The sometimes daunting prospect of reading a contemporary novel of serious length is often met by informed scepticism. Does the work deserve the commitment of time or is it simply grandiose bloviation?
The elegant, sweeping beauty of Abraham Verghese’s 712-page novel instantly vanquished all doubt, transporting me immediately to Kerala, on south India’s Malabar Coast, to follow three generations of a family suffering a peculiar affliction called “The Condition” where, in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning. For three straight days, I was completely riveted by this fantastic saga, which begins in 1900 when a 12-year-old girl from Kerala’s ancient Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to the village of Parambil for an arranged marriage to a 40-year-old man she meets for the first time at the altar. From this inauspicious beginning, this young girl – and future matriarch known as Big Ammachi – lives an extraordinary long life, witnessing revolutionary political change and social upheaval as well as experiencing great passion, miraculous wonders and devastating tragedies.
The epic concludes in 1977, when Big Ammachi’s physician granddaughter and namesake, Mariamma, makes a shocking discovery. This unites the distinct narrative threads, whose heroes include a Scottish physician, Digby, whose limited social and economic means have sent him from Glasgow to India in search of medical and surgical opportunity; Rune, a benevolent and gifted Swedish surgeon who ministers to a colony of lepers at Saint Bridget’s in Cochin; and Mariamma’s mother Elsie, a talented artist whose sculptures and drawings are the only artefacts that remain after her mysterious disappearance.
According to Verghese, this novel was born in 1998 when his young niece, Deia Mariam Verghese, asked her grandmother, “Ammachi, what was it like when you were a girl?” Believing a simple verbal response was inadequate, his mother filled “157 pages of a spiral notebook with memories of her childhood … interspersing quick sketches alongside her text”.
Similarly, Verghese’s cousin Thomas has provided evocative drawings that introduce each of the novel’s 10 sections.
The peripatetic narrative’s focus on family, healing, the progress of women’s rights and the gradual dissolution of the caste system echoes the peregrinations and promise of Verghese’s own life. Born and raised in Addis Ababa by Christian immigrants from Kerala, he began his medical education at the Madras Medical College in India. After graduation, he left for a medical residency in the US and, like many other foreign medical graduates, found only the less-popular hospitals and communities open to him, an experience he described in a 1997 New Yorker article, “The Cowpath to America”.
As his interest in writing grew, he took time off from medicine to study at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts in 1991. After leaving Iowa, Verghese became a professor of medicine and infectious diseases in Texas, where he lived for the next 11 years. In 2009, aged 54, he published his epic first novel, Cutting For Stone, which remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 107 weeks.
In 2015, he received the Humanities Medal from Barack Obama for “… his efforts to emphasise empathy in medicine, [and for] his imaginative renderings of the human drama”. For the past 15 years, he has been at Stanford University.
This humanistic pursuit of empathy in healing is embodied in the character of Big Ammachi. Like her fictional counterpart, his great-grandmother was married as an adolescent to an older widower. “It looked very unpromising,” Verghese says, but it ultimately grew into a “magnificent” union. Outsiders know little of the Christian minority on the South Malabar Coast, a millennia-long history overshadowed by aggravated tensions between Hindus and Muslims. “Christianity existed in south India about the same time as it existed in ancient Rome, about 52AD, when St Thomas, the notorious doubting apostle, found his way across the Arabian Sea to southern India.”
Big Ammachi has other hurdles that cannot be reconciled by her faith alone. For three generations, a member of her family has drowned, a liability among the lagoons and wetlands of Kerala. This paradox expresses itself in fear of travel, for all expeditions require crossing waterways, which prevent many of Big Ammachi’s descendants from leaving the safety of Parambil. It is only by crossing the waters, letting progress in, that modern medicine finally discovers the family curse has a physiological basis. Water becomes immersive and life-giving.
Verghese writes, “Every family has secrets, but not all secrets are meant to deceive. What defines a family is not blood … but the secrets they share.” And the secret that unites all the threads of this complex, enchanting novel is the miracle of modern medicine infused with empathy and love. “This is the covenant of water: [we are] all linked inescapably by acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone.”
The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese (Grove Atlantic, $37.99).
