The bestseller “The Covenant of Water” by Abraham Verghese has been published in Ukrainian. It was a choice of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club, was included in the list of Barack Obama's favorite books, and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 37 weeks.
Abraham Verghese, a practicing physician and professor of medicine at Stanford, wrote The Water Testament while working in medicine. The saga was a selection of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club and was on the list of most borrowed books in public libraries in the United States in 2023-2024 . Verghese categorically refuses to separate writing from medicine. As a doctor, he is trained to notice small signals: symptoms, gestures, changes in condition. And it is this way of observation that he transfers to prose. What else should you know about this author and how his large-scale saga turned out?
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The events of The Water Covenant span the period from 1900 to 1977 and focus on a family from the St. Thomas Christian community (to which the author's family also belong) in the state of Kerala, South India. The work opens with a scene in which 12-year-old Mariamma, after the death of her father, is sent by boat to the Parambil estate, where she marries a 40-year-old widower and becomes the mistress of approximately 500 acres of land. She later takes the name Great Ammachi and heads the family for several decades.
According to Verghese, in early 20th-century Kerala, marriages like Mariam's were typical: children were formally married, but in reality remained part of the extended family and began married life only after they grew up.
The key motif of the story is a family curse: in every generation someone inevitably dies from water. The characters try to rationalize and control this incomprehensible phenomenon. Children are forbidden to go near rivers, asked to avoid boats and even swimming, but death from water still happens. To put it in perspective: Kerala has 44 rivers, numerous lagoons, lakes and inland waterways. In such an environment, refusing contact with water means seriously restricting everyday life.
The plot unfolds through several parallel lines. One of them is the story of Scottish doctor Digby Kilgour, who arrives in colonial India in 1933 after professional failures in Glasgow. In Great Britain, he encountered class and religious restrictions, so he came to study at Madras Medical College, one of the key educational centers of colonial India. Verghese himself studied there.
Another important line is the work of the Swedish doctor Rune Orqvist, who works with leprosy patients. The theme of leprosy comes from the author's childhood observations in Africa and his studies in India, where the disease was widespread. Verghese was born in Ethiopia, where his parents, originally from Kerala, went to work as teachers during the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie. After the civil war began, Verghese emigrated to the United States. Thus, the novel recreates real aspects of the epidemic: a long incubation period, the need for long-term treatment, as well as social stigma – the isolation of patients and their exclusion from society.
The Water Covenant can be read as a fictional chronicle of the development of medicine in 20th-century India, from colonial hospitals to the gradual changes in attitudes towards leprosy, midwifery, addiction and mental health. Verghese shows not only the technological progress but also the transformation of thinking – how fear, stigma and religious beliefs gradually give way to a scientific approach, although they never completely disappear.
The inspiration for creating the world of the saga was not an abstract research base, but concrete materials – drawings and memories of life in Kerala of Verghese's mother, who was almost ninety years old when work on the story began.
Abraham Verghese wrote The Water Testament before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, while working as a doctor at Stanford Medical School. He literally put it together on a large board: he wrote out characters, drew connections, and recorded plot nodes. As the text grew, this scheme constantly collapsed. Then the writer would photograph the board, erase it, and start over. According to him, there was an initial plan, but over time the characters refused to obey him.
The idea of writing a large work was conscious. Verghese says outright that he wanted to create a large-scale text, similar to the ones he himself likes to read. His argument is simple: many pages are a format that stops time, allowing the reader to experience decades of years in a few days of reading.
In Verghese's prose, private life is inseparable from the social context, and the fates of the characters are shaped by the influence of large historical processes. An important background of the saga is the caste system of restrictions. The characters face direct prohibitions on communication or marriage. These restrictions are not an abstract problem, but practical rules that determine life trajectories.
Verghese fills the text with secondary figures who appear in several scenes and show in detail how this world works. Even the image of the elephant Damodaran, which, by the way, has a realistic basis. In southern India, working elephants were a common occurrence – they were used to transport wood or in religious practices. Verghese recalls that as a child he regularly saw elephants being led to the river to bathe. In the novel, Damodaran is endowed with almost human features, but this is not fantasy, but an attempt to convey the experience of interacting with an animal that is perceived as part of the community in local culture.
It is significant that “The Covenant of Water” is based not so much on events as on pauses – moments where nothing big happens, but they determine what follows. Verghese consistently shifts attention from the climaxes to the intervals between them: conversations, everyday life, observations, medical trivia. In this sense, the novel works almost contrary to expectations from a great saga: instead of speeding up, it slows down the reading. And it is because of this that it allows us to better see how life is shaped over the long haul.
The book was published by Artbooks.