The Covenant of Water

1976, Parambil

Under Joppan’s watch, Parambil is becoming a lush Eden, a model farm, the plantain and mango trees sagging with fruit, and young palms sporting thick yellow necklaces of coconuts. Their thriving dairy sells milk to a cold-storage business, providing an additional source of revenue. Joppan’s two young cousins serve as his permanent assistants. For the past two years, while Mariamma was in Madras, Joppan at first wrote her monthly letters, listing expenditures and income. But in just six months, at his urging, they hired a part-time bookkeeper. Parambil is doing well.

The house, however, shows its age in the spider’s web of cracks on the red oxide floors; the dull teak walls cry out for a varnish. Mariamma takes Anna Chedethi to Kottayam to pick out a new paint scheme for the entire house, and to select ceiling fans, new sinks and fixtures, a two-burner gas range, and a backup generator. The grin on Anna Chedethi’s face only falters when a refrigerator is delivered. “Ayo, molay! What do I do with this? How will it listen to me? Does it know Malayalam?” The first time Mariamma brings her a glass of sweet lime juice, frosted on the outside and with ice cubes clinking on the top, Anna Chedethi becomes a believer. Now meat, fish, vegetables, and milk will keep for days.

The Mar Thoma Medical Mission Hospital is the tallest structure around for miles. The sprawling grounds around the hospital are enclosed by a whitewashed boundary wall; the NO POSTING warnings stenciled on the wall are covered by Congress and Communist Party posters. Across from the main gate is a bus stop and Cherian’s tea shop. Further down the road, a new long, rectangular building holds Kunjumon’s Cold Storage, London Tailors, and Brilliant Tutorials. Mariamma struggles to recall the time when all this was uncleared land with trees that she and Podi climbed.

Raghavan, the poor watchman, is hoarse from explaining to clamoring patients that yes, the hospital looks finished, but no, it’s not ready for business. If they call him a liar, he shows them the unfurnished interior, the crates of equipment stacked everywhere, some donated by foreign missions. One night, Raghavan rouses Mariamma at home at two in the morning because of a child with severe asthma who he thinks is in mortal danger. He is right. Without the adrenaline in Mariamma’s medical bag, the child would not have survived.

Mariamma mentions this at the weekly board meeting; the bishop who is chair of the board has ensured this one room is lavishly furnished. The members listen politely as she tries to convey the urgency of opening a casualty room with basic supplies, then without comment they move to the more urgent task of deciding the size of the inaugural plaque in the lobby and whose names should or should not be on it.

She leaves the meeting, seething, and is surprised to find Joppan outside, puffing on a beedi. He walks back with her in the dark as she voices her frustration. “It’s comical! At this rate, the hospital might never open.” They cross the gated private pedestrian bridge arching over the canal and into Parambil. When they reach the house, he says, “Molay, nothing is happening because Uplift Master’s not there. He’ll know how to deal with them. I’ll send word.” Only after he leaves does Anna Chedethi tell her that the reason Joppan had been at the hospital was to escort her home because it was dark. It’s just what her father might have done.

The rumor that Master only ventures out at the witching hour and prefers the company of ghosts to that of humans must be true, because Anna Chedethi is already asleep when Master comes. Mariamma shares her frustrations about the hospital. She gets the sense Master is pleased to hear about the hospital’s administrative dysfunction. She begs him to talk to the board.

“Never! They must ask me themselves. They still blame me for that woman who tried to embezzle the Hospital Fund.” Mariamma assures him that no one faults him. “Aah, people say that. But if I drop by for tea, they count the grains of paddy in their ara when I leave. That’s how our people are.”

She pleads, invoking the names of her grandmother and her father, but he holds firm.

“I’ll be your silent advisor, nothing more. Here’s what you do, Mariamma. First, don’t waste your time asking the board anything. Aadariyumo angaadi vaanibham?” Does the goat understand the butcher’s trade? “Just make a list of medicines and supplies you need. I’ll send the order to T.N.T. Wholesale Medical in Kottayam in your name, with instructions to invoice the bishop. Second, your watchman, Raghavan, is a good fellow. I only got him that job. You give him a stack of blank paper. Have him ask every person he turns away from the gate to write something, even if it is one or two lines, and sign at the bottom with their address. If they can’t write, just sign. We’ll mail the letters to the Metropolitan. It won’t take more than ten or twenty letters before the bishop feels some pain. Lastly, I’m glad you told me about the plaque. I know where they will order it and I will find out how much it might cost. I’ll call the bishop’s secretary pretending to be a journalist. I’ll ask, ‘Is it true a child almost died of asthma because you couldn’t buy ten rupees’ worth of medicine, but you are spending twenty thousand rupees on a plaque?’ ”

“Master, in one minute you accomplish more than I could in a month,” Mariamma says. “We need you.”

“It’s nothing,” he says, but he’s pleased. “Do you know, I only coined the name ‘Mar Thoma Medical Mission Hospital’? It flows like honey off the tongue, does it not? But before the foundation was poured, people shortened it to ‘Yem-Yem-Yem Hospital.’ ” Mari­amma thinks it understandable: “M” on the Malayali tongue can come out as “Yem.” And Malayalis love acronyms. “Then they began calling it ‘Triple Yem Hospital’! Can you imagine? So vulgar, Triple Yem! Like some ointment for piles!” She doesn’t admit to him that Triple Yem has caught on—she’s as guilty as all the others.

When he leaves, he says, “By the way, when the bishop questions you about the T.N.T. invoice, you just say that since he was ordering hair oil, Cuticura powder, and vitamins for himself and listing them as ‘essential supplies,’ you didn’t think he’d mind if you added a few essentials to save lives.”

With Uplift Master working behind the scenes, the part of Triple Yem she needs to function is taking shape, with electricians assembling equipment and the ground floor becoming furnished. One room at the front of the Triple Yem becomes Casualty. A large room at the back, with a waiting area outside, becomes the outpatient department. They have four hospital beds set up on a “ward” for emergencies alone. The operating theater is complete and has a state-of-the-art surgical light with so many bulbs it looks like an insect’s eye. But the selection of surgical instruments—all donated—is bizarre: everything one needs for cataract surgery and for dental work, but the bare minimum for abdominal surgery. Mariamma has a night nurse, a day nurse, and a compounder presiding over a small dispensary.

The one commodity that’s been abundant from the outset is patients.

When the outpatient department opens, entire families dressed in their finest come on excursions to Triple Yem, just as they might attend the Maramon Convention. One morning, a kochamma sits smiling and silent on the stool before Mariamma after waiting an hour in line. When asked why she’s come, she makes a twisting gesture with her wrist, “Oh, chuma!” Just like that! “Son and wife were coming, so I thought, What’s there? Why not I come too? Aah. Since I’m here, why not give me that orange injection?”

Mariamma is forced to inaugurate the operating room before she’s ready, performing an emergency caesarean section at midnight for a baby in distress. Her night nurse gets weak-kneed the moment they enter the theater and has to sit in a corner. Mariamma turns to Joppan (who is there because Raghavan has standing orders to fetch him anytime he summons the doctor after dark or risk his wrath). With minimal instruction, Joppan calmly and competently drops ether on the gauze mask. Mariamma, operating alone, hauls the baby out. Only when she hears its shrill cry does her tension vanish. The night nurse is at least capable of receiving the baby in her lap. Mariamma closes the uterus, then muscle and skin. Joppan’s awestruck expression has changed to a silly grin by the time she’s put in the last stitch. “You breathe more of that ether,” she says with mock severity, “and Ammini will think you were at the toddy shop.” He’s still euphoric as he escorts her back. “Molay, what you just did . . . I have no words for it. Imagine if Podi had stayed in school. Or if I had stayed. We were smart, but we weren’t smart enough to understand how important it was to study, were we?”

“Don’t say that. You’re what makes Parambil thrive. You put our relatives to shame. And Podi and her husband are making good money—”

He shakes his head. “Not the same thing. Anyway, I’m so proud of you, molay.”

She’s still glowing from his words when her head hits the pillow.

But every visit to the theater is nerve-racking; there’s no senior surgeon to turn to and no one competent to assist. One night, for a patient who was stabbed in the belly, she promotes Raghavan to ether-mask duties, and Joppan becomes her scrub nurse and assistant. From watching her, Joppan has already picked up the basics of sterility. Now she shows him how to scrub, then don gloves and gown and stand ready, across from her. The sight of the open belly doesn’t faze him. He hands her hemostat, forceps, scissors, and ligature when asked, and pulls on the retractor for her. He soon anticipates her needs. When they’re done, he’s elated. “Molay, whenever you need my help, please call me. In the daytime too. My assistants Yakov and Ousep can spare me for a few hours.”

She’d rather have Joppan’s help than anyone else’s. He’s quick to grasp her explanations of the physiology involved and how a disease has altered it. She’s found him studying her surgical manual while he waits for her, his lips moving as he deciphers the English words.

Six months in, the outpatient routine wears her down with its monotony. Most complaints are trivial—body aches, pains, coughs, colds—or else they’re chronic, like asthma, or the tropical leg ulcers that need to be dressed daily. The tedium is interrupted now and then by a medical or surgical emergency. Mariamma refuses to do elective surgery till she has an anesthetist and more nurses. The dream of a referral hospital with specialists is still far away, but with Uplift Master working behind the scenes and Mariamma as his amanuensis, there’s more momentum. His masterful touches are hard to hide. When the bishop (pressed by the Metropolitan) breaks down and begs Uplift Master to intercede to release equipment stuck in customs, Master is officially back in the fold.

After her years in Madras with its many diversions, Mariamma’s evenings and weekends at Parambil might have felt tedious if she didn’t have a project that kept her busy: she’s fleshing out every node and branch of the Water Tree. She especially wants to learn about the women who married and moved away and whose fate was never recorded. Her relatives—even sweet Dolly Kochamma—are reluctant to talk about the Condition or admit it exists. A breakthrough comes from an unexpected source.

Every afternoon, Cherian sends over a “special” tea and butter biscuits for “Doctor Madam” in the outpatient department. But he refuses payment. Early one morning, she watches him prop up the thatch awning with poles, unlock the wooden barrier, and systematically unbutton his stall for business. She walks over to thank him. Cherian insists she have a coffee. The arc of steaming liquid flies back and forth between his two mixing receptacles before it lands with a flourish in the glass that he hands to her. Her “thank you” makes him incredibly shy. She sips her coffee, and they stand awkwardly together, staring at Triple Yem as if it has just landed there and Martians might emerge. Big Ammachi once said to Mariamma, “You can confide in quiet people. They make way for one’s thoughts.” But Ammachi, when they don’t utter a word, how do you begin?

She’s leaving when Cherian says, “My sister drowned.” She stops and stares at him. Did he speak or is she hallucinating?

“Also, my grandfather’s brother. Drowned. My brother’s daughters both hate water.” What prompted Cherian to volunteer this? Is it common knowledge that the Parambil family has the Condition? “My poor sister had to work in the flooded paddy fields, she had no choice. When a bund broke, she was knocked off her feet and drowned in shallow water.”

“Cherian, you obviously know that our family has the same . . . condition. Do you think we are related?”

“No. My family isn’t from here. I was a lorry driver till I had an accident. I used to drive all over Kerala. In that time I heard of a few other families like ours. All Christians. Surely there are others.”

She mulls over Cherian’s extraordinary admission all day. Cherian is wrong: they are related. The community of Saint Thomas Christians is now quite large, but they share the same ancestors in the original families that Doubting Thomas converted to Christianity. An image of a bicycle wheel comes to her mind. If she were to place each family with the Condition along a single spoke of the wheel, then Cherian’s family is on one spoke and the Parambil clan on another. The other afflicted families Cherian mentioned have their own spokes. Tracing the spokes back to the center will bring them to the ancestor with the altered gene with whom it all began. She’s excited. Her task is to find many more spokes, more families with the Condition. There’s one man she knows who can help.

Broker Aniyan’s thick gray hair is parted in the center and swept back on his temples; his intelligent eyes miss nothing as he cycles up to the house. He dismounts elegantly, swinging one leg forward and over the bar, the only option when wearing a mundu. In a place where mustaches are the rule, his clean-shaven face makes him look younger than his seventy years.

“Molay, I remember as if it were yesterday, I proposed an alliance for Elsie of Thetanatt with Philipose of Parambil.”

“I thought they met on a train!”

He smiles indulgently. “Aah, train meeting-greeting may be there, loving-longing may be there, but without a broker how can families be introduced, or dowry discussed, or horoscopes matched?”

Anna Chedethi has prepared tea and jackfruit halwa, Big Ammachi’s specialty.

“What if the horoscopes don’t match but the couple are adamant?” Mariamma asks.

Aniyan squeezes his eyes shut and opens them, a gesture that to outsiders might look like someone wincing with pain but in Kerala means something specific. “It’s not a problem. We adjust! That’s all. Most impediments are minor impediments, and minor impediments are no impediment. You see, parents often have faulty memories of the exact time of birth,” he says, with the patience of a priest who must regularly recite the articles of faith. He samples the halwa and approves. “Ladies, before we begin today, may I share with you three lessons I’ve learned in doing this for decades?”

Before Mariamma can interject, Anna Chedethi says, “Yes! Do tell us!”

“First lesson—and don’t take this wrong, molay—but your generation often tries to drive the bullock cart backward. In fact, the greater the education, the more someone will make this mistake,” he says, eyeing her meaningfully. “The first priority is to find the right person, is it not? You must look at this proposal, then that proposal, then make a table of pluses and minuses, correct?”

They nod. He sips his tea, smiles. “Wrong! That’s not the first priority.” He settles back, waiting. Mariamma asks, otherwise they’ll be here all day.

“First priority is: Set the date! Simple. You know why?”

They don’t.

“Because you set a date and you’re committed! Tell me, molay, if you decide to open a practice, will you first wait to see a patient walk by and then rent the building and put up a sign? Of course not! You commit! You rent an office, sign the lease for a certain date. You get furniture, is it not? Aah, aah. My dear God, if you only knew how much time I wasted with this doctorate fellow from Berkeley in United States of California. He comes on two weeks leave. I introduce mother and him to eight first-class, Yay-One suitable girls . . . and he goes back undecided! Why? No date! So, the first lesson is to commit to a date.”

“What’s the second?”

“Aah, aah, second lesson I already mentioned first.” He grins naughtily. “Maybe you weren’t paying attention earlier. I said, most impediments are . . . ?”

“Minor impediments,” the two women say in unison.

“Aah. And minor impediments are . . . ?”

“Not impediments!” Mariamma feels she’s back in primary school.

“Exactly. Adjustment is there.” He looks pleased.

Anna Chedethi can’t help herself. “Is there a third?”

“Certainly! There are ten. But these three I share because it makes my work easier. The rest will die with me. My son sees no future in this business because of the newspaper matrimonial advertisements. God help people who try that.”

Anna Chedethi clears her throat.

“Aah, yes. Third rule is this. Looks change, but character doesn’t. So, focus on character, not looks. And to know a girl’s character you look to the girl’s . . . ?”

“Mother?” they both say.

“Aah, correct.” He nods, pleased with his pupils. “And for a boy’s character you look to the boy’s . . . ?”

“Father!” they say, confidently.

“Wrong!” he says, pleased to have lured them into his trap. He lights a cigarette, then returns the spent match to the match box. Mariamma wonders why smokers all do this. Is it a parallel addiction that goes with nicotine? Or is this fastidiousness meant to compensate for using the world as an ashtray? She can suddenly taste the cigarette she took off Lenin in the lodge. “Wrong, my dear ladies. For the boy’s character, again you must look to the mother! After all, the only thing each of us can be sure of is who our mother is. Is it not?”

Anna Chedethi takes a second to digest this and bursts out laughing. Mariamma sees that Anna Chedethi is getting much too excited. She hasn’t told her why she invited Broker Aniyan.

“Achayan, are you related to our family?” Mariamma says.

“Certainly! On the Parambil side, I am your great-­grandfather’s second cousin’s granddaughter’s husband’s brother.” He looks to the ceiling. “On the Thetanatt side—”

“Wait,” Mariamma says. “ ‘Great-grandfather’s second cousin’s granddaughter’s’ . . . That’s so distant . . . In that case you can claim you’re related to every family you call on.”

“No! If you can’t trace the relationship, you can’t claim anything!” he says with some indignation. “I can. Therefore, I’m related.”

“Achine,” she says, using the respectful term for “elder.” “I promise, when I’m ready to marry, I’ll come to you. No newspaper matrimonial. I hope you’ll forgive me, but I didn’t ask you here to help me get married. I need your help with a serious medical condition, one that took my father’s life. And the lives of others in our family—well, you know better than anyone. I don’t know your name for it, but Big Ammachi called it the Condition.”

She sits next to him and spreads out an expanded and updated copy of the genealogy, this one in Malayalam. “I copied this from the original, which our family kept for generations.”

Aniyan’s clever eyes dart around the sheet, a nicotine-stained fingernail traces the generations. “That’s an outright lie here—he never married,” he mutters. “Hmm, not three but four sisters here—twins—but one died as an infant, the other was Ponnamma . . .” In minutes with his pen, he has fleshed out three previous generations, working back from her grandfather. It’s more than she’s accomplished in weeks. He pointedly does not address the generations presently alive.

“Achayan, I’m trying to complete this chart.” She tells him about Cherian. Aniyan understands her “spokes of the wheel” analogy at once. “If I can complete all the spokes in the wheel, we’ll understand how the disease is inherited.”

He ponders this. “Molay, are you able to do something once you find others with the Condition?”

He has homed in on the weakest link in her argument. “No . . . Not yet. For now we can only justify surgery for those with severe symptoms because it’s a dangerous operation. But soon we’ll be able to perform a safer one through a tiny hole above the ear. By taking the tumor out earlier, we might keep those children affected from becoming deaf, or even from drowning. Also, if we understand how it’s inherited, we might for example ensure that a boy and a girl who are both unknowingly carrying this trait don’t get married. Too many have suffered and died from the Condition. It’s the reason I’m going to specialize in neurosurgery. To prevent it, or else to treat it earlier. This is my life’s mission.”

He studies her warily. Then he surprises her. “Why not? I plan to retire end of this year, so why not? It’s a worthy cause. But not till then.” He gathers his matchbox and cigarettes. “Two things I want to tell you before I go. Firstly, my job is to make alliances, to reduce impediments. I always know more than I choose to reveal about both parties. Don’t misunderstand. I’ll never suggest a match that is detrimental. I won’t hide madness or mental retardation or epilepsy. But molay, remember this—another rule, if you like, though I’m only telling you: Every family has secrets, but not all secrets are meant to deceive. What defines a family is not blood, molay, but the secrets they share. So, your task won’t be easy.”

He has his foot on the pedal when Mariamma says, “Wait, you said two things. What’s the second?”

“Set a date, Mariamma,” he says, smiling. “Even if it’s five years from now. Set a date.”

The next evening, Mariamma returns home from Triple Yem after an exceptionally long day. Under the pedestrian bridge, the water moves lazily. The hibiscus and oleander are aflame. Two water buffalo, unyoked from the plow, stand silhouetted against the horizon, facing each other like bookends. The crickets pick up volume, sounding delirious, and soon they’ll rouse the frog chorale. These everyday, unremarkable noises of her youth are now, with the passing of her cherished loved ones, an ode to memory, bearing the past into the present. It is the hour for gracious ghosts.

Her route takes her past the Stone Woman, and she never fails to acknowledge the sculptor. Elsie married into the Condition, but she didn’t have it; what cruel irony that she should drown. Mariamma passes the barn on whose roof Lenin tried to channel lightning. Set a date. If only I could.

After her bath, she and Anna Chedethi eat in the kitchen, forgoing the new dining table and chairs for the blackened, cinnamon-scented walls, which carry the living memory of Big Ammachi. Joppan comes by to go over drawings and costs for a new building with adjoining smoke shed dedicated to their rubber trees. Here the latex will be poured into trays, mixed with acid till it hardens. Then a new manual press will turn the hardened latex into thin rubber sheets that are then hung in the smoke shed to cure before they are stacked and sold. Anna Chedethi ignores Joppan’s protests that he’s eaten, and serves him. So, just as on many other evenings, all of them are seated on the four-inch high stools, bending over their plates, which rest on the ground. Shamuel would’ve been scandalized to see his son inside the house and eating from a dish that wasn’t earmarked for his use alone. Parambil has changed. The three of them are family and all one caste.