“When your father’s columns eventually resumed, full of wisdom and humor—and pain—she knew he’d overcome the addiction. I dare say she was the Ordinary Man’s most avid reader. She’d translate them for me. Before she became blind, that is. Then others had to read his columns to her.”
“Does she know anything about my life?”
“Oh, God yes!” He smiles. “As much as we could find out. When your father’s editor wrote that article explaining the mystery of the Condition, the autopsy . . . she couldn’t stop thinking about it. It made her sad that the knowledge came too late for him, too late for Ninan. She felt she’d unfairly blamed him for Ninan’s death—in their grief, they’d turned on each other. By the time he was freed from the clutches of opium, Elsie of Parambil was long dead. She never got to say how sorry she was.”
Digby’s features are highlighted by the light coming through the window; Mariamma sees profound sadness, exaggerated by the scar on his face. She even sees something of herself in this man who is almost seventy years old. She leans on his shoulder. Tentatively, he puts his arm around her, this other father of hers, embracing his daughter as together they look out at her mother.
Love the sick, each and every one, as if they were your own. Her father had copied out that quote for her; she still has it, tucked in next to the title page of her mother’s Gray’s Anatomy.
Appa, am I to love this woman who declined to engage in my life? A woman who staged her death so that I’d never think to look for her? I might understand, but can I forgive? Can there ever be sufficient reason to abandon one’s child?
Abruptly, her body stiffens. She pushes away from Digby.
“Digby, I know her! Yes, lepers look alike. But I know her! She’s the beggar who’d come to Parambil. Always before the Maramon Convention. She’d walk up and stand there, unmoving. Digby, I’ve put coins in her cup!”
His guilty expression confirms it.
“She hungered to see you, Mariamma. We both did. I couldn’t, because as a white man, I stand out. But every year I’d drive her as close as I dared. She’d dress as a beggar and wait for hours until she spied you before she walked up to the house. I had my own deep yearning to see you. I was envious whenever she succeeded. If she failed, she was distraught. It became harder as the years went on. Once she became blind, it was all over. One year, it was Anna who put coins in her cup. Elsie was heartbroken when she returned to the car. Impulsively, we drove back past the house. I saw you for the first time . . . saw you coming down the road, clear as day. I still carry that image. I so wanted to know you . . . but you had a father. He was the better man, a better father than I might ever—”
“Yes, he was,” she says sharply. It’s on her tongue to add, Don’t you ever forget it! But she doesn’t have the heart. They’ve all suffered enough.
“Digby, as much as you knew of leprosy, couldn’t you preserve her sight? Or her hands?”
He stares at her in disbelief. “D’you think I didnae try?” he sputters. “She’s my worst patient! Her active leprosy is gone, thanks to dapsone and other treatments, but nerves—once they’re deid, they’re deid! She were robbed of the gift of pain. If I could’ve protected her from repeated trauma, she wouldnae look like this!” She’s taken aback by his indignation, the anger in his voice, and the flushed cheeks. It’s the first time she’s heard his accent twisting through. “But all that mattered to her was her bloody art. I’d pad her hands every morning, but if the dressing got in the way, she’d pull it off. She might still have sight, but when her facial nerve was affected and her cornea dried out, I’d patch the eye shut so the cornea could heal and she’d pull it off! We battled over this. We still battle over it. She says that I might as well ask her not to breathe! She says if she stops work, then she has no life . . . That cuts me deep. I suppose I want to hear that I am her life. Because I’m living for her.”
Digby looks at his hands, as if the failing resides there. She wonders if her own desire to be a doctor, to be a surgeon, to take the world in for repairs came from this man, from his genes.
He says more softly, “Ah, well . . . I always knew I was in the presence of genius. Your mother’s kind of talent only comes along once in a great while. Her art is bigger than me, her, or this wretched disease! Her compulsion is hard for us to understand. Believe it or not, she’s still making art. When her sight deteriorated, she was in a frenzy to complete her unfinished projects, further damaging her hands. Sometimes she has me strap charcoal sticks to her fist, and then I bind my hand on top of hers, and we draw.” He laughs ruefully. “We’ve come full circle!” Mariamma has no idea what he means. “In the dark in our bungalow, she works with soft clay. All she has is her palms. She holds the clay against her cheeks, or even her lips, to feel the shape. Unsighted, she’s created hundreds of unique clay creatures, enough to populate a miniature world. Her confidence is astonishing. She knows the value of what she produces. She’s always known.”
“Who gets to see it?”
“Just me. Nobody else. She wanted her work to be seen, but not if it revealed who she was. I wanted it seen. Years ago, we tried cautiously. I moved several pieces to a dealer in Madras, someone I knew, a former patient. I said it was the work of an artist who never wished to be named. It sold at once at an exhibition, four of the seven pieces going abroad. Then an article about this anonymous artist ran in a German magazine. People were intensely curious. The possibility of discovery terrified her. We never tried that again. I’ve two sheds here full of her work. Who knows if the world will ever get to see it? The only thing more important to her than her art is that the world think she drowned, that no one ever finds out that she lives here as a leper. She wants her secret to die with her, even if it means her art dying too.”
Mariamma thinks of her poor father, who died with his own secret, never knowing that his wife lived. Or did he know? Is that what triggered his sudden trip to Madras? Some new knowledge that came his way?
Mariamma breaks the silence. “Digby . . . Now that I know, now that the secret is out, do you think she’d want to talk to me?”
He sighs. “I don’t know. The purpose of her vanishing was that you should think she died. She—we—invested a lifetime making sure of it. She thinks she’s succeeded. I thought she had too—till you walked into the theater today. So . . . would she want to talk to you? Do we shatter the illusion she worked so hard to create? I don’t know.”
Mariamma thinks about her own shattered illusions. Should she thank or curse the Condition and Lenin for bringing her here? The Condition takes away, but it also gives gifts that one might not have wanted. She suddenly longs for Lenin.
She studies the woman seated on the lawn—Elsie. Her mother. She looks strangely at ease in that disfigured, broken body—or is that a daughter’s wishful thinking? All her mother has of what once defined her is thought . . . that and the remnant of a body that barely gets around but still tries to make art. And she has this man who loves her, even as less and less of her remains.
“Mariamma,” Digby says softly, “do you want to talk to her?”
The question makes her heart race and her throat turn dry. No! a voice within her says, without hesitation. I’m not ready. But another voice, a little girl’s voice, a daughter’s voice disagrees, addressing its mother: Yes, because there’s so much you should know about me. And about my father—you never knew the man he became, how he still loved you. He was the best father a girl could ever have.