The Covenant of Water

by Abraham Verghese

“You have a good head. But being curious is even more important. High school for you. College, too! Why not? I won’t let you marry young like your mother.”

The British ‘protect’ him from what? Isn’t the enemy already inside the walls?”

Happened is happened, she thinks. The past is unreliable, and only the future is certain, and she must look to it with faith that the pattern will be revealed.

“Are we not doing some good here, Honorine?” he asks gently. She looks at him kindly. “Aye, bonny lad, you are! Us all are! Our hospital, the railways, and telegraphs. Plenty good things. But it’s their land, Digby, and we take and take us. We take tea, rubber, take their looms so they must buy our cotton at ten times the cost . . .”

“buy what you love and what you can afford.”

Does she need his validation, or the validation of anyone, for that matter, in order to exist?

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

She understands that violent loss begets more violence.

A daughter has an open door into a father’s heart.”

Whether the thorn falls on the leaf, or the leaf falls on the thorn, the leaf suffers.

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.

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

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

“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. Ahab, Queequeg, Ophelia, and other characters die on the page so that we might live better lives.”

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

How many insights vanished in the ether because they weren’t written down?

“You see yourselves as being kind and generous to him. 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, they maintained, and that favored them. It’s like the British bragging about the railways, the colleges, the hospitals they left us—their ‘kindness’! As though that justified robbing us of the right to self-rule for two centuries! As though we should thank them for what they stole! Would Britain or Holland or Spain or Portugal or France be what they are now without what they earned by enslaving others? During the war, the British loved telling us how well they treated us compared to how the Japanese would treat us if they invaded. But should any nation rule over another nation? Such things only happen when one group thinks the other is inferior by birth, by skin color, by history. Inferior, and therefore deserving less. My father was no slave. He was beloved here. But he was never your equal so he wasn’t rewarded as one.”

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.

Call it communism or whatever you like, but standing up for the rights of the lowest caste appeals to me.”

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

It comes to her that it’s only when one’s father and mother are both dead that one stops being a child, being a daughter. She has just become an adult.

How do you know you go to a better place? he thought. What if it’s a place where the horror that haunts you repeats itself every minute?