The Covenant of Water
The Covenant of Water
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Abraham Verghese on The Covenant of Water
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A school notebook and two grandmothersThe novel began not with a plot idea but with an object. After finishing Cutting for Stone, Verghese returned to a handwritten school notebook his mother had filled in her seventies, at her granddaughter’s request, with roughly 100 pages of anecdotes about her Kerala childhood, illustrated with drawings of kitchen implements and seasonal customs. He had read it before. Reading it again, he found something the stories themselves hadn’t carried.
More precious to me were the mood and voice that came through in her words, which I supplemented with my own recollections of summer holidays with my grandparents in Kerala, and later visits when I was in medical school.
His mother’s voice pointed him toward a type of person the novel would need to honor. Both of his grandmothers had lost children young, one to typhoid and one to rabies, and then held their families together for decades without public recognition of any kind. Big Ammachi, the novel’s matriarch, is not drawn from either grandmother directly, but the kind of endurance she embodies comes from both of them.
The inspiration was very much my mom and the strong women around my mother, such as her mother-in-law and her mother. These were sort of heroic women who lived quiet lives. The world would never know about their heroism, the world would never know how much tragedy they went through. [paraphrased from audio]
His mother died at 94 before the book was published. He dedicated it to her.
The novel’s central condition, a family in which one member in each generation drowns, required a setting where water could function as more than backdrop. Kerala, with its forty-four rivers, lagoons, and backwaters, gave him a geography where that condition would feel inevitable rather than arbitrary.
If you write a novel set in Kerala, water is inescapable; it is the prevailing metaphor for everything. We’re talking about a land with forty-four rivers, countless lagoons, lakes, streams, back waters, fingerlike projections into the sea. Water is the great beating heart of the state.
Setting also answered a biographical question. Verghese grew up in Ethiopia, trained in India and the United States, and has never had a fixed hometown. Writing Kerala’s lamplight evenings and ancestral rituals into three generations of one family was, in part, an act of imagining something he does not have.
How he wrote it
Whiteboards, detours, and the story that wrote itselfHe installed a large whiteboard in his study and used it as an architectural plan: character sketches in the margins, timelines, arrows tracing plot threads across three generations. The plan held for roughly six weeks before the characters refused it.
Every iteration of my whiteboard turned out to be a flawed roadmap from which I quickly deviated.
When a character diverged from the plan, he photographed the board, erased it, and started again. The final whiteboard was accurate not because it had predicted the story but because he drew it after the story had already resolved itself.
He knew two writers who represented opposite poles of the planning question. John Irving, a friend and mentor, writes from a completed outline. Michael Ondaatje writes without knowing where the story leads. Verghese landed somewhere he hadn’t anticipated: he eventually knew the whole novel, but he arrived there by writing through it. What he didn’t expect was how often the characters themselves enforced that discovery.
Or at least they tell you, this thing you planned — there’s no way I would do it. Get out of here... It’s actually delightful. It’s the moment that you know you’ve struck the truth. You’ve hit the gold mine with this particular character.
The novel spans roughly 1900 to 1977 and required Verghese to know exactly where each character stood relative to India’s independence movement, the two world wars, and the formation of Kerala as a state. He tracked those positions on a spreadsheet. But the deeper problem was authority: he had visited Kerala every summer as a child and later as a medical student in Madras, but had never lived there as an adult.
I felt for the longest time that I didn’t have the authority to write about Kerala. I didn’t grow up here; I would come here every summer for vacations, but it felt to me, and especially because Malayalis are so critical, that I just didn’t have the authority to write about this.
He made multiple research trips and relied on cousins, academics, and friends in Kerala for historical verification. His mother, in her nineties by then, called him nearly every day with anecdotes, sometimes repeating the same one from the day before. He never told her he had already heard it.
After completing the manuscript, he broke a contract with a previous publisher at considerable financial cost because their vision for the book’s length diverged from his. He then found Peter Blackstock at Grove Atlantic, who had edited The Sympathizer and Shuggie Bain. Blackstock’s first statement about the sprawling, still-unresolved manuscript gave him the permission he needed to finish it on his own terms. For the audiobook, Verghese set himself an equally uncompromising standard, spending two and a half weeks in a studio adjusting pitch to separate male and female voices and studying YouTube clips of regional accents when he was stumped.
I don’t want to do this unless I’m the best of all the people that you have. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
The escape fiction offered a doctorVerghese trained through the AIDS epidemic in rural Tennessee and has practiced medicine across four decades, including through COVID. He began writing fiction during the years when his patients were dying faster than medicine could explain. The pull toward narrative wasn’t incidental to his clinical work; it was a direct response to its limits.
writing fiction was my escape. In my stories, I could keep people alive, and I could reverse the course of disease.
That same clinical experience shapes how he handles death in the novel. The deaths in The Covenant of Water are not devices; they come from forty years at the bedside, where he watched what impermanence does to the people left behind. He draws on John Irving’s observation that life is a terminal condition, and pushes it further.
roses would be weeds if they lived forever. What makes a rose beautiful is that it blooms, and then it’s gone.
What he wants us to sit with
Instructions for living, left in the marginsHe pushes back against colleagues and readers who treat non-fiction as the more serious form. His counterarguments are historical: Uncle Tom’s Cabin eroded the social acceptability of slavery, and A.J. Cronin’s The Citadel helped lay the intellectual groundwork for Britain’s National Health Service. Fiction, for Verghese, is not entertainment that occasionally rises to something more. It is a form with a specific obligation.
stories must offer instructions for living, if you like. Stories must speak to a kind of truth, and they only resonate if they do that — if they echo with our own challenges, our own lives and the things that we should have done or could have done — the regrets we have and the things that we now know we should do. So I think novels are always a form of atonement, and they’re also a form of instruction.
After publication, readers reflected something back to him that he hadn’t fully seen while writing. He had set out to build a three-generation family saga organized around a medical mystery. What the mail and the conversations told him was different, and it sent him back to the grandmothers he had started with.
The thing that seems to echo with readers is really that it’s about strong women. A quiet kind of heroism, the kind that allows you to just go on every day despite setbacks and tragedies, relying on sheer willpower, faith, ritual. Which is the story of my grandmothers, both of them. And I don’t know that I set out with that ambition, but it’s become very clear to me. [paraphrased from audio]
That gap between what he intended and what readers found doesn’t trouble him. He thinks of the novel as something completed in the reader’s imagination, not on the page. He has received graduate theses arguing that Cutting for Stone employs Jungian archetypes, and his response is genuine rather than deflective.
I have this belief that a writer provides the words, the reader provides their imagination, and in the middle space is this mental movie. But it belongs to you, to the reader.