Abraham Verghese: Cutting for Stone

On the day they were to sail, all the novitiates rode from the convent in a caravan of cycle-rickshaws to the harbor to send off their two sisters. In my mind's eye I can see the novitiates lining the quay, chattering and trembling with excitement and emotion, their white habits flapping in the breeze, the seagulls hopping around their sandaled feet.

I have so often wondered what went through my mother's mind as she and Sister Anjali, both just nineteen years old, took their last steps on Indian soil and boarded the Calangute. She would have heard stifled sobs and “God be with you” follow her up the gangway. Was she fearful? Did she have second thoughts? Once before, when she entered the convent, she'd torn herself away from her biological family in Cochin forever and moved to Madras, which was a day and a night's train ride from her home. As far as her parents were concerned, it might just as well have been halfway across the world, for they would never see her again. And now, after three years in Madras, she was tearing herself away from the family of her faith, this time to cross an ocean. Once again, there was no going back.

A few years before sitting down to write this, I traveled to Madras in search of my mother's story. In the archived papers of the Carmelites, I found nothing of hers, but I did find Saintly Amma's diaries in which the abbess recorded the passing days. When the Calangute slipped its mooring, Saintly Amma raised her hand like a traffic policeman and, “using my sermon voice which I am told belies my age,” intoned the words, “Leave your land for my sake,” because Genesis was her favorite book. Saintly Amma had given this mission great thought: True, India had unfathomable needs. But that would never change and was no excuse; the two young nuns—her brightest and fairest—were to be the torch-bearers: Indians carrying Christ's love to darkest Africa—that was her grand ambition. In her papers, she reveals her thinking: Just as the English missionaries discovered when they came to India, there was no better way to carry Christ's love than through stupes and poultices, liniments and dressings, cleansing and comfort. What better ministry than the ministry of healing? Her two young nuns would cross the ocean, and then the Madras Discalced Carmelite Mission to Africa would begin.

As the good abbess watched the two waving figures on the ship's rail recede to white dots, she felt a twinge of apprehension. What if by their blind obedience to her grand scheme they were being condemned to a horrible fate? “The English missionaries have the almighty Empire behind them … but what of my girls?” She wrote that the seagulls’ shrill quarreling and the splatter of bird excreta had marred the grand send-off she had envisioned. She was distracted by the overpowering scent of rotten fish, and rotted wood, and by the bare-chested stevedores whose betel-nut-stained mouths drooled bloody lechery at the sight of her brood of virgins.

“Father, we consign our sisters to You for safekeeping,” Saintly Amma said, putting it on His shoulders. She stopped waving, and her hands found shelter in her sleeves. “We beseech You for mercy and for Your protection in this outreach of the Discalced Carmelites …”

It was 1947, and the British were finally leaving India; the Quit India Movement had made the impossible come about. Saintly Amma slowly let the air out of her lungs. It was a new world, and bold action was called for, or so she believed.

THE BLACK-AND-RED FLOATING PACKET of misery that called itself a ship steamed across the Indian Ocean toward its destination, Aden. In its hold the Calangute carried crate upon crate of spun cotton, rice, silk, Godrej lockers, Tata filing cabinets, as well as thirty-one Royal Enfield Bullet motorcycles, the engines wrapped in oilcloth. The ship wasn't meant to carry passengers, but the Greek captain did just that by housing “paying guests.” There were many who would travel on a cargo ship to save on passage, and he was there to oblige by skimping on crew. So on this trip he carried two Madras nuns, three Cochin Jews, a Gujarati family, three suspicious-looking Malays, and a few Europeans, including two French sailors rejoining their ship in Aden.

The Calangute had a vast expanse of deck—more land than one ever expected at sea. At one end, like a gnat on an elephant's backside, sat the three-story superstructure which housed the crew and passengers, the top floor of which was the bridge.

My mother, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, was a Malayali from Cochin, in the state of Kerala. Malayali Christians traced their faith back to St. Thomas's arrival in India from Damascus in A.D. 52. “Doubting” Thomas built his first churches in Kerala well before St. Peter got to Rome. My mother was God-fearing and churchgoing; in high school she came under the influence of a charismatic Carmelite nun who worked with the poor. My mother's hometown is a city of five islands set like jewels on a ring, facing the Arabian Sea. Spice traders have sailed to Cochin for centuries for cardamom and cloves, including a certain Vasco de Gama in 1498. The Portuguese clawed out a colonial seat in Goa, torturing the Hindu population into Catholic converts. Catholic priests and nuns eventually reached Kerala, as if they didn't know that St. Thomas had brought Christ's uncorrupted vision to Kerala a thousand years before them. To her parents’ chagrin, my mother became a Carmelite nun, abandoning the ancient Syrian Christian tradition of St. Thomas to embrace (in her parents’ view) this Johnny-come-lately pope-worshipping sect. They couldn't have been more disappointed had she become a Muslim or a Hindu. It was a good thing her parents didn't know that she was also a nurse, which to them would mean that she soiled her hands like an untouchable.

My mother grew up at the ocean's edge, in sight of the ancient Chinese fishing nets cantilevered from long bamboo poles and dangling over the water like giant cobwebs. The sea was the proverbial “breadbasket” of her people, provider of prawns and fish. But now on the deck of the Calangute, without the Cochin shore to frame her view, she did not recognize the breadbasket. She wondered if at its center the ocean had always been this way: smoking, malevolent, and restless. It tormented the Calangute, making it pitch and yaw and creak, wanting nothing more than to swallow it whole.

She and Sister Anjali secluded themselves in their cabin, bolting the door against men and sea. Anjali's ejaculatory prayers startled my mother. The ritualized reading of the Gospel of Luke was Sister Anjali's idea; she said it would give wings to the soul and discipline to the body. The two nuns subjected each letter, each word, line, and phrase to dilata-tio, elevatio, and excessus —contemplation, elevation, and ecstasy. Richard of St. Victor's ancient monastic practice proved useful for an interminable ocean crossing. By the second night, after ten hours of such close and meditative reading, Sister Mary Joseph Praise suddenly felt print and page dissolve; the boundaries between God and self disintegrated. Reading had brought this: a joyous surrender of her body to the sacred, the eternal, and the infinite.

At vespers on the sixth night (for they were determined to carry the routine of the convent with them no matter what) they finished a hymn, two psalms, and their antiphons, then the doxology, and were singing the Magnificat when a piercing, splintering sound brought them to earth. They grabbed life jackets and rushed out. They were met by the sight of a segment of the deck that had buckled and pushed up into a pyramid, almost, it seemed to Sister Mary Joseph Praise, as if the Calangute were made of corrugated cardboard. The captain kept his pipe lit and his smirk suggested his passengers had overreacted.