The Covenant of Water

“My head is fine,” he says. “I remember . . .”

They wait for him to go on. Outside, a common tailorbird chirps, Go-on-go-on-go-on. Mariamma holds her breath.

“I remember . . . I had a headache for so long.” The words squeeze out in English, but he’s out of practice. “If I cough or sneeze, my head . . . bursts. Life was being pressed out of me.” He’s becoming more fluent. “I had convulsions. Many. Daily. We had cyanide capsules. I was ready to take mine, then I thought . . .” Again, the pause, like a radio with a loose wire.

“Where is it?” Digby asks.

Lenin roots around the end of his mundu. Digby helps, extracting rupee notes held in a rubber band and a dirty ball of plastic wrap.

Lenin watches Digby. “Doctor, I know from my mother that you helped her when she needed you most. You prevented my entry into this world. Now you stop my exit!”

Digby laughs. “Both times premature. But believe me, if I hadn’t tracked down Mariamma, you wouldn’t have needed the cyanide.”

Hearing this, something bursts in Mariamma. A few hours’ delay and she’d have come to see a corpse, not this conscious, conversant being, this man who, despite everything, she loves. She sags against the table. An alarmed Digby drags a stool over for her.

Lenin’s hand reaches for hers.

His smile is skewed from the facial paralysis. But the warmth, the affection and concern for her in his eyes—that’s real, all Lenin. She doesn’t want to be the doctor anymore. But they aren’t done. She gathers herself. She wonders why he doesn’t ask how they took his headache away?

“Lenin?” He looks so vulnerable, his forehead bisected by her pen and a sutured wound on his head. “You have a tumor, an acoustic neuroma. It raised the pressure—”

“I’m sorry about your father, Mariamma,” he interrupts. “I read the paper. The Condition. So proud of you. Did you take my tumor out?”

It hurts to see hope extinguished in his eyes when she shakes her head. She uses the surgical pen on a piece of paper to explain what is going on. “. . . and when we put in the needle, fluid came surging out. You awoke. But it just bought us a little time.”

A playful light appears in his eyes. Then he laughs, which exaggerates the immobility of half of his face, so that it looks like a snarl. She must keep her eyes on the right side of his face.

“Mariammaye,” he says affectionately. “My doctor. Do you remember when we were children you said something was loose in my head? And someday you’d fix it?”

They’d been in church. Lenin had caught her eye as she stood on the women’s side; then, with no change of expression, he’d let a string of saliva spool down from his lip. She hadn’t been able to suppress her giggle. Big Ammachi pinched her ear.

“What I said was one day I’d crack your skull and pull out the Devil.”

“And you did!”

Digby brings them back to reality. “Lenin, you understand the tumor is still there. All we did was temporarily relieve the pressure above it.” He looks to Mariamma for support. “The pressure will rise again.”

Lenin says, “A needle into my brain? But I feel nothing.”

Digby says, “It’s a paradox, isn’t it? Poke the brain directly, you feel no pain. Step on a nail, though, and your brain pinpoints the exact spot. Unless you’re one of the patients here who feel nothing and come to harm.”

Mariamma says, “Lenin, you urgently need the tumor out. But we can’t do it here.” She puts her hand on his chest. “We must get you to Vellore. They have experience in such operations.” She sees him recoil. The fugitive calculating his escape routes.

“Why not here? I trust you—”

“I wish I could. I don’t have the skills. Yet.”

“Vellore? It won’t take long for them to know who I am.”

“But with the tumor out, you live. Live a full life!” She holds her breath.

He doesn’t respond. He’s withdrawing further. She thinks he’s steeling himself for death.

Digby says gently, “Lenin? What do you think?”

He doesn’t meet Digby’s gaze. He looks suddenly weary. “I think . . . I’m so hungry it’s hard to think.”

“Oh, heavens!” Digby says. “Some doctors we are! You must be starving. And this young lady needs a cup of tea too.”

Mariamma is suddenly weighed down, as though the ceiling just descended on her shoulders. She needs fresh air.

Cromwell squats outside the theater. On seeing Mariamma he smiles . . . then the smile is gone, and he leaps to his feet, rushing at her. What now? she thinks. And why’s the ground tilting so strangely?

She’s reclined in an armchair, her legs on an ottoman. A silk shawl covers her. Tea, biscuits, and water are beside her. She vaguely remembers being carried by Cromwell. She revived once she was horizontal, an anxious Digby hovering over her and insisting she rest. She said she’d close her eyes for five minutes. She must have fallen asleep. She has no idea for how long.

She drinks and eats greedily. Her refuge is a cool, carpeted, low-ceilinged study with bookcases built into the wall and rising up and over the door and window frames. It feels intimate and welcoming. Heavy curtains frame French windows that look out onto a small rectangle of lawn, bordered with colorful rose bushes; the garden is enclosed by a picket fence with a door cut into it on the far side. She imagines this lawn as Digby’s refuge, a place to sit in the sun and read a book. She stares out, fascinated by the ruler-like edges of the lawn, the beautifully trimmed rose bushes. It’s like a postcard she’s seen of tiny gardens fronting row houses in England, the enclosed patches of earth far too small for the owners’ horticultural ambitions, but warm and cozy all the same.

Among the bookshelves are nooks that display photographs. She’s drawn to an elegant silver frame holding a black-and-white picture of a small white boy in knee-high stockings, shorts, a tie, and a V-necked sweater. In his brow, his eyes, she sees unmistakable traces of the adult Digby. The boy’s shy smile as he looks at the camera doesn’t conceal the trace of anxiety. His first day of school, perhaps? A beautiful woman in a skirt crouches next to him, laughing, her knees together, her hand on his shoulder. That must be Digby’s mother. Her face is youthful but weary, her dark hair already showing a streak of gray. But for that instant when the shutter clicks she’s gathered her best self, drawn on her experience like a veteran actor when the curtain rises, and the result is simply stunning. She’s as beautiful as a movie star and blessed with a presence to match.

An unframed photograph in another alcove shows a huge, bearded white man flanked by lepers, his arms on their shoulders, like a coach with his squad. It’s the same face she saw in the oil portrait hanging just within Saint Bridget’s portico. This must be Rune Orqvist. She’s seen that name so often in the flyleaf of her mother’s ancient copy of Gray’s Anatomy. It was his book, even if the inscription inside was from Digby. It must have made a perfect gift for a young aspiring artist. Mariamma was so preoccupied with Lenin that she and Digby never talked about this connection. Lenin! She hurriedly drains the tea, no time to dawdle.

She washes up, still marveling at the connections in her world, invisible or forgotten, but there all the same, like a river linking people upstream with those below, whether they know it or not. The Thetanatt home was somewhere close by—gone now because her uncle sold it long ago. Rune was Elsie’s godfather. As a schoolboy, Philipose had been here too.

Exiting the room, she sees Digby coming down the hall: yes, the schoolboy’s tinge of worry, the earnestness, and even the smile are preserved in the older man’s expression. His concern for her is heartwarming.

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