The Covenant of Water

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
Read September 2023 - Zoom Reading Circle

What a beautiful and marvelous book.  A true epic story spanning three generations of people whose lives intersect (in large and small ways) in India, specifically in the Kerala on the south Malabar coast.  Side note, this book definitely makes me want to travel to this region.  I feel that I could smell, see, taste, and hear the richness and beauty of this area and culture and people.  Abraham Verghese has a way of writing that is so descriptive and so evocative that you feel you ARE smelling, seeing, tasting and hearing everything.  I was so invested in the lives of the characters, particularly Big Ammachi, who we first meet as a young girl about to enter an arranged marriage with an older man - and also Digby Kilgour, a young doctor from Scotland who travels to India and makes his life there.  

The author is himself a physician and he writes, in great detail at times, about medical conditions and treatments.  One mystery that carries throughout the book is ‘the Condition’, a mysterious ailment that often results in drowning and is passed down through generations within families.  I also learned a great deal about leprosy, something that I think we are all ‘familiar’ with but then realize we actually know nothing about it.  While this may sound like it would make for dry reading, it is anything but.  The way the author draws us into the drama and drudgery and hardship and calling of medicine - for providers and patients, is amazing.  He weaves a story that shifts from one character to another, allowing us to get close to them before diverting to another character more in-depth.  At first I wanted him to continue with the storyline we were on... but as he wove the tale, I began to realize there were so many layers of connections between all the characters.  I appreciated even more deeply how it all came together into one epic story in this special region of the world.  

I am now seeing that the audiobook is narrated by the author himself.  I am seriously thinking I want to now listen to this book - just to hear his narration.  Yes, it is a VERY long book at 775 pages, but I loved it so much.  I know I would get something new from the audio version if I were to listen to it.  

Also, I found that Oprah has a 6 part podcast with Abraham Verghese discussing this book in detail.  I am just now starting to watch it and am loving it.  Below is the first of six episodes of the podcast and they are well worth the viewing.

From this podcast - about 18 minutes in on this first episode... talking about difference between being cured and healed.  That there are two aspects to illness... there is a spiritual or soul aspect and also the actual medical event (injury, disease).  To truly be a healing physician, there must be more than just the modern medicine ‘cure’... but a sense of addressing and ‘healing’ the woundedness.  He talks about his experience with Aids patients in the 80’s... that “one could be healed without being cured”. 

And below are (many) lines from the book that I highlighted as I read... 

Travel broadens the mind and loosens the bowels. 

All water is connected and only land and people are discontinuous.

So interesting to me that this book looks at Caste and again clarifies that it is not just in India... but throughout the world.  (Digby is in a lower caste in Scotland due to being Catholic).  

You’re the victim of a caste system.  We’ve been doing the same thing to each other in India for centuries.  The inalienable rights of the Brahmins.  And the absence of any rights for the untouchables.  And all the layers in between.  Everyone who is looked down on can look down on someone else.  Except the lowest.  The British just came along and moved us down a rung. 

Secrecy lives in the same rooms as loneliness.  

The thumb alone would prove the existence of God.  A working hand is a miracle. 

Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives.

Medicine is his true priesthood, a ministry of healing the body and the soul of his flock. 

Literacy alters patterns of life that have gone undisturbed for generations.

Life is like this.  Crushing is there, and success is there.  Never only success. 

How many insights vanished in the ether because they weren’t written down. 

We don’t have children to fulfill our dreams.  Children allow us to let go of the dreams we were never meant to fulfill. 

It comes to her that it’s only when one’s father and mother are both dead that one stops being a child, being a daughter.  She has just become an adult. 

You can confide in quiet people.  They make way for one’s thoughts. 

There’s nothing emptier than a hospital bed to which a loved one might not return. 

This is the covenant of water: that they’re all linked inescapedly by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone. She stays there listening to the burbling mantra, the chant that never ceases, repeating its message that all is one. 

Every family has secrets, but not all secrets are meant to deceive. 

What defines a family isn’t blood but the secrets they share. Secrets that can bind them together or bring them to their knees when revealed. 

Death is the mother of beauty.  Only the perishable can be beautiful.

Here is a short bio of the author - from Oprah Winfrey. 

This book will go down as one of my all time favorite reads.  I gave it 5 stars.  Reading Circle gave it 4.4.