The Covenant of Water

1974, Cochin

Philipose spends a rare night away from Parambil at Cochin’s famous Malabar Hotel, courtesy of his newspaper. He’d proposed an article with a different take on Robert Bristow, the man viewed as a saint in this port city. His editor liked the idea.

Bristow, a marine engineer, arrived in Cochin in 1920 and saw that despite its booming spice trade, Cochin was fated to remain a minor port because of a rocky sandbar and a mammoth ridge that barred all but small boats. Ships had to berth out at sea, and goods and passengers had to be rowed to shore. Bristow pulled off an engineering feat as formidable as digging the Suez Canal: he removed the obstacles and, in the process, threw up enough silt and rock to create Willingdon Island. Ships now have a deep-water harbor that sits between Willingdon Island and the mainland; Willingdon Island is home to Cochin Airport, government offices, businesses, shops, and the magnificent Malabar Hotel.

Philipose, dining outdoors at the Malabar, looks out at the broad sea channel that runs between Vypin Island and Fort Cochin, then out to the Arabian Sea. It amuses him—given his feud with water—to be seated on land that was once water. He’s here because a cranky biologist has pestered the Ordinary Man to explore what Bristow’s engineering feat has done to the ecology of Vembanad Lake, which opens to the ocean at this spot. The canals and backwaters, which are the lifeblood of Kerala and feed into the lake, are exposed to salt water. “Immeasurable damage occurred to the benthic, nektonic, and planktonic communities,” the man says in his letter. “And since dredging goes on year-round, the damage is ongoing. The precious rock-oyster, Crassostrea, is vital to a food chain that goes from fish larvae to adult fish to young children with growing brains!” Philipose is sympathetic: he’s seen similar issues with building dams, denuding teak forests, or digging for ore—there are unintended consequences. The poor villagers whose lives might be affected rarely have any voice to object beforehand to such projects. Once the damage is done, what they say hardly matters.

He lingers over dinner and a complimentary brandy from the chef who, it turns out, is an admirer of the Ordinary Man. The breeze is delicate, like a woman’s fingers grazing through his hair. How he wishes Mariamma could be here with him at this grand hotel.

I’m at the edge of my world, he thinks. This is as far as I’ll ever go.

He smells history in this breeze. The Dutch, the Portuguese, the English . . . Each left their stamp. All gone now. Shades. Their cemeteries are overgrown with weeds, the names unreadable, weathered by wind. What stamp will he leave? What will be his masterpiece? He knows the answer: Mariamma. She is his masterpiece.

After dinner he walks to his room, stepping carefully; he’s unaccustomed to brandy. The tourists seated earlier at a long table have left behind a book on the chair. No, not a book, but a small and beautifully printed catalog on the kind of heavy paper that invites touch. He picks it up. On the cover is a black-and-white photograph of a large outdoor stone sculpture.

Suddenly he’s sober. The ocean is stilled, the breeze is arrested, the stars stop twinkling.

Her shoulders and arms are overdeveloped—a woman, but a superhuman one. She resembles a primitive clay figure, with her breasts full and pendulous. Her shoulder blades look like wings flattened against her body. Her skin is deliberately left coarse. She’s on all fours but extends one arm. The woman’s face is not revealed, still locked in the stone.

His gut coils and an equine shiver pushes out hair follicles: The magnified proportions, the posture, the attitude—it’s all Elsie.

He stumbles to his room, and in a frenzy, he studies the catalog under the table lamp. The index lists this figure as “#26, Artist Unknown.” The catalog is for an estate sale of the contents of the Adyar house of an apparently wealthy Englishman and “Orientalist” who’d amassed a collection of Indian paintings, folk art, and sculptures. The Madras auction house of Messrs. Wintrobe & Sons presides. He pores over each page, studying the other items. He sees nothing else that is Elsie’s. Conceivably this statue could be a work of Elsie’s from before they were married. Or when she went away after Ninan’s death. But his gut says it isn’t.

He returns to the cover. The rough, untouched stone where the face is buried is deliberate. He breaks into a sweat, feels an urge to claw at the paper, break open the stone to reveal the face.

He paces, unable to sit, trying to make sense of what makes no sense.

We never found a body. In its absence, we presumed.

He was barely present when Elsie drowned, lost in opium fantasies of reincarnation, and then sinking into recrimination. When he returned from the forest after Shamuel, Joppan, Unni, and Damo had carried him away, he was clearheaded and sober. He’d held Elise’s clothes to his face, the ones she’d left on the bank. He inhaled her scent, the new scent that was hers when she returned from being away so long. The fragrance of suffering. He’d never wanted to accept that she willingly gave herself to the river, took her life, because if that were so, then he knew he’d driven her to it. No, it was an accident. In his nightmares he stumbled onto her decomposed body far from Parambil, picked apart by crocodiles and wild dogs.

But in all these years, he’d never ever considered a possibility other than her drowning; he’d never pictured a scenario in which her living, breathing self still existed in the same universe as his, still practiced her craft. She had cause to run away from him. But from her own child? No, surely not.

Oh, Elsie. What kind of beast were you married to if the only way you could pursue what mattered to you was to sacrifice Mariamma?

The auction is to take place the day after next. The catalog might say “Artist Unknown.” But two decades of newspaper work have taught him that what is unknown is often just undiscovered.

He must go to Madras. For all these years that city has been synonymous with his failure. Not even his daughter being there could entice him to board a train. The thought of it still made him feel breathless and break into sweat.

But he will go. He must go. Not just for answers, but to make amends.

The next morning, the Manorama’s Cochin office manages the impossible. Standing at the reservations window a few hours later he collects his ticket. He’s shaky, his palms sweating. He addresses his body: We’re getting on the train and that’s final. Back at the Malabar Hotel, he pens a letter to Mariamma.

My darling daughter, I’m boarding the train to Madras soon. I will be there by morning. I’ll probably get there before this letter is delivered. But you did say that after all these years if I did show up without warning you would die of shock. Hence, these words to say I’m on my way. I have much to tell you. The voyage of discovery isn’t about new lands but having new eyes.

Your loving Appa

In the afternoon, when it’s time to board, he sees his name on the typed list glued to the carriage; it brings back memories of standing on this very platform with Uplift Master. It’s as though his whole life has yet to unfold; he has yet to meet that adventurous girl in tinted cat’s-eye glasses who is to be his wife; Big Ammachi, Baby Mol, and Shamuel are alive; and Ninan and Mariamma are unborn, waiting for the summons to appear . . .

He climbs aboard like a seasoned traveler, with nothing but the soft briefcase that holds his notebook, shaving kit, and a change of clothes. “Most welcome,” he hears himself say magnanimously, helping a woman push her trunk under his bench. The train jerks forward. He laughs with the others as a kochamma yells from the platform, “And don’t forget to wash your own underwear, kehto! Don’t give it to the dhobi, you hear?” The college boys in the next cubicle shout, “What is there, ammachi? Let him be! For dhobi’s itch you simply scratch, that’s all!”

The journey is off to a rollicking start. His new cubicle friends debate whether it’s better to order dinner in Palakkad or wait till Coimbatore, as though life rests on such small decisions. He’s astonished to hear himself offer an opinion, pretending to have experience. You coward! he thinks. The fuss you made for years about visiting Madras! All you needed was for Elsie to come back from the dead.

At dusk, the lush Malabar slopes of the Western Ghats quiet the passengers, mute their conversations. He stares out, lost. If you changed, Elsie, I did too. I learned to be steadfast. I walked my daughter to school every single day till she forbade me. I read stories to her every night. Thank God she’s a reader, and there’s nothing she likes better than to be buried in a book. Wednesdays I decreed were Carnatic music night from All India Radio, but she preferred opera on the BBC—such awful sounds. Oh, Elsie, how much you missed of our daughter’s life! I never accomplished very much in my life, I’ll be the first to admit. But what accomplishment could be bigger than our daughter? You need say nothing to me. You owe me nothing. Elsie, I’m coming to say I am sorry. To say, I wish I could rewind the thread of our lives. I was someone different then. I’m someone else now.

As they enter the first of the tunnels, the feeble compartment lights give the bogie a ghostly glow, and the train’s hammering on the tracks is amplified into a roar.

I never stopped thinking of you. The way you looked when I first met you, and met you again, and our first kiss . . . I talk to your picture every night.

But Elsie, Elsie—what is the meaning of this statue? Could this be from the year you were away? If not, does it mean you live? Perhaps I preferred to think of you dead, so I didn’t have to face how awful I had been. But Elsiamma, if you’re alive and hiding, then hide no more. Let me see you, show me your face. There’s so much to say . . .

Soon the train will cross over a river on a long trestle bridge that he remembers from so long ago, remembers with a shudder, because it had shaken him. He’d looked out of the window because the rhythmic clatter of the wheels on the track had changed to a high-pitched whir, and when he peeked out, they seemed to be sailing over water, with nothing holding up the train. His young self had almost fainted. Best he be asleep when it happens.

He climbs up to his berth—the topmost—and stretches out. In the confined space, the sight of the ceiling inches from his nose reminds him of a coffin. He shuts his eyes and conjures up Mariamma’s face. She has made up for his thwarted ambitions, his loneliness, the imperfections of his earlier self. We don’t have children to fulfill our dreams. Children allow us to let go of the dreams we were never meant to fulfill.

He’s drifting off when he’s called back by a sharp crack coming from another carriage, followed by a jolt that travels through his bogie. He feels himself rising free of the bunk. This is strange! The cubicle is turning around him. He observes a child suspended in space, while an airborne adult slides past. The compartment explodes with screams and the squealing of metal. He’s thrown up against the ceiling, except the ceiling is the floor.

The lights go out. He tumbles in the darkness, plunging down and down, his stomach in his mouth, just as in that foolhardy ride a lifetime ago with the boatman and his dying baby.

There’s a resounding crash and the compartment cracks like an egg on impact. Water gushes in. Reflexively, he takes a deep breath, ballooning his chest just moments before chilled water engulfs them all. He slides out of the cracked carriage like yolk slipping out of the egg. It’s all so familiar. Eyes open! he hears Shamuel’s voice command.

He sees a faint dark blur like a whale just under him—his carriage sinking to the deep. The air in his chest carries him up. He breaks the surface and gulps in fresh oxygen, feeling the world spin around him, clutching at a hard object next to him to steady his vertigo, but its sharp edge cuts his hand. He desperately seizes another object. It stays afloat. Eyes open, the dizziness eases.

It is deathly quiet. He looks out over a flat surface of water that is illuminated in a ghostly light and dotted with luggage, clothing, slippers, and bobbing heads. One end of a railway carriage breaks the surface, rises to point accusingly heavenward, then sinks.

On either side of him the craggy walls of a gorge press in, framing a ribbon of stars. He sees the broken remnant of the trestle bridge from which the train plunged. The water is cold. He feels no pain, but his right leg fails to respond. A light behind him! He turns slowly, but it is a gibbous moon, indifferent to what it witnesses. Now he hears a rising chorus, the cries of survivors. “Shiva, Shiva!” a woman’s voice screams, and another from the opposite direction, “God! My God!” but the god of disasters is unmoved and both voices gurgle horribly into silence.

An immobile figure floats near him, facedown, a tangle of cloth and long hair, the body wrenched into an impossible shape that makes Philipose recoil.

What Philipose has managed to hook his armpit over is a soft, soggy floating cushion with a spine of something stiffer. It is barely buoyant. He paddles with his free hand, surprised to make headway. There’s no current to fight, just death and debris floating in the stillness. He kicks out and now feels an electric shock of pain in the right leg.

“Appa! Ap—!”

The child’s cry comes from somewhere behind him. A little girl, or is it a boy? Or is he hallucinating?

He flails his free arm to turn himself and his bulky float. On the mirrored surface he catches sight of hair streaked over a pair of panicked eyes that are as big as moons and losing focus, the tiny nose and lips gurgling below the water and rising briefly to try to scream while desperate little hands climb a ladder that isn’t there. It’s the child’s struggle to breathe that galvanizes him. It is the boatman’s baby all over again. The small head sinks out of sight. He hears a roar in the back of his throat as he wallows in that direction, but oh, how slowly he moves, pain searing his leg. Appa! It’s the cry of his child, of all children. Understanding comes to him now, at the most inopportune time, that the one face he so desperately wanted to see, the face of the Stone Woman, was never meant to be seen. What did it matter? We are dying while we’re living, we are old even when we’re young, we are clinging to life even as we resign ourselves to leaving it.

But in the sinking child he paddles to, he, an ordinary man, has a chance to do something of true account. Love the sick, each and every one, as if they were your own. He wrote out those words from Paracelsus for his daughter. Here, and just out of reach, is a child, not his child, yet all are his to love as if they were his own. This child may be beyond saving, and he may be too, but it matters not and matters terribly, pedaling and paddling furiously, the one-legged, one-armed man who cannot swim, moving to a child just out of reach. His flailing hand brushes tiny fingers, but they are already sinking past him.

He takes a deep breath, pulling the skies, the stars, and the stars beyond those stars into his lungs, and Lord, Lord, my Lord, where are you? Lord, I breathe you in, Lord breathe on me, breathe on me breath of God . . . For once in his life, freed of indecision, freed from doubt, he is absolutely sure of what he must do.