The Covenant of Water

“The minutes we spend watching the waves don’t count against our life spans,” she says.

“Really? Maybe I should just stay here, then, if I’m to live to my thirties.” He’s smiling, but she doesn’t like what she hears.

It’s pitch dark when they leave, stumbling in the sand, holding hands. The last bus to the city has left. The old Mariamma would’ve panicked; this one couldn’t care less.

The hand-lettered sign on the narrow, three-story lodge reads MAJESTICHOTELROYALMEELS, the letters squished together. A lone seated figure jumps to his feet, brandishing his towel like a whip, flicking dust off the chairs and dining tables. He’s overjoyed to have customers. He leads the way up rickety stairs while Mariamma marvels at the steeple shape of his skull.

She lifts the thin mattress and scans for bedbugs. There’s nowhere to sit other than the narrow bed. A naked bulb on the ceiling provides light. A raised door leads to a tiny bathroom with a squat-toilet, a tap, and a bucket with a mug bobbing in it. Cockroaches scurry away when she turns on the light. She fills the bucket and bathes, washing off sweat, sand, and salt. Lenin lends her a mundu from his bag and she ties it under her armpits. Then it’s his turn.

The boy who delivers the food must be the chef’s son, because his skull is also shaped like a tower. “It’s called oxycephaly,” she says to Lenin. He’s impressed, but less so when she says there’s no treatment for it.

“Good that there’s a name, at least,” he says.

Unwittingly, his words deflate her. Just like with “the Condition,” a name cures nothing.

The banana-leaf packets of vegetable biryani exceed their expectations of RoyalMeels; the chef’s cooking is better than his spelling. Lenin, bare-chested, hardly eats. She’s seen him without his shirt often, but somehow this feels different. He’s bemused as she wolfs down her packet and the rest of his. When she’s done, he punches her on the shoulder.

“So, Mariammaye,” he says, “it’s the usual story with you. I turn around and you’re in trouble.” He lights a cigarette. She snatches the cigarette from his mouth. “Hey! You could ask!”

She draws in the smoke and lets it out; the lazy spiral that rises to the ceiling is like a living being. His grin has traces of the old Lenin, but it’s an effort. “So, twin brother. Spit it out. What’s going on with you?” So much for giving him room to decide.

He stares out of the window for a long time.

“I’ve gone down a path,” he says.

She waits, but nothing more is forthcoming. “A straight line, right? Can’t stop till you must?”

He nods. “But on this one when I come to the end, it will be the end.”

He has nothing more to say.

“So, how’s your tribal friend—Kochu paniyan, was it? And Raghu, the banker? See? I read your letters.”

He looks at her, his expression even more somber.

“They’re both dead.”

She feels a cold hand clawing at her throat. She wants to plug her ears. She should stop him from saying another word. She stands, unsure why. The naked bulb glares in her eyes and she turns it off. There. That helps. She paces the room, with measured steps, trying not to look frantic. Her eyes adjust. There’s faint light from the window. A woman’s voice drifts up from downstairs. She remembers as a girl how she hated the newly arrived Lenin for his antics, but she couldn’t stop herself from trailing him. Why? She had to see what happened next. It was a compulsion. Lenin’s face in the glow of his cigarette shows concern for her. And behind that expression, she sees despair. She settles back on the bed, cross-legged, facing him. She can’t help herself. The old compulsion won’t go away. She must know.

“When I got to Wayanad, I started remembering the strangest things,” Lenin says. “I don’t think I mentioned this in my letters. We had lived there when I was a young child, so my parents said, but I had no memories from then. It was only in getting to know Kochu paniyan, visiting his settlement in the forest, a place his family has been for three or four generations, that some of it came back. Memories of my beautiful mother. I remembered waiting for her outside huts like Kochu paniyan’s, shutting my ears to a woman’s screams as she delivered. I can see a man just like Kochu paniyan coming to our house with a giant carp to give my mother. Maybe as payment. And he cleaned it for us, then he came back with cooking oil and maybe paddy. Maybe he found us alone, the kitchen fire out, and my father gone—that would be a good guess. Surely, I didn’t imagine all this? What other memories are buried in my head?”

Tribals are suspicious people, Lenin said. They’d been used and abused by everyone who came. The British abolished slavery, yet they compelled the tribals to cut down their precious trees to build ships. If the British hadn’t discovered tea, the mountains would be bald. Instead, they made the tribals terrace the slopes they had lived on for generations. Then more recently, it was Malayalis from Cochin and Travancore who did the exploitation, a northern migration, Lenin said. Clerks, merchants, drivers. “People like my father.” The tribals didn’t use cash; they bartered for what they needed. The newcomers would encourage them to build pukka houses, and to help themselves to pickaxes, wheelbarrows, shovels, pulleys, cement, clothes—no cash needed, just a thumbprint. When they couldn’t pay, they forfeited land. The tribals learned painful lessons. “When you are robbed, you quickly become politically conscious. You have nothing to lose but your chains. That’s Marx, by the way, not me.”

“Good that you can quote Marx,” Mariamma says.

Lenin pauses. “I can stop if you don’t want to hear more.”

She doesn’t respond.

At Baby’s Tea Shop—“Moscow”—Lenin liked to sit with Raghu. Lenin would occasionally see him with an older man in his forties, Arikkad, who never stayed long. Raghu said if Lenin really wanted to understand the class tensions in Wayanad, then Arikkad was the professor. Arikkad was from a middle-class Christian family. He had been to prison for participating in the coir-workers strike. Raghu said there was no better education than being behind bars. Das Kapital and Stalin’s History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union circulated among the jailed for the simple reason that they were the only ones translated into Malayalam. One went in for public drunkenness and came out a sober Communist. Arikkad became a dedicated Party man, living with the tribals, advocating for them. That was something no Congress Party worker ever did.

Lenin says, “When I was introduced to Arikkad I found him humble. Inspiring. More than my old achen. Here was someone actually doing something to improve life for the tribals. He was far more interested in me, in my calling to be a priest.”

“Aah! You had a good story for that, didn’t you,” Mariamma says drily. It came out before she gave it much thought. “I’m sorry. Ignore that. Go on.”

Abraham Verghese's books