A story of water and faith
Abraham Verghese’s new novel tells an epic tale of a family of Thomas Christians in modern India.
In Review
The Covenant of Water
A Novel
“Malayalis of all religions doubt everything, except their faith. Each year the need to renew it, to be reborn, to drink again at the source, draws Malayali Christians to that great February revival meeting, the Maramon Convention.” So opens chapter 60 of Abraham Verghese’s capacious new novel of modern India.
The story begins in 1900 with the marriage of a 12-year-old village girl to a 40-year-old widower on the Malabar Coast of the Arabian Sea. Both families, and both of their villages, are St. Thomas Christians, members of a church that, according to legend, was planted by the apostle Thomas in 52 CE. (The Mar Thoma Syrian Church and half a dozen other Indian denominations that follow the Syriac rites have been a major presence in Kerala for 1,000 years.) The child bride accedes to her parents’ decision to arrange her union with a much older man she has never met.
From inauspicious beginnings grows a loving and mutually empowering marriage. In the narrative that follows, set in India’s far south, we move with three generations from Kerala on the Arabian Sea to Madras on the Indian Ocean coast and to remote plantations and clinics in the mountains and valleys of the Western Ghats, where the narrative ends in 1977.
