When asked to describe the south Indian state of Kerala, the word that springs to mind for Dr. Abraham Verghese is this: “Water – 44 rivers, countless streams and lagoons and hundreds of miles of waterways.” More than a decade after the publication of his previous novel, “Cutting for Stone,” these waterways are where Dr. Verghese, author and professor of medicine at Stanford University, has set his latest book “The Covenant of Water,” out May 2 from Grove Atlantic.
Water is the “defining element” of Kerala, Dr. Verghese says, which is why the central tragedy of “Covenant” is one of a family cursed by inexplicable drownings. The novel begins with the arranged marriage of the family’s matriarch, known as “Big Ammachy,” or “Big Mother,” who discovers something is very wrong with the family she’s just joined: They’ve been fighting a war with the waters of their homeland for generations.
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Geography is intentionally a character in Dr. Verghese’s books. Just as “Cutting for Stone” brought to life the Ethiopia he connected with as a child, “The Covenant of Water” takes the audience to the lush tropical landscape of Kerala, the land of his parents and grandparents.
It’s also the land of my own forebears, and where my father, uncles, aunts and cousins grew up. When I visit India on summer breaks and winter vacations, Kerala is a stop I make to see family still living at our ancestral home. Days go like this: Waking up in the tropical heat and humidity mitigated by ceiling fans in large, airy rooms; taking lazy morning and afternoon dips in the river meandering past the family house; feasting on stew and lacy pancakes called “appams”; playing card games or music outside at sunset; watching farmworkers, schoolchildren and fishermen steer “vallams,” or small wooden boats, home for the night. Every visit is a reminder of my privilege and a vital reconnection with where I come from.
Kerala is a state where education is prized and the literacy rate is, at around 94 percent, the highest in India. Politics lean left, labor unions are influential and communist parties have strong showings in elections. A well-covered topic in “Covenant” is Christianity, which has had a foothold in Kerala since St. Thomas, a disciple of Jesus, is said to have arrived there and founded several churches in the first century A.D.
A vast and epic telling of the generations who face the curse known as “The Condition,” Dr. Verghese’s latest work weaves history and medicine together to welcome readers to the home of his ancestors.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Q. Was there a specific motivating factor for setting the book in Kerala?
When my mother was in her 70s, my niece, who was five at the time, asked her: What was it like when you were a five-year-old girl? At the time, my mother was living in Florida, and trying to figure out how to answer that question for this little girl born in America.
So she wrote it in longhand: a 100-page-plus manuscript – with illustrations, because she was very good at drawing – of familiar, somewhat exaggerated stories about our eccentric cousins and escapades and whatnot. It just reminded me how rich that geography and that culture is, and how the history of our Christian community is really quite unique and unknown to many readers.
Q. How did you go about researching that time period, the early 1900s in Kerala and in South India?
When I used to visit Kerala as a child, which would have been the late ‘50s, early ‘60s, it was pre-electricity. The evenings were all lit by lamplight and there was no indoor plumbing – everything was well water drawn in a little outhouse. Still, by any standards, my family were very well off compared to, you know, people working for them. They weren’t very rich, but they had someone cooking and someone helping with cleaning. And so, in a funny way, I had a glimpse into what life would have been like in the pre-electricity, pre-gas stove kind of days for my grandmother and great-grandmother.
The rest of it was a lot of research and a lot of conversations with my parents. My mother passed away in her 90s, and my dad’s still alive, and vibrant, at 96. I also had access to uncles, aunts – not that they were alive in that period, but they certainly have vivid memories of being alive in the time of British rule. India gaining independence is a very recent thing for them, it happened after they were in college. So I was tapping into that.
You might be able to appreciate this detail: I wanted to play up how readily we label people by their talents or professions in our culture. There’s “Artist Kurien” and “Engineer Babu,” and then people live up to those roles, you know?
Q. My father likes to say he learned to swim when his father threw him in the river at age three. My sister and I were taught to swim early as well (we had actual lessons!) It’s why the “family curse” of drowning felt so devastating, like an actual supernatural curse.
Yes, something like “The Condition” is so, so bizarre in a place where everybody learns to swim. It’s an example of something people could only describe as a family curse and never know what it was. As time goes on, it becomes clearer what “The Condition” is because you have medical advancements – better imaging and more refined autopsies and so on.
That was also part of why I picked that particular time period (1900-1977). Not only was the world going through cataclysmic changes in World Wars One and Two, not only was India going through cataclysmic changes that culminated in Independence, but it was a tremendous period of medical advancement.
It was actually quite easy to research medicine in these time periods, because we have very vivid records in journals and elsewhere describing different conditions. And sometimes you can look at them and think, “Oh, my God, how naive they were.” Then you realize that 100 years from now, people are going to look at the way we describe certain diseases and think, “Oh, my goodness, they were so backward.”
I think readers have an inherent interest in things medical to some degree, because what is medicine but life lived at its most extreme?
Q. You don’t shy away from discussing caste and the inherent unfairness of it through some of your characters.
Yeah, my desire to talk about caste was in part because of the tensions that I felt it created in our world. For example, the older generation would never have really questioned why things were how they were. Being born outside of Kerala, however, and being more exposed to the more worldly view of equality and the French idea of egalitarianism, it would chafe me to see, for instance, how some people, some servants, weren’t permitted to come inside the house. There are all these little rules that you quickly become aware of.
It’s in the very fact that we were Christians and so devout, and yet no one thought to convert the people working for us to Christianity. We left it to the Anglicans to come and do that. And even when they were converted, it didn’t erase any of the barriers. I always thought that was intriguing. I truly wanted to put myself in the shoes of people on both sides of that divide.
The funny thing is I look around America, and in some ways, it’s the same. Kids play together when they’re young, but as time goes on, one kid goes to private school, the other goes to the public school, and suddenly it’s different roads depending on what their parents’ income levels are. So it’s not as though we’re equal in America, far from it. Issues of income and race are really very, very similar to issues of caste. A book on this I found very insightful was Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste.” That was a powerful book for me.
Q. Reading this book was deeply personal for me, since I’ve experienced so much of the Kerala you describe. How do you hope readers will respond to this glimpse into a place they might never have heard of before?
I’m hoping that readers enjoy looking at a world that might feel alien to them, and yet recognize the things about family, about relationships, that are universal.
I love the idea of introducing them to a world that they have no familiarity with. I hope that the book awakens their curiosity, maybe inspires them to travel there. More than that, I hope that they will identify with the characters, because I think the underlying lesson is that wherever you are, whatever nationality, the molecular units of a life are the same – family and relationships and marriages and lineage and privilege. It’s all the same thing.
