Baby Kochamma and Father Mulligan

Baby Kochamma’s relationship with Father Mulligan is an unrequited attachment that survives its object: even after his death, she continues to write that she loves him, while her memory remakes him into the man she had wanted him to be. The diary’s repeated declaration and her imagined restoration of the former priest reveal a private bond sustained less by reciprocation than by the power of recollection to claim what life denied her.

The attachment and its written ritual

In the late episode, Baby Kochamma opens her maroon diary, turns to 19 June, and makes a fresh entry in a routine manner: “I lovc you I love you.” The first word’s misspelling does not interrupt the formula. It appears on every page in that diary, and she has a case full of diaries containing identical entries. Some pages also preserve daily accounts, to-do lists, or snatches of dialogue from favorite soaps, but even those entries begin with the same declaration. The phrase is thus both a record of an enduring feeling and a ritual repeated across the ordinary business of her days.

The repetition gives her attachment a form that does not depend on a reply. The scene presents the words as an established practice, not a new response to news of Father Mulligan’s death. When she closes the diary, she returns the pen to its loop; the careful, familiar gesture completes another entry in a long-running sequence. The relationship persists in writing even as the person addressed is absent.

Father Mulligan’s departure from the priesthood

Father Mulligan died four years before this scene of viral hepatitis in an ashram north of Rishikesh. His path there began with contemplation of Hindu scriptures: theological curiosity eventually led him to change his faith, and fifteen years earlier he had become a Vaishnavite devotee of Lord Vishnu. He remained in contact with Baby Kochamma after joining the ashram, writing to her every Diwali and sending a New Year greeting card each year. A photograph he sent showed him addressing middle-class Punjabi widows at a spiritual camp, the women in white with their sari palloos over their heads and Father Mulligan dressed in saffron.

The image makes his transformation visible and, to Baby Kochamma, difficult to accept. She had kept his other gifts, but not this photograph. What offended her was not simply that he had renounced his vows; it was that he had done so for another religious life, not for her. The narration figures her disappointment as the pain of opening one’s arms to someone who walks past into another embrace. His change of faith therefore sharpens the asymmetry of their relationship: he chose a different spiritual commitment, while she continued to hold fast to the hope and memory attached to him.

A rejection neutralized in memory

Father Mulligan’s death does not alter the words in Baby Kochamma’s diary because, in her understanding, it does not alter his availability to her. His gentle, compassionate rejection in life is neutralized after death by the private nature of memory: she can possess her recollection of him as wholly her own, without sharing it with the faith or religious companions he chose. The narrative makes clear that this possession belongs to her imagination, not to a changed history between them.

In that memory, Father Mulligan embraces her as a man embraces a woman. She strips away the saffron robes and restores the Coca-Cola cassock she loved, takes away his begging bowl, tends his feet, gives him back his comfortable sandals, and converts him again into the familiar figure who came to lunch on Thursdays. These concrete reversals turn his religious departure into a scene she can undo. They do not change his choices; they disclose how she preserves the attachment by replacing the man’s later identity with an earlier, desired image.

The bond after death

Night after night, year after year, Baby Kochamma writes the same declaration in diary after diary. The routine outlasts Father Mulligan by four years and remains unchanged by the fact of his death. Her grief, possessiveness, and longing are concentrated in a practice that is at once repetitive and sustaining: the words keep the attachment present, while the imagined embrace supplies the reciprocity the living relationship did not provide.

The episode places this private persistence beside the novel’s account of separation and loss. Father Mulligan’s death closes off any possibility of renewed contact, yet it also gives Baby Kochamma’s memory an authority it never had over him while he lived. Her attachment endures not through reunion or mutual commitment but through diary, photograph, and a mental act of restoration. The relationship’s final shape is therefore a contrast: the historical Father Mulligan leaves her for another faith, while the remembered one is returned to the Catholic image she can keep.