The Covenant of Water
By Abraham Verghese
Grove/Atlantic
ISBN 9780802162175
715pp. 

Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water is an epic novel spanning several generations which will suck you in from the get go. It is a story about land, faith, class and caste, love and loss.

It begins with a 12-year-old girl in South India preparing to be wed to a 40-year-old widower, Big Appachen, and leave her mother, her only parent. She will travel by boat to live with her husband and his young son Jojo, to Parambil, where he owns a large estate in a jungle.

It’s hard not to recoil on reading about child marriage, even if you console yourself about this happening in 1900, when such marriages were common. The bride’s mother, widowed after her priest husband’s death and who herself is just a tad younger than her son-in-law, feels her daughter will be better off with a husband than at home, unprotected in the absence of a father.

“The helplessness on her mother’s face embarrassed her,” writes the author of the child bride before her marriage is finalised. “She felt pity for her mother, when she so wanted to feel respect. …She was pleading, as if her daughter had protested. Her words had trailed off, her eyes darting around nervously. …‘How different from here can life be there? You’ll feast at Christmas, fast for Lent ... church on Sundays. The same Eucharist, the same coconut palms and coffee bushes. It’s a fine match ... He’s of good means.’”

Set in Kerala and spanning over seven decades, a novel traverses stories about land, faith, class and love and immerses readers in the history, culture and landscape of South India

Although child marriages are much rarer today, arranged marriages are transactional in nature and, when broken down, there’s an element of protection (physical or financial) at play. The girls’ parents want to ensure their daughter’s financial security and the boy’s parents want to ensure that their bloodline continues.

Verghese’s language is rich and his attention to detail is remarkable. You can visualise her description of her new home. “[It is a] child’s fantasy world of rivulets and canals, a latticework of lakes and lagoons, a maze of backwaters and bottle-green lotus ponds; a vast circulatory system because, as [the bride’s] father used to say, all water is connected.”

It is this connectedness that binds the story and its many characters together.

This young girl, who will grow into the matriarch known as Big Ammachi, will bond with her husband who, to his credit, gives the child bride time to adjust to her new surroundings and new role as stepmother to Jojo, wife and home manager. She will have her first child aged 17.

At the heart of this family’s saga is a dark secret Big Ammachi will soon discover, though a hint of it was told to her mother and uncle by the matchmaker: in every generation of Big Appachen’s family, a member has drowned, no matter how much they avoid water.

Her husband won’t travel by boat and won’t let Jojo near the water either. It is an affliction that will lead Big Ammachi to try to understand it from a medical viewpoint. Imagine fearing water because your family suffers “the Condition”, as she calls it, or curse, when you are surrounded by water. They live on the Malabar coast and, irrespective of how much they avoid water, inevitably a family member has drowned. Can Big Ammachi’s progeny avoid this fate?

Big Ammachi’s family aren’t the only characters in this 700-page book. There are a dozen characters — including an elephant whose appearance from time to time sparks joy — whose woven stories ultimately come together in a breathtaking way. Parambil holds the story together, but we also meet a doctor in Glasgow, Digby Kilgore, who ends up working in Madras (Chennai now) as a surgeon.

“The sight of suffering is familiar; its language transcends all borders,” he says. But an incident renders it difficult for him to continue practising, so he retreats to a hill station to live with friends on a plantation he ends up managing. Those friends will help him connect with Dr Rune Orqvist, a Scandinavian doctor who lives on a leprosy commune he set up.

There is Shamuel, a loyal servant from the landless caste who mans Big Appachen’s lands. Shamuel’s son’s Joppan’s friendship with his employer’s second son, Philipose, changes when the latter begins school but Joppan isn’t allowed to due to his caste. They will confront some ugly realities of the caste system when they grow into adults.

And then there’s Big Ammachi’s granddaughter, Mariamma, who pursues a career in medicine, perhaps to understand the Condition away from folklore, like Big Ammachi attempted. But Mariamma can do so using science and, in doing so, connects with the past.

All these characters’ paths will converge down the line in a way that will — I don’t want to give too much away — evoke a lot of emotion.

Verghese’s writing immerses readers in the history, culture and landscape of South India. You become vested in the characters’ arc, rooting for them as they face challenges, tragedies and learn secrets. The reader learns about Kerala, the Saint Thomas Christians in that area, and as the novel spans seven decades, so many important moments and movements serve as a backdrop to the story: the world wars, the aftermath of Independence and Partition and the rise of the communist movement in the state.

Verghese is a doctor so it’s not surprising to read all the medical details, even gruesome at times, but he never strays from the characters’ deeper understandings of the world around them and their survival in it.

The reviewer researches newsroom culture in Pakistan. She tweets @LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, August 27th, 2023