It is Philipose, putting down his pen to see why the house is so silent, who finds Big Ammachi and Baby Mol wrapped in each other’s arms, unmoving, their faces peaceful.
He doesn’t raise an alarm but sits cross-legged beside them, utterly still, in silent vigil. Through tears he remembers his mother’s life, what he was told of it by her and by others, and what he witnessed of her years on earth: her goodness, her strength despite her tiny size, her patience and tolerance, but especially her goodness. He recalls their conversation the previous night. What was there to forgive? You could never have done anything that wasn’t in my interest. He thinks of his loving sister, and the narrow, confined life she lived that never seemed that way to her, and how much she enriched their lives. He was her “precious baby,” never aging for her, just as she never aged. Strangers might feel sorry for Baby Mol, but if they’d understood how happy she was, how fully she lived in the present, inhabiting each second, they’d have been envious. It will take time, he knows, to begin to trace the outlines of the massive rent in his life, in the lives of everyone who knew the matriarch of Parambil and who knew Baby Mol. For now, it is too large to comprehend, and he bows his head.
Part Eight
CHAPTER 63
The Embodied and the Disembodied
1968, Madras
On her first day, Mariamma and her classmates walk to the Red Fort, which sits apart from the rest of the medical school like the scary relative hidden away in an attic, but in this case behind the cricket grounds. Thick, muscular, gray vines form an exoskeleton holding up the crumbling red brick. The mosque-like turrets and the gargoyles staring down from the friezes remind her of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Madras has changed from her father’s brief student days, when the British were everywhere, their pith helmets bobbing on the streets and most of the cars carrying white people. Now, only their ghosts linger in buildings of fearsome scale, like Central Station and the University Senate Building. And the Red Fort. Her father said these structures had intimidated him; he resented them because they were paid for by smashing the handlooms of village weavers so Indian cotton could only be shipped back to English mills and the cloth sold back to Indians. He said that every mile of railway track they built had one purpose: to get their loot back to ports. But Mariamma has no resentment. It’s all Indian now—hers—whatever its origins. The only white faces around belong to scruffy tourists with backpacks who desperately need to bathe.
She takes a last glance outside, like Jean Valjean saying goodbye to freedom, as they pass under the arch that reads MORTUI VIVOS DOCENT. Inside the Red Fort, it’s unnaturally cool. The yellow-lustered lanterns hanging down from the lofty ceilings ensure it is as dim as a dungeon. The flanking glass cabinets at the portal are like sentries, one holding a wired human skeleton and the other empty, as if the occupant has taken a stroll.
Two unshaven, khaki-clad, barefoot peons, or “attenders,” watch them file in. One is tall and cadaverous, his mouth a slit, his eyes unfocused, like an abattoir worker watching the herd entering the chute. The other man is short, his mouth blood-red from betel nut, and he drools his lechery. Of the one hundred and two students, a third are female; the second attender has eyes only for the women; Mariamma feels soiled when his gaze falls on her face then drops to her breasts. The senior students warned them that in the caste structure of the school, these two, who look like the lowest of the low, have the professors’ ears and can determine a student’s fate.
“Stay close, Ammachi,” Mariamma silently says under her breath. The night Big Ammachi died, Mariamma was away in Alwaye College, at her desk, studying her botany notes. She had the curious sensation of her grandmother being in the room, as though if she turned around, she’d see the old lady standing in the doorway, smiling. The feeling was there when she woke up, and still there when her father appeared in a hired car to bring her home. Her grief over the deaths of Baby Mol and Big Ammachi is fresh. She doubts it will ever fade. But through it all, her sense of Big Ammachi accompanying her, being embodied within her has remained—that’s her consolation. Her grandmother lit the velakku the night of her birth with the hope that her namesake might shed light on the deaths of JoJo, Ninan, and Big Appachen, and the struggles of those like her father and Lenin who live with the Condition, that she might find a cure. The journey begins here, but she is not alone.
The pungent smell of formalin with an after-odor of slaughterhouse batters their nostrils even before they enter the dissection hall. The cavernous space is surprisingly bright thanks to floor-to-ceiling frosted windows and skylights that illuminate the rows of marble slabs. On the slabs, stained red rubber sheets drape static shapes that were once alive. Mariamma drops her gaze to the tiled floor. The formalin scratches her nostrils and her eyes water.
“WHO IS YOUR TEACHER?”
They come to a halt, a confused herd, panicked by this roar. Someone steps onto her heel.
The voice bellows again, repeating the question. It originates from thick lips floating under flaring nostrils. Swimmy, bloodshot eyes peer out of a fortresslike face and from under the overhanging slabs that form the brow; the cheeks resemble weathered, pockmarked concrete. This living, breathing sibling of the gargoyles atop the Red Fort is Professor P. K. Krishnamurthy, or “Gargoylemurthy,” as the seniors refer to him. His hair is neither parted nor combed but instead sticks up like a boar’s bristle. But his long lab coat is brilliant white and of the finest pressed cotton, making their short, itchy linen coats look gray by comparison.
Gargoylemurthy’s fingers wrap around the arm of an unlucky baby-faced fellow whose prominent Adam’s apple makes him appear to have swallowed a coconut. This student’s thick, wavy hair falls into his eyes and he reflexively tosses his head back, a gesture that looks insolent.
“Name?” Gargoylemurthy asks.
“Chinnaswamy Arcot Gajapathy, sir,” he says confidently. Mariamma is impressed—in his place, she’d have stammered or gone mute.
“Chinn-ah!” The gargoyle is amused and bares long, yellow teeth. “Arcot Gajapathy-ah?” Gargoylemurthy smirks at the rest of them, insisting they find the name as funny as he does. Like Judases, they oblige. “So, I’m now knowing who you are. But Chinnah, I ask again: Whooo-eh is, your-eh, teacher-eh?”
“Sir . . . you are our teacher? Professor—”
“WRONG!”
His fingers flex tighter around Chinnah’s arm, a python readjusting its hold. “Chinnah?” he says, but he’s surveying the herd, ignoring Chinnah. “By chance have you noticed the words over the entry as you firstly walked in?”
“Sir . . . yes, I noticed something.”
“Something, aah?” Gargoylemurthy pretends to look annoyed.
“It was some other language, sir. So, I . . . ignored—” Chinnah hastily tries to correct himself, “I think it said ‘Macku’ . . . or something.”
They gasp. “Macku” means dummy. Dunce.
“Macku?” The brows come together like thunderclouds. The squat neck retracts into the chest. The eyes bore into Chinnah. “Macku is what you are. That ‘some other language’ is Latin, macku!” Gargoylemurthy collects himself. He fills his chest. He shouts, “It says, ‘MORTUI VIVOS DOCENT’! It means, ‘The Dead Shall Inform the Living’!”