The Covenant of Water

by Abraham Verghese

What’s fur ye won’t go by ye, Digby thinks. It was a phrase his mother would use: whatever is in his destiny will come to him, regardless.

My solitude is a state I’ve gotten used to. It feels safer than . . .” He can’t bring himself to utter the alternative.

His secret—and his failing—is that after his mother’s betrayal, he cannot risk love.

Same.

Digby vows not to think of her. He thinks of her all the time.

Sooner or later, she must sit down to the meal of consequences.

Lean not on your own understanding. Let God worry.

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

Yes!

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

!!!

Yes, us was mad at you. Disappointed. I won’t make any bones about it. But I got over it long before I got your letter. Yer human! Flawed. Ya’ think you’re alone. You deserve to be forgiven. We all do. I don’t know if you will ever forgive yourself, but you must try. I wanted you to hear that from me.”

Literacy alters patterns of life that have gone undisturbed for generations.

“Reading is the door to knowledge. Knowledge raises the yield of paddy. Knowledge combats poverty. Knowledge saves lives.

Each one must teach one.

Your husband does see it. He sees you. He’s smiling.

“Good tea, that much I will say,” Jana exclaims at last, smacking his lips. “Life is like this. Crushing is there, and success is there. Never only success.” He pauses for emphasis. “I wanted to study. Father died. Crushing! What to do? I work! Buying old newspapers firstly and reselling, then secondly old books. Now? I’m sitting on knowledge! I read anything and everything. Better than education. I am saying you will succeed! Never to give up!” Crushing, Philipose has had aplenty. He’d wanted to sail the seas like Ishmael, but the Condition dashed that dream early. He told himself he’d explore the world by land, but here he is in Madras and already eager to return. He’s had the crushing. What can success look like now? Janakiram has the answer. “Success is not money! Success is you are fully loving what you are doing. That only is success!”

!!!

Every human bad habit generates art!

We have no practice, he thinks, of seeing our real selves. Even before a mirror we compose our faces to meet our own expectations.

When Elsie stated her wish so many moons ago, if only he’d said “No!” Or said a true “Yes.” 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.”

Aah, I said. Enough about that. I didn’t come to talk about your signboard. I’m a collector of wart cures, of which there are legion. Yes, yes, he said, most agreeably, and moreover, he added, the common ingredient to all the cures is belief. When a cure works it’s because the patient believes. When the cures are elaborate it’s easier to believe. That’s human nature. Fair enough, I said, because for once I agreed with him. So, I said. Tell me, what do you do for your wart patients? He held out his hand. I asked, What’s that? Put money there, please. If a patient cares enough to put money in my hand, that means they have faith. Then my cure is sure to work. I took my bicycle off the stand, ready to leave. I don’t have warts, I said. I’m asking as a journalist. He said, You are sadly mistaken—I diagnosed warts the first moment I saw you. Where? Show me! Aah, but your warts are all on the inside, as you surely know. His hand was still held out. Dear Reader, don’t judge me harshly. Tears of understanding sprang to my eyes. I put money in the doctor’s hand. Doctor, I said, I am desperate. And I believe.

Woah

We are enslaved even after we are free, Uplift Master thinks. We assume a white man’s message is better than what our own might say.

He didn’t disagree that God may have other plans for me, but he said sometimes we have to “live the question,” not push for the answer.

One shouldn’t just hope to be treated well: one must insist on it.

She had launched right into inflammation, the body’s first response to any threat, the common denominator of all disease.

marveling at the connections in her world, invisible or forgotten, but there all the same, like a river linking people upstream with those below, whether they know it or not.

He’d wished for such words. He struggled to believe her because he was an expert in disappointment. The only protection was to anticipate it. Trying to hold on to the people you loved was the recipe for disappointment.

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