The Covenant of Water

My first fiction of the year……

A multigenerational saga with interwoven storylines set in South India….... The prose is easy flowing, filled with sensory details and super immersive…The story follows the life of a young girl(Big Ammachi)from a Christian family, who is married off at the age of 12 to a much older widower. She eventually becomes the matriarch of the family, navigating love, loss, and the mysterious tendency of drowning in her family…. The central theme of the book is this affliction/genetic condition of drowning, and every theme springs out of it. My feelings are that it is a deeply moving book that made me sad once I finished it!!

Some reflections

• Reading this book made me very self-conscious of hereditary diseases…..I keep thinking of how Big Ammachi marries into her husband and seemingly all her woes and loss is thus effectively inherited ( Her children and grandchildren too!)… While it is fiction I wonder if it will make me different if my partner had sickle cell or Diabetes or some hereditary cancer traits or whatever….. If it doesn't stop other people all around the world all the time, it shouldn't be different for me. And besides we live in a wonderful period of history with accelerated advancements in medicine (not just preventive)…… I mean notwithstanding medical developments, Love trumps all and hereditary diseases should be marginal! (Although Big Ammachi didn't have a choice!!)

• It seems very telling how (given the central theme of the book) Verghese, a doctor, can write intertwining medicine with storytelling. The family's "drowning curse" is eventually explained as a genetic disorder affecting the nervous system, how nifty! I suppose it's the same reason why J.R.R. Tolkien a philologist is able to create the universe of the Lord of the Rings or Andy Weir can write hard science fiction. Good writers leverage expertise in their respective fields to create stories that feel uniquely authentic and immersive.

• I was taken aback how the author just describes Malayalam words in a "matter of fact" way… For example, I don't what Kanikonna or kumkumam or meen vevichathu (and so on) is and at some point I stopped searching out of laziness. Inside me I felt a guilty pleasure that the families were Christian, and the names were easy for me to pronounce and remember…. is it because I try to remember trivial stuff more than normal people?? But in any case, the author trusts the reader to absorb the meaning through context, rhythm, and repetition. The goal was Minimal Explanation with immersion

• Relatedly I found a lot (if not most) of the cultural aspects/names/events are strange to me even as a South Asian. It makes me acknowledge the diversity of human race more…I did a cursory estimation of the distance between my hometown and Kerala (where the novel is set)….. If I had to analogize Bologna, Kiev, Ukraine (~1580 km) would still be much nearer(!!) and if I wanted to go south it would be akin to travelling to Marrakesh, Morocco (~2,205 km)!

• I suppose it is an acknowledgement of my implicit western bias…maybe I am too I am too accustomed to the western milieu by virtue of exclusively (or disproportionately) reading western literature, media etc?

  Exhibit: I mean I am not supposed to know what a mulberry pie is, but I do!