The Covenant of Water

Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water is a gorgeous tale of a world filled with hardship, heartbreak, and tragedy fully embraced by love. The novel follows the lives of three generations of a family in India from 1900 to 1977. They live in what is now the state of Kerala, along the southwest coast of India, where the community of Saint Thomas Christians live. The Saint Thomas Christians date their faith back to when their ancestors were evangelized by Thomas the Apostle (Doubting Thomas), who in the first century would have followed the Spice Route by sea from the Mediterranean world to the coast of India. It is the faith of those Christians that drives story as we follow characters striving to live in the world God imagines for them. That faith shapes the ways many of the characters in the family interact with each other, with their neighbors, with other fellow creatures, and with the natural world.

Abraham Verghese was born in 1955 in Ethiopia, where his family had moved from Kerala. He had begun his medical education in Ethiopia when, in 1974, Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed by a military coup. Verghese and his family moved to the United States. After a couple years, he went to India to complete his medical training at the Madras Medical College. After completing his internship there in 1979, he moved back to the United States and served residencies and fellowships as a doctor in Tennessee and Massachusetts and then started teaching in medical school in Tennessee. At the end of the 1980s, he dropped out of medicine for a while to enter the Iowa Writers Workshop, completing an MFA at the University of Iowa in 1991. He then returned to the medical field, first as a professor at a medical school in Texas and now at Stanford University. Along the way, he was written four books, including two novels.  Kerri Miller interviewed Verghese on MPR’s “Talking Volumes” in September 2023.

Verghese was inspired to write The Covenant of Water in part because of his mother’s memories of childhood, written in a spiral notebook in response to Verghese’s niece’s question to her grandmother, “what was it like when you were a girl?” Verghese says he was especially inspired by the “mood and voice” of his mother’s memories, which he supplemented with his own memories of summer vacations with his grandparents in Kerala.

The novel begins with a twelve-year-old girl, whose father has just died and whose mother is too poor to care for her, being given into an arranged marriage with an older man recently widowed. The man owns a farm at a considerable distance, so after the wedding in the girl’s church, where she meets her husband for the first time, she moves away from the only home she has ever known. We read of the terror of this girl of twelve, but we soon learn that the man she has married is a good man, and we eventually see that this arranged marriage is a good one. Husband and wife create a thriving household and raise children. Along the way, however, she notices that her husband has a strange aversion to water. This relationship with water, sometimes juxtaposed with baptism, is one of the threads that knits the story’s beginning with its end and gives the novel its title.

As the girl grows to adulthood and has charge of the household, she becomes known to all in the family and the neighborhood as Big Ammachi (Big Little Mama). We get to know the farm’s environment through Big Ammachi’s eyes as she learns to appreciate it through her husband’s. Among the residents of the neighborhood that she gets to know is an elephant named Damodaran (Damo), who helps loggers in the forest and also does some work on the farm. India in the early twentieth century operated under the caste system, and some of the people in the neighborhood and who worked on the farm were of a lower caste. Big Ammachi cared for all of them, infused as she was by a surrounding ethic of love for neighbor, which she received through her Christian upbringing and sustained through her faith. She brought many of her concerns for her loved ones and her surroundings to God in prayer. Life on that farm was hard, and sometimes tragic, in response to which Big Ammachi often prayed fervently. At several times throughout the novel, though, we learn from the narrator that God was silent (perhaps calling to mind Elijah’s experience of God’s silence in 1 Kings 19).

Verghese introduces several story lines throughout the novel, and given his expertise as a medical doctor, it’s not surprising that several of the characters practice medicine. India being a British colony presented an option for people in Europe who wanted to "get away from it all." Two of the characters who play important roles in the novel are doctors, one from Sweden and one from Scotland. In the process, we learn about various diseases that afflicted the people of India, especially leprosy. Verghese is gifted at explaining medical matters so that non-specialist readers can appreciate those facets of the narrative.

The three central characters in the novel are Big Ammachi, her son, Philipose, and his daughter, Mariamma, named for her grandmother, whose given name was Mariamma. As we follow the lives of these three, their family, and their friends and neighbors, India makes transitions through both world wars, the end of British rule, and the first three decades of independence. We witness the grip the old caste system has on people’s values even as they recognize the system’s incompatibility with Jesus’ teachings. We see various efforts by the family and their neighbors to carry India into modernity. And we read vivid descriptions of rivers and streams, forests, cultivated areas, and weather events as the characters earn their livelihoods from those environments and otherwise try to negotiate them. Through it all, an abiding desire to engage others lovingly animates the characters in the novel, even Damo, and even as some of the characters face challenges they are unable to meet in ways they might have hoped.

The Covenant of Water is a joy to read, with an abundance of passages that are deeply affecting. I heartily recommend it to all who want to immerse themselves in a very different culture but one to which we can relate because its characters are motivated by hopes we share with them, because of a faith we share with them.

Fredric L. Quivik