The Covenant of Water

Mariamma has forgotten where she is, forgotten her name. She is that embryo. A cell from Philipose and a cell from Elsie. The two became one, and then divided.

Professor Jamsetji Rustomji Cowper drops the cloth. It’s no longer a three-dimensional embryo, but a flat duster. He brushes chalk from his palms. He comes around the broad desk. He raises his hands as though in submission, his voice quiet. “We know so little. What little we do know leaves me in awe. Haeckel famously said, ‘Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.’ Meaning, the stages of the development of the human embryo—yolk sac, gills, even a tail—echoes the stages of human evolution, from one-cell amoeba, to fish, to reptile, to ape, to Homo erectus, to Neanderthal . . . to you.” He has a faraway expression, his eyes full of emotion. Then he catches himself and returns to the present, smiling. “All right? That’s enough for your first day.”

He turns to leave, then stops and says, “Oh, and welcome to each one of you.”





CHAPTER 64


The Ginglymoarthrodial Joint


1969, Madras

Every day the six of them saw and scrape at “Henrietta”—they’ve named her in honor of Henry Gray—beginning with the upper limbs. It’s shocking how quickly their initial reticence dissipates, and soon their dissection guide, Cunningham’s Manual of Practical Anatomy, is propped on Henrietta’s belly as they work, three on each side. They feel possessive of her—they can’t imagine working on any other cadaver. She’s an ally in their labors. When Henrietta’s shoulder is disarticulated, Mariamma carves their group number on a square of intact skin as the arms are thrown together in the formalin tank in the corridor. The next day, da Vinci fishes with his bare hands, hauls out a dripping limb, and shouts the number. Mariamma tries to carry it back with her thumb and index finger encircling Henrietta’s wrist but finds she needs to hold it with both hands, like a saber; fat drops of formalin seep between her slippered toes. It’s impossible to eat lunch after dissection, the formalin reek clinging to her skin. A brief letter from Lenin in the first week is a welcome sight.

Dear Doctor: May I be the first to call you that? But don’t call me Achen because I don’t know if I will ever be one. By the way, BeeYay Achen came to speak at the seminary. I told him that I am seriously thinking of leaving. After all these years, all I know is that my life was spared to serve God. But what if God meant for me to serve in some other way? BeeYay encouraged me to finish my rural student-service posting. He didn’t disagree that God may have other plans for me, but he said sometimes we have to “live the question,” not push for the answer.

They became pen pals when she entered Alwaye College, by which time he was well along in seminary. His letters switch back and forth between Malayalam and English. She’d never expected him to be such a faithful correspondent. What surprises her even more is how willing he is to pour out his feelings, to explore them at length, as though he has no one else to share them with. Before she came to Madras, he’d written to say:

I’m a boil sticking out on smooth skin here. If my fellow seminarians share my doubts, they’ll never admit to it. They’ll even pretend Judges, or Chronicles—surely the most boring books in the Bible—are inspiring. But we have one or two gems whose faith burns in their every action. I’m envious. Why can’t I feel that way?

The upper limb dissection takes six weeks to complete. After the exam on the upper limb, she writes to Lenin, celebrating this milestone. “I get depressed if I dwell too long on what remains. Thorax, abdomen and pelvis, head and neck, lower limb. One more year of this. If Alwaye College was like drinking from a hose, medical school is like drinking from the raging river—and there’s so much to memorize.”

A year and two months after Mariamma first met her, Henrietta looks like the remains of a man-eating tiger’s kill. At night, Mariamma and Anita take turns being examiner and examinee, practicing for the viva voce that follows the written exam. Anita tosses a bone into an empty pillow cover and says, “Reach in, Madam.” Mariamma is expecting a wrist or tarsal bone, which she must identify by feel alone.

“Easy-scapula-left-side.”

“Slow down, smarty pants! Has anyone else told you you speak too fast? Name the bony features.”

“Coracoid process, acromion, spine . . .”

“Take it out and show me the insertion of trapezius and the teres major . . .”

Soon she’s writing to her father to remind him to send the final exam fees: the year has somehow gone by.

It’s nice that Podi sends greetings through you but ask her why she can’t write. Tell her I won’t send another letter till she does. Please assure Anna Chedethi that I drink the Horlicks every night. I’m not surprised about what you heard about Lenin. He wrote to me that he’d rather be dissecting corpses than sitting with classmates who feel like corpses.

Appa, after over a year of studying the body, my passing or failing will come down to six essay questions. If I fail, I join the B batch and repeat in six months. Imagine, hundreds of pages that I’ve memorized, diagrams practiced, just for six questions that will all be like this: “Describe and illustrate the structure of X.” X will be the name of one joint, one nerve, one artery, one organ, one bone, and one topic in embryology. It’s unfair! Six essays to judge everything I learned in over 13,000 hours. (Anita added it up.)

By the way, I told you about Gargoylemurthy and Cowper. They both like my dissections and invited me to appear for the Prize Exam in Anatomy. Only a few students dare go for it. It’s a separate day, with one advanced essay and then an assigned dissection to complete in four hours.

During the study holidays she wakes from an afternoon nap to find a black-faced, wizened fellow with gray sideburns crouched on her desk, blinking rapidly. He must have reached through the window bars and worked open the bolt. When she tries to shoo him away, he bares his teeth and steps forward menacingly. The kurangu ransacks the desks for food and when he finds none, he pulls down the clothesline out of meanness before leaving. The monkey problem is truly out of control.

She seeks out Chinnah, their class president. He sighs. “I’ve pestered the dean and the superintendent for help. Hopeless! I wanted to wait till after exams, but the monkeys have declared war.”

Chinnah was their unanimous choice for president, perhaps because of his coolheadedness on their first day with Gargoylemurthy. While the rest of the class is feverishly studying, Chinnah begins the Indo-Simian Campaign. He enforces the rule of no food stored in rooms; violators are shamed on the mess blackboard. He pays street urchins armed with slingshots to sit on the upper balconies to meet the regular afternoon forays the monkeys make. Then, mysteriously, a pair of monkeys gets trapped overnight in the dean’s office and another in the superintendent’s office, destroying and soiling these rooms in their frenzy to escape. The next day, a work crew trims overhanging branches around the hostels and repairs window screens, and now garbage is collected twice a day. The blackboard in the mess hall proclaims NO MONKEY BUSINESS WITH CHINNAH. He’s a shoo-in for reelection.

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