The Covenant of Water

1974, Madras

She holds an unopened letter from her father in her hands. Her tears fall on the address penned in her father’s impossible script which somehow the postman always manages to decipher.

In this letter her father is alive.

That morning in the morgue he was not.

Outside the morgue, earlier that day, an angry crowd of relatives had clamored for news. In their contorted, tear-stained, uncomprehending faces Mariamma had seen what her face must have looked like. The same claw had gathered them all like a tuft of grass in its grip, and the same sickle had chopped them off at the knees by robbing them of their loved ones. The guards allowed a tearful Mariamma, in her white coat, to squeeze through the folding metal gates even as they held back the other bereaved: “Why should she be allowed to see the body, and not us?”

The body. That word felt like a cudgel blow.

She was to meet Uma in the morgue, but not seeing Uma, she walked around the cavernous room, no one stopping her in the bedlam, with bodies laid out on metal stretchers and on the bare floor. Then she saw a hand, as familiar as her own, peeking out from under a rubber sheet. She went to him then, held the cold hand, uncovered his face. Her father looked peaceful, resting. Unreasonably, she wanted a blanket for him in place of the rubber sheet, and a pillow too so that his head wouldn’t rest on cold unyielding metal. He wasn’t dead. It was a mistake. No, he just needed to sleep, that was all, then after he got some rest, he would sit up and come away with her from this noisy morgue . . . Her legs went weak, the room became dim, and sounds went soft. In a protective reflex, she sank to a squat on the floor by his stretcher, head between her knees, still clutching his hand, and sobbing inconsolably. The world had come to an end.

Slowly, the sounds of the room returned. No one paid her any attention. There was too much chaos, the wailing of others, the shouts of someone trying to restore order. After a long while she pulled herself upright. Through tears she asked her father what made him get on a train. Why that train? He knew she was on her way home, so why come?

Uma Ramasamy, wearing an apron, found her talking to her father. Uma and every pathologist on staff were busy helping the beleaguered coroner deal with more bodies than a morgue should hold. Uma held her, cried with her. When Mariamma asked, Uma said the rubber sheet concealed a shattered knee and a deep laceration to his left flank. She had no desire to see for herself.

She was conscious that Uma needed to leave and couldn’t stay with her all day. “Uma, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. This isn’t how or where I imagined I would tell you, but it has to be now. It’s important. It’s about my father, about my family. Please? A few minutes?”

Uma had listened, her face still, her manner attentive, her eyebrows rising in surprise.

“I’ll do it,” Uma said. “I’ll do it personally. I’ll need you to sign some papers.”

Now in her hostel room, hands shaking, Anita at her side, she opens her father’s letter.

My darling daughter.

She reads once, twice. He says that he’s en route to see her. But not why. “The voyage of discovery isn’t about new lands but having new eyes”?

The words make no sense. She presses the letter to her lips, hoping for understanding. She catches the scent of his homemade ink: the unmistakable fragrance of home, of the red laterite earth he so loved.

At Parambil two days later, when Mariamma returns with her father’s body, she and Anna Chedethi cling to each other like two drowning souls. Anna Chedethi is more than blood: she is now the last surviving member of her family.

Joppan is right behind Anna Chedethi, his face stony as he clutches Mariamma’s hands, his eyes dark embers as though he’s plotting vengeance against a God who took his best friend. Neither Anna Chedethi nor Joppan has any idea why her father got on the train.

She barely recognizes the bag of bones who comes forward to console her: it’s Uplift Master. Her father was his only supporter after the scandal around his employee’s embezzling funds, though it turned out it was the bank that had suffered most, and the Hospital Fund was largely intact. Master had judged himself more harshly than anyone else. Still, he’s the man for moments like this: the needs of others, the need to organize and execute the funeral, give him purpose. “My heart is broken, molay,” he says. He moves off to talk to the driver of the van bearing the coffin.

At the church the next day, there are so many faces she doesn’t recognize, admirers of the Ordinary Man who’ve come to offer condolences. A woman who in appearance could be a sister to Big Ammachi, but bent over and with a cane, says, “Molay, we laughed with your father and cried with him for a quarter century. Our heart breaks for you.” She squeezes Mariamma to her bosom.

Mariamma carries a secret that none of the mourners can know: Her father’s body in the casket has had all its viscera removed; the abdomen and thorax are just a hollow shell. Uma took his entire spine out en bloc as well, inserting a broomstick in the gutter left behind. Those who earlier viewed the open casket never saw the long incision at the back of his head, running from ear to ear, just under the hairline. His scalp was peeled forward and his calvarium opened to remove his brain. Then skull and scalp were restored. A brain autopsy would not normally have been done in the setting of a disaster and with so many victims, especially if the lungs showed he had drowned. However, Uma will personally conduct a brain autopsy on this victim. But no autopsy will explain why her father got on the train.

He is to be buried next to his father; Big Ammachi; Baby Mol; JoJo; and his beloved son, her brother, Ninan, in the red soil that nurtured them and that they loved. If her mother’s remains are ever found, she too will lie here. As will Mariamma herself.

She wonders what Big Ammachi would say about her son’s body not being whole. The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible. Did her grandmother believe that literally? Perhaps she did. If God can raise the decomposed, then God can surely reconstitute her father, even if his mortal remains are divided and on opposite coasts.

The coffin is lowered. Dirt rattles on the lid with a note of such finality that she discovers a new reservoir of tears. Later, back in the house, the extended Parambil family gathers: all the adults she knew as a child, many of them quite aged now. The twins are old men, even more alike now in their bent-over state than when they were younger, with matching canes and receding hair. Decency Kochamma isn’t there; she’s bedridden, in her late eighties, devoid of reach or venom. Dolly Kochamma is the same age as her co-sister; she has some wrinkles but somehow looks and moves like a spry fifty-year-old as she bustles back and forth helping Anna Chedethi bring out the food. Mariamma sees the faces of children she grew up with, some barely recognizable as adults. Missing are the faces of two who might have brought her some comfort: Lenin and Podi. In the Saint Thomas Christian tradition there is no graveside eulogy, but now, with the burial over, those gathered in the house look at Mariamma expectantly before Achen says a prayer. She stands, hands clasped together, bravely facing them. It comes to her that it’s only when one’s father and mother are both dead that one stops being a child, being a daughter. She has just become an adult.

“If Appa could see you now, he would be overwhelmed with gratitude. For your love for him, and for the way you have supported me in my grief. My father had so much love for Ninan, and so much love for my mother. But he never got the chance to love them for as long as he wanted. He poured all that love into me, more love than most daughters experience in many lifetimes. I was blessed. I thank each of you for being here, for giving me strength. I’ll try to go on. We must all go on. That’s what he would have wanted.”

The morning of the funeral, her father’s beloved newspaper runs his column for the last time. Under his photograph and byline the only words are: The Ordinary Man, 1923 to 1974. Beneath that, the column is empty, only a thick black border framing the void.