party, run for office?” She had suggested just that to Lenin. “Why this? He’s an idiot. Just throwing away his life!” The vehemence of her words takes them aback. Has she overdone it?

“Well,” her father says after a while, “one thing I’ll say for Lenin, from the very first day he showed up here, he stated his intentions. He always felt deeply for the pulayar. The yoke on their necks weighed on his. We sit here and believe we are enlightened, fair. But the truth is we can be blind to injustice. He never was.”

If only Lenin could hear her father defending him.

When Anna Chedethi goes for her bath, Mariamma sits alone in the dark kitchen that is so redolent with scent and memory. She recalls Damodaran once applying his ancient eye to the window and Big Ammachi pretending to be annoyed, scolding him. The week her grandmother died, Damo disappeared into the jungle near the logging camp. This they only learned later from Unni, who had waited in his forest hut for weeks to no avail. Damo went to keep Big Ammachi company, no doubt. Unni was a broken man. Mariamma finds the matchbox and lights one of Big Ammachi’s palm-sized oil lamps, the kind that her grandmother favored, and would take with her when she went to bed. Mariamma weeps unabashedly, picturing that kindly face bathed by the lamp’s soft glow. But her grandmother is with her always; these tears are for the past, for innocent times when she sat here and was fed by that loving hand, was entertained with stories, and knew she was cherished.

She composes herself before joining her father in his study. How she’s missed the aroma of old newspapers and journals, and of homemade ink! And missed his familiar scent of sandalwood soap and neem toothpaste; missed this hallowed time at the end of each day when he read stories to her. Why was it one had to leave something, or have it taken away, to really appreciate it? But tonight, she’s the storyteller, because he’s hungry to hear every detail of her medical world, bringing his curiosity like a moth to anything that shines of new knowledge. He craves every detail. She obliges, describes it all for him . . . all but Brijee.

When they turn in, he says, “It must be so hard to see such suffering every day.” He shudders. “I couldn’t do it. Only luck and the grace of God keeps us free of such afflictions. We’re so blessed, aren’t we?”

She marvels that a man who has suffered so much can feel this way. “Appa, I’m ashamed to say I often take it for granted. I used to be frightened of the sick. Now, we’re all so focused on disease that sometimes the person suffering barely registers. When I come home from L&D, or the surgical wards, I’m only thinking about dinner, or wondering if there’s a letter waiting. I think all doctors have the illusion that we have some sort of bargain with God. We care for the sick and are spared in return.”

“That reminds me,” her father says, handing her a paper. “I came across this in my reading, the oath of Paracelsus. I said, ‘I must copy this for Mariamma.’ ” Her father’s writing is normally illegible, but this he’s painstakingly printed out. “I thought, ‘I want my Mariamma to be this kind of doctor.’ ” She reads, “Love the sick, each and every one, as if they were your own.”

That night she sleeps in Anna Chedethi’s bed in the old bedroom near the ara, taking comfort in snuggling next to this woman who breastfed her, who was as much a mother to her as she was to Hannah. Anna Chedethi confides that Joppan has had a rough time. Iqbal had wanted to retire from the barge business. Joppan bought him out by taking out a bank loan, but to pay it off he had to work twice as hard, expanding his routes, taking on as much business as he could. Anna Chedethi says he paid his workers generously—he was one of them, after all. But he drove them hard. Before Onam, at his busiest time, his boatmen and loaders went on strike. They wanted part ownership of the company. Joppan tried to reason with them. Did they want a share of his debt as well? They weren’t listening. He felt betrayed. “You remember that Party fellow he campaigned for and helped to get elected from that district?” Anna Chedethi says. “Well, he and the Party took the workers’ side. Better to sacrifice Joppan’s one vote than lose all the workers’ votes. Joppan locked his workers out and tried to hire others. His workers sunk one barge and tried to set fire to his warehouse. Instead of giving in to their demands, Joppan closed the business. He let the bank take it. I don’t know how much money he has managed to save, but I worry.” Mariamma thinks at the very least they won’t starve; Ammini makes an income selling her thatch panels. And they have their property. And perhaps Podi can help since she has joined her husband in Sharjah. But this isn’t how Joppan had imagined his life would be. She’s surprised her father didn’t mention this. Perhaps he felt protective of his friend.

In the morning, she grabs a thorthu and heads out. She wants to see the hospital construction, but first she stops by the nest. She breathes in its dry, woody scent. Trumpet vines romp over the sunny side. Is this what her mother intended? That nature should renew and alter the nest every year and in every season? The two tiny stools are still there, and she sits down, her knees bumping her chin, remembering Podi, who would sit opposite her. They’d play checkers or take turns sharing Can-I-Tell-You-Somethings, secrets that the adults around them didn’t want them to know. Sometimes she would come by herself and pretend that her mother sat on the other stool. They’d have tea together and talk about life.

The Stone Woman is on the way to the canal. She and Podi had discovered her quite by accident when they were young, all but hidden by pepper vine and goatweed. Mariamma had been struck at once by her power, her faceless presence. She dwarfed them. She still does. Her father said it was a sculpture her mother had abandoned. She and Podi freed her, cleared the ground around her, and planted marigolds. She used to think of the Stone Woman as another incarnation of her mother, different from the one smiling at her in the photograph in Mariamma’s room. As a child, she’d lie down on the Stone Woman’s back and imagine her mother’s strength seeping into her flesh, like sap rising in a tree. Now, she just runs her hands over the Stone Woman in silent greeting.

Across the canal, the concrete for the foundation for the hospital has been poured. Already the bamboo scaffolding lashed together with rope suggests a much bigger structure than she could’ve imagined. She tries to picture what the completed building will look like. It pleases her to think that the gold bracelet she peeled off at the Maramon Convention is embedded in there in some fashion, part of the hospital’s bones.

The canal is newly widened and dredged all the way to its confluence with the river. The water surface is a kaleidoscope of green and brown; floating leaves move along more quickly than she recalls. She finds a spot that’s secluded and strips to her underclothes. Then she scrambles down the stone incline, her soles sliding and skating on the moss, before she pushes off and dives in headfirst. The sensation of sudden transition is exhilarating, familiar, nostalgic . . . and sad. She’d hoped to slip back in time by plunging in. But there’s no going back; time and water move on relentlessly. She surfaces much farther downstream than she expected. The confluence of the waters announces itself noisily ahead of her, and the current is surprisingly strong. She cuts to the side, finds a handhold, and scrambles out. No, it’s no longer the same canal, and she’s not the same Mariamma.

At the end of her short break, her father splurges on a tourist taxi, not to take them to the bus station but to drive them all the way to the train station in Punalur, a two-and-a-half-hour ride. They sit like royalty in the back. Her father confides to her that the task of running Parambil lands has worn him down. “I was never good at it. If I had Shamuel’s or my father’s passion, then we’d cultivate a lot more land and make more money.” He looks sheepishly at her. “The truth is your father prefers the pen to the plow.”

Mariamma thinks he’s being modest. He’s well known for his Unfictions. Once or twice a year he writes long investigative pieces that appear in the weekend magazine section of the Manorama.

“So, I’ve been talking to Joppan about managing all of Parambil for us. I made him an offer. I’m hopeful. He’s getting out of the barge business. Too many headaches. Years ago, after Shamuel died, we made Joppan a good offer. He said so himself. It would’ve given him his own land, more than any of our relatives around here, and a share of the harvest in exchange for being our manager. But he had dreams of conquering the earth. Or at least the waterways. He turned it down. Also, he didn’t want to be thought of as ‘Joppan pulayan’ taking Shamuel’s place.”

“So did you offer him something different this time?”

“You should ask. After my time, this will be yours, so it’s good to know. I offered him ten acres that will be his outright. In return he manages our lands for ten years and takes ten percent of all our yield. Then, as he develops his land and earns money, if he wants, he can buy more land from me.”

“It’s generous,” Mariamma says.

Her father looks pleased. “I hope he thinks so too. The offer I made long ago was much better, but so much has changed. I feel bad for him.” He looks out, silent for a while. “Molay, Joppan was our hero, our Saint George when we were children, do you know? Destiny is a funny thing. Look at me. I finished school, had ambitions to go to college, to see the world. Instead, here I am, where I started, while Joppan is the well-traveled one. Parambil is where I feel complete. Joppan may well find that the very thing he ran away from is what will save him and make him happy. You resist fate, but the hound finds you anyway. Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!”

Parting from him on the platform is wrenching. She feels a rush of guilt for all that she’s held back from her father. Her secrets. Secrets that are damning. She can’t imagine her father having secrets, but perhaps even he does.

Their long embrace is different from past embraces. They’ve reversed roles. She’s the parent leaving her child to fend for itself, but the child clings to her. As the train pulls away, her father stands there waving, smiling bravely, a lone and forlorn figure.