The Covenant of Water is a massive novel published by Abraham Verghese in 2023. It belongs to that particular subgenre of literary fiction that covers three generations within a single family. In this instance, the multi-generational family at the center of the epic tale is a Christian family living in India over the twentieth century. The story begins in 1900 with the central protagonist, Mariamma, introduced as a twelve-year-old girl entering into an arranged marriage with a middle-aged widower. The novel closes more than seventy-five years later with its central protagonist having transformed into Big Ammachi or "Big Mother" who oversees more than five hundred acres of land. Meanwhile, halfway across the globe in Glasgow, a Scottish surgeon named Digby Kilgour is growing weary of anti-Catholic bias and signs on with the Indian Medical Service where he reluctantly must come face to face with the truth about colonization when he realizes that he has gone from being oppressed to becoming a member of oppressor class.
Lying at the center of the connective tissue which unites the family over this long period is the strange anomaly of members of the family drowning to death. Such is the omnipresence of this coincidental link that the family has termed their familial fate "The Condition." This oddity in the lineage of the family becomes a metaphor that drives the narrative and themes of the story. A character wonders, "Is the Condition a curse? Or a disease? Is there a difference? She knows of a family in which the children have bones that break easily, and the whites of their eyes have a light-blue tinge. They grow out of it, and as adults, they seem almost normal." Later, another character notes how "So many scientists looked under the microscope at leprous tissue before him, but they didn’t see the leprosy bacillus. It’s not that hard to see! It’s because they’d decided no such thing could be there. Sometimes we must imagine what is there to find."
The narrative puts a heavy focus on the medical advancements that took place throughout the story's timeline. In some ways, the book is a historical overview of the development of scientific knowledge and practice over the previous century and how it managed to push superstitions and misplaced beliefs to the side. A third-generation descendant and namesake of Big Ammachi will pursue a medical degree specifically to try to find a scientific cure for this family curse. The idea that a series of drowning deaths claiming the lives of so many members within the bloodline of one single family line could be considered some sort of disease seems as absurd as it is the result of a curse. But that is the point. That is why the book is so long, the timeline so broad, and the narrative so complex. The Condition could be a curse, it could be a disease, it could be a combination of both, or it could be something else entirely.
Ultimately, the vast family narrative covered in this novel is the story of the century in which it is set. That setting is a period of history that saw one mythic belief and superstitious fear fall away after another in the face of scientific knowledge. Despite this progressive movement in knowledge, however, religious faith and adherence to things like curses and miracles failed to disappear from global society. That the family at its center are Christians living within the mostly Hindu culture of India is not incidental considering that religious faith's dependence upon belief in baptism as a ritual by which water "washes away the sins of the world."
