It’s dusk when they reach Cochin and make their way through the city to a lodge. Her mother goes straight to bed, but at Ranjan’s insistence, Big Ammachi and Baby Mol head out to get their first glimpse of the ocean. It laps noisily at the shore, sounding just like Caesar drinking from his bucket but with a thousand times the intensity; it dwarfs Vembanad Lake. Moored offshore is a ship so big she cannot fathom how it is afloat. The streets are thick with people and inside the grand shops it is still bright daylight because of electric lighting. In her prayers that night, Big Ammachi says, “Lord, forgive me, but sometimes I think you are the God of my little Parambil alone. I forget how vast this world is that you created, and that you watch over.” After JoJo’s death, she studied the book of Job intensely, searching for meaning in their senseless loss, but meaning eluded her. Now she recalls how Job, despite his suffering, praised the God, “who does great things beyond understanding, and marvelous things without number.”
The next morning, with a bleary-eyed and hungover Ranjan leading the way, they visit the vast spice market, pray in the Portuguese basilica, walk in and out of shops, stroll past palaces, and spend hours by the ocean watching the fishermen operate their strange levered nets from shore. By the time they return to the lodge in the late afternoon, they’ve seen so many white men—sa’ippus—and even white women, that Baby Mol no longer wants to touch them to see if the color comes off. They bathe and then head to the clinic in Mattancherry; Big Ammachi tells Ranjan that they can find their way back; he takes off happily. Big Ammachi, her mother, and Baby Mol join the queue outside the clinic of the man who, it is said, is the most astute physician in Travancore and Cochin. Big Ammachi tries to sound out the doctor’s name on the signboard, but it twists her tongue into knots.
Dr. Rune Orqvist appeared in Fort Cochin in 1910 AD, washing ashore like Ask and Embla. Like those first humans of Norse mythology, Rune quickly found his legs, and they carried him to food, shelter, drink, women, and raucous company. With his giant girth and his booming baritone, the first impression of the newly arrived blond, bearded foreigner was of an oracle, the sort of man who in apostolic robes, carrying a staff, could have stepped off a dhow alongside that other apostle, Saint Thomas. His arrival is clouded in almost as much myth as that of Saint Thomas. What is known is that South India was the last stop on a journey that began in Stockholm. According to the good doctor, one night, full of akvavit and “singing to myself on Stora Nygatan, I was abducted. When I woke up I was a ship’s physician on a vessel bound for Cape Town!” That occupation took him to all the major ports of the Orient and Africa. But, in his midthirties, he disembarked in Cochin. The beauty of the cluster of islands forming a city at the confluence of myriad waterways; the warmth of its people; its temples; its churches, basilicas, and synagogues; and the cobblestone Dutch colonial streets and houses led the big Swede to drop anchor for good. Soon after settling in, he commenced the study of Malayalam with one tutor and the study of the Vedas, the Ramayana, and the Bhagavad Gita with another. His appetite for knowledge was matched by one for toddy and female companionship, a cocktail of desires that would sink most physicians.
For most Westerners, Malayalam’s rolling “rhha” scrapes the mucosa off the hard palate and cramps the tongue, but not for Rune. He can banter with children outside his clinic who giggle at the Scandinavian lilt to his Malayalam; he even trots out a few phrases in Judeo-Malayalam to the Paradesi (“foreign”) Jews. (After he relieved the rabbi’s wife of a huge ovarian cyst, the Paradesis—who had arrived from Iberia in the great Sephardic diaspora—would see no one else.) The old Saint Thomas Christian ladies attend his clinic as faithfully as they attend church, presenting him their aches and pains that are often surrogates for chronic marital woes—he offers placebos and sympathetic homilies, such as “Mullu elayil vinallum, ela mullel vinallum, elakka nashttam.” Whether the thorn falls on the leaf, or the leaf falls on the thorn, the leaf suffers. “Aah, aah, you’re so right, doctor. My husband is a thorn only, what to do?”
The doctor’s fortunes changed in 1912 with Mrs. Eleanor Shaw, a middle-aged woman with diverticulitis, acid reflux, and biliary colic—a constellation of unrelated disorders that he thinks of as “Orqvist’s Triad” because they seem to occur together in women like her: white, perimenopausal, and overweight. Rune removed her gallbladder, treated her reflux, and regularized her bowels but Eleanor Shaw felt no relief. In a moment of divine inspiration Rune asked her a delicate question that he never had occasion to ask the poor, whose sex lives never suffered despite illness and deprivation: “Mrs. Shaw? Perchance is the marital bed less appealing after all these years? Painful, even?” His singsong Swedish intonation made it hard for her to take offense. “Eleanor—if I may—these organs are vital and they cannot rust without repercussions.” Rune divined that lack of lubrication, not lack of libido, was the issue. He dispensed thirty-two ounces of an inert, oily unguent, and prescribed sixteen ounces of fresh toddy, which was to sit for eighteen hours to become eye-wateringly potent, taking pains to make clear which medicine was for which orifice. Eleanor’s husband, Mr. Benedict Shaw, was advisor to the Cochin maharajah, and head of a major British trading concern. Rune’s intervention with his wife was so successful that a grateful Benedict Shaw directed his trading house to refurbish an old Dutch mansion into an elegant nursing home for Rune, complete with a surgical theater, ten beds, and a clinic in the front. Mrs. Shaw’s case was proof that a sound treatment has salutary effects on the family, and that a single patient can alter a doctor’s fortunes.
On the evening in 1913 that Big Ammachi, her mother, and Baby Mol arrive at the clinic, the waiting bench is already full and they must stand. Rune Orqvist bustles in, clutching under his arm an impossibly large stack of newly purchased books, and grinning at the assembled patients. Rune’s fees are nominal for the poor and painful for the rich. A Paradesi couple—he in a white suit with an embroidered kippah on his head, she in a high-neck buttoned chemise—sit uneasily next to two bare-chested “black Jews”; the latter community settled in Cochin at the time of Solomon, and as a group they resent the Paradesi “newcomers” for their superior attitude to their darker-skinned kinsmen. Also on the bench are a stevedore massaging a parotid swelling, a fidgety policeman, a dyspeptic Englishman, and a Brahmin lady wearing gold chains sturdy enough to moor a boat.
When at last it’s their turn, Dr. Rune Orqvist welcomes them with a smile that disarms Big Ammachi. The sa’ippu doctor has a stethoscope around his neck. A polished stone paperweight holds down a stack of papers before him. His eyes settle on Baby Mol with a look of recognition. When he extends his enormous hand, Baby Mol, who has never shaken a hand in her life, happily gives him hers. “And who is this beautiful young lady?” he says in perfect but accented Malayalam.
“I’m Baby Mol!”
“For you I have a red sweet or a green one. Which do you want?”
“Both!” Baby Mol says. “One for Kunju Mol too,” she says, holding out her doll.
His laughter fills the room. He hands over the treats.
He turns to Big Ammachi, who is still in shock to hear him speak Malayalam. She begins hesitantly with the Condition, JoJo’s drowning, the genealogy—she’s certain it’s all relevant—before coming to Baby Mol. He listens attentively.
When she’s done, the doctor says, “Very unusual. I don’t know how to explain the drownings in the family. But,” and he leans forward, touching Baby Mol’s cheek, “I don’t think that’s the issue with this beautiful girl—”
“Thank God! My husband doesn’t think so either.”
“I do know what is going on with Baby Mol.”
“You do?” Big Ammachi says, thrilled.
“Yes. You see, I recognized her at once.”
“What do you mean? You’ve seen her before?”