A Long Journey Through The Covenant of Water

                                                 

This is a short review of a book that runs to more than 700 pages.

As usual, I began reading it on Kindle, moved to the audiobook, and finally settled on the iBooks version. The book was recommended by Oprah’s Book Club, but I had no plans to read it until I came across Abraham Verghese’s short story Abscond, which is just 38 pages long. It tells the story of the death of a surgeon and how thirteen-year-old Ravi Ramanathan must find a new place for himself in the aftermath of his father’s death. As I neared the end of the novel, I found myself struggling to say goodbye to characters who had lived with me for nearly three months. The book unfolds across generations and possesses an extraordinarily wide literary canvas. Art is celebrated through Philipose, the writer of the Ordinary Man column in Malayala Manorama; Elsie, the painter; and Digby, Rune, and Mariamma, who transform surgery into an art. In many ways, the novel is a celebration of the human hand and its fingers. Water becomes a recurring metaphor for the passage and flow of time, while Mariamma’s research into the Condition is particularly captivating. 

 

One of my favourite passages from the book is, fittingly, a Biblical verse:

“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”

 

As I ploughed through the 700-plus pages, I felt bored at times, especially when the author became a doctor and got lost in the medical descriptions of surgery and medical terms, for which the author had consulted physicians and nurses. There are repeated references to Gray’s Anatomy and to the art of drawing. The references to traditional Syrian Christian food items even led to several social media posts. The references to Madras Medical College and the description of the Anglo-Indian community in Perambur provided fascinating historical context.