The Covenant of Water ~ Abraham Verghese (59 of 2024)

 A book running into 796 pages, running across three generations with roots in Kerala India and spreading across, thought of grabbing this book on Doctors day, as I heard that it is by a doctor and related to them.  Final verdict after the read. 

This doctors day – the 1^st of July, thought of reading a book related to Doctors, and lo and behold, here is ‘The Covenant of Water’ by Abraham Verghese a book by a doctor, about human condition(s) and doctor filled with reminiscences. Most nostalgic was big ammachi, her desire to read, wanting to have a doctor in the family and being the strong woman – a mother to so many. Reminding me of my ‘Ammuma’ in many possible ways.

Filled with wealth of details, over 700 pages, including beautiful imagery and spanning three generations from 1900 to 1977 this is a fictional story with real world events of that time period.

Excerpt from the book:

“Some books are lies from end to end,
And some great lies were never penn'd...”

But you have my word this book is true, and I know it through and through.

For Elsie, who helped me understand, that past and present go hand in hand.

With eternal gratitude,

Digby Kilgour,

1936 St. Bridget’s Leprosarium

Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese. 

Early in The Covenant of Water, Big Ammachi’s granddaughter and namesake, Mariamma, “begs for a story about their ancestors.” This request, like much of the novel’s 715-page answer, was inspired by Verghese’s own mother. In 1998, Mariam Verghese was asked by her granddaughter (middle name: Mariam), “Ammachi, what was it like when you were a girl?” Verghese’s mother responded by filling 157 pages of a spiral notebook with intricate illustrations and written memories of her girlhood in Kerala. He used several of the stories from this notebook in the novel, but, he writes, “more precious to me were the mood and voice that came through in her words, which I supplemented with my own recollections of summer holidays with my grandparents in Kerala, and later visits when I was in medical school.” Here, Verghese shares his personal family photographs from those visits and explains how his own experience influenced his fictional world.

Verghese has given us Parambil, a water-filled, near-mythical dreamscape in Kerala. Verghese's story opens with a storytelling grandmother. Drawing on ancient Malayali Christian communal histories that reach back to 52 A.D. with St. Thomas' arrival in India, this story is about the ebbs and flows of lives across three generations from 1900 to the late-1970s. As various historical events of both British and then independent India unfold, we experience them through the loves and losses of a cast of characters that keeps growing like a nodal system with ever-multiplying branches and intersections.

Mariamma, a 12-year-old child bride, marries a 40-year-old widower and becomes the mistress of 500 acres of Parambil. Her husband's family has a secret medical "condition" where water is the cause of death for members in each generation. Big Ammachi, as she comes to be known, experiences many joys and sorrows from that early age until her passing. Though she remains in Parambil all her life, the human and spirit worlds forever intervene. Her wide-open heart takes in everything and everyone, no matter if they bring pain or comfort.

As I watched the unfolding of that relationship and family, I came to recognize how the world worked at that time. How he honored his wife until she came of age, how the relationship grew in love, and then what the story was truly meant to be about – this “condition” feared and how it would rock the family in such a devastating way.

Then another story emerge about a fellow named Digby. A new timeline then back in time to our original story of our young girl, now grown, widowed, managing. 

Would her story and Digby’s intersect? It ends in 1977, when that girl’s physician granddaughter arrives at a shocking discovery. Let’s just say that this family loves and suffers in a variety of ways.

That kind of capaciousness is also a notable stylistic quality of the novel. At times, we might wonder why almost every character has a backstory or why certain subplots exist. Ever the skillful surgeon, Verghese threads meaningful connections between macrocosmic and microcosmic details so elegantly that they are often barely noticeable at first. For example, the parallel narratives of the Parambil family, the Scottish doctor Digby Kilgour, and the Swedish doctor Rune Orquist seem like they could each be entire novels on their own. Instead, Verghese takes his time to reveal how everything, like the waterways there, is connected and eventually flows together.

"The best possible operation is not the same as the best operation possible".

"We don't have children to fulfill our dreams. Children allow us to let go of the dreams we were never meant to fulfill."