The Covenant of Water

“What you’re doing wrong is getting into the water, monay,” he says sternly. He’ll be firm even if Big Ammachi isn’t. “Your father doesn’t like to swim. Do you see him near the water? Be like he is.”

Without being aware of it, Shamuel speaks of the big thamb’ran as if he’s working in the next field over. After all, the artifacts of his master’s life are all there and call out to him: the trestle, the pickaxe, the plow, the fences their hands dug together, every field they plowed, every tree . . . How could the thamb’ran not be around?

Philipose peels away to desultorily kick an ola ball. Shamuel heads to the kitchen.

“Did he get any farther this time?” Big Ammachi says.

“Farther down in the mud. He buried his head in the riverbed like a karimeen. I dug mud out of his ears and nose.”

Big Ammachi sighs. “Do you know how hard it is for me to let him go to the river?”

“Then forbid him!”

“I can’t. My husband made me promise. All I can do is hold him to his vow not to go alone.”

Later she finds Philipose sitting with his ball in the shade of their oldest coconut tree, poking at an abandoned anthill with a twig. He is downcast. She sits with him, ruffles his hair.

“Maybe I should try to go up,” he says softly, pointing to the top of the tree, “instead of . . .”

What is it with men needing to go up or down, turn bird or fish? Why not just stay on the ground? He looks at her so intensely it makes her shudder. He believes I have all the answers. That I can protect him from the disappointments of this life. “Up is good,” she says.

After a while, the boy speaks. “Did you know my father climbed this tree the week before he died? Shamuel says he cut down tender coconuts for all to drink that day!” The animation in his voice is returning, like a parched shrub uncurling after the rain. Thank God he didn’t inherit his father’s silence.

“Aah. Well . . . he almost fell—”

“Still, he managed to go all the way to the sky,” the boy says, standing and putting one foot into the wedge cut on this side of the bark, gazing up as he visualizes this feat, looking to where the tree ends, and where the firmament begins.

“Aah, that’s true . . .” she says.

But it isn’t true. Evidently Shamuel hasn’t told Philipose what really happened. Her husband had stopped climbing in the last year of his life. But a week before he died, some impulse sent him aloft. The tree was as familiar to him as the bodies of the two women who bore him children. Decades ago he’d cut the wedges that serve as footholds. It wasn’t the tree but his strength that betrayed him and he was stuck a quarter of the way up. Shamuel climbed after him, a loop of coir strung between his feet, jackknifing himself up till he reached the thamb’ran. Shamuel touched the thamb’ran’s foot and got him to slide it down to the next toehold. “Aah, aah, that’s it. It’s nothing for you, isn’t it? Now the other . . . and slide the hands down.” She could only breathe when he was back on earth, the only place those feet belonged now. “I cut down tender coconuts for you,” her husband said to her, pointing vaguely behind him, but there were no coconuts. “Aah. I’m very happy for that,” she replied. They walked back into the house hand in hand, not worrying about who was watching.

Philipose brings her back to earth. “I may not want to climb that tree just yet. It’s a bit high for me, isn’t it?” She detects the rare note of caution in her son’s voice.

“For now, it is.”

“Ammachi, if he was strong enough to climb this tree . . . then why did he die?”

He catches her off guard. By her feet, red ants carry off a leaf, absorbed in their labor. If she dropped a pebble on them, would they see it as a natural calamity? Did they talk to God, or answer impossible questions from their children?

“The Bible says we live three score and ten if we’re lucky. Seventy years, that is. Your father was close. Sixty-five. I’m much younger than him. I was thirty-six when he died.” She sees worry in his face and knows he’s doing the arithmetic. “I’m forty-five now, monay.”

Her son puts a thin arm around her and hugs her. They stay that way for a long while.

Abruptly he turns to her and says, “I’ll never be able to swim for a reason, isn’t that so? My father also couldn’t swim for a reason.” The expression on his face is no longer that of her nine-year-old. In admitting defeat he looks older, wiser. “What is the reason, Ammachi?”

She sighs. She doesn’t know the reason. Perhaps he might be the one to discover the reason. How wonderful if his stubborn determination turned into a quest to cure the Condition! He could be the savior of future generations. He could spare his children from what he suffers. For now she can only name it for him, describe the havoc it has caused this family since ancient times. Perhaps she will hold off on showing him the genealogy—the Water Tree—so as not to frighten him with visions of an early death. She takes a deep breath. “I will tell you what I know.”





CHAPTER 28


The Great Lie


1933, Parambil A ten-year-old boy who cannot claim the waters turns fiercely to the land. The potter lusts for blue alluvial clay on riverbanks, while the brickmaker submerges himself in shallow tributaries, basket in hand, filling his boat with river mud, not caring for any other kind. Philipose’s tastes are eclectic; with his prehensile toes he gauges the proportions of sand, clay, and silt. For feel underfoot, the pillowy sandy soil by the church is unsurpassed, a contrast to the unyielding red laterite near Parambil’s well. The granite-rich sod by his school is the color of altered blood and as cold as the headmaster’s handshake; yet this varietal, when ground and filtered and dried on paper, leaves vivid, chromatic stains. Tinkering like an alchemist, he arrives at a formula for ink that glitters on the page like no commercial brand and makes writing a pleasure. The final recipe includes crushed beetle shell, gooseberries, and a few drops from a bottle in which copper wire is suspended in human urine (his own).

Like his late father, he has become a prodigious walker. Let others be poled, rowed, or ferried to school. He will walk. Yes, call it a feud with water. He hasn’t lost his hunger to see the world. But he’ll skip the seven seas. A walker sees more and knows more, so he tells himself. Only a walker could befriend the legendary “Sultan” Pattar who is always seated on a culvert outside the large Nair tharavad. Pattar is the term for Tamil Brahmins who migrated to Kerala from Madras. His nickname “Sultan” comes from his signature style of wrapping his thorthu around his head, leaving a little peacock tail sticking up. What makes him a legend is his jalebi. Wedding guests soon forget if the bride was fair, or the groom ugly, but none forget Sultan Pattar’s dessert that caps the feast. Some mornings Pattar gives the young walker a piece of jalebi left over from the previous night’s festivities. For over a year, Philipose begged Pattar for the secret recipe. One day, without warning, before Philipose could write it down or memorize it, Pattar rattled off the formula like a priest reciting a Sanskrit shloka. It was hopeless, because Pattar’s measures for chickpea flour, cardamom, sugar, and ghee and whatnot were in buckets, barrels, and oxcart loads.

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