The Covenant of Water

“No, you’re right. I have a good story. That’s the trouble. I used to believe my own story. But I don’t now. I wasn’t spared to serve God. I was spared to serve people like the pulayi who saved me. But I wasn’t doing it, not as a seminarian. Anyway, I confided my doubts to Arikkad. He said, ‘So, you’re tired of dispensing opium?’ I didn’t get it till he explained. Apparently, Marx said that religion was the opium of the masses. It kept the oppressed from complaining or trying to change things. Arikkad also said the church didn’t have to be the way it is here. He said there were Jesuits in Colombia and Brazil who lived and worked with tribals, doing just as Christ taught. When the peasants began an insurgency against a government that oppressed them, these priests couldn’t help but be in solidarity with them. They joined the rebels. They disobeyed their church. One of the Jesuits had written about his cause. He called it ‘liberation theology.’ It was a revelation to me. I wondered if my seminary library had those texts. Probably not.”

Everything changed for Lenin when Kochu paniyan failed to show one day for work. He came the next morning, early, knocking at Lenin’s door, looking anguished, desperate. He said his younger brother had borrowed money from a businessman named C.T., then borrowed even more, pledging the family land. The loans were due. Rather than tell the family—and he must have had many warnings—the brother had disappeared. Kochu paniyan first knew about it when C.T. arrived with court papers saying the family had seventy-two hours to leave. Kochu paniyan wanted Lenin to come with him to ask Achen to talk to C.T., since he was a parishioner and on the church board. “People like C.T. are the opposite of Arikkad. They hate communism because exploiting the tribals is exactly how he became a rich and powerful man.” Achen reluctantly went to see C.T. and returned right away, shaken. He’d been abused for interfering. Achen said he would pray. “I tell you, Mariamma, never have prayers felt more worthless.”

Kochu paniyan had already been to see Arikkad, who was trying to get a stay order in court. “That’s good!” Lenin said. Kochu paniyan had looked pityingly at Lenin and said, “Good? Since when has court been good for our people? Court is all their people.” The day of the eviction Lenin had gone to Kochu paniyan’s settlement. Many tribal families had come to give support, along with Arikkad, Raghu, and other activists. Though Arikkad had filed for a stay, the judge was “one of theirs.” Soon three jeeps arrived, packed with tough-looking men carrying cycle chains and bamboo sticks. Behind them a police jeep pulled up and parked at a distance. C.T. called out that the family had five minutes to leave. On Arikkad’s instruction, all the assembled people sat peacefully on the ground.

“When the five minutes was up, C.T.’s goondas came at us. The police looked on. I saw and heard a cane break Kochu paniyan’s jaw. Arikkad took the second blow. A woman tried to shield her head and I heard the chain snap her forearm. I was in a trance. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Suddenly I felt terrible pain in my shoulder. I turned and grabbed the chain and punched my attacker—so much for Gandhian nonviolence. But they rained blows down on me. Mariamma, they beat me mercilessly. Then those thugs tossed petrol on the thatch and set the houses on fire. I had to crawl away, the heat was so intense.

“Kochu paniyan was in the hospital with a broken leg and jaw. Arikkad and Raghu were beaten badly too. A few others were treated in Casualty. Someone brought me to my room on a cycle because my knee was the size of a football. Achen hardly recognized me; my face was like a swollen mask. Poor Achen: he wept as he nursed me. He cried, looking to the heavens. He fell on his knees, calling to God to right what was wrong. Oh, Mariamma . . . if only God had answered Achen, who was as faithful a servant as any god might ask for . . . If only God had answered . . . my life might have taken a different path. If only God had answered . . . I was peeing blood. I couldn’t walk. I just lay on that bed, brooding, licking my wounds.”

A few Moscow acquaintances came to check on Lenin. They said that Kochu paniyan was gone from the hospital. “Self-discharge against medical advice,” the hospital claimed. With a broken leg and jaw, how do you “self-discharge”? What it really meant was the police or paramilitary took Kochu paniyan and tortured him for information. The poor man knew nothing! His family has not seen him. They probably dumped the body in the forest where the wild animals will make sure nothing remains. He learned it was not the first time. Meanwhile no one knew anything about Arikkad and Raghu’s whereabouts. The police were hunting them. They had gone underground. Rumor was they were Naxalites.

Naxalites.

A chill runs down Mariamma’s spine. The room is suddenly freezing. The very utterance of that word—“Naxalite”—feels dangerous. It’s enough to make her pulse race. “Stop, Lenin,” she says, rising. He is not surprised. “I need to pee.”

She tries to recall what she actually knows of the Naxalite movement. She knows its name came from a small village—Naxalbari—in West Bengal. The peasants there, after slaving for the landlords, were given so little back of the harvest that they were starving. In desperation they took the harvest from the land they had tilled for generations. Armed police who were in the landlords’ pay arrived and fired on the peasants who had assembled for a dialogue, and a dozen or more, including women and children, were killed. That’s what she recalls. It dominated the news. Outrage at the massacre in Naxalbari spread like cholera all over India, and the “Naxalite” movement was born. It was about the time Mariamma was leaving for Alwaye. Peasants in many places attacked and even killed feudal landlords and corrupt officials. The police responded just as violently. There had been a palpable fear that the country was on the verge of a revolution. If peasant groups across India coalesced, they could seize power. The government responded by charging a secret paramilitary force to go after Naxalites with no oversight, no limits on their powers. They had dragged away two innocent boys in her college who had not been seen since. The Naxalite movement had been particularly strong in Kerala. She’d worried about her father becoming a target, but he reassured her that their holdings were tiny by comparison to those of the landlords further north, who owned thousands of acres; also, they had never had tenant farmers.

Mariamma returns to sit on the bed, wrapping the sheet around her shoulders because she’s shivering. Lenin asks if he should stop. “It’s too late for that,” she says. “Go on.”

“I was in pain. It took me a long time to heal,” Lenin says. “But I had another kind of pain. It was the injustice and cruelty I had witnessed. I kept thinking of Acca, the pulayi who saved me during the smallpox. What was her reward? To be driven away like a stray dog. The starving little boy—me—had promised her, ‘I’ll never forget you.’ I didn’t forget—that part was true. But what had I done for her? What would I ever do for her as a priest? I had ‘lived the question’ for a long time. In that bed, licking my wounds, I came to the answer. I had no choice.

“I told a Moscow regular that I wanted to contact Arikkad. Or Raghu. He was alarmed. He claimed not to know and left. Two days after that I had a note under my door telling me to be at a bus station at midnight. A motorcycle came. I was blindfolded and we rode away. When the blindfold came off, I was in a clearing. Three men approached, slinging rifles. One was Raghu. He tried to dissuade me. He said I could do other things with my life, if not seminary. ‘Like what, Raghu?’ I said. ‘Banking?’ There was no going back.”

Lenin’s voice comes from far away, it seems to Mariamma. She’s in a room with a Naxalite, not the boy she grew up with. She feels terrible sadness, despair. Her body and mind are numb, in shock. She listens.

Abraham Verghese's books