Every Thursday, undaunted by the merciless midday sun, they would stand there by the well. The young girl and the intrepid Jesuit, both quaking with unchristian passion. Using the Bible as a ruse to be with each other.
Invariably, in the middle of their conversation, the unfortunate soapy child that was being force-bathed would manage to slip away, and Father Mulligan would snap back to his senses and say, “Oops! We’d better catch him before a cold does.”
Then he would reopen his umbrella and walk away in chocolate robes and comfortable sandals, like a high-stepping camel with an appointment to keep. He had young Baby Kochamma’s aching heart on a leash, bumping behind him, lurching over leaves and small stones. Bruised and almost broken.
A whole year of Thursdays went by. Eventually the time came for Father Mulligan to return to Madras. Since charity had not produced any tangible results, the distraught young Baby Kochamma invested all her hope in faith.
Displaying a stubborn single-mindedness (which in a young girl in those days was considered as bad as a physical deformity—a harelip perhaps, or a clubfoot), Baby Kochamma defied her father’s wishes and became a Roman Catholic. With special dispensation from the Vatican, she took her vows and entered a convent in Madras as a trainee novice. She hoped somehow that this would provide her with legitimate occasion to be with Father Mulligan. She pictured them together, in dark sepulchral rooms with heavy velvet drapes, discussing theology. That was all she wanted. All she ever dared to hope for. Just to be near him. Close enough to smell his beard. To see the coarse weave of his cassock. To love him just by looking at him.
Very quickly she realized the futility of this endeavor. She found that the senior sisters monopolized the priests and bishops with biblical doubts more sophisticated than hers would ever be, and that it might be years before she got anywhere near Father Mulligan. She grew restless and unhappy in the convent. She developed a stubborn allergic rash on her scalp from the constant chafing of her wimple. She felt she spoke much better English than everybody else. This made her lonelier than ever.
Within a year of her joining the convent, her father began to receive puzzling letters from her in the mail. My dearest Papa, I am well and happy in the service of Our Lady. But Koh-i-noor appears to be unhappy and homesick. My dearest Papa, Today Koh-i-noor vomited after lunch and is running a temperature. My dearest Papa, Convent food does not seem to suit Koh-i-noor, though I like it well enough. My dearest Papa, Koh-i-noor is upset because her family seems to neither understand nor care about her well-being …
Other than the fact that it was (at the time) the name of the world’s biggest diamond, Reverend E. John Ipe knew of no other Koh-i-noor. He wondered how a girl with a Muslim name had ended up in a Catholic convent.
It was Baby Kochamma’s mother who eventually realized that Koh-i-noor was none other than Baby Kochamma herself. She remembered that long ago she had shown Baby Kochamma a copy of her father’s (Baby Kochamma’s grandfather’s) will, in which, describing his grandchildren, he had written: I have seven jewels, one of which is my Koh-i-noor. He went on to bequeath little bits of money and jewelry to each of them, never clarifying which one he considered his Koh-i-noor. Baby Kochamma’s mother realized that Baby Kochamma, for no reason that she could think of, had assumed that he had meant her—and all those years later at the convent, knowing that all her letters were read by the Mother Superior before they were posted, had resurrected Koh-i-noor to communicate her troubles to her family.
Reverend Ipe went to Madras and withdrew his daughter from the convent. She was glad to leave, but insisted that she would not reconvert, and for the rest of her days remained a Roman Catholic. Reverend Ipe realized that his daughter had by now developed a “reputation” and was unlikely to find a husband. He decided that since she couldn’t have a husband there was no harm in her having an education. So he made arrangements for her to attend a course of study at the University of Rochester in America.
Dance interpretation of Nina Simone’s song Four Women, with dancer Linda Martina Young as the characters Aunt Sarah, Safronia, Sweet Thing, and Peaches
“The worst thing about wars is that they reduce the enemy to a single characteristic. The country ceases to be history, language, architecture, theater, gardens, and legends; a heritage of love stories, philosophy and science; shared ancestral dreams and uncountable varieties of human striving along the roads of the universe. Instead, every becomes a mere label, blot, field of battle. This is what war has done to the names Palestine, Vietnam, Lebanon, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. These are no longer multifaceted countries and their names are mentioned in news bulletins not as such but as ‘fields’–fields from which the numbers of the dead and wounded are garnered daily like the output of a canned goods factory. The whole of history is now ‘today’ and today has become a reduction of every ‘yesterday’ that has passed over the face of this earth, a reduction of all history. AS though al-Mutanabbi had never walked the markets of al-Kufa hugging himself with joy at a nation that would be singing his verses for a thousand years. As though the Abbasids had never built their libraries on the banks of the Tigris and Abu Nuwas never maintained his pinnacle of shamelessness and flagrant sexual indulgence through to the pinnacle of day after first exhausting the night with poetry and lovely depravties that spared neither male nor female. As though al-Hallaj had never been crucified defending what he had seen with the eye of the imagination and the eye of the mind. AS though Hammurabi had never written his code on tablets of burnt clay before Coca-Cola and Mcdonald’s had been transformed into a religion for all mankind, while Gilgamesh, who achieved immortality but not finding the plant of immortality on the steppes of his everlasting legend, is treated as though he were not of the land of Iraq. Bush and Rumsfeld reduced all of this to the word ‘enemy.’”
— Mourid Barghouti, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here
countervisuality 