BookBrowse Reviews The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

BookBrowse:

A sumptuous literary masterpiece recreates a bygone era in South India through a family whose strongest bonds are linked to a mysterious affliction that haunts multiple generations.

BookBrowse Fiction Award 2023

Along the Malabar Coast of South India in 1900, a 12-year-old girl grieving her father's death sets off to a rambling estate called Parambil to marry a man almost 30 years her senior. Three generations later, her granddaughter and namesake begs her for a story about their ancestors and a genealogy "chock-full of secrets." So begins an unforgettable journey of faith, medicine and love in Abraham Verghese's magisterial novel The Covenant of Water.

Mariamma, the young bride, arrives at the 500-acre Parambil farm missing her mother and uncertain of her future. Finding strength in her faith as a Saint Thomas Christian (see Beyond the Book), she throws herself into her duties as a wife and homemaker. As the years go by and she bears a child, her stepson JoJo calls her Big Ammachi ("Big Little Mother"), and the name sticks. She becomes the matriarch and mainstay of a family with a peculiar affliction, one she refers to as the "Condition": every generation, one person dies from drowning. Early in her marriage, after an unimaginable tragedy occurs, her husband unrolls a fragile parchment revealing a family tree (what she will call "the Water Tree") going back seven generations:

"The tree on her lap lacks symmetry and is devastatingly accurate. She understands at once that it is a catalog of the malady that has shattered the Parambil family, but unlike Matthew's gospel, this is a secret document, hidden in the rafters, to be viewed only by family members, and only when they absolutely must see it."

Now knowing, Big Ammachi protects her children from situations that might portend tragedy. What she cannot protect them from, however, is a caste system that "is so ancient that it feels like a law of nature, like rivers going to the sea." When her son, Philipose, witnesses the humiliation of a friend in school, she must explain this system, "conscious of how absurd it must sound." Verghese explores themes of caste further through Digby Kilgour, a young man from Glasgow whose storyline eventually intersects with that of the Parambil family. Digby struggles to become a surgeon in British medical establishments biased against Catholic physicians (not to mention Irish, of which he is half). Circumscribed by this hierarchy that forms a caste system of its own and nursing the emotional scars of his mother's death, he peels "off his past like a soiled glove" and takes ship to Madras in 1933 to join the Indian Medical Service, where he develops his skills in a native surgical ward.

Here is where Verghese's wealth of experience as a practicing physician and professor at Stanford University's School of Medicine is on full display through the book's description of the esoteric ins and outs of surgery and pathologies found in tropic climes. One memorable and humorous episode is Digby's first surgery at his new clinic, when he realizes a "routine" hydrocele removal is anything but:

"Digby stares at the most astonishing sight framed by the surgical towels: a scrotum ballooned beyond the size of a watermelon, now reaching the kneecaps. The penis is buried in the swelling like a belly button in an obese abdomen."

Digby's panic is allayed by the appearance of the head matron, the no-nonsense Honorine, who reassures him the operation is no different than what he has already done back in Scotland, only the pathology is magnified. In Verghese's elegant prose, the moment moves from the absurd to the transcendent: "That word captures Digby's first impression of India. It is a term he'll use often when a familiar disease takes on grotesque proportions in the tropics: 'magnified.'"

Magnified is also an apt way to characterize a book weighing in at 736 pages. Verghese sustains this massive story with numerous enigmatic and vividly drawn characters like Big Ammachi, Digby, a Swedish physician named Rune who runs a colony for lepers, Philipose and his love Elsie, who is born to be an artist of staggering genius if only the world will let her. However, running like a riptide beneath the waters of the Malabar Coast, the Condition strikes the family in new, unbidden and heartbreaking ways. It will reach a crescendo with Mariamma, Big Ammachi's granddaughter, who becomes a neurosurgeon to unlock the secrets of this affliction, only to face the secrets "that can bind them together or bring them to their knees when revealed." She will come to understand how the Condition takes away but also gives gifts one may not have wanted.

Set against the backdrop of India's journey from the yoke of British colonialism to partition, independence and violent Naxalite revolutionary movements, Abraham Verghese's first novel since Cutting for Stone (2009) is a lush, literary masterpiece—written with a surgeon's skill and an artist's eye—that delivers a rich, emotional return on the reader's investment.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in May 2023, and has been updated for the December 2023 edition. Click here to go to this issue.

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