The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

Every family has secrets, but not all secrets are meant to deceive. What defines a family is not blood, molay, but the secrets they share.

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese is a sprawling novel with a simple conceit: in happiness and grief, during excesses and famine, in battling diseases and enjoying wealth - we are all connected. This connection is literalized through water - the backwaters of the South-Indian state of Kerala that resemble blood vessels in the human body, but also through oceans that connect continents and carry travelers from afar. “All water is connected and only land and people are disconnected”.

The novel begins in Travancore in 1900, when India was a British colony. 12-year old Mariamma, the daughter of a priest, is arranged to marry a 40-year old widower. Mariamma is a devout Syrian Christian, a descendent of the first converts of St. Thomas, an apostle of Jesus who is believed to have arrived in Kerala in 52 AD before settling in Madras, where he met his demise.

She is twelve years old, and she will be married in the morning. Mother and daughter lie on the mat, their wet cheeks glued together. “The saddest day of a girl’s life is the day of her wedding,” her mother says. “After that, God willing, it gets better.”

God wills it; and belying expectations for novels that are set in India where such marriages were common, things get better for Mariamma. Her husband and sister-in-law treat the child kindly as she transforms into a woman and a matriarch - Big Ammachi. Her happiness is shattered by an accident, and she discovers an ailment that runs in the family. Known only as “The Condition”, it causes many male members of the family to encounter strange accidents often related to drowning. The Covenant of Water tracks the family through three generations across about seventy five years as they share and hide secrets and battle the mysterious condition.

The multi-generational setup with fantastical elements echoes Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Arundhati Roy showed influences of Marquez in her excellent God of Small Things, which is also set in Kerala. However, while Marquez leans into the magic and Roy examines the impact of the caste system, Verghese borrows from his successful career as a doctor to introduce a scientific twist. This makes The Covenant of Water unique - it is a character study that morphs into a medical thriller before switching back to literary fiction. Unlike Marquez and Roy, Verghese deals with humane characters who, despite their flaws, are trying their best. His characters are good to a fault.

Mariamma is both a beneficiary and the source of such goodness. She learns faith from her priestly father, and leans into it through her life. It helps her cope with sadness and gives her hope for the future. Mariamma’s sister-in-law mentors her ("Molay, the sweetness of life is sure only in two things: love and sugar. If you don’t get enough of the first, have more of the second!”). She grows into a matronly figure to a diverse set of characters. Her husband talks little, but listens to her a lot: “Listening is talking for him; there’s an eloquence to this kind of attentiveness; it’s rare, and yet he’s generous with it. He alone amongst all the people she knows uses his two ears and one mouth in that exact proportion”. As a mother and a grandmother, Mariamma rarely imposes her views on kids, especially in matters of education.

Even characters not directly in Mariamma’s orbit, such as a Swedish physician and a Scottish surgeon, are inherently moral. In the latter half of the book, we meet more colorful characters: a woman known as “decency Kochamma” due to her tendency to label other people’s behavior as indecent; a man known as “uplift master” who helps bring amenities to the town by repeatedly petitioning the rulers while rueing the lack of physical affection in his marriage, and more. There is even an elephant, Damodaran, who makes himself present during significant events in Parambil.

The novel is mostly set in Kerala. While planning my first visit to Kerala with my work colleagues from Chennai, a teammate declared, in jest, that he won’t join us since he did not have a passport. Kerala has always seemed foreign: their movies, their humor, their culture are different even for a person growing up in the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu. Kerala is, in the author’s words, “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 her father used to say, all water is connected. It spawned a people–Malayalis–as mobile as the liquid medium around them, their gestures fluid, their hair flowing, ready to pour out laughter as they float from this relative’s house to that one’s, pulsing and roaming like blood corpuscles in a vasculature, propelled by the great beating heart of the monsoon”.

A pleasant surprise to me was that the novel travels to and lingers in Madras – the former name for Chennai, the city I grew up in – for a while. Learning about pre-independence Chennai and getting a glimpse of The New Elphinstone Theatre, Royapettah, and Marina Beach kept me engrossed. Despite the heat, “(t)he Madras evening breeze has a body to it, its atomic constituents knitted together to create a thing of substance that strokes and cools the skin in the manner of a long, icy drink or a plunge into a mountain spring. It pushes through on a broad front, up and down the coast; unhurried, reliable, with no slack until after midnight, by which time it will have lulled them into beautiful sleep. It doesn’t know caste or privilege as it soothes the expatriates in their pocket mansions, the shirtless clerk sitting with his wife on the rooftop of his one room house, and the pavement dwellers in their roadside squats.”

The novel briefly takes us to Glasgow. The author introduces an Irish catholic boy who lives in the Protestant heavy Scotland, “Glasgow, like most Scottish cities, is violently split by religion”, we learn. In reaction to working conditions in factories that produced Singer sewing machines, Glasgow had a strong labor movement. The boy’s treatment as a Jesuit in Scotland and England are compared to the caste system in India, and these events significantly shape him and lead him to settle down in India. However, for a novel that is so ambitious in scope, The Covenant of Water is limited in terms of geography.

“I’ll sew off the duodenum, leaving a blind stump. Then I’ll connect a loop of jejunum to the remnant of the stomach.” It’s the same familiar procedure he does for the peptic ulcers at Longmere. “A gastrojejunostomy, is it? Why not join the stomach directly to the duodenum? A Billroth One? Why not keeping the normal continuity? And then no duodenal stump to leave behind that mighty leak.”

Abraham Verghese uses his profession to his advantage. By not over-explaining medical terminology, he primes us for the fact that his novel is also an account of the development of medicine in India across a few decades. There are references to Sushruta’s contributions to facial surgery about 3000 years ago, not just as an off-hand remark, but as a plot mover. Verghese covers a lot of ground here, including the difficulty to enter medicine as a woman.

In terms of political history, the timeline and the setting of the novel allow Verghese to examine various decisive moments in Indian history. However, except for the Naxalite movement in Kerala, the author largely shies away from examining politics. We learn about India’s independence on a radio, a character conveniently predicts the rise of Communism in Kerala, people are affected by historical droughts and floods, and we meet some Maharajas and Governors. But, the author makes a conscious choice to not let external events distract the narrative. It seems odd that in a novel spanning 8 decades, the characters are not affected directly by a country in upheaval. But for all I know, this could have been true for some people. In The Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin takes a momentary break from talking about warring clans to show the life of a common civilian, and we realize that the peasant neither knows nor cares about who is sitting on the throne.

By foregoing politics, Verghese is able to focus on his characters. His strength is his willingness to delve deep into his characters and his ability to portray emotional moments, especially ones involving loss, with resonance. It might be due to the fact that Malayalam is very close to the language I speak, Tamil, but when a father cries “Ayo! Ayo! Ente ponnu monay!” My precious child!", my heart tugged. The dialogues are well written as well. For example, anglo-Indians use phrases like “big bloody gumbaloda Govinda” (I will not attempt to translate this to English). The humor works in multiple other places, including a Maramon convention, which is the biggest Christian convention in Asia. A scene involving a local translator translating the speech given by an American clergy to his people had me in stitches. The translator remarks on the clergy’s joke involving a ladies handbag, comments on how out of touch the joke is, and beseeches his audience to laugh on the count of 3 so as to not offend the clergy. Verghese also relies a lot on humor in operating rooms. His nurses across various hospitals exhibit wit that lightens the medical jargon.

“Ayo, you call that pulling, Doctor?” Akila shouts from the other side of the room without looking. “The baby will drag you back inside, slippers and all, if you can’t do better.”

In sketching detailed backstories for multiple characters, it does feel like Verghese takes it too far. For example, the plot mechanics need a Scottish doctor to land in Kerala and be at a specific place. But this requires multiple other characters including another Swedish doctor. Verghese competently manages these threads, but one is left wondering if we really needed two European doctors with similar characterization. Additionally, I felt that some characters and ideas were introduced much later than they should be. We witness Baby Mol’s life from her birth, but we learn that she has a dancing routine to welcome the monsoon season when she is middle-aged. Some central characters enter the novel only in the second half. There are also some minor editing gaffes, with ideas being introduced more than once (burden stones and Ida Stone). There is an off-hand remark about mundus in Chennai, except that people in Chennai wear veshtis, not mundus. And finally, the novel over-explains facts for Western audiences, and this bloats up the novel further, resulting in a 700-odd page magnum opus.

These are nitpicks, but my biggest reservation about The Covenant of Water is the unrealistic niceness of most of its characters. In Verghese’s world, Kerala and Chennai in the 1900s and 1950s were more progressive than today. If you follow the Chennai subreddit on Reddit, you will notice many posts from young couples asking for recommendations for hotels where unmarried couples could spend some time together. However we see a couple in The Covenant of Water do this easily in 1970s, without guilt or judgments. There is only one outright evil character - an English doctor who is incompetent and heartless. But most others are, and this feels odd to say, too nice. It makes us question the realism of Verghese’s world.

Despite these flaws, I enjoyed The Covenant of Water. Abraham Verghese is in complete control of his craft. He transforms us to pre-independence and pre-liberalization India, and sketches characters to keep us there. We feel the emotional highs and lows of these people, and tear up and laugh with them. This is not a feel-good novel, for there is immense tragedy, but when the novel is done, I felt great. Arundhati Roy would have examined the brutal reality of a 12-year old child married to a 40-year old man. Verghese lets her grow into a woman who shapes the lives of people around her. The reality of Kerala and India, its people and its politics, fall between Arundhati Roy’s pessimism and Verghese’s optimism.