There is a curious symmetry in the bookending of Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water. It begins as it ends – with a mother and daughter, united in grief, taking solace in their immediate, if impermanent, proximity to each other. With its epic sweep and its historical span of almost eight decades, the book is many things. It is an exploration of familial relationships as also an ode to connections forged by humanity, and the redemption offered, counterintuitively, by human frailty. It is the story of three generations of one family, set in the village of Parambil, Travancore, in present-day Kerala. It is also, crucially, the dogged pursuit of a medical mystery, a strange “Condition” that passes for a curse, causing death by drowning in successive generations of the Parambil family.
This, perhaps, is Verghese’s greatest triumph. He takes what could have been a myth or even superstition – what is, definitely, a family’s well-kept secret – and turns it into scientific enquiry, pulling together disparate strands, gathering characters from colonial and newly-independent India – a doctor from Scotland, another from Sweden, an Anglo-Indian community – a few love stories, a whole brood of misfits and outliers who populate the 715 pages of this expansive novel. It is interesting then, that Verghese chooses, over other potential leitmotifs, as beginning and end, mothers and daughters, dispossessed in patriarchal discourse, but imaged as primary actors in this story of love, loss, ambition, and intrigue.
Water, a spectator and an agent
It seemed particularly portentous to be reading this book against the backdrop of an exceptionally volatile monsoon, amid reports of devastation caused by water. The story starts with a 12-year-old bride, to be married to a man 28 years older, a widower with a young child in need of a mother. The unnamed child bride, bidding goodbye to her house with its adjacent expanses of water, soon realises that her husband and the men of Parambil are in a constant state of war against water. Her husband, deeply attached to the land he tends to with great care, never steps into the water, not even in a boat, preferring to walk long distances. Her stepson is similar, choosing to climb trees instead of swimming across canals.
“All water is connected,” she ruminates, and in this connectedness, her world appears limitless, even as her husband, and later, her son, Philipose, remain locked inside the patch of land they claim as their own. Decades later, her granddaughter, Mariamma, has a similar epiphany: “It is indifferent, this water that links all canals, water that is in the river ahead, and in the backwaters, and the seas and oceans – one body of water (…) The water she first stepped into minutes ago is long gone and yet it is here, past and present and future inexorably coupled, like time made incarnate. This is the covenant of water: that they’re all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone.”
Water, in this book, is both spectator and agent, causing human tragedy, but also healing it. With its substantial bulk, The Covenant of Water requires of its reader both commitment and immersion. It has a dauntingly large cast of characters, spread over several generations of the Parambil community, and connected to them, in a Forsteresque network, friends, acquaintances, and lovers. The child bride, finding herself in her new home at the very turn of the century in 1900, goes on to become Big Ammachi, the matriarch of the Parambil family. From Travancore, the narrative travels far and wide, to Glasgow in 1919, with its rumblings of factory-workers’ protests, Cochin in the aftermath of the First World War, and colonial Madras in the early 1930s. It details the growing forces of the nationalist movement, the expansion of railways and coffee plantations in the 1940s and 50s, famines and floods that plagued the land, the rise of left-wing politics in the newly formed state of Kerala, and travels all the way into the 1970s, delving into the violence and the disillusionment of the Naxal movement, and in stark contrast, the advancements in education and medical science in modern India.
The canvas is broad, the strokes are detailed. The telling of this inter-generational saga could have gotten tedious, but it is to the writer’s credit that the pace of the narrative never flags. Verghese’s Philipose, growing up in rural Travancore, learns English from reading Moby-Dick and Great Expectations. Little wonder then that its stylistics locate the text, at least partially, within a Dickensian, mid-Victorian, realist tradition. When Digby Kilgour, the doctor from Scotland, asks a young Philipose his name, the boy responds with, “Call me Philipose”, in an obvious, chuckle-inducing homage to the 19th-century greats.
Converging waterways
The book captures both context and milieu, even as it attempts to tackle questions of caste, class, race, and gender, sometimes settling for easy resolutions. Parambil is easily a microcosm of the outside world, one that seems perfect on the surface but is deeply flawed within. Shamuel, companion, foreman, and friend to Big Ammachi’s husband, the benevolent patriarch of Parambil, is resigned to his “lower caste” identity and consequent position of subordination and service.
This status quo is challenged by Shamuel’s son, Joppan, Philipose’s best friend. Joppan’s impassioned diatribe on caste privilege and the sham of “generosity” is incisive and scathing. The text navigates various manifestations of marginalisation, studying the sliding scale of power and oppression, the liminality between race and caste, the prejudices that separate Brahmins from other castes, the British from Anglo-Indians, and the diseased from the able-bodied.
It also takes note of patriarchal oppression, particularly in its portrayal of the helplessness of widows and the obstacles in the way of women when they want careers and independent destinies. The censure is especially sharp when Philipose, besottedly in love with Elsie, an artist of tremendous (if emerging) talent, is forced to acknowledge that he might be marrying for love, but his bride has opted for a “safe” husband – a writer – an artist himself, who she hoped would understand her ambition and not limit her to domestic drudgery and childbearing. Women in the world of The Covenant of Water often make radical choices, for themselves and for their children. While the author’s desire to set right historical wrongs is laudable, the story sometimes glosses over or softens difficult bits, like in its rose-tinted treatment of child marriage, in the slow-blossoming romance between Big Ammachi and her strong, silent, and brooding husband.
There are three primary strands in this big book that entwines eventually, much in the way of Mariamma’s image of converging waterways. There is, primarily, the Parambil family with its strange history of eccentricities and drowning. There is Digby, the idealistic and dedicated Scottish doctor who, heartbroken and at the centre of a scandal, flees from Madras to Cochin in the hope of redemption, and there is the Swedish doctor, Rune Orqvist, who finds his calling in the pursuit of the cure of leprosy, setting up a community for those excised from society as the ultimate act of service. Inexorably, the narrative pulls the reader into a world where art and medicine, faith and love, are all in a symbiotic relationship.
Kalighat paintings from Bengal, the enigmatic sculptures of Mahabalipuram, Raja Ravi Verma’s portraits that wound their way into millions of homes through calendar art, all form definitive episodes in the stories of men and women of medicine. Art is never far removed from the world of science. When confronted with the tragedy of “the Condition”, Big Ammachi refuses to see it as a curse, sequestering it from irrationality, hoping to be sent a cure to this disease that threatens her family. Her hope is centred as much in science as it is in her faith, in her Church and her god. This, however, is not a world of sterile rationality. There are ghosts that lurk in cellars, children who can peek into the future, and love that triumphs against all odds.
In holding together these divergent threads, the narrative becomes a space of delicate balances, one that allows for contradictions to co-exist. In its nuanced plotting and its ambitious scale, the book might well be a mosaic of fragments that come together to form a pattern both stunning and evocative. The reader, of course, when faced with this behemoth of a book, must venture in with curiosity and faith, when faith is, in the words of Big Ammachi’s father, “to know the pattern is there, even though none is visible.”
The Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese, Atlantic Books.
