The Covenant of Water

1977, Saint Bridget’s

The resurrected Lenin has his eyes fixed on her. She cannot move. She watches Digby slice the ties that immobilize Lenin’s head, speaking calmly to him as if they just met at the club. “I’m Digby Kilgour. I saw you this morning, but I doubt you’ll recall that.”

For a moment Mariamma imagines they’ll shake hands like Stanley and Livingstone. It’d be fitting. Their last meeting was the stuff of legend: Lenin shook a fist at him, and Dr. Kilgour sent it packing with the glowing end of a cheroot.

“You’re not at the estate but at Saint Bridget’s Leprosarium.” Lenin looks worried. “You’re quite safe here. We had to smuggle you down from Gwendolyn Gardens. Too dangerous up there.”

Lenin’s right hand floats up to his skull. “Hold on!” Digby says. “You have a stitch there.” Digby looks to Mariamma as if to say, Go on now!

“How’s your head?” she says. Oh, God. Are those really my first words to my one and only lover after five years apart? How’s your head—after I drilled your skull and stuck a needle in your brain? Blood surges to her face. When she was a child no one could make her blush like Lenin.

“My head is fine,” he says. “I remember . . .”

They wait for him to go on. Outside, a common tailorbird chirps, Go-on-go-on-go-on. Mariamma holds her breath.

“I remember . . . I had a headache for so long.” The words squeeze out in English, but he’s out of practice. “If I cough or sneeze, my head . . . bursts. Life was being pressed out of me.” He’s becoming more fluent. “I had convulsions. Many. Daily. We had cyanide capsules. I was ready to take mine, then I thought . . .” Again, the pause, like a radio with a loose wire.

“Where is it?” Digby asks.

Lenin roots around the end of his mundu. Digby helps, extracting rupee notes held in a rubber band and a dirty ball of plastic wrap.

Lenin watches Digby. “Doctor, I know from my mother that you helped her when she needed you most. You prevented my entry into this world. Now you stop my exit!”

Digby laughs. “Both times premature. But believe me, if I hadn’t tracked down Mariamma, you wouldn’t have needed the cyanide.”

Hearing this, something bursts in Mariamma. A few hours’ delay and she’d have come to see a corpse, not this conscious, conversant being, this man who, despite everything, she loves. She sags against the table. An alarmed Digby drags a stool over for her.

Lenin’s hand reaches for hers.

His smile is skewed from the facial paralysis. But the warmth, the affection and concern for her in his eyes—that’s real, all Lenin. She doesn’t want to be the doctor anymore. But they aren’t done. She gathers herself. She wonders why he doesn’t ask how they took his headache away?

“Lenin?” He looks so vulnerable, his forehead bisected by her pen and a sutured wound on his head. “You have a tumor, an acoustic neuroma. It raised the pressure—”

“I’m sorry about your father, Mariamma,” he interrupts. “I read the paper. The Condition. So proud of you. Did you take my tumor out?”

It hurts to see hope extinguished in his eyes when she shakes her head. She uses the surgical pen on a piece of paper to explain what is going on. “. . . and when we put in the needle, fluid came surging out. You awoke. But it just bought us a little time.”

A playful light appears in his eyes. Then he laughs, which exaggerates the immobility of half of his face, so that it looks like a snarl. She must keep her eyes on the right side of his face.

“Mariammaye,” he says affectionately. “My doctor. Do you remember when we were children you said something was loose in my head? And someday you’d fix it?”

They’d been in church. Lenin had caught her eye as she stood on the women’s side; then, with no change of expression, he’d let a string of saliva spool down from his lip. She hadn’t been able to suppress her giggle. Big Ammachi pinched her ear.

“What I said was one day I’d crack your skull and pull out the Devil.”

“And you did!”

Digby brings them back to reality. “Lenin, you understand the tumor is still there. All we did was temporarily relieve the pressure above it.” He looks to Mariamma for support. “The pressure will rise again.”

Lenin says, “A needle into my brain? But I feel nothing.”

Digby says, “It’s a paradox, isn’t it? Poke the brain directly, you feel no pain. Step on a nail, though, and your brain pinpoints the exact spot. Unless you’re one of the patients here who feel nothing and come to harm.”

Mariamma says, “Lenin, you urgently need the tumor out. But we can’t do it here.” She puts her hand on his chest. “We must get you to Vellore. They have experience in such operations.” She sees him recoil. The fugitive calculating his escape routes.

“Why not here? I trust you—”

“I wish I could. I don’t have the skills. Yet.”

“Vellore? It won’t take long for them to know who I am.”

“But with the tumor out, you live. Live a full life!” She holds her breath.

He doesn’t respond. He’s withdrawing further. She thinks he’s steeling himself for death.

Digby says gently, “Lenin? What do you think?”

He doesn’t meet Digby’s gaze. He looks suddenly weary. “I think . . . I’m so hungry it’s hard to think.”

“Oh, heavens!” Digby says. “Some doctors we are! You must be starving. And this young lady needs a cup of tea too.”

Mariamma is suddenly weighed down, as though the ceiling just descended on her shoulders. She needs fresh air.

Cromwell squats outside the theater. On seeing Mariamma he smiles . . . then the smile is gone, and he leaps to his feet, rushing at her. What now? she thinks. And why’s the ground tilting so strangely?

She’s reclined in an armchair, her legs on an ottoman. A silk shawl covers her. Tea, biscuits, and water are beside her. She vaguely remembers being carried by Cromwell. She revived once she was horizontal, an anxious Digby hovering over her and insisting she rest. She said she’d close her eyes for five minutes. She must have fallen asleep. She has no idea for how long.

She drinks and eats greedily. Her refuge is a cool, carpeted, low-ceilinged study with bookcases built into the wall and rising up and over the door and window frames. It feels intimate and welcoming. Heavy curtains frame French windows that look out onto a small rectangle of lawn, bordered with colorful rose bushes; the garden is enclosed by a picket fence with a door cut into it on the far side. She imagines this lawn as Digby’s refuge, a place to sit in the sun and read a book. She stares out, fascinated by the ruler-like edges of the lawn, the beautifully trimmed rose bushes. It’s like a postcard she’s seen of tiny gardens fronting row houses in England, the enclosed patches of earth far too small for the owners’ horticultural ambitions, but warm and cozy all the same.

Among the bookshelves are nooks that display photographs. She’s drawn to an elegant silver frame holding a black-and-white picture of a small white boy in knee-high stockings, shorts, a tie, and a V-necked sweater. In his brow, his eyes, she sees unmistakable traces of the adult Digby. The boy’s shy smile as he looks at the camera doesn’t conceal the trace of anxiety. His first day of school, perhaps? A beautiful woman in a skirt crouches next to him, laughing, her knees together, her hand on his shoulder. That must be Digby’s mother. Her face is youthful but weary, her dark hair already showing a streak of gray. But for that instant when the shutter clicks she’s gathered her best self, drawn on her experience like a veteran actor when the curtain rises, and the result is simply stunning. She’s as beautiful as a movie star and blessed with a presence to match.

An unframed photograph in another alcove shows a huge, bearded white man flanked by lepers, his arms on their shoulders, like a coach with his squad. It’s the same face she saw in the oil portrait hanging just within Saint Bridget’s portico. This must be Rune Orqvist. She’s seen that name so often in the flyleaf of her mother’s ancient copy of Gray’s Anatomy. It was his book, even if the inscription inside was from Digby. It must have made a perfect gift for a young aspiring artist. Mariamma was so preoccupied with Lenin that she and Digby never talked about this connection. Lenin! She hurriedly drains the tea, no time to dawdle.

She washes up, still marveling at the connections in her world, invisible or forgotten, but there all the same, like a river linking people upstream with those below, whether they know it or not. The Thetanatt home was somewhere close by—gone now because her uncle sold it long ago. Rune was Elsie’s godfather. As a schoolboy, Philipose had been here too.

Exiting the room, she sees Digby coming down the hall: yes, the schoolboy’s tinge of worry, the earnestness, and even the smile are preserved in the older man’s expression. His concern for her is heartwarming.

“The tea and biscuits were magical,” she reassures him. “I’m fine now.” He looks relieved. “Digby, the picture in your study—that’s Rune, isn’t it? Same as in the foyer?” Digby nods. “His name is in my mother’s copy of Gray’s Anatomy. And you wrote the inscription. I’ve had the book with me all these years. It’s my good luck charm!”

Digby looks touched, almost overcome. He seems to struggle to say something and gives up. Instead, he wings out his elbow, a gesture so foreign to her that she wants to laugh. She threads her arm through his. It feels like the most natural thing in the world.

They walk back to Lenin in silence, passing through a cool, shaded cloister, the brick arches giving it the feeling of a medieval monastery. The paving stones underfoot are etched by the moss pushing up in the gaps. In the shadows of the cloister, a leper in white stands against a pillar. She is so still that, for a moment, Mariamma mistakes her for a statue . . . until the pallu of her sari, drawn over her head, stirs in the breeze. The leper cocks one ear to the sound of their footsteps in the manner of the sightless. Mariamma shudders involuntarily, not because of the woman’s grotesque features, but because the object she took to be lifeless came alive.

When this nightmare with Lenin is over, she’ll write to Uma Ramasamy about this leprosarium and its living patients, such a contrast to the formalin-preserved human remnants over which she labored. She’s tempted to tell Digby about Uma and their shared interest in this disease he’s given himself to, his life sentence. That fortuitous assignment with Uma led her to finding the cause of the Condition, led her to Lenin. But such thoughts are indulgent. There are pressing issues to discuss.

“Digby, I think the Condition does more than produce acoustic neuromas. My theory is that it also affects personality, makes them eccentric. It’s responsible for Lenin’s . . . recklessness, the stupid path he took. And his stubbornness now.”

“Well, it’d be a good argument before a judge, if he surrenders,” Digby says. “Might shorten his time in the clink.”

“I heard of this Naxalite woman serving a life sentence,” Mariamma says. “She was released after seven years.”

She marvels at where her mind is trying to take her. She’s gone from thinking she’d never see Lenin again to plotting a future. You’re getting too far ahead of yourself.

“Digby,” she says, “what if Lenin won’t surrender or go to Vellore, then—”

“Convince him. You must.” He releases her. “I’ll leave you two together.”

Lenin is back in the room where she first saw him, propped up again and appearing to be asleep. She sits on the chair by his bed. He opens his eyes.

“Mariamma?” He smiles at her. He picks out a biscuit from the pack beside him and breaks it down the middle. “If we bite at the same time, we’ll have supernatural powers. Like Mandrake the Magician. Remember? One bite, and somewhere in the galaxy, if we two are in time . . . ?” He makes the sign of the cross over her with the half biscuit, like a priest, but she grabs his hand.

She’s laughing despite herself. “It was Phantom Comics, macku. Not Mandrake.” She’s brought him back from the dead to call him an idiot. “Lenin, we don’t have much time. You will lose consciousness again, you understand? Please let us take you to Vellore.”

The one-sided smile fades. He looks away. He says, “What a waste, ma. These last five years. Seems like forty. Nothing changed for the adivasis, the pulayar. And you and me? I was so stupid, so blind.”

She’s overcome with sadness for him—for them. A narrow shaft of sunlight filters through leaves, touches the bed. The God who never interferes with drownings or train wrecks likes to peer in on the human experiment at such moments of reckoning, touching the scene with a little celestial light. She’s impatient, waiting for Lenin’s answer.

“Mariamma, when it’s all done, when life is almost over, what do you want to remember?”

She thinks of their one night together in Mahabalipuram. She found him when she’d already lost him to a doomed cause. And it’s happening again. Finding him only to lose him. She doesn’t answer. She just holds his hand.

“What do you want to remember, Lenin?” she says softly.

He doesn’t hesitate. “This. Here. Now. The sun on your face. Your eyes more blue than gray today. I want to remember this room, the remnant of biscuit in my mouth. Why wait for the world to show me anything better?” It’s as though he’s saying goodbye.

A dark cloud passes over his face—a trespasser. His breath quickens and beads of sweat glisten on his brow.

“Lenin, I beg you. Let us take you to Vellore. When the tumor is gone, then let whatever happens happen. Surrender and take what comes. But live! Live for my sake. Don’t ask me to watch you die.”

“Mariamma, it’s no good. I’ll die anyway. The police will kill me, tumor or no tumor.” His words stumble over one another. His eyes wander and it’s an effort to focus on her. She can see the veil descending. His voice is faint. “I’m glad you put that needle in. I could see you one more time, touch you, hear you. Mariamma, you know, don’t you? You know how I feel about you . . . ?”

His body stiffens; his eyes roll to one side.

She cries out for Digby, and he’s there, in time to watch Lenin have a seizure, rattling the bed with the violent shaking. Gradually it subsides.

Digby says, “Did he tell you what he wants?”

She bypasses the question because she won’t lie. “We’re going to take him to Vellore.”

In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. But this is her truth, her revolutionary act for Lenin and for herself. Long live the revolution.

The battered car bounces and weaves its way across the tapering waist of India from one shore to the other, racing to Vellore, Cromwell driving. Digby couldn’t come—he was sad about it. She wanted him with her, but she didn’t question his reasons. She sits turned sideways, checking frequently on Lenin, but he’s in a post-seizure stupor—either that or the fluid has built up again. They head north to Trichur, then turn east to climb the Palghat Gap in the Western Ghats before heading down into the plains to Coimbatore. Three hours in, her neck is stiff from twisting to attend to him. She dozes off and when she wakes, she’s startled to find Lenin looking at her, as if he’s the chaperone and she’s the patient being rushed to brain surgery.

She hadn’t given much thought to what she’d say to him about taking him to Vellore against his wishes. She’d been sure that moment was far away, perhaps long after surgery . . . that is if he survived the ride, let alone the surgery. What does she say now? I wanted you alive, no matter how you felt about it? Lenin watches her squirm, amused.

“Oh, go ahead, say it,” she bursts out. “Say I’m taking you to Vellore against your will.”

“It’s all right, Mariamma. No need. Cromwell explained.”

“Don’t mention,” Cromwell says, glancing back in the mirror. “Two hours more,” he adds. “Maybe less.”

She looks out the window. The moon shines through clouds, its ghostly light illuminating an arid, pocked landscape—they’ve landed on a lunar crater, by the look of it. The world, and the two men in the car, are at peace. She’s the one who is agitated. She wants to strangle them both.

Lenin reaches for her hand. “Cromwell says it was just this morning that we spoke, but I feel I’ve been gone months and months. And all that time I was thinking about our conversation. Your last words. I reflected on it for weeks, it seems like.” His hand unconsciously goes to his brow to touch the bandage. “Before I woke up in this car, I’d already come to a decision. If I was ready to die for something that I don’t believe in, surely, I must be willing to live for the one thing I do believe in.”

She doesn’t dare breathe. “And what’s that?”

He smiles. “By now you must surely know.”

A few stray dogs run around the streets of the small provincial town that is Vellore. Dawn is still hours away as they pass through the gates of the Christian Medical College Hospital. They’re expected, and as interns and nurses swarm over Lenin, the neurosurgical registrar comes by, talks to Mariamma at length. He orders a loading dose of anticonvulsant and forbids Lenin from taking anything by mouth. When day breaks, Lenin is whisked away for tests.

She finds Cromwell, who’d slept in the car. She encourages him to head back—it’s pointless for him to stay. He leaves reluctantly. She calls Digby. He is relieved they arrived safely. “Listen,” he says, “I think it might be a good thing for you to call the editor of the Manorama. Tell him what’s going on. If they connect Lenin to your family, your father, the Condition, it might serve notice to the police not to harm him. By the way, at Vellore they know who he is. I told them. They’ll have to let the Madras state police know. They will eventually inform their Kerala counterparts.” After she hangs up with Digby, she makes the call to the Manorama.

Lenin returns after his tests, his head fully shaved. He falls asleep. She does too, in the chair by his bed. At noon, the entire neuro­surgical team returns, this time with the chief, a compact, quiet man with kind, intelligent eyes behind rimless glasses. He’s still in surgical scrubs. He nods politely to Mariamma as the senior registrar presents Lenin’s case in a low voice, and shares the test results. Mariamma is tongue-tied before her future boss. The chief examines Lenin quickly, but thoroughly.

“You came just in time,” he says to both of them. “We discussed your case with our neurologists as well. We had to postpone a major surgical case. So we’ll operate right away, no point waiting. Let’s pray for a good outcome.”

The orderlies arrive to take Lenin away. It’s happening faster than Mariamma dreamed possible. All she gets to do is kiss him on his cheek. Lenin says, “It’ll be all right, Mariamma, don’t worry.”

There’s nothing emptier than a hospital bed to which a loved one might not return. She’s overcome, slumped on the chair, her face buried in her hands. The woman caring for her son in the next bed comes over to comfort her. To Mariamma’s surprise, a nurse comes and sits beside her and prays aloud. Faith at this institution is concrete, not abstract. After her father’s death she’d turned her back on religion, having lost faith. But she closes her eyes while the nurse prays . . . Lenin needs all the help he can get.

Now she must wait. Three hours, then four. The wait is agonizing. All she can do is helplessly stare at her watch and look up whenever anyone enters the ward. Then, an orderly comes for her—the chief wants to see her, that’s all he knows.

They walk through corridors, up stairs . . . her thoughts are a blur. She is led into a large hall outside the surgical suites where the chief waits calmly, seated on a bench. His mask dangles from one ear. He pats the bench beside him.

“He’s doing well. We managed to remove most of it. I had to leave some capsule behind because it was dangerously adherent. His facial nerve may or may not recover, but I’m hopeful.” His smile reassures her even more than his words.

Relief floods her being and tears spill out. He waits patiently. “Thank you! I’m sorry,” she manages to say at last, dabbing at her eyes. “I’m just overwhelmed. I can’t help thinking of my father. And of my father’s father. And so many of my relatives who never understood what they had. This is the first time anyone in my family who suffered this disease has had it treated.”

He listens, nodding, waiting. When he’s sure she is done he says quietly, “I read the papers you sent us with your application. It made me wonder if some of our patients with acoustic neuromas over the years might not have been from families like yours. We’re paying closer attention to the family histories now. Good work.”

“Thank you. I’m honored to be coming here,” she says. “What you did . . . removing such a tumor in that tiny space seems . . . impossible. A miracle.”

He smiles. “Well, we don’t believe we do anything alone.” He nods toward a large mural on the opposite wall. It depicts gowned, masked surgeons bent over a patient, under the halo of a theater lamp. In the shadows, figures observe the surgery. One of them is Jesus, his hand resting on the surgeon’s shoulder. Mariamma stares at it. She’s envious of the chief’s kind of faith.

“We pride ourselves here that we can do just about anything that the top centers in the world can do, but at a fraction of the cost. But the surgery we just performed, taking a rectangle of skull out just above his hairline, pushing aside the cerebellum . . . well, quite honestly, it’s crude compared to another operation for acoustic neuroma that right now only two or three centers in the world are doing. It was invented by an ENT surgeon, William House, who was a dentist before he became a surgeon. He began using a dental drill to get at the inner ear, the bony labyrinth, and realized that he could, by deepening that tunnel, approach an acoustic neuroma. It’s a brilliant innovation, yet incredibly difficult if you don’t know what you are doing.”

Mariamma has read about this surgery, but she doesn’t interrupt the chief lest she come across as a know-it-all.

“That’s what we need to offer here. It requires an operating microscope, the dental drill, and irrigation and other tools he adapted. But more than anything, it requires special training, many hours of dissecting the temporal bone on cadavers till one learns to do it. Right now only House and a few surgeons he trained perform the surgery. In time I’d like to send someone to train with him.” He smiles, rising. “Who knows, maybe that’s God’s plan for you, Mariamma. Let’s see. Let’s pray about it.”

Big Ammachi would have loved this man, relished his words. God had answered her grandmother’s prayer: heal the Condition or send someone who can.

The chief says, “By the way, DSP Rajan of our local police talked to me. I’ve given him my assurance that Lenin won’t be going anywhere. I know you’ll help me keep my word.”