The Covenant of Water

by Abraham Verghese

“Faith is to know the pattern is there, even though none is visible.”

But such memories are woven from gossamer threads; time eats holes in the fabric, and these she must darn with myth and fable.

A good story goes beyond what a forgiving God cares to do: it reconciles families and unburdens them of secrets whose bond is stronger than blood. But in their revealing, as in their keeping, secrets can tear a family apart.

All water is connected, and her world is limitless. He stands at the limits of his.

“Small things make a big difference, Digby. God is in the small things.”

Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!”

To see the miraculous in the ordinary is a more precious gift than prophecy.

He wonders if he’s avoided his fate or found it.

‘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.’”

“Success is not money! Success is you are fully loving what you are doing. That only is success!”

“And with a radio, the world comes to you, doesn’t it?”

Dear Reader, the moral is give as generously as nature gives. And take a good look at your plavu because secrets are hidden in the most obvious places.

In a life, it is the in-betweens that are fatal; indecisiveness killed his son. But in his grief, in his bitterness, at this moment he thinks it all began with Elsie’s fateful wish: “You can cut down that tree.”

Unlike Baby Mol, who sees things forward, she sometimes sees things only by looking back . . . but mostly the past is unreliable.

“When you are robbed, you quickly become politically conscious. You have nothing to lose but your chains. That’s Marx, by the way, not me.”

Apparently, Marx said that religion was the opium of the masses. It kept the oppressed from complaining or trying to change things.

She knows its name came from a small village—Naxalbari—in West Bengal. The peasants there, after slaving for the landlords, were given so little back of the harvest that they were starving. In desperation they took the harvest from the land they had tilled for generations. Armed police who were in the landlords’ pay arrived and fired on the peasants who had assembled for a dialogue, and a dozen or more, including women and children, were killed. That’s what she recalls. It dominated the news. Outrage at the massacre in Naxalbari spread like cholera all over India, and the “Naxalite” movement was born.

We sit here and believe we are enlightened, fair. But the truth is we can be blind to injustice.

We don’t have children to fulfill our dreams. Children allow us to let go of the dreams we were never meant to fulfill.

This is the covenant of water: that they’re all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone.

Every family has secrets, but not all secrets are meant to deceive.

The Maramon Convention is legendary and I hope to visit some year;