The Covenant of Water is a voluminous, voluptuous multigenerational family epic teeming with characters connected by water, genes, and community. It is set in Kerala, a lush region on India’s southwest coast of the Arabian Sea, land that becomes a character of its own.
At 736 pages, it is a commitment. The audiobook clocks in at 32 hours. Author Abraham Verghese’s family is from Kerala, but he was born in Ethiopia, of missionary parents. The story was inspired by his grandmother from Kerala.
The novel starts with Big Ammachi as a 12-year-old bride. She immediately becomes mother to Jojo, barely nine years younger. Her gentle, loving husband is never given a name in the book, but is called Big Appachen, or father. Their daughter, Baby Mol, stays a mental age of five but has the emotional range of a savant. Their son, Philopose, arrives with great promise but needs a village to help him find his way. He marries Elsie, a gifted artist, who gives birth to Baby Ninan and almost dies in childbirth with Miriamma.
Big Appachen’s family suffers from what they call The Condition, an ailment that leads to death by drowning at least once a generation, even in shallow water. The problem is exacerbated by Kerala’s geography—it’s laced with canals that largely provide transportation, especially in the early-to-mid 1900s, when most of the novel is set. Big Appachen has The Condition and therefore avoids water, even if it means walking for hours instead of taking a short boat ride. Philipose has it too, but he responds by insisting he can learn to swim. He’s stubborn, but he still can’t swim.
Big Ammachi, a devout St. Thomas Catholic, prays for a savior to find a cure for The Condition. Will it be the gentle Rune, a doctor from Sweden, who builds St. Bridget’s Leprosarium? Or Digby, who comes to India from Glasgow, with his surgeon’s skills and tendency to love women married to other men? Or will the answer come from closer to home? Verghese takes his time to give us the answer, luring us into multiple side journeys that educate and entertain, introducing a slew of characters so well developed we miss them when we finally finish the novel.
The book develops like water itself, building momentum through the years, as traditional medicine merges with Western and as both integrate with the community. Finding a treatment for The Condition means listening to the people, learning their history, using traditional techniques to understand the patient and the tools of modern medicine to define the disease and search for a cure.
It’s the kind of medicine Verghese teaches as a professor at Stanford Unversity, the kind that works with and for people.
Death is a profound part of the book, and Verghese uses it to show the necessity of truly living with and through family—biological or not. Trauma forges the people of the ovel; in loss they find love; in despair, they turn to goodness.
Verghese says the meaning of “covenant” in the title should remain a bit mysterious and, as in the rest of a novel, “the reader provides their imagination and somewhere in the middle spaces a mental movie takes shape.”
As the book unfolds, the covenant of water becomes a baptism, a rebirth, and an absolution. To coexist with the water, the Kerala community must respect its rhythms and barriers. They know water can heal, it can serve, it can kill, and it can keep secrets.
Verghese does a masterful job reading the audiobook, especially nailing the book’s many accents—Swedish, Scots, British, and varied Indians castes. He has special fun with one particular scene, in which a missionary from Body of Christ (Corpus Christi), Texas, a stand-in for Billy Graham, gives a bizarre sermon that is translated into a form nothing like the original by Uplift Master. (Uplift is one of the many characters named for his function in the community—he takes care of things and boosts morale.) The scene deserves to be listened to, read, and reread.
The book ends in the 1970s, a time of social progress and change. Women doctors are common, valued friends are no longer required to eat outside because of their caste, and medicine is at a crossroads. A new hospital is being built because the community—especially Uplift Master—envisioned, financed, and staffed it. Old ways of healing remain and, ideally, guide a new generation of doctors.
— Pat Prijatel
Note: This version of Pat’s review of The Covenant of Water was adapted from her original review published at Psychology Today: Storytelling as Medicine
Books, Brews & Banter 