(Book Review) #2 “The Covenant of Water” (2023) By Abraham Verghese
Book Review #2 “ The Covenant of Water ” (2023) By Abraham Verghese “Covenant” means ‘a formal agreement or promise between two or more people’. The author has his own interpretation for this term as he surmises it through the character of Mariamma: And now that the daughter is here, standing in the water that connects them all in time and space and always has. The water she first stepped into minutes ago is long gone and yet it is here, past and present and future inexorably coupled, like time made incarnate. This is the covenant of water: that they are all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone. She stays there listening to the burbling mantra, the chant that never ceases, repeating its message that ‘all is one’. What she thought was her is all ‘maya’ an illusion, but it is one shared illusion. And what else can she do but go on. (Verghese ‘The Covenant’ 706). The Parambil family has a bizarre relationship wi...