Like “Cutting for Stone,”
religion, history, disease, and doctors are prominent in “Covenant.” However,
the new novel is much more expansive, following three generations of a family
across nearly a century and bringing in secondary plots that converge with the
main story.
The book opens in 1900 in southwest
India on the Malabar Coast among a religious minority known as St. Thomas
Christians. Mariamma, age 12, is to be married to a 40-year-old widower whom
she has never met. She travels hours from her home to be wed to him. She is
scared and homesick. Her new sister-in-law stays with the new couple and
teaches her to cook and care for her stepson, Jojo.
Both Jojo and his father have a
strange aversion to water. After Jojo drowns in a few inches of water in a
ditch, Mariamma’s husband confides his family’s secret. In every generation at
least one person dies by drowning. Grief-stricken, Mariamma begs God that if He
can’t cure the affliction, at least send someone who can.
Mariamma, now called Big Ammachi
(mother), has two of her own children, a daughter who is born with what was
then called “cretinism,” and a son, Philipose, who has the same “condition” as
his father. The story follows the family through Philipose’s generation and
that of his daughter, who becomes a gifted physician.
Two characters whose lives
intersect with Big Ammachi’s family are also doctors. A Swede in Cochin, who
has a religious revelation, converts an abandoned lazaretto into a leprosarium
to treat the region’s many lepers. Another is a Scottish transplant, Digby, who
first practices in Madras and later meets and joins the Swedish doctor at the
leprosarium. The author’s unflinching detail of the diseases and their
treatments is both fascinating and, at times, repulsive.
Despite hardship and grief, Big
Ammachi’s faith never waivers. Her water covenant with God remains strong
throughout her life, in spite of water being the source of much of her grief.
Big Ammachi witnesses social upheaval—the end of the British Raj, the
secularization of Indian society— and technological changes of the twentieth
century that alter her world in ways she never imagined as a child.
“The Covenant of Water” is the
story of a family’s resilience and devotion to God and each other. It is a
sweeping narrative that incorporates science, superstition, and magic. It
reveals the power of both faith and science. It is a masterpiece of love,
grief, and triumph. Verghese’s lyrical style and endearing characters make this
novel impossible not to love.
