The Covenant of Water

“The tea and biscuits were magical,” she reassures him. “I’m fine now.” He looks relieved. “Digby, the picture in your study—that’s Rune, isn’t it? Same as in the foyer?” Digby nods. “His name is in my mother’s copy of Gray’s Anatomy. And you wrote the inscription. I’ve had the book with me all these years. It’s my good luck charm!”

Digby looks touched, almost overcome. He seems to struggle to say something and gives up. Instead, he wings out his elbow, a gesture so foreign to her that she wants to laugh. She threads her arm through his. It feels like the most natural thing in the world.

They walk back to Lenin in silence, passing through a cool, shaded cloister, the brick arches giving it the feeling of a medieval monastery. The paving stones underfoot are etched by the moss pushing up in the gaps. In the shadows of the cloister, a leper in white stands against a pillar. She is so still that, for a moment, Mariamma mistakes her for a statue . . . until the pallu of her sari, drawn over her head, stirs in the breeze. The leper cocks one ear to the sound of their footsteps in the manner of the sightless. Mariamma shudders involuntarily, not because of the woman’s grotesque features, but because the object she took to be lifeless came alive.

When this nightmare with Lenin is over, she’ll write to Uma Ramasamy about this leprosarium and its living patients, such a contrast to the formalin-preserved human remnants over which she labored. She’s tempted to tell Digby about Uma and their shared interest in this disease he’s given himself to, his life sentence. That fortuitous assignment with Uma led her to finding the cause of the Condition, led her to Lenin. But such thoughts are indulgent. There are pressing issues to discuss.

“Digby, I think the Condition does more than produce acoustic neuromas. My theory is that it also affects personality, makes them eccentric. It’s responsible for Lenin’s . . . recklessness, the stupid path he took. And his stubbornness now.”

“Well, it’d be a good argument before a judge, if he surrenders,” Digby says. “Might shorten his time in the clink.”

“I heard of this Naxalite woman serving a life sentence,” Mariamma says. “She was released after seven years.”

She marvels at where her mind is trying to take her. She’s gone from thinking she’d never see Lenin again to plotting a future. You’re getting too far ahead of yourself.

“Digby,” she says, “what if Lenin won’t surrender or go to Vellore, then—”

“Convince him. You must.” He releases her. “I’ll leave you two together.”

Lenin is back in the room where she first saw him, propped up again and appearing to be asleep. She sits on the chair by his bed. He opens his eyes.

“Mariamma?” He smiles at her. He picks out a biscuit from the pack beside him and breaks it down the middle. “If we bite at the same time, we’ll have supernatural powers. Like Mandrake the Magician. Remember? One bite, and somewhere in the galaxy, if we two are in time . . . ?” He makes the sign of the cross over her with the half biscuit, like a priest, but she grabs his hand.

She’s laughing despite herself. “It was Phantom Comics, macku. Not Mandrake.” She’s brought him back from the dead to call him an idiot. “Lenin, we don’t have much time. You will lose consciousness again, you understand? Please let us take you to Vellore.”

The one-sided smile fades. He looks away. He says, “What a waste, ma. These last five years. Seems like forty. Nothing changed for the adivasis, the pulayar. And you and me? I was so stupid, so blind.”

She’s overcome with sadness for him—for them. A narrow shaft of sunlight filters through leaves, touches the bed. The God who never interferes with drownings or train wrecks likes to peer in on the human experiment at such moments of reckoning, touching the scene with a little celestial light. She’s impatient, waiting for Lenin’s answer.

“Mariamma, when it’s all done, when life is almost over, what do you want to remember?”

She thinks of their one night together in Mahabalipuram. She found him when she’d already lost him to a doomed cause. And it’s happening again. Finding him only to lose him. She doesn’t answer. She just holds his hand.

“What do you want to remember, Lenin?” she says softly.

He doesn’t hesitate. “This. Here. Now. The sun on your face. Your eyes more blue than gray today. I want to remember this room, the remnant of biscuit in my mouth. Why wait for the world to show me anything better?” It’s as though he’s saying goodbye.

A dark cloud passes over his face—a trespasser. His breath quickens and beads of sweat glisten on his brow.

“Lenin, I beg you. Let us take you to Vellore. When the tumor is gone, then let whatever happens happen. Surrender and take what comes. But live! Live for my sake. Don’t ask me to watch you die.”

“Mariamma, it’s no good. I’ll die anyway. The police will kill me, tumor or no tumor.” His words stumble over one another. His eyes wander and it’s an effort to focus on her. She can see the veil descending. His voice is faint. “I’m glad you put that needle in. I could see you one more time, touch you, hear you. Mariamma, you know, don’t you? You know how I feel about you . . . ?”

His body stiffens; his eyes roll to one side.

She cries out for Digby, and he’s there, in time to watch Lenin have a seizure, rattling the bed with the violent shaking. Gradually it subsides.

Digby says, “Did he tell you what he wants?”

She bypasses the question because she won’t lie. “We’re going to take him to Vellore.”

In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. But this is her truth, her revolutionary act for Lenin and for herself. Long live the revolution.

The battered car bounces and weaves its way across the tapering waist of India from one shore to the other, racing to Vellore, Cromwell driving. Digby couldn’t come—he was sad about it. She wanted him with her, but she didn’t question his reasons. She sits turned sideways, checking frequently on Lenin, but he’s in a post-seizure stupor—either that or the fluid has built up again. They head north to Trichur, then turn east to climb the Palghat Gap in the Western Ghats before heading down into the plains to Coimbatore. Three hours in, her neck is stiff from twisting to attend to him. She dozes off and when she wakes, she’s startled to find Lenin looking at her, as if he’s the chaperone and she’s the patient being rushed to brain surgery.

She hadn’t given much thought to what she’d say to him about taking him to Vellore against his wishes. She’d been sure that moment was far away, perhaps long after surgery . . . that is if he survived the ride, let alone the surgery. What does she say now? I wanted you alive, no matter how you felt about it? Lenin watches her squirm, amused.

“Oh, go ahead, say it,” she bursts out. “Say I’m taking you to Vellore against your will.”

“It’s all right, Mariamma. No need. Cromwell explained.”

“Don’t mention,” Cromwell says, glancing back in the mirror. “Two hours more,” he adds. “Maybe less.”

She looks out the window. The moon shines through clouds, its ghostly light illuminating an arid, pocked landscape—they’ve landed on a lunar crater, by the look of it. The world, and the two men in the car, are at peace. She’s the one who is agitated. She wants to strangle them both.

Lenin reaches for her hand. “Cromwell says it was just this morning that we spoke, but I feel I’ve been gone months and months. And all that time I was thinking about our conversation. Your last words. I reflected on it for weeks, it seems like.” His hand unconsciously goes to his brow to touch the bandage. “Before I woke up in this car, I’d already come to a decision. If I was ready to die for something that I don’t believe in, surely, I must be willing to live for the one thing I do believe in.”

She doesn’t dare breathe. “And what’s that?”

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