‘She is twelve years old and she will be married in the morning.’ Verghese opens his epic novel, ‘The Covenant of Water’, with a shocking statement of fact about life in Kerala, Southern India, at the turn of the twentieth century. The reader is immediately immersed in the drama.
In India, young girls were forced to abandon their own family in favour of the groom’s, for better or for worse. The journey to the groom’s Church takes almost half a day by boat which feels like a world away to a young child. Fortunately, the girl’s husband is a kind man. He’s a man of action and not of words, a farmer who owns a considerable estate known as ‘Parambil.’ No homestead is complete without an elephant, Damodaran, who is an understated symbol of wealth within a strict Indian caste system.
The Covenant of Water, Verghese elegantly weaves the lives of this family across four generations. Big Ammachi, the sylf-like matriarch, and her husband learn to communicate after an arranged marriage. Their family begins to flourish until calamity strikes, changing everything. It tears couples apart with an inexorable finality that only the strongest and most grounded can resist. Some characters capture deep joy and claim it as their own, not least Baby Mol. For others, life is harder and happiness more elusive.
Early in The Covenant of Water, the reader is suddenly transported to Glasgow to meet Digby who sports a sinister ‘Glasgow smile’ from a young age. Overlooked for medical positions in the United Kingdom, and with little family to speak of, he purchases a one-way ticket to India.
With Digby there is always drama and the intensity of Verghese’s writing about him enthralls me and leaves me spellbound. I want to see this pace maintained throughout the novel. Twelve main characters, I think, is too many. There are so many characters that in The Covenant of Water that I never feel I quite get the opportunity to know them all fully.
By contrast, in Cutting for Stone, there were six and for me that is sufficient. Any more dilutes the action making the plot difficult to retain and recall.
Abraham Verghese is Vice Chair of the Department of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Medicine and medical research form the context for the novel. You can tell this novel was written over fourteen years while Verghese immersed himself in medicine.
I was entranced by much of the Covenant of Water: it’s beautifully written and indeed majestic. Joy is mingled with deep sorrow that is made more palatable by the exquisite turn of phrase. The novel boasts an abundance of humanity in the face of adversity that is refreshingly life-affirming. I recommend it.