The lights go out. He tumbles in the darkness, plunging down and down, his stomach in his mouth, just as in that foolhardy ride a lifetime ago with the boatman and his dying baby.
There’s a resounding crash and the compartment cracks like an egg on impact. Water gushes in. Reflexively, he takes a deep breath, ballooning his chest just moments before chilled water engulfs them all. He slides out of the cracked carriage like yolk slipping out of the egg. It’s all so familiar. Eyes open! he hears Shamuel’s voice command.
He sees a faint dark blur like a whale just under him—his carriage sinking to the deep. The air in his chest carries him up. He breaks the surface and gulps in fresh oxygen, feeling the world spin around him, clutching at a hard object next to him to steady his vertigo, but its sharp edge cuts his hand. He desperately seizes another object. It stays afloat. Eyes open, the dizziness eases.
It is deathly quiet. He looks out over a flat surface of water that is illuminated in a ghostly light and dotted with luggage, clothing, slippers, and bobbing heads. One end of a railway carriage breaks the surface, rises to point accusingly heavenward, then sinks.
On either side of him the craggy walls of a gorge press in, framing a ribbon of stars. He sees the broken remnant of the trestle bridge from which the train plunged. The water is cold. He feels no pain, but his right leg fails to respond. A light behind him! He turns slowly, but it is a gibbous moon, indifferent to what it witnesses. Now he hears a rising chorus, the cries of survivors. “Shiva, Shiva!” a woman’s voice screams, and another from the opposite direction, “God! My God!” but the god of disasters is unmoved and both voices gurgle horribly into silence.
An immobile figure floats near him, facedown, a tangle of cloth and long hair, the body wrenched into an impossible shape that makes Philipose recoil.
What Philipose has managed to hook his armpit over is a soft, soggy floating cushion with a spine of something stiffer. It is barely buoyant. He paddles with his free hand, surprised to make headway. There’s no current to fight, just death and debris floating in the stillness. He kicks out and now feels an electric shock of pain in the right leg.
“Appa! Ap—!”
The child’s cry comes from somewhere behind him. A little girl, or is it a boy? Or is he hallucinating?
He flails his free arm to turn himself and his bulky float. On the mirrored surface he catches sight of hair streaked over a pair of panicked eyes that are as big as moons and losing focus, the tiny nose and lips gurgling below the water and rising briefly to try to scream while desperate little hands climb a ladder that isn’t there. It’s the child’s struggle to breathe that galvanizes him. It is the boatman’s baby all over again. The small head sinks out of sight. He hears a roar in the back of his throat as he wallows in that direction, but oh, how slowly he moves, pain searing his leg. Appa! It’s the cry of his child, of all children. Understanding comes to him now, at the most inopportune time, that the one face he so desperately wanted to see, the face of the Stone Woman, was never meant to be seen. What did it matter? We are dying while we’re living, we are old even when we’re young, we are clinging to life even as we resign ourselves to leaving it.
But in the sinking child he paddles to, he, an ordinary man, has a chance to do something of true account. Love the sick, each and every one, as if they were your own. He wrote out those words from Paracelsus for his daughter. Here, and just out of reach, is a child, not his child, yet all are his to love as if they were his own. This child may be beyond saving, and he may be too, but it matters not and matters terribly, pedaling and paddling furiously, the one-legged, one-armed man who cannot swim, moving to a child just out of reach. His flailing hand brushes tiny fingers, but they are already sinking past him.
He takes a deep breath, pulling the skies, the stars, and the stars beyond those stars into his lungs, and Lord, Lord, my Lord, where are you? Lord, I breathe you in, Lord breathe on me, breathe on me breath of God . . . For once in his life, freed of indecision, freed from doubt, he is absolutely sure of what he must do.
CHAPTER 71
The Dead Shall Rise Incorruptible
1974, Madras
She holds an unopened letter from her father in her hands. Her tears fall on the address penned in her father’s impossible script which somehow the postman always manages to decipher.
In this letter her father is alive.
That morning in the morgue he was not.
Outside the morgue, earlier that day, an angry crowd of relatives had clamored for news. In their contorted, tear-stained, uncomprehending faces Mariamma had seen what her face must have looked like. The same claw had gathered them all like a tuft of grass in its grip, and the same sickle had chopped them off at the knees by robbing them of their loved ones. The guards allowed a tearful Mariamma, in her white coat, to squeeze through the folding metal gates even as they held back the other bereaved: “Why should she be allowed to see the body, and not us?”
The body. That word felt like a cudgel blow.
She was to meet Uma in the morgue, but not seeing Uma, she walked around the cavernous room, no one stopping her in the bedlam, with bodies laid out on metal stretchers and on the bare floor. Then she saw a hand, as familiar as her own, peeking out from under a rubber sheet. She went to him then, held the cold hand, uncovered his face. Her father looked peaceful, resting. Unreasonably, she wanted a blanket for him in place of the rubber sheet, and a pillow too so that his head wouldn’t rest on cold unyielding metal. He wasn’t dead. It was a mistake. No, he just needed to sleep, that was all, then after he got some rest, he would sit up and come away with her from this noisy morgue . . . Her legs went weak, the room became dim, and sounds went soft. In a protective reflex, she sank to a squat on the floor by his stretcher, head between her knees, still clutching his hand, and sobbing inconsolably. The world had come to an end.
Slowly, the sounds of the room returned. No one paid her any attention. There was too much chaos, the wailing of others, the shouts of someone trying to restore order. After a long while she pulled herself upright. Through tears she asked her father what made him get on a train. Why that train? He knew she was on her way home, so why come?
Uma Ramasamy, wearing an apron, found her talking to her father. Uma and every pathologist on staff were busy helping the beleaguered coroner deal with more bodies than a morgue should hold. Uma held her, cried with her. When Mariamma asked, Uma said the rubber sheet concealed a shattered knee and a deep laceration to his left flank. She had no desire to see for herself.
She was conscious that Uma needed to leave and couldn’t stay with her all day. “Uma, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. This isn’t how or where I imagined I would tell you, but it has to be now. It’s important. It’s about my father, about my family. Please? A few minutes?”
Uma had listened, her face still, her manner attentive, her eyebrows rising in surprise.
“I’ll do it,” Uma said. “I’ll do it personally. I’ll need you to sign some papers.”
Now in her hostel room, hands shaking, Anita at her side, she opens her father’s letter.
My darling daughter.
She reads once, twice. He says that he’s en route to see her. But not why. “The voyage of discovery isn’t about new lands but having new eyes”?
The words make no sense. She presses the letter to her lips, hoping for understanding. She catches the scent of his homemade ink: the unmistakable fragrance of home, of the red laterite earth he so loved.