Uma ponders this. “Don’t worry—I don’t think you’re mad. You have a gift, Mariamma. There’s no other way to dissect like this. Our brains have extraordinary capabilities. In our simplistic understanding, we put each function in its box—Broca’s area for speech, and Wernicke’s area for interpreting what we hear. But the boxes are artificial. Simplistic. The senses intertwine and spill over from one area to another. Think of the phantom limb. The leg is amputated, but the brain feels pain in what isn’t there. So I can see how your brain might take the visual signal and do something different with it.”
Mariamma thinks about the Condition. Already, with the knowledge of anatomy and physiology that she has, she thinks the Condition must involve parts of the brain associated with hearing and balance. Perhaps for those affected by the Condition, immersion in water causes the signals to spill over to parts of the brain that should be off limits—the opposite of a gift. She must ask Uma, but before she can, Uma speaks.
“I’ve seen some of your sketches. You draw well.”
“Not really. I wish I had my mother’s artistic gifts.”
“What sort of art does she do?”
“Well, she doesn’t. But she did once . . . I never knew my mother. She drowned soon after I was born.”
“Oh, Mariamma!”
The sadness in Uma’s voice makes Mariamma feel a rush of grief. It’s not grief for her mother, exactly. How could she grieve for someone she didn’t know? And she’ll never get over her grief for Big Ammachi, who was mother, grandmother, and namesake all rolled into one. But being around Uma Ramasamy, given her age, and her dynamic, vibrant nature, affords Mariamma a sense of what it might have been like to converse with her mother. If she hadn’t drowned.
Uma rises, squeezes Mariamma’s shoulder, and goes back to her office.
Her classes, clinics, dissections, and books keep her mind occupied. Now and then she has the absurd urge to write to Lenin, who is of course unreachable. The only letters she gets now are from her father, full of the news from home. Joppan has agreed to be the manager of Parambil, and from his first day it feels as if he’s been doing it forever. Her father says he can breathe for the first time. And there’s drama around Uplift Master and the Hospital Fund, he reports. Podi used to work for Uplift Master, helping him with accounts. After she left, Master hired a new girl, who has apparently embezzled. The mess is being sorted out, but meanwhile poor Uplift Master is suspended, even though he’s quite innocent. It hasn’t affected the construction:
The outside walls are almost complete. I look at it and think I am dreaming to see such a beautiful modern building in our Parambil. I wish Big Ammachi could see this. It’s her vision. Perhaps she does see it. She certainly knew we were on our way. Anna Chedethi sends love. We are so proud of you.
Your loving Appa
On a Saturday, when Mariamma catches up on her dissections, Uma drops by and they look at some of the first nerve sections together under the two-headed microscope. Uma says, “I often think about Armauer Hansen. So many scientists looked under the microscope at leprous tissue before him, but they didn’t see the leprosy bacillus. It’s not that hard to see! It’s because they’d decided no such thing could be there. Sometimes we must imagine what is there to find it. That, by the way, I learned from you!”
It’s flattering and inspires Mariamma to work harder. She’s drawn to Uma. When she was a child, she would daydream of her mother coming home, bejeweled, always in a chariot, and with her hair flowing free, released at last from a magician’s spell that kept her asleep for years. Such fantasies came to her usually when she was with the Stone Woman, or in the nest, because her mother was alive in those creations, alive in her incomplete sketches and paintings—an artist interrupted who would be back any moment. But as the years passed, the sleeping beauty never did return, the paintings remained incomplete. Uma, her living, breathing, vibrant mentor, the sort of woman who, she discovers, competes in rallies and is rebuilding an engine with her own hands, is more real than any drawing, more real than a faceless stone relic in Parambil.
She books a ticket to go home for a week during the short holidays. Two days before she’s to leave, she toils in the lab, readying her dissection to be photographed.
She senses a presence behind her. She turns. Uma stands half in and half out of her office, the oddest expression on her face, her eyes wet. Mariamma’s first thought is that Uma’s been fishing in the formalin tank and the fumes got to her.
Uma floats toward her in slow motion like a sleepwalker and gently clasps her shoulders.
“Mariamma,” she says, “there’s been an accident.”
CHAPTER 70
Take the Plunge
1974, Cochin
Philipose spends a rare night away from Parambil at Cochin’s famous Malabar Hotel, courtesy of his newspaper. He’d proposed an article with a different take on Robert Bristow, the man viewed as a saint in this port city. His editor liked the idea.
Bristow, a marine engineer, arrived in Cochin in 1920 and saw that despite its booming spice trade, Cochin was fated to remain a minor port because of a rocky sandbar and a mammoth ridge that barred all but small boats. Ships had to berth out at sea, and goods and passengers had to be rowed to shore. Bristow pulled off an engineering feat as formidable as digging the Suez Canal: he removed the obstacles and, in the process, threw up enough silt and rock to create Willingdon Island. Ships now have a deep-water harbor that sits between Willingdon Island and the mainland; Willingdon Island is home to Cochin Airport, government offices, businesses, shops, and the magnificent Malabar Hotel.
Philipose, dining outdoors at the Malabar, looks out at the broad sea channel that runs between Vypin Island and Fort Cochin, then out to the Arabian Sea. It amuses him—given his feud with water—to be seated on land that was once water. He’s here because a cranky biologist has pestered the Ordinary Man to explore what Bristow’s engineering feat has done to the ecology of Vembanad Lake, which opens to the ocean at this spot. The canals and backwaters, which are the lifeblood of Kerala and feed into the lake, are exposed to salt water. “Immeasurable damage occurred to the benthic, nektonic, and planktonic communities,” the man says in his letter. “And since dredging goes on year-round, the damage is ongoing. The precious rock-oyster, Crassostrea, is vital to a food chain that goes from fish larvae to adult fish to young children with growing brains!” Philipose is sympathetic: he’s seen similar issues with building dams, denuding teak forests, or digging for ore—there are unintended consequences. The poor villagers whose lives might be affected rarely have any voice to object beforehand to such projects. Once the damage is done, what they say hardly matters.
He lingers over dinner and a complimentary brandy from the chef who, it turns out, is an admirer of the Ordinary Man. The breeze is delicate, like a woman’s fingers grazing through his hair. How he wishes Mariamma could be here with him at this grand hotel.
I’m at the edge of my world, he thinks. This is as far as I’ll ever go.
He smells history in this breeze. The Dutch, the Portuguese, the English . . . Each left their stamp. All gone now. Shades. Their cemeteries are overgrown with weeds, the names unreadable, weathered by wind. What stamp will he leave? What will be his masterpiece? He knows the answer: Mariamma. She is his masterpiece.
After dinner he walks to his room, stepping carefully; he’s unaccustomed to brandy. The tourists seated earlier at a long table have left behind a book on the chair. No, not a book, but a small and beautifully printed catalog on the kind of heavy paper that invites touch. He picks it up. On the cover is a black-and-white photograph of a large outdoor stone sculpture.
Suddenly he’s sober. The ocean is stilled, the breeze is arrested, the stars stop twinkling.
Her shoulders and arms are overdeveloped—a woman, but a superhuman one. She resembles a primitive clay figure, with her breasts full and pendulous. Her shoulder blades look like wings flattened against her body. Her skin is deliberately left coarse. She’s on all fours but extends one arm. The woman’s face is not revealed, still locked in the stone.