84 pages • 2-hour read
The Covenant of Water
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The Will to Believe
It is fitting that the Saint Thomas Christians were converted, perhaps apocryphally, by the apostle known as Doubting Thomas. The characters here have their faith tested, and sometimes broken, many times over the decades. The Condition and its consequences impact the Parambil family at least once a generation, not to mention the other tragedies they must endure. Digby and his cohort—Rune Orqvist, Celeste Arnold, Elsie—also suffer numerous tragic events, from injury and death to illness and ill-fated circumstances. Maintaining faith in the face of such situations is difficult, if not impossible. However, some of the characters succeed in cultivating a closer connection to their faith in the end. When inherited faith is tested, what sometimes emerges is a stronger form of belief—one that must be actively chosen.
Faith fails Big Ammachi with the death of JoJo. In the aftermath, she questions her ability to believe; she refuses to have her own daughter, Baby Mol, baptized. She doubts whether it will do any measurable good: “Grace didn’t save JoJo,” she says, in her conversations with God (179). Later, Big Ammachi will have her faith tested to the breaking point; she has lost her grandson, Ninan; her cousin, Odat Kochamma; and the estate manager’s wife in a six-month span. Her beloved daughter-in-law, Elsie, has fled the estate after the death of Ninan. She scolds God and blames him for these deaths and absences: “Oh, it’s pure blasphemy, but she doesn’t care” (417). Her granddaughter and namesake, Mariamma, will inherit this tendency toward doubt. While she believes she has rejected her faith altogether, she will lean on it when necessary: “After her father’s death she’d turned her back on religion, having lost faith. But she closes her eyes while the nurse prays…Lenin needs all the help he can get” (648). When her heart’s love is close to death, faith returns to her.
Digby experiences his own failure of faith when reunited with Elsie. She has just come back to him, and while he does not yet know that she has contracted leprosy—another test to endure—he knows that her despair over the death of her son brings her perilously close to suicide. She hesitates at the edge of the cliff, but he is able to bring her back: “He is certain she’d imagined stepping off, that she’d intended to shame God, shame that shameless charlatan whose hands stayed behind his back when children fell from trees, when silk saris caught fire” (682). The suicide of his own mother still lingers in his doubt, too. Still, his faith in his love for Elsie, in his promise to never leave her even as the illness robs her of everything, carries him through.
The determination to believe takes effort. Big Ammachi knows this, as does Mariamma—and even Philipose, who flirts with atheism in his youth. When Big Ammachi discovers that Philipose’s informal tutor—the one who gets him hooked on Moby-Dick—is an atheist himself, she says, “Well, Koshy Saar may not believe in God, but it’s a good thing that God believes in that old man. Why else did he send him into your life?” (236). Later, Mariamma, now a doctor and a scientist, realizes that “God had answered her grandmother’s prayer: heal the Condition or send someone who can” (650). For all of her doubts and disappointments, Mariamma herself cannot shake her fundamental faith, the values with which she was raised. Perhaps Philipose puts it best in one of his Ordinary Man columns before his death: The doctor in his parable notes that “the common ingredient in all cures is belief. When a cure works it’s because the patient believes. [...] Doctor, I said, I am desperate. And I believe” (444).
The Injustice of Caste and Class
The caste system has been enforced in India for millennia (while it has relaxed somewhat in recent years, mostly in urban centers, it is still very much a part of the culture). It is a rigid social hierarchy, with Brahmins at the top and the pulayar (in Malayalam) at the bottom, as the lowest caste—once called “untouchables.” The system is inherently unjust, with children inheriting the status of their parents and ancestors and possessing little to no chance of changing that status. In the United Kingdom, a similarly rigid class system dominates social life; while not as unforgiving as the caste system, class is often—especially during the time period covered by the book—a determining factor in the opportunities citizens enjoy. These are both ways in which land and wealth are kept within certain families and communities, while ensuring a steady supply of supplicant workers to support their estates and lifestyles.
When Philipose’s friend Joppan, the estate foreman’s son, cannot attend school—he is one of the pulayar—Philipose is hurt and furious:
The injustice he witnessed isn’t the kaniyan’s [teacher’s] fault alone. Its roots are deep and so ancient that it feels like a law of nature, like rivers going out to sea. But the pain in those innocent eyes reminds [Big Ammachi] of what is so easy to forget: the caste system is an abomination (222).
She tries to convince Philipose that, as Saint Thomas Christians, they are not as beholden to the caste system; she says that they “slide between the layers” (223). But Philipose knows the truth: His friend is not allowed to attend school with him, much less to eat at the table with him. Later, when the two boys are grown, Joppan refuses Philipose’s offer to take Shamuel’s place—but with more land as recompense. Joppan knows that he, and others like him, are exploited for their labor and their loyalty:
The ‘kind’ slave owners in India, or anywhere, were always the ones who had the greatest difficulty seeing the injustice of slavery. Their kindness, their generosity compared to cruel slave owners, made them blind to the unfairness of a system of slavery that they created (487).
Philipose cannot argue against the power of Joppan’s understanding of a system under which Joppan himself was denied an education and thus opportunities.
While Digby’s experience is much less humiliating and constricting than Joppan’s, he still faces discrimination in his native Scotland based on his religion (he is Catholic in a Protestant nation) and his lower-class status. When he travels to Madras on the steamship, he is in the second-class cabins. All of first class is occupied by a wealthy maharajah and his entourage. Digby notices, besides the fact of his “tiny cabin,” that there are “two classes below his, the segregation so complete that he hears rather than sees them” (91). The steamship’s levels are named “classes” without irony. When he discusses his reason to join the Indian Medical Service with a fellow shipmate—the Indian barrister, Banny—Digby explains that, as a Catholic, he is considered of a lower status than if he were a Protestant. Banny pronounces, “You’re the victim of a caste system. We’ve been doing the same thing to each other in India for centuries” (93). Banny also notes that, “The British just came along and moved us down a rung” (93). Empire does not so much disrupt the system as reinforce it.
Condition and Connection
Digby has a revelation while traveling to India, one that will stay with him: “All water is connected and only land and people are discontinuous” (90). This statement metaphorically describes the book as a whole, wherein the lives of a disparate group of people become intimately and inextricably entangled, like bodies of water, though they are also isolated from one another in important ways, like peninsulas of land. For Big Ammachi’s family, water can be treacherous—often deadly—and they try to maintain an uneasy truce with its power. Big Ammachi tries to keep her children and grandchildren away from the water, often to no avail. For Digby, water ties him to his destiny and takes him across the vast ocean to India. In this book, water symbolizes not only danger and death, but also connection and purification.
While Big Ammachi does not fear the water—it is her husband’s bloodline that is affected by the Condition—she slowly begins to realize how this war with water affects her new family. While she dives into the river with abandon, her husband will not even attend church with his wife, because they must travel by boat to get there. Big Ammachi is revived by the river, “nothing restores or renews her more than this” (212). Echoing Digby’s sentiment above, Big Ammachi also notes that “All water is connected, and her world is limitless. [Her husband] stands at the limits of his” (51). Those limits also eventually apply to their son, Philipose, whose youthful (and unsuccessful) efforts to learn to swim lead to an adult fear of water. Her husband and son live circumscribed lives, wherein Parambil marks the boundaries of their worlds.
After Philipose is grown and married, he assumes more responsibility for the estate, and he has learned not merely to fear or despise the water but to respect its sacred capacities. As the monsoon breaks, Philipose looks at his world with renewed awareness and thinks:
[My] eyes open to this precious land and its people, to the covenant of water, water that washes away the sins of the world, water that will gather in streams, ponds, and rivers, rivers that float the seas, water that I will never enter (395).
The covenant of water contains not only the process of purification but the promise of the life-giving monsoons. Even if Philipose’s Condition keeps him from entering the water or from feeling safe around it, he appreciates its practical and symbolic significance. On the night that Big Ammachi dies, she and Philipose make their peace, and she goes to take a bath. Her thoughts echo his from long ago: “Such precious, precious water, Lord, water from your own well; this water that is our covenant with You, with this soil, with the life You granted us. We are born and baptized in this water” (517). Again, water is sacred. For Big Ammachi, it brings life, not only here on Earth but also eternally.
Some years later, after Mariamma is assaulted at school, she longs for purification: “It’s not temples but the ocean that Mariamma wants most: the murmur of the waves, the restoration of water” (546). She is the one destined to find the cause and the cure for the Condition, to restore her family’s ability to traverse the waters. When she discovers the truth about her parentage—that Digby is her biological father and that her mother is still alive—she looks out at the canals, and in her pain she realizes that, “It is indifferent, this water that links all canals, water that is in the river ahead, and in the backwaters, and the seas and oceans—one body of water” (705). The water has never been at war with the Parambil family; only humans can assign symbolic meaning to it. She further expresses what her discoveries have revealed to her: “This is the covenant of water: that [humankind is] all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone” (706). This is the great promise that water represents, the unity and comfort of communion.
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