The Covenant of Water

by Abraham Verghese

The chaos and hurt in God’s world are unfathomable mysteries, yet the Bible shows her that there is order beneath.

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

“Molay, the sweetness of life is sure in only two things: love and sugar. If you don’t get enough of the first, have more of the second!”

If God gave her one moment in time that she could stretch out for as long as she lives, this would be it.

All water is connected and only land and people are discontinuous.

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.

I am so behind that yesterday catches up with tomorrow.

God is in the small things.”

Secrecy lives in the same rooms as loneliness.

They’re both cut from the fabric of loss.

They’ve come to that threshold beyond which words lose their utility. Standing so close to her, in his own house . . . there are no more words he wants to say except her name. He has sounded it in the dark, bounced it off the ceiling and walls. Celeste. Celeste. Its last syllable lingers in the corners like a trapped whisper. He wants to say it aloud now. His hand moves, as though of its own volition, reaches for hers. He cannot know that hours before, her husband reached for her wrist and she yanked it away. “Celeste,” he says, dragging out her name. “Celeste, there’s more paintings you must see.” Her fingers find refuge in his.

How is a dream that involves two people to be sustained by one?

Compared to their messy, roiling emotions, the body is always steadfast, reassuring.

He feels himself disappear in the capaciousness of the universe.

their separateness an illusion. All is one. The universe is nothing but a speck of foam on a limitless ocean that is the Creator.

What is it with men needing to go up or down, turn bird or fish?

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

For twenty-eight years of Baby Mol’s life, the sun has never failed to come up, yet every morning she’s ecstatic at its return.

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

“A dog lives for you. A cat just lives with you.”

The alchemy of shared hands, this pas de deux, has reached back through his fingers, up through his nerves, to liberate a portrait from his occipital cortex, pry it out of memory, tagging it with love and laughter.

One leaves home at one’s own peril.

The valley below, the rock underfoot, and the mountain before him will outlast him. On the scale of this land, he is nothing; words like “shame” and “guilt” mean little here; and a reputation is no more than a fleeting blue flame, an evanescent spirit in a brandy glass.

“Ammachi, when I come to the end of a book and I look up, just four days have passed. But in that time I’ve lived through three generations and learned more about the world and about myself than I do during a year in school.

He hardly slept, while she slept the sleep of the sinless.

In a crooked house, there’s no point using the front door.

Whatever is next for me, whatever the story of my life, the roots that must nourish it are here.

Yes, I am mad. You can’t set out to achieve your goals without a little madness.

If two people at the very same moment hold visions of each other, perhaps atoms coalesce into invisible forms, like radio waves, and connect them.

Philipose quotes Gandhi: “There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of food.”

“Feet reveal character. You could be a king or bishop and adorn your hands with jewels. But feet are your unadorned self, regardless of who you proclaim yourself to be.”

The Ordinary Man has managed something extraordinary.

He, a flawed mortal—not Emperor Shah Jahan or a genie after all—is dwarfed by her talent; he’s no longer sure of himself, searching for the right way to be with her, to be worthy of her.

His art, so he tells himself, is to give voice to the ordinary, in memorable ways.

Lucky life, it says to Philipose as the rain pelts down. Lucky, lucky life! Lucky you can judge yourself in this water. Lucky you can be purified over and over . . . When she’s done, she has secured their covenant, the monsoon has pledged its loyalty, the family is safe, and all is well with the world.

brothers one and all, every barrier of caste and custom erased in the terrible solidarity imposed by death,

Life comes from God and life is precious precisely because it is brief. God’s gift is time. However much or however little one has of it, it comes from him.

How can they heal if not together?

Men like to think that women forget the pain upon seeing the blessed baby. No. A woman forgives the child, and she might even forgive the father. But she never forgets.

It is a reminder that Parambil must go on. A householder, a mother, a grandmother has precious duties that don’t cease, that go on till her dying day.

That rectangular sheet of paper holds the round world and its imagined corners, the remembrances of the disappeared and the dead, and the beating hearts of the faithful who pray each night that God’s will be done, not knowing what that will be.

sometimes when you are most afraid, when you feel most helpless, that is when God is pointing out a path for you.”

“We know so little. What little we do know leaves me in awe.

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.

Forgiveness is hollow, but it’s all she can offer the man she loves.

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

We are dying while we’re living, we are old even when we’re young, we are clinging to life even as we resign ourselves to leaving it.

but it matters not and matters terribly,

That’s all the ambition I need: to remain worthy of this remarkable woman.

In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.