“The home… lies in Travancore, at the southern tip of India, sandwiched between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats… The land is shaped by water and its people united by a common language: Malayalam.”
And so we enter the world of Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water. The year is 1900, and a 12-year-old girl takes a boat to get married to a 40-year-old widower. She goes on to become Big Ammachi, the matriarch of the estate of Parambil. Over the course of seven decades, she will be the unwavering centre of this land and its community. She will discover that there is a curse, a “Condition” that runs in the family – a drowning in every generation – that no one can explain and everyone prays a doctor will find a cure for.
In parallel, there is another story, of Digby Kilgour, a young Scottish doctor who travels from Glasgow to Madras to join the Indian medical service during colonial times. The two stories dovetail only towards the end, “like a river linking people upstream with those below”. Threaded through the novel are historic events – Indian soldiers fight for the British in the world wars; India gains independence; the newspaper then the radio then a post office arrives; the state of Kerala is formed; the communists win elections; the Naxalite revolution runs rampant.
The primary allegiance of the novel is to the land and the lives it sustains (“he falls into a peaceful slumber… that can only happen… on Parambil soil and in God’s Own Country”). Verghese was born in Ethiopia to Indian parents from Kerala, going on to practise as a physician and a professor of medicine in America. He writes in meticulous detail about the bountiful nature (“a child’s fantasy of rivulets and canals, a latticework of lakes and lagoons, a maze of backwaters and bottle-green lotus ponds’”), the intricate rituals of everyday life (“[she] seeds the leftover milk with a fleck of that day’s yoghurt, covers it with a cloth, and moves it to a cool spot”), and the rigours of medical study (“six essays to judge everything I learned over 13,000 hours”).
Verghese’s debut novel, Cutting for Stone, was widely praised and stayed on the New York Times bestseller charts for more than two years. The Covenant of Water, published 14 years later, has the aspirations of an epic; a saga of births, deaths and everything in between happening in cycles. The plot turns on climate catastrophes, diseases and accidents, punctuating the novel’s 10 sections, each calamity tragic, riveting and pivotal to the story. Some set pieces, such as when the special child, Baby Mol, dances to announce the onset of the monsoons, or Big Ammachi’s last night as she moves seamlessly through her home, are moving and memorable. The use of the present tense to talk about the past gives the writing an immersive and universal quality, invoking the oral storytelling tradition of India. Christianity provides the moral backbone, and Malayali pride shines through at key moments.
But in looking at the past through a wide lens, the book papers over problematic practices of the time – the child bride effortlessly warms to her husband 30 years her senior, high-caste and low-caste live together as family, colonial masters and subjects are nothing but friends, the revolutionary regrets his uprising, and independence erases all ills of colonialism (“It’s all Indian now, whatever its origins. The only white faces around belong to scruffy tourists”).
The characters are almost biblical in temperament – kind, conscientious, sometimes displaying woke-ness that seems ahead of their times. The nefarious ones redeem themselves, the corrupt are unfailingly punished, forgiveness is begged for and granted, grief overcome and rifts reconciled in a matter of chapters. The feelgood feels a bit too good after a point.
The sweeping intergenerational scope that makes this novel such a feat is also its greatest risk, given its 715-page length. Consistency and momentum flag. The Condition goes unmentioned for several hundred pages; Digby disappears for long stretches, only returning for cameos. The author struggles to keep up the lyricism in the second half.
That said, The Covenant of Water is an important book for its efforts in documenting times and places most readers would be too young to have witnessed. It is also a tribute to the scientific progress that has made human lives healthier, and the sacrifices made by previous generations. As one of the characters with the Condition says: “The voyage of discovery isn’t about new lands but having new eyes.”
Santanu Bhattacharya is the author of One Small Voice (Fig Tree)
• The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese is published by Grove Press (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
