To tweak a beautiful quote, there are books that ask questions and books that answer. The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese does both.
As an idea, too, it had its beginnings in a question, asked by Verghese’s niece to his mother: “Ammachi, what was it like when you were a girl?” And, Ammachi, like any granny, had a story to share―157 pages, written in “assured and elegant cursive”. His mother’s anecdotes flowed into Verghese’s writings, too. That is why the book is a grandma’s tale of sorts―warm, comforting, full of love, loss, learning and nostalgia.
This historical novel begins with another ammachi though―Big Ammachi, the towering (in stature, not height) matriarch of the house of Parambil in once-upon-a-time Travancore. When you meet her on the first page of the book, she is all of 12, about to be married to a 40-year-old widower. The widower has a young son and a “Condition”―every generation, someone in his family dies by drowning. Despite this revelation early on in the book, death creeps up on you, be it in the family or in the periphery.
And that is because Verghese’s words have a sense of stillness to them, as if life comes with no ripples. That does not mean that his writing is not vivid. You can almost taste Big Ammachi’s erechi olarthiyathu (beef fry), feel the cool breeze on a hot Madras afternoon, smell the stale tobacco at a Glasgow theatre and see Parambil in all its glory. The story does not flit through these places; it strolls. So while there is a permanence to Parambil and its people, the other places and characters are not fleeting and have their relevance. That unhurried pace in his writing, perhaps, comes from his work ethic as a medical professional.
A physician and professor of medicine at Stanford University, Verghese is a proponent and practitioner of old-school bedside medicine, taking his time to physically examine and talk to patients. And, that personal touch and medical expertise come through in his writings, be it short essays, newspaper articles, his two memoirs―My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story (1994) and The Tennis Partner (1998)―or his two novels―Cutting for Stone (2009) and The Covenant of Water (out in May).
Though personal, there is a profound message that strikes a chord. Through the everyday life in the Parambil household, he manages to talk about sociopolitical issues like caste and the Naxal movement with gravitas. The women have been treated with respect, empathy and zero judgment. There is humour, too, showing up in places you would least expect it to. And, there are sentences that will stay with you long after you have finished reading the book. Like, “To see the miraculous in the ordinary is a more precious gift than prophecy,” writes Verghese, an Ethiopian-born Indian American. Or, “There’s nothing emptier than a hospital bed to which a loved one might not return.”
As for the Condition―more mystery than secret―its cause is unravelled by Big Ammachi’s namesake granddaughter, Mariamma (named after Verghese’s mother). Big Ammachi first truly learns about the Condition in the 1900s. Mariamma finds its true name only in the 1970s, almost a decade after Big Ammachi’s death.
As American author Zora Neale Hurston wrote in Their Eyes Were Watching God, “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
THE COVENANT OF WATER
Author: Abraham Verghese
Publisher: Grove Press UK
Pages: 736; price: Rs899