He made no answer and resumed his bandaging. “Elsie, what would you have done if I hadn’t received the letter? If I hadn’t come?”
“I was going to walk to Saint Bridget’s,” she said without hesitation. “If you came, I’d planned to have you take me straight to Saint Bridget’s. But I was so very tired. And I knew we needed time to talk. I had to explain. I owed you that.”
He peeled off his clothes, rinsed off, and came to her, his tiredness catching up with him. As he lowered himself to the bed, she tried to push him away. “You can’t sleep with me. Why are you doing this, Digby?”
He didn’t answer, pulling the sheet over his naked body and hers, snuggling against her. Her eyelids were heavy from her tears, from her ordeal, from relief, albeit temporary. He heard a mumbled, “I forbid you.” Then she was out. He looked at her sleeping form, her face as white as the pillowcase. Tired as he was, his thoughts were still racing, and sleep eluded him.
An hour later, he was still awake, his arm numb under the weight of her head. He didn’t care if it fell off. He could no longer separate himself from her suffering. The disease that afflicted her was now his, too. He couldn’t linger on an estate that didn’t need him, knowing that the great love of his life was elsewhere. Elsie had died to the world for the sake of their child. She couldn’t make this sacrifice alone. It was now clear to him what he must do. This is the end of one life. And the beginning of another that I could never have imagined. I have no choice, which is the best kind of choice.
She awoke as light streamed in through the window, disoriented, unsure where she was. Then she realized she was in his arms. Digby’s eyes were open, staring at her with tenderness. Outside she could hear the chatter of workmen going past, a foreman shouting orders. The noises of Gwendolyn Gardens. Just another day. She raised her head to look around. Digby moved his arm from under her. She studied him. He looked peaceful. Then tears came, clouding her eyes again.
“Digby. I can’t stay. Not even for a night.”
“I know.”
“Why are you smiling?”
“If Saint Bridget’s is the one place where no one will find you, then my fate has been decided. Wherever you go, whatever happens to you, it happens to me. No, don’t argue, Elsie. It’s clear to me. It couldn’t be simpler. I’ll always, always be with you. Till the end.”
CHAPTER 84
The Known World
1977, Saint Bridget’s
Mariamma feels something burning her fingers. Her tea. She drops the cup. It bounces off her body and lands unbroken on the carpet. Hot liquid soaks through and scalds her thighs.
Pain has no past or future, just the now. She leaps back from the window and pinches her sari and skirt free of her skin.
“Goodness!” Digby says. “Are you all right?”
She’s very far from all right. On the other side of the French windows, the woman—the mother she has never known in her twenty-six years of life—sits oblivious on the beautiful lawn, sorting seeds in her palm. Something tells Mariamma that she has yet to blink. A lifetime passes before she can find her voice.
“How long has she . . . ?”
“She’s been here almost as long as you’ve been alive,” Digby says.
The conflicting signals in her brain clash with each other. There’s a photograph at Parambil of the mother she carries in her head: those gray eyes tracked her across the room every day of her growing up—they’d even watched her daughter dress and gird herself this morning to confront the man who sired her. That mother stayed youthful, composed, beautiful, and elegant, her closed lips suppressing a laugh—perhaps at something the photographer had said. It was the face of a mother a daughter might confide in. How is she to reconcile that long-dead mother with this living apparition on the lawn?
“I need air,” she says, turning her back to the window and fleeing the room.
She runs down a brick-lined path leading away from the main cluster of buildings; runs past an orchard, past a nursery; and arrives at the back wall of the property, hemmed in, until she spots a small gate that she flings open and races down mossy stone steps . . . and comes to a halt. Before her is the serene, slow-moving water of a canal that winds away to join a river she can hear but not see. Her feet are submerged as she stands on the last step. Every part of her, every cell wants to plunge in, to let herself be carried away as far from here as she can get.
She stands at this junction of land and water, her heart racing, breathless, and yet only now can she breathe. On the water’s green, rippled surface, she sees her undulating, fragmented reflection. She came here broken, came here to question the man who fathered her but who was not her father. Instead, she found her dead mother, who somehow lives. Who has always lived. Who has been alive all the years Mariamma pined for her, prayed for her to come back from the dead.
The canal flows past, soaking the hem of her sari, undeterred by her distress, her new knowledge. It is indifferent, this water that links all canals, water that is in the river ahead, and in the backwaters, and the seas and oceans—one body of water. This same water ran past the Thetanatt home where her mother learned to swim; it brought Rune here to reclaim an abandoned lazaretto; and brought Philipose to save a dying baby, his hands coupled with Digby’s; the same water swept Elsie away to die and then delivered her, born again, into the arms of the man who loved her more than life—and who fathered Elsie’s only daughter, Mariamma.
And now that daughter is here, standing in the water that connects them all in time and space and always has. The water she first stepped into minutes ago is long gone and yet it is here, past and present and future inexorably coupled, like time made incarnate. This is the covenant of water: that they’re all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone. She stays there listening to the burbling mantra, the chant that never ceases, repeating its message that all is one. What she thought was her life is all maya, all illusion, but it is one shared illusion. And what else can she do but go on.
She gathers herself. She walks slowly back. She pictures Elsie growing up nearby, motherless—they had that in common. Whatever else the young Elsie imagined, surely, she never imagined that she would end up here. Her mother did not choose to be a leper. With everything that Elsie had to offer to the world, how cruel that this is her fate: to be cloistered in a leprosarium, a place so apart from the world that it could be another planet. And all the while, an ancient, slowly dividing bacterium took away sensation, stripped her of sight, robbed her bit by bit of the ability to do the one thing she was born to do. Mariamma shudders at another appalling realization: through it all, her mother’s mind must have been intact, the artist forced to witness the creeping ruin of her once-beautiful body, the progressive diminution of her capacity to make art. Mariamma cannot even begin to fathom such suffering.
Digby hasn’t moved from the window, still looking out at the figure on the lawn, his unguarded expression showing sorrow and love, those two sentiments fused into one, and like a second skin for him. This scarred man stayed by her mother’s side all these years, bearing witness to her suffering and suffering himself in watching her deterioration.