The Covenant of Water

He drags Chinnah to the nearest slab, snatching off the rubber sheet to expose what they’ve been dreading. There it is . . . A fallen log, a petrified leathery object in the shape of a woman, but the face is pancaked flat, hard to recognize as truly human. Anita, Mariamma’s roommate, whimpers and leans against her. Mariamma prays she doesn’t faint. The previous night, homesick, Anita asked if she could push their beds together, and without waiting for an answer she’d huddled against Mariamma, the same way Mariamma had huddled against Hannah or Big Ammachi or Anna Chedethi. They’d both slept soundly.

Gargoylemurthy places Chinnah’s hand in the hand of the cadaver, like a priest uniting the bride and groom. “Here, macku, is your teacher!” A smile cracks Gargoylemurthy’s features. “Chinnah, kindly shake hands with your professor! The Dead Shall Inform the Living. I am not the teacher. She is.”

Chinnah shakes his new teacher’s hand readily, preferring it to Gargoylemurthy’s.

Mariamma and her five dissection mates perch like vultures on stools around their slab, with “their” body. They’re each given their very own “bone box”—a long, rectangular cardboard carton—to take home. It contains a skull, its pieces glued together, the calvarium coming off like a kettle top, and the mandible hinged in place; vertebrae strung together by a wire through the neural arch to make a necklace; one temporal bone; a sampling of loose ribs; a hemi-pelvis with a femur, tibia, and ulna from the same side; one sacrum; one scapula with matching humerus, radius, and ulna; one hand and foot, fully articulated with wire; and loose wrist and tarsal bones in two small cloth sacks.

Gargoylemurthy poses Chinnah in the “anatomical position”: standing with his hands by his sides, palms forward, slightly reminiscent of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

He says, “We are mobile, flexible creatures. But for anatomical descriptive purposes we must pretend the body is fixed in Chinnah’s standing position, understand? Only then can you describe any structure in the body by its position relative to adjacent structures.”

He spins Chinnah around and superimposes the scapula on Chinnah’s scapula. He then defines for them its medial (closer to the midline), lateral (further from the midline), superior and inferior (or cranial and caudal), anterior, and posterior (or ventral and dorsal) aspects. Anything nearer to the center or closer to the point of attachment is “proximal” (so the knee is proximal to the ankle), while things further out are “distal” (the ankle being distal to the knee). They need this basic vocabulary to begin. In Moore Market the previous day, her father’s old friend Janakiram gifted her a used but recent edition of Gray’s. “Mug it up, ma!” he said. “ ‘Memorization and recitation’ is the mantra!” When she ruffled through its pages, she heard the same mantra ring out, echoed in the meticulous underlining and margin notes of the previous owner, road signs to guide her on the journey. Gray’s was familiar to her. In high school, once she set her sights on medicine, she spent hours with her mother’s copy of Gray’s Anatomy. It was an ancient edition even if the illustrations were largely the same. Anatomy hasn’t changed but the terminology has. The Latin names are gone, thank goodness; the “arteria iliaca communis” is now the “common iliac artery.” She’d been fascinated by the illustrations in her Gray’s, and not just because they must have been useful to her mother. She didn’t have her mother’s artistic hand, but she’d stumbled onto something she did have. After staring at an illustration, she could close the book and reproduce the figure accurately (though not artistically), entirely from memory. She thought nothing of it, but her astounded father assured her it was a gift. If so, her gift was being able to translate a two-dimensional figure on the page into a three-dimensional one in her head. Then, like a child stacking blocks, she reproduced the figure by going from the inner layer out, till she had the whole. It had been entertaining, a parlor trick. Now she’ll need to know the names of each structure and memorize the pages of text that accompany each figure.

Two hours later they file out, all one hundred and two of them, to a lecture hall at the other end of the Red Fort. Just as in college, the ladies occupy the first few rows of the sloping gallery. The boys fill the rows behind. Glaring down at them from the walls are former Heads of Anatomy—HOAs—all of them white, whiskered, bald, unsmiling, and deceased, but memorialized in these portraits.

Dr. Cowper enters quietly, the first and only Indian HOA, appointed after Independence, a clean-shaven Parsi. Cowper is small-boned, with fine, pleasant features. When his portrait eventually goes up, he’ll also be the only one with a full head of hair. The two barefoot attenders and the assistant professor flutter about Cowper, but he doesn’t need or expect their fawning. As the assistant calls out their names Cowper stands to one side, regarding each face with paternal interest. When Mariamma rises to say “Present, sir,” Cowper glances in her direction, a welcoming look, just for her (or so she thinks, but later learns they all felt that way). She feels a stab of homesickness for her father.

The overlapping blackboards on pulleys behind Cowper shine like ebony. The shorter attender with the lecherous gaze (or “da Vinci,” as the seniors call him) lines up colored chalk and duster cloth, his former sluggishness gone, as is his paan cheek-bulge. The class waits, pens and color pencils in hand, ready to reproduce every drawing from this legendary teacher of embryology. The only sounds Mariamma hears are the groans and sighs of the ancient fort.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Cowper says, stepping forward and smiling, “we are merely renting these bodies of ours. You came into this world on an in breath. You will exit on an out breath. Hence, we say that someone has . . . ? ‘Expired’!” His shoulders shake silently at his own joke, his eyes glinting behind his wire glasses. “I know what happens to the body when it is no more, but not what happens to you, to the essence of you. Your soul.” He adds wistfully, “I wish I did.”

By confessing his doubt, he has won them over, this smiling, gentle professor.

“However, I do know where you came from. From the meeting of two cells, one from each of your parents—that’s how you came to be. We’ll spend the next six months studying that nine-month process. You could spend a lifetime and never cease to marvel at the elegance and beauty of embryology. ‘Abiding happiness and peace are theirs who choose this study for its own sake, without expectation of any reward.’ ”

While lecturing, Cowper draws on the boards with both hands as naturally as he walks on two feet. He swiftly diagrams the intricate fusion of ovum and sperm to form a single cell, then becoming the blastocyst.

Toward the end of the hour, Cowper spreads out the rectangular duster cloth on the demonstration table. Delicately, he pinches up a fold down the center of the cloth duster, down its long axis, carefully shaping a long ridge. “This is how the neural tube forms, the precursor to your spinal cord. And this bulbous end,” he says, fluffing up one end of the ridge, “is the early brain.”

Then comes a moment none of them will forget: he lowers his body so his eyes are at the level of the surface of the table and his pale fingers carefully—as though handling living tissue—raise the long edges of the duster cloth from either side so they arch over the central ridge to meet above it in the midline. “And that,” he says, pointing with his nose, and then peering at them through the hollow cylinder he has formed, “is the primitive gut!”

Abraham Verghese's books