1913, Parambil
In the aftermath of JoJo’s passing, Big Ammachi feels flung off the wheel of life, struggling to find her rhythm. The cock crows every morning before she’s ready to wake; the barber walks up to the house before she remembers it is the first of the month. Were it not for her mother managing the kitchen, they’d all be foraging for food like the estate’s chickens.
Parambil has lost its sole male heir, lost the child she still thinks of as her firstborn, even if he did not come from her womb. But the loss is not hers alone. The first time she goes down to the cellar, an empty pickling urn falls off a shelf above her head without any provocation. She’d seen it out of the corner of her eye and pulled her head back in time for it to shatter on the floor at her feet. She flees up the stairs, only to be met by the sight of her fearless husband looking frightened, gazing past her and down into the cellar. So you knew she was there all this time? The expression on his face drives her into a fury. How dare this spirit that she has treated so hospitably intimidate her husband? Big Ammachi charges back down the steep stairs and she ignores the broken shards poking at her soles. She grabs an empty urn with a strength she did not know she had and launches it toward the room’s shadowy corner. “JoJo was mine too, you know?” she shouts. “I had him for longer than you! If you can make an urn fall on me, why didn’t you pick JoJo up as soon as he fell in the water?” She thinks she hears faint sobs. Her anger subsides. She leaves. But it doesn’t end there. A few days later she finds a syrup-soaked urn overturned, and the cellar swarms with the big red ants whose stings are excruciatingly painful. Big Ammachi wraps her feet in cloth and, lighting a torch of dried palm fronds, she drives the ants back with the flames, coming dangerously close to setting the cellar on fire before she douses the torch in a bucket. She mops the floor and then goes over it once more with kerosene. “Keep this up and I’m calling the achen. Is that how you want to be remembered? Not as a good mother, but as a poltergeist we had to drive out?” A truce holds in the cellar, but in the kitchen her curries taste strange in her reliable clay pots. The milk she inoculates each night for yogurt turns bad. She endures these provocations until gradually they subside. But the heartbeat of Parambil remains irregular. Neither prayers nor church nor tears restore the cadence.
In that same unsettled period, and much too soon after their loss, her husband shows up silently outside her door at night while her mother and the baby are fast asleep. She senses him and sits up, surprised. She isn’t ready. JoJo’s scent is still so strong in this room, and his imprint lingers on the mat beside her. Her husband too seems unsure; he doesn’t extend his hand but just fills the doorway. She doesn’t move. His being there feels like sacrilege. He leaves. The next day he ignores her. Then she understands: this is about Parambil needing a male heir too. Even so, she needs time.
She finds solace and sanity in her garden behind the kitchen. When she first came to Parambil, she noticed her kid goat nibbling the berries on a scraggly bush by the back steps and becoming noticeably frisky. She investigated, and the berry’s scent gave it away. After careful pruning and fertilizing, the bush now towers over her, providing Parambil with coffee. The dark brew has an oily shimmer on its surface and an unexpected bite; it is a reminder that the sweetness of life comes with bitterness. But her banana trees are her real delight. She began with a tiny sucker off a poovan varietal from Dolly Kochamma. Now she has a personal grove of trees, fed by the runoff from the kitchen roof. The leaves block the afternoon sun and make a rustling, knocking sound in the wind that comforts her. She harvests the bunches while they are still green, letting them ripen in the cool of the pantry. The miniature poovan delights her daughter; the child’s father can eat ten at one sitting. She marvels that the earth provides such a delicious bounty with nothing more than water, sunlight, and her love. For each tree, the day arrives that she must hack it down, feeding the corpse to the cows and goats. From the brood of suckers around the stump she cuts away all but one lucky one that begins the miracle all over again, carrying inside it the memory of its ancestors.
She still hasn’t baptized Baby Mol. In her dialogues with God, she avoids the topic but she senses God’s disapproval. One evening she addresses the issue head-on. “How do you expect me to walk past the grave of one child and then go inside to baptize another?” Besides, she has doubts about a ritual meant to confer grace, which she understands as God’s inherent love, benevolence, and forgiveness. “Grace didn’t save JoJo.” God is silent.
One night, she awakes to see her husband once again at the foot of her mat, silent, so as not to rouse her mother or Baby Mol. How long has he been there? He holds out his hand, and this time she rises. She feels the familiar acuity of hearing and sight as he pulls her quietly to her feet. She didn’t realize how much she had missed this closeness. Their task is both tender and urgent.
Fourteen months pass, and many visits to her husband’s room until at last she misses her monthlies. Then she miscarries. She’s stunned. That possibility hadn’t occurred to her. She’d assumed another child would follow, even if it took time, but never this. It feels as though her body betrayed her. Her husband is crushed even if he doesn’t speak of it. “Take nothing for granted,” God reminds her, “unless you want to feel its loss.” What can one do but go on? She miscarries again. When she recovers, she looks to cast blame: might this be the doing of the spirit in the cellar? Could it be that spiteful? She descends to the cellar and sits on an empty urn, sniffing the air, taking her soundings. To her surprise she feels the spirit commiserate with her. She comes away mollified. God only knows why miscarriages happen. God only knows—but doesn’t choose to explain.
When Baby Mol is five, they almost lose her to whooping cough that follows on the heels of measles. As soon as she recovers, Big Ammachi arranges for the baptism, fearful for the child’s soul. She asks Dolly Kochamma to be godmother. Dolly moves her head in assent, her face lighting up with happiness at the honor but saying nothing. In describing this exchange to her husband at dinner, Big Ammachi says, “You and Dolly are alike. Sparing with your words, and never one to gossip or speak ill of others.” He grunts in response. She says, “Of course Dolly’s co-sister will grumble that I didn’t ask her to be godmother.” In the years since her family’s unannounced arrival in Parambil, Decency Kochamma’s prudery has more than justified her nickname; gluttony, however, is not a sin the woman recognizes, for she has now doubled in size, her face merging into her neck, and her body becoming a shapeless barrel. The big crucifix that once pointed accusingly at whomever she was addressing has risen on her expanding bosom so it faces the heavens. Dolly Kochamma, despite her trials with her impossible co-sister and housemate, preserves her youthful figure, her face still unlined by worry, and her friendly demeanor unchanged, all of which must feel like a violation to Decency Kochamma. Big Ammachi adds, “I’m sure Decency Kochamma thinks she’s the saintlier of the two.” Her husband mutters something she doesn’t digest till he has left the table. “Only if you measure saintliness in tons.” It sinks in that her husband has just made a joke!
During the baptism, Baby Mol delights in having water poured on her head, something JoJo would never have tolerated. Big Ammachi hears the achen intone the baptismal name she has chosen, and Dolly Kochamma dutifully repeats it. But that name sounds jarring to Big Ammachi’s ear, while on her tongue it feels as brittle as uncooked rice.
When they return from church, her husband is waiting. He tosses his daughter into the air and the child lets out a hoarse cry of delight. “So, what’s your name?” he asks.
“Baby Mol!” the little one says. He looks inquiringly at his wife.
“It’s true. I left the other name in the birth register and that’s where it will stay.”
Five years on, she lives with the pain of JoJo’s death the way one lives with vision turned cloudy from a cataract, or the ache of an arthritic hip. But the newly baptized Baby Mol is their salvation; even the little girl’s father, who has long ago renounced God, must see the divine in her ready smile and generous nature. She’s everyone’s favorite. As an infant, she was happy to be carried, and equally happy in her little hammock. Now that she’s older, she’s content to sit for hours on one verandah bench that she has made her own. From there she reveals a strange ability to announce the arrival of visitors before they have come into view. “Here comes Shamuel!” she might say, and they see nobody, but three minutes later, Shamuel will arrive. Her mother finds it remarkable that Baby Mol rarely cries. The only time she recalls her crying was that one terrible day when she keened till she turned blue, the day when Big Ammachi had wished . . . It is best not to recall what she wished. She understands that violent loss begets more violence.
During the monsoon that year they all take ill with fever. The hearth fire stays cold for one whole day because there’s no one to attend to it. Her mother is the last to recover: she’s always tired, sleeping early, and only rising when the sun is high overhead. Rising from her mat is an effort, and her hair is unkempt because her arms fatigue in the act of combing. When her mother does eventually appear in the kitchen, she’s listless, too weak to help. Most alarming is that her mother’s stream of chatter is silenced. They send for the vaidyan, who takes her mother’s pulse and examines her tongue, then prescribes his usual massage oils and tonics, but they don’t help. She’s getting worse. Moreover, her daughter has her hands full, trying to care for her and run the household.
Blessings come in many shapes and sizes, but the one that arrives around the Onam festival happens to be of the bow-legged variety. Baby Mol announces her arrival—“an old lady is coming”—minutes before the bow-legged Odat Kochamma waddles in as if she’s heard a silent summons for help. This gray-haired, hook-nosed woman can stand with her feet together and Baby Mol could still pass between her knees. She’s a distant cousin of “Big Appachen,” as Baby Mol calls her father (a name they gradually all take to using when speaking of him in the third person). Big Ammachi finds out later that the old lady wanders among the homes of her various children, staying for a few months with one, then another before moving on. But Parambil is where she will stay.
“Where do you keep the onions?” Odat Kochamma says, walking into the kitchen, speaking out of the corner of her mouth so her chaw of tobacco doesn’t fall out. “And hand me the knife. In all my years I keep praying for onions to cut themselves and climb into the pot, but you know what?”—and she squints at each of them while looking deadly serious—“So far it has never happened.” Then her deadpan expression cracks, the face breaks into a myriad of wrinkles, and her disarming grin is followed by a cackle so unexpected and lighthearted that it banishes the dark clouds from the kitchen. Baby Mol is thrilled and claps her hands, laughing with her.
“My gracious God,” Odat Kochamma says, spotting the rice boiling over, raising her hands up to the heavens, or trying to, but her stoop lets them get only as far as her face. “Is anyone watching over this kitchen?” The admonishment is offset by the twinkle in her eyes and the tone of her voice. “Who’s in charge—the cat?” She whips her thorthu off her shoulder and uses it to move the pot off the fire, then pokes her head out of the back door, puts two fingers to her compressed lips, and shoots out a jet of tobacco juice. She turns back in time to spot the cat sneaking up on the fried fish. Caught in the act, the cat freezes. Odat Kochamma’s upper lip slowly everts, then crudely carved wooden teeth emerge like muddy fangs as she pushes out a denture. It’s too much for the cat, who turns tail and flees. The dentures retreat and the old lady’s laugh rings out again. “By the way,” she says in a stage whisper, looking around to make sure no strangers are eavesdropping, “these aren’t my teeth. That appooppan left them on a window ledge just now.”
“Which old man?” Big Ammachi asks.
“Hah! My wretched daughter-in-law’s father! Who else? I was leaving that house after she called me an old goat. I saw the teeth and I thought, Aah, if I’m the old goat, then don’t I need this more than him? If he left it there it means he mustn’t want it, illay?” She tries to look innocent but her eyes are full of mischief. Big Ammachi cannot stop laughing. All her worries momentarily vanish.
Odat Kochamma is the tonic Parambil needs. The old lady is ceaseless in her toil. Within a week, Big Ammachi comes to rely on being fussed at, told to sit down and rest, or made to laugh so hard she has to pee. The only thing she doesn’t like is that Odat Kochamma always puts on the same turmeric-spattered mundu after her bath, even though she hotly denies it. “But I just changed it yesterday!” In the middle of the night, Big Ammachi understands and is furious with herself: Odat Kochamma has only one change of clothes. The next day she presents her with two brand-new sets, saying, “I didn’t see you last Onam, so these have been waiting for you.”
Odat Kochamma acts indignant, her brow furrowed, fingering the white cloth that will never again be as white as it is just now. But her eyes betray her. “Oho! What’s this? Are you scheming to marry me off, at my age? Aah, aah. If I’d known I’d never have come to visit. Send my suitor away! I won’t see him. Something’s wrong with him that you’re not telling me. Is he blind? Does he have fits? I’m done with men. This pot has more intelligence than a man!” All the while, she keeps thrusting the clothing back at Big Ammachi yet retains a firm grip.
Baby Mol runs to her father whenever she sees him. He’s more patient with her than he was with JoJo, who was in any case awed by his size and his silence; Baby Mol is not. She shows her Big Appachen her ribbons and her dolls. One rainy afternoon when he’s imprisoned by the downpour, Baby Mol interrupts her father’s anxious pacing on the verandah and pulls him down to what has become her bench. “Sit here!” He lowers himself obediently. “Why does the rain fall to the ground and not go up to the sky? Why—” He listens, befuddled, to the barrage of questions. Baby Mol doesn’t wait for answers. She stands on the bench to crown her father with a hat she wove out of green coconut fronds with Odat Kochamma’s help. Pleased by the effect, she claps her hands. Then she wraps her stubby arms around her father’s neck and presses her cheek to his, squashing both their faces. “You can go now,” she says. “You’ll stay dry with this hat.” He wags his head in gratitude. Big Ammachi bites her lips to keep from laughing at the sight of her giant of a husband, burnished by decades of sun, crowned by a comically small, misshapen hat. Once he’s out of his daughter’s sight she sees him remove it and examine it.
“I never thought I’d live to see such a thing,” Big Ammachi says to Odat Kochamma.
“Aah. Why not? A daughter has an open door into a father’s heart.”
I’ll take some credit too, she thinks. I helped to soften him. I helped unburden him of his secrets.
The chemachen who comes calling for a subscription one morning is no more than a boy, the growth on his upper lip so sparse that each hair could be named after an apostle. His voice has just broken. In his white cassock, which is far too big for him, and a black cap that swallows his forehead, he looks dressed for the priest part in a school play. No doubt his family “dedicated” him to the church when he was in shorts, to be raised (and fed) by the seminary, a boon when paddy is scarce. All such boys go on to be ordained, but Big Ammachi wonders about their true conviction.
The silly chemachen had spent minutes observing Damo, till Unni chased him away. Now he’s too busy gawking at Baby Mol to recall why he’s there, until Big Ammachi asks him about the ledger. His childlike eyes turn uncomprehendingly to her.
“That thing under your sweaty armpit,” she says, pointing.
He hands it over. “What’s wrong with the little one?” he asks solicitously.
She jerks up, following his gaze to where Baby Mol sits on her bench, as she does for hours each day, her legs keeping time.
“What do you mean, what’s wrong? Nothing’s wrong with her!”
Several seconds elapse before he understands he’s said something terribly stupid. He walks backward, but then remembers his ledger, reaching warily for it, worried she will clout him with it before he escapes.
A furious Big Ammachi studies her smiling daughter. What did the stupid boy see? Was it her daughter’s tongue? The family is used to Baby Mol’s habit of parking her tongue on her lower lip, as though there’s no room in her mouth. Her face is broad, or perhaps her prominent forehead just makes it seem so. The soft diamond that babies have in the front of their heads remains visible under Baby Mol’s skin, though she’s going on six. Her features are blunt, that’s true. Unlike her parents, she has a snub nose, and it sits on her face like a berry on a saucer.
Big Ammachi feels the muttam sinking beneath her and reaches for a verandah pillar for support. Baby Mol was three before she could walk without clinging to something, and four before she put words together. Big Ammachi was too relieved to have a child who didn’t wish to swing from vines to make much of these things.
She seeks out Odat Kochamma. “Be honest—what do you think?” The old lady studies Baby Mol for a while. “Could be something isn’t right. Her voice is so hoarse. And her skin is different, puffy.” It pains the old lady to say this, but Big Ammachi knows she’s right. “But what does it matter?” Odat Kochamma adds. “She’s an angel!”
Big Ammachi summons the vaidyan, who pulls out a bottle of tonic after a cursory glance at the patient. “Give her this,” he says, in his priestly manner, “three times a day, followed by warm water.”
“Wait! What do you think is wrong with her?” she says, ignoring the proffered bottle.
“Aah, aah, this should work,” he says, looking at neither of them, still holding out the bottle.
“That’s the same tonic you gave her when she had whooping cough.”
“Why not? Cough is gone, is it not?”
Big Ammachi dismisses him and speaks urgently to her husband. He becomes very still. After a long while he nods.
That evening, the patriarch of Parambil summons Ranjan and asks him to escort Big Ammachi and Baby Mol to Cochin; he is the better traveled of the twins and knows Cochin. Dolly reports that Decency Kochamma has had a fit, because of her husband’s obvious pleasure in an assignment where she won’t be monitoring him. She makes him kneel, prays over him, anoints him with holy oil, and threatens to skin him alive if he misbehaves.
Big Ammachi asks her mother to come with them, hoping the excursion might shake her out of her lethargy. They set out before dawn, the women dressed in their finest, carrying umbrellas and packed lunches. Baby Mol’s excitement keeps them all in good spirits. A boatman takes them down the river and then weaving through canals and backwaters until they arrive at Vembanad Lake, one edge of which Big Ammachi last saw as a twelve-year-old bride on the second-saddest day of her life. A bigger boat carries them across the lake.
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?”
“You could say that.” He examines Baby Mol’s hands. “I expect she has a swelling, a hernia by her belly button, am I right?” He lifts Baby Mol’s shirt, and it’s as he says, a bulge that Big Ammachi thought nothing of, since it never troubled her little girl. Baby Mol giggles. The doctor has her walk for him, put out her tongue.
He rests his huge forearms on the desk and leans forward. “What Baby Mol has is a well-known affliction. It’s called ‘cretinism’—but the name is not important.” It means nothing to Big Ammachi in any case. “There’s a gland here in the neck. The thyroid. You’ve seen it swell into a goiter in some people?” She has. “That gland produces a vital substance for the body to grow and the brain to develop. Sometimes at birth the gland doesn’t work. Then children develop like Baby Mol. The tongue. The broad face. The hoarse voice. The thickened skin. She’s a smart child, but she’s slow to learn what others her age know.” He’s listed all the things about her daughter that she resisted seeing.
“You can tell all this by looking at her?” Big Ammachi asks, still doubtful.
He steps to his bookshelf and without hesitation picks out a volume. He rifles through pages just as her father could with his Bible, familiar with chapter and verse. He turns the big book around to display a photograph. It’s true: Baby Mol resembles this child more than she resembles her blood relatives. Baby Mol puts her broad finger on the page and giggles in recognition.
“Is there medicine to cure this?”
He sighs and shakes his large head. “Yes and no. There’s an extract of the thyroid, but it isn’t available in India. Even if it were, it would have to be administered from birth. At this point, no amount of that extract will reverse what you see.”
Big Ammachi looks at this man whose hair and beard are like spun gold, and whose eyes are the color of the ocean. Many Malayalis have light-colored eyes, the influence of the Arab and Persian visitors of old, but nothing like this doctor’s eyes. More than the color, it’s the kindness in them that is so striking; it only makes his words more painful for her to hear. The door into her daughter’s future has been pushed open. The view is crushing. She wants to argue. He reads her mind. “She’ll always be a child. That’s what I have to tell you. She’ll never grow up, I’m sorry to say.” He smiles at Baby Mol. “But what a happy child! A child of God. A blessed child. I wish I had some other news for you. I wish I did,” he says, his face grave, those kind eyes now full of sorrow.
Her mother looks on, her eyes wet, a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. Baby Mol is her happy self, too absorbed with the doctor and his beard and the instruments on the table to be affected by the discussion.
“Bless you,” Big Ammachi says, her voice choking. She has just thanked this man who gave her this terrible news, habit being so strong.
“Please understand. This happened before her birth. She was born this way. Nothing you or anyone else did caused it. Understand? This isn’t your fault. In Jeremiah, doesn’t God say, ‘Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee’?”
“He does!” she says, shocked to hear a Bible verse from this worldly man.
He opens his hands as if to say, God’s work is a mystery to us.
She can’t help her tears. He puts his hand on hers and she clutches it, bending her head. Nothing can absolve me, she wants to say. After a while she looks up. “But what about the Condition, the drowning I told you about? If I have more children. Will they have it? Will they be like Baby Mol?”
Rune says, “The drownings . . . I really don’t know. That is clearly something passed from generation to generation. It’s just that I can’t think what it is. But what happened to Baby Mol will not happen to the next child. I promise you that.”
They’re at the door when the doctor says, “A moment, Kochamma.”
It’s not Baby Mol but the child’s grandmother who has his attention. She’d sat in the room with them, abstracted though not indifferent. “May I?” He places his fingers on her neck and probes thoughtfully. When he removes his hand, Big Ammachi sees the knot that he spotted on her mother. Is there no limit to the bad news in this room? He says, “Her eyes are a bit yellow.”
“She’s been weak for months,” Big Ammachi says. “It’s hard for her to lift her arms, and once she sits down, hard to rise.”
He guides her mother to the examining table. He feels her belly. Big Ammachi notices it looks swollen, despite her weight loss. Her mother looks befuddled but doesn’t protest. The doctor is noticeably subdued. “Kochamma,” he says, addressing her mother. “I have some medicine for you. Would you take Baby Mol out to look at the garden while I get it ready? I’ll give it to your daughter.”
As their boat approaches the jetty, Big Ammachi sees a familiar silhouette perched high up in a coconut palm. By the time the red earth of home touches her feet, her husband is there waiting. Baby Mol regales her father with the wonders she has seen: the ocean, the electric lights, the doctor with skin painted white—a tale she will repeat for the rest of her life.
When husband and wife are alone in his room, seated on the edge of his bed, she tells him all. “Baby Mol’s mind and body are fixed in time. She’ll always be just as she was last year. And the year before.”
The big chest heaves. He sighs, hangs his head. After a long, long while he speaks, his voice hoarse. “If you’re saying she’ll always be Baby Mol, a child, a happy child . . . that’s not such a bad thing.”
“No,” she says through tears. “Not such a bad thing. An angel forever.”
He puts his arm around her, pulling her close.
“There’s more,” she says, sobbing. She tells him of the jaundice the sa’ippu doctor noticed in her mother’s eyes, the rock-hard lump he felt in her neck and also in her belly, her enlarged liver—it explained her lassitude. Privately, the doctor told Big Ammachi that a cancer in the stomach had spread to the liver and the glands in the neck. It was too far gone for surgery. There was no treatment other than to make her comfortable. “I felt as if the same mule that kicked me ten minutes before kicked me again,” she says.
“Does she feel pain?”
“No. But he says she will. We must buy opium pills to keep her from suffering toward the end. He said, ‘Some Christians think that pain confers dignity, that there’s Christian redemption in pain. But I don’t.’ That doctor is a saint.”
That night in her prayers, she says, “You knew all these things, Lord. What is there for me to tell You? Before my mother was born and before Baby Mol was born You knew what was written on their foreheads.” She knows she must thank God for the few good years she’s had with her mother. But not tonight. It wouldn’t be heartfelt. “I pray You keep her from suffering. She has had enough of that in this life already.”
She prays too for the kind doctor. How gifted he is to know in an instant what ailed Baby Mol, and then to see that something was very wrong with her mother. Yet, despite being able to name these disorders, he could offer no treatment. In that sense, the annoying vaidyan, with his one tonic for every malady, could argue that he was no worse. But the vaidyan knows nothing. “Lord, that doctor knew everything . . . but he didn’t know about the Condition. I beseech You once more: If You won’t heal the Condition, please send us someone who can.”
