The Covenant of Water

1976, Parambil

The Ordinary Man’s former editor is one of the many dignitaries at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new hospital. To Mariamma’s surprise, he comes over to the house after the event. Other than greeting him at her father’s funeral, this is her first conversation with him. He’s a handsome, elegant man, older than her father. He reminisces with obvious affection about his late columnist. But he has no idea what made her father leave abruptly for Madras. “He was in Cochin writing a story about the saline contamination of our backwaters. But he barely got there before he asked our Cochin office to get him a ticket to Madras. I only found out he’d gone to Madras after the accident.

“For the longest time I was after your father to write something from Dubai, or Qatar, about all our people there. You know, when oil was discovered in the Gulf in the fifties, many daring young men went by kalla kappal—illegal country boats hammered together by the side of the river—or by the dhows that still go back and forth. They had no papers, nothing. But guess what? People still go the same way, because they can’t afford the No Objection Certificates or plane tickets. They’re dropped offshore and must wade or swim to the beach. If they’re caught, they sit in jail. I wanted your father to travel on a dhow—legally of course—and write about the journey. Then I said I’d put him up in a fancy hotel for a week and he could write about our people laboring in the hot sun and sleeping packed together like fish to save every paisa to send home. I even promised to fly him back first-class. It was a perfect subject for the Ordinary Man. He always resisted and I never understood why.”

“You mean you didn’t know about my father’s feud with water?” He doesn’t. He’s dumbfounded when Mariamma describes the Condition and shows him the genealogy. He looks queasy when he hears the details of her father’s brain autopsy. “In death, my father solved the mystery.”

He’s speechless. “My goodness,” he says. “I had no idea! You know our readers—his fans—would have loved to hear this story. Of course, my lips are sealed. Rest assured, I won’t breathe a word or write about this.”

“Actually, I’d be very happy if you wrote about it. The secrecy around the Condition for generations hasn’t helped. Secrets kill. How do we tackle this disease if we don’t know how many are affected, or how it’s inherited? My relatives may not like it, but my father’s story and everything I know I will happily share. The Condition is my mission. It’s why I’m going to Vellore to train as a neurosurgeon.”

Dear Uma,

Ever since my father’s editor wrote the feature article about the Condition and how it caused the Ordinary Man’s death, my relatives are suddenly willing to talk to me. I’m enclosing the newspaper cutting. I know you can’t read Malayalam, but you can see the pictures. The article reads like a detective novel, with my father being one of the victims. And the detective hunting the murderer is his own daughter! “The Ordinary Man Solves the Mystery of his Own Death from the Condition” is the title. I’m glad he called it “the Condition.” I think “a variant of von Recklinghausen’s disease” is not only cumbersome but, as Dr. Das said, this may not be related to von Recklinghausen’s disease at all. I’m quoted as encouraging readers to write to me if they know of family members with an aversion to water. By the way, I think that’s the best single screening question. Believe me, in Kerala if you don’t like water, people notice. I’ve heard from three families. Also, thanks to my relatives, I have the stories of many of the brides who moved away after ­marriage—the missing element in the “Water Tree.”

It’s fascinating how the women with the Condition are all remembered as “eccentric.” That stood out as much as their dislike of water. We girls are taught “adakkavum” and “othukkavum,” or modesty and invisibility, from an early age. But these girls were anything but humble and retiring. One girl was so outspoken that potential grooms stayed away. (The same qualities in a man would be called self-confidence.) When she finally did marry, she built herself a treehouse on her husband’s property. She was terrified of floods but not of heights. When the river crossed its banks, the treehouse was where she lived. Another girl was fascinated by snakes as a child, and quite fearless. In her husband’s village she was the one to call if you found a serpent behind the kitchen pots. She’d grab it by the tail, then dangle it at arm’s length. Apparently, a snake can’t twist up and bite—it needs a surface to push against. But who wants to chance that? I found out both these women died with symptoms like my grandfather’s: dizziness, headaches, facial weakness. A third girl was determined to be a priest, which is heresy. She dressed like a priest and tried to preach in church. She was thrashed for that. She took to standing outside churches and sermonizing till they chased her away. Her family forcibly put her in a convent, but she escaped and turned up in an all-male seminary, her hair short, pretending to be male. After that they locked her up in an asylum, where she died.

But I must say, as far as eccentricity goes, my grandfather, my father, Ninan, JoJo, and my cousin Lenin would all be considered eccentric, in their own ways. They had a gravitational pull that was different from others’. It was either climbing trees, or a compulsion to walk a straight line, or walking distances others couldn’t imagine. I think you’d agree that these “eccentricities” aren’t explained by a tumor on the acoustic nerve? So here’s my hypothesis: What if these acoustic neuromas have a counterpart in the mind, some aberration that’s part of the Condition and reveals itself as “eccentricity”? What if they have a “tumor of thought” (as I think of it), something that we can’t see with the naked eye or with our usual tools?

I may have one tool, though, to study my father’s thoughts. He had the habit of obsessively keeping journals (more eccentricity! Writing many entries each day). All those thoughts are preserved here in nearly two hundred notebooks. That’s my next project: to systematically look into these journals for this “tumor of thought.”

She faces one major hurdle with her project: her father’s indecipherable writing. As an inquisitive child she had peeked into his journals, looking for juicy secrets, but she was stopped in her tracks by his tiny script that abhorred margins or white spaces. He wrote as though paper was more precious than gold, even if the ink was free. Writing in English gave him a measure of privacy, but his wedge-shaped letters resemble ancient Sumerian characters. Deciphering his writing will be like learning a foreign language. Besides that, her father’s most valuable thoughts could be buried in a sea of trivial daily observations on mildew, on lizards falling off the rafters and the like. When Mariamma briefly scans the notebook titles she sees SMELLS, RUMORS, HAIR (FACIAL AND BODY), FEET, and POLTERGEISTS. Despite these labels, after a few pages, his entries veer off to something else and never return. He had no index or cross-reference for his entries. There’s no question of Mariamma skimming through pages. The task ahead is daunting. It may be impossible.

Every night before she falls asleep, she thinks of Lenin. If only she could talk to him, tell him about her day. She’d share with him her pleasure in being home; the only drawback is that here she’s robbed of any identity other than that of being the doctor. She longs to be done and begin neurosurgical training. And how was your day, Lenin? She shudders to imagine it. Is he even alive? If he were to die, would she know?

Uma is excited by the “tumor of thought” idea and spurs her on. So Mariamma toils away every evening, indexing entries as she goes. It’s exhausting work, leaving her fingers copper-tinted from his ink. Gradually her reading speed increases. The index grows. So far, her only insight into her father’s mind is its ability to flit from one subject to another, like a moth in a room full of candles. Is that the tumor of the mind? Now and then a passage leaves her breathless:

Last night as Elsie sketched in bed, I looked at my bride’s profile, more attractive than any other my eyes could fall on. I suddenly had a vision, as if a portal had opened in time. I saw the trajectory of Elsie the artist as clearly as if I were seeing an arrow sailing through space. I understood as never before that she will leave her mark for generations to come. I’m nothing by comparison, blessed to be in the presence of such greatness. I felt emotional, on the verge of tears. She saw my strange expression. She didn’t ask. Maybe she read my thoughts and understood, or maybe she thought she did. She put her sketch away, and she pushed me back on the bed. She took me like a Queen making use of one of her nobles, but fortunately I am the only nobleman she loves. My only real claim to lasting fame will be this: Elsie chose me. She chose me and therefore I am worthy. That’s all the ambition I need: to remain worthy of this remarkable woman.

On another evening, Mariamma stumbles onto a vastly different moment in her parents’ marriage, one that feels like a cudgel blow: in the wake of Ninan’s ghastly death, her parents turned on each other. It chills her to read her father’s words, so raw on the page: the agonizing pain from his broken ankles; his self-loathing for not cutting down the tree; his unreasonable anger at Elsie for fleeing Parambil—she’d been gone six months at the time of the entry. Mariamma had never known they’d been apart! Her father’s words are rambling and disjointed, an ode to opium. Instead of a “tumor of thought,” she’s peering into the cesspit of an addict’s addled mind. Yes, hers is a scientific quest, but the subject under the microscope is her father. His thoughts can crush her.

She closes the journal, walks out of the room, tempted to abandon the project. Please God, as I pursue my father’s thoughts, don’t let me end up loathing the man I idolize and love. Don’t take that away from me.

Her feet carry her to the Stone Woman, still luminous in the clearing, even at dusk. Embodied in rock, this manifestation of her mother has a permanence like nothing else in Mariamma’s life; in her unmoving pose she expresses the patience of nature, of time measured in centuries instead of minutes and hours. Mariamma sits there for a long time.

“The Condition . . . it’s just life, isn’t it, Amma?” she says, speaking to the Stone Woman. “Maybe I’m not looking to solve the mystery of the Condition or the mystery of why I’m on this earth. Mystery is the nature of life. I am the Condition. Maybe it isn’t the workings of Appa’s mind that I’m after, the clues to an inherited disease. I think, Amma, that it’s really you I’m looking for.”