The Covenant of Water

1977, Parambil

Prisoners aren’t allowed visitors for one month. For Mariamma, waiting that long is torture. To make things worse, every Triple Yem patient seems to know her business. Not a day goes by without someone saying, “At least in jail they get one good meal a day. How bad can that be?” A toddy tapper with a deep laceration on his forehead opines from under a surgical towel: “If only I’d gone to prison, I wouldn’t be climbing trees. They learn useful things, like tailoring.” Her patience vanishes and she drops her needle holder. “You’re right. If you’d gone to prison, I wouldn’t be stitching up a man who kissed a goat, mistaking it for his wife.” Joppan takes over the suturing, something he excels at, while she storms out.

Every morning, Anna Chedethi fusses over her, checking the drape of Mariamma’s sari before she lets her go to Triple Yem. “You’ve lost weight,” Anna Chedethi scolds. “And you’re not eating what I send over.”

She and Uplift Master travel to Trivandrum to retain a lawyer. The man is competent and experienced. Until Lenin is formally charged, there is very little to be done, he says. He lists Naxalites who have been sentenced for seven to ten years, even life, but most have had their sentences commuted in three or four years. With Lenin’s medical history, and since he hasn’t been directly connected with any deaths, he might serve only “a few years.”

This is good news. Or should be. Yet by the time Mariamma gets home, the reality of what “a few years” will mean to their lives has her despondent. Soon she’ll be in Vellore for her neurosurgical training. Instead of a three-hour bus ride, it’ll be an overnight train journey to see Lenin. And every day she’ll be worrying about his welfare in prison. She’s emotionally exhausted.

Anna Chedethi takes one look at her face when she walks in and without a word, she sits her down. She whips chilled yogurt and water in a small bowl, adds a slice of green chili, chopped ginger, curry leaves, and salt, and serves it to her in a tall glass. She pushes Mariamma’s hair back behind her ears, just as when she was a little girl, home from school. Mariamma drains the glass. This is a better invention than penicillin. She bathes, has a bit of kanji with pickle, then heads to bed early.

Just past midnight she’s wide awake. There’s no point fighting it. She heads to her father’s study wanting to hear his voice in his journals. She has bookmarked those precious entries where he expresses his love for his daughter. Those passages bring her to tears every time. She marvels at the number of these odes to her at a time when she still lived under his roof; once she left for college, he pined for her even more. If only she’d come home more often.

She strokes the cover of the notebook. This is all she has left of him—his thoughts. The only notebook that’s missing is at the bottom of a lake, one artifact among many in a terrible tragedy. She might never know why he got on the train to Madras. Thus far, the “tumor of thought” hasn’t shown itself, unless the very existence of these rambling notes, the sheer volume of them, the compulsive, incessant commentary on life is the “tumor.” But it’s not a trait shared by others with the Condition. It was unique to him.

Even if she knew for sure that her hypothesis was wrong and there was no “tumor of thought,” she’d keep going through every notebook. On these pages her father, the Ordinary Man, is very much alive; she dreads the day when she’ll come to the last entry.

She adjusts the lamp, picks up her pen, and resumes the deciphering, the indexing, where she left off at the bottom of a page. She turns to the next page—

—and something looks off. Her eyes are jarred by the sight of white spaces, paragraph breaks, and a string of capital letters—the very things her father avoided like mortal sins. This page feels like a violation of his rule book.

My Mariamma turned seven today and wanted cake. No one has ever made a cake before in Parambil. She got the idea from Alice in Wonderland. She and Ammachi mixed the batter in a lidded tin and put hot coals above and below. I assured her that I had the DRINK ME potion, just in case like in Alice, this was an EAT ME cake and made her suddenly tall. Delicious! Vanilla and cinnamon. Then I gave her the birthday present: her first fountain pen, Parker 51, gold top and blue barrel. A beautiful instrument. It is what I had always promised as soon as she became a big girl. She was so excited. “Does this mean I’m a big girl at last?” I said she was. And she is!

Mariamma sees her own childish scrawl in English on the page with the new pen.

MY NAME IS MARIAMMA. I AM SEVEN.

After another white space, her father resumes.

Only in meditating on Ninan’s death, by suffering it anew each night for twelve years, have I come to fully understand the gift, the miracle, of my precious Mariamma. I didn’t see it at once. It took time. I had to scale the highest palm, just like my father, to see what had eluded me on the ground, to see what I didn’t want to see, what I have never put in these notes because if I did, I would be acknowledging what I knew in my bones, but I never wished to acknowledge. Thoughts can be pushed away. Words on a page are as permanent as figures carved in stone.

Tonight, prompted by my daughter becoming the big girl she wanted to be, I must be worthy of her by being truthful to myself and to these journals. I could not put these words down

UNTIL THIS MOMENT

Mariamma is disoriented by the large letters. Her father clearly stopped to fuss over each one, doodling to build a word monument, seeking to memorialize the moment. Or was he hesitating, second-guessing himself about whatever it was he was loath to put down? The three words occupy the rest of the page.

She turns to the next page:

After Ninan’s death, my Elsie left. She was gone for just over a year. When she came back, Elsie was already with child.

My writing “already with child” is proof that my eyes are open. Perhaps Big Ammachi saw it all along. Perhaps that is what she meant when she said to me at Mariamma’s birth, “God sent us a miracle in the form of this baby, who arrived fully formed and only herself.” The baby was not Ninan reborn, but something infinitely more precious: my Mariamma! But I was a fool in the clutches of opium, unable to receive or recognize the priceless gift of my baby, who today is a “big girl.”

Free of opium, my healing really only began when I undertook to love the baby girl with all my heart. I am her father—yes, I am—by my choice. Were she of my own blood, then she would be a different child, not my Mariamma, and that I shudder to imagine. I refuse to. I would never want to lose my Mariamma. My loving God didn’t give me my son back. No, he gave me something far better. He gave me my Mariamma. And she gave me life.

She reads her father’s words again and again, failing to understand at first, then refusing to understand, even as the words crash onto her head like the roof collapsing.

already with child

When she does understand, she chokes on this terrible knowledge. She stumbles away from the desk, her mind reeling, her body threatening to reject her meager dinner.

This room, her father’s room, is suddenly foreign to her. Or is it she herself—the observer—whom she no longer knows? She remembers coming to this room with him after they ate her birthday cake. She sat on her father’s lap, holding her new Parker 51, filling it with Parambil Purple ink. And writing the words now immortalized on the page. Her father’s words below that are what devastate her.

“Appa, what are you saying? My beloved father—who tells me he is not my father—what are you saying?”

She’s going mad. Who might she ask? Big Ammachi knew, or so her father thought. But she isn’t here for Mariamma to ask. She paces the room, numb with disbelief. Where did her mother go in that absent year? Who assuaged her grief? Did she begin a new life? If so, why come home again? To give birth?

She’s halfway through her father’s journals, the entries scattered in time. But this is the only mention he’s made of this. He had the knowledge all along, but the words were too painful to write. His every unspoken thought he’d put down except for this one. He could not . . . until he did. Perhaps he never addressed it again in writing, having expunged what festered inside him and found peace.

“Oh, Appa, you found your peace, but you’ve left me upended. You’ve slashed the roots that connect me to this house, to my grandmother, to you . . .” She thinks of waking Anna Chedethi, crawling into her arms. Would Anna Chedethi have known? No, she only came to Parambil when Elsie was about to give birth. It would appear that her father never discussed his suspicions, his sure knowledge with Big Ammachi. And Big Ammachi didn’t talk about it with her son. She carried what she knew to her grave. As did her son . . . but for this note.

She catches sight of herself in the mirror that her father used for shaving, still there in an alcove, as though waiting for him to take it out to the verandah. She recoils because she sees a wild-eyed, anguished, insane woman staring back.

“Who am I?” she says to the apparition in the mirror. She always felt she had her father’s eyebrows, his way of tilting his head to listen; definitely his nose, his upper lip—how can that not be true? Even their hair was so similar, thick, with a slight recession at the temples, though he didn’t have her piebald streak.

Her piebald streak . . . That is her clue. That’s what carries her to the top of the palm like her father, and now her vision is unimpeded.

I see.

I remember. I understand.

I have it now, this terrible knowledge I never wished for.