What is most affecting about The Covenant of Water, a novel that spans generations of a family with true-to-life depiction, is witnessing a 12-year-old age through the pages and become a 70-something, ready for her death. The novel’s length allows her to remain a child long enough to leave an imprint of the girl you are first introduced to, an unlikely bride to a 40-year-old man, leaving her village to go to his. The novel begins with her strange marriage in 1900 and plods unhurriedly through eight decades, drawing in characters from as far as Scotland in this very Kerala story. Abraham Verghese, the author, dives into the past to create vivid pictures of every passing decade, letting the family story weave into the events of the world, even as it remains spectacularly singular.
In the months after the novel’s release in May this year, it has received warm adulations from around the world, including the coveted selection in Oprah’s Book Club. Abraham is a US-based physician and writer with roots in Kerala. He has narrated the vast book, with its adorable scatterings of Malayalam phrases, for its audio version. It has charmed the native Malayali speaker as much as it did the foreign readers, unfamiliar with the terrain and culture of Kerala of a long-ago time. It is perhaps intriguing even to the hardcore Malayali how life had been a different ball game altogether a hundred and twenty years ago when little girls unquestioningly married men triple their age and became teen mothers and twenty-something matriarchs, managing entire households and families.
The 12-year-old in Covenant, who will soon earn the unlikely name of Big Ammachi (grand-mother), is not upset to be uprooted from her home, which had suddenly become alien after her father's death and her mother's subservience to a cruel uncle. She comes to Parambil, where her husband's family takes her, leaving her childhood behind. Right away, we are introduced to the strange 'condition' of the husband's family, of how their men have an aversion to being in water – they can't swim or even be on a boat. At least one male in every generation has drowned. The child bride adapts to everything, learning to cook, understanding the silent husband, and having her rare needs satisfied – a newspaper to read, a church visit – with the help of the husband's Dalit companion, Shamuel. There is no pretence of Kerala's reality at the time. Shamuel, hailed for everything, does not enter the house, being a Pulaya, an oppressed caste.
Caste, like several nuggets of history the book handles, is not ignored or conveniently forgotten. The thread runs through the novel, around Shamuel's family as it does the Parambil family, who enjoys the status of privileged Christians—tracing their origin to one of the apostles of Jesus Christ. Shamuel's is a Dalit Christian family, which means they are descendants of Hindu Dalits who converted to Christianity – a widespread practice in 20th century Kerala to escape the shackles of the rigid caste system. Shamuel's son Joppen is chased away from school when he tries to attend it. As grown-ups, Joppen and Philipose – the son of Big Ammachi – have a mind-numbing conversation about how it is often the "kind" slave owners who have the greatest difficulty in seeing the injustice of slavery. Joppen says, "Their kindness, their generosity compared to cruel slave owners, made them blind to the unfairness of a system of slavery that they created, they maintained, and that favoured them."
Philipose's response to this is a belated understanding of the problem. The Parambil family, ideal in matters of principles and humanity, was still accepting of the social inequalities of the time. They came with their flaws shining through the myriad expressions of love – silent in the times of Big Ammachi and her aged husband, louder for Philipose and his wife Elsie, and hidden in the next generation. Love is the underlying thread of the novel, connecting worlds, people, and ideas.
The novel breaks away from Parambil to narrate the story of a Scottish doctor who comes to Madras and much later to Kerala. Abraham's medical expertise is lavished in descriptions of the doctors' work (there are more than one).
Even with all the linear and elaborate narrations, the novel still takes you unawares in its connecting all the loose ends. Women rule the book even in its very realistic patriarchal setting. Elsie, that ineffable artist who can capture the minds of people in her paintings, is perhaps the most enigmatic of the lot, while Big Ammachi, whose name is revealed only at a very late stage in the book, remains the most defining. Limitations of an earlier time had not paused their dreams or unconventional pursuits. Mariamma, a third-generation doctor, is more readable than either of the women, driven by the force that appears to have passed onto her.
The men, even with their flaws, may seem too idealistic, rarely rough to the women in their lives and far too sensitive. If Philipose was too understanding of Elsie's departures, his father had ensured that Big Ammachi had all she needed, waiting for her to grow to a consenting age before becoming husband and wife. Lenin of another generation threw himself into doing good for others but fell into extremist ways. Naxalism, the wars of the world, independence, and the changeover from monarchy to democracy all merge into the story in Abraham's undiluted telling of it.
Like all stories that go painstakingly through generations, The Covenant of Water can draw you close to its people, have you marvel at the circles of lives they complete, and be in awe of the covenant of water that connects them all.