The Covenant of Water

 

CHARACTER CHART
I made this chart to help me keep the main characters straight in my head and heart while reading The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese. The chart doesn't include all the characters. For example, it doesn't include a minor character named Lenin, who is the lover of Mariamma. Not Mariamma AKA Big Ammachi but Mariamma AKA the daughter of Elsie and her lover Digby. 

CASTE
Baby Mariamma grows up in India to become a brilliant doctor. During her lifetime, she sees leprocy sweeping segments of the population where a person who is normal one day becomes infected and more tragically outcast the next day, as people afraid of becoming infected designate colonies where the infected live. She also sees life through the system of caste practiced by Hindus, where individuals are born into a specific financial and social rung. There will always be rungs higher than mine and rungs lower than mine, unless my rung happens to be the bottom most. Caste is not a system where aspiration is welcomed. In other words, I can be brilliant and/or work harder than most but I can never climb up the ladder of rungs. Caste is a system where only when I accept the rung I am born into can I have a chance at a higher rung in my next life.

TWO PATHS
Lenin is a radicalized revolutionary. He is willing to commit violence if such extremism can combat the oppressive system of caste. That Mariamma who has toiled to work within a conventional and traditional path of medicine falls in love with an unconventional Lenin is both tragic and poetic as excerpted from one of the most gripping scenes of the book on page 561, as follows:

"Mariamma. Marry me! Come away with me ... She feels very naked. "Listen to you!" she hisses. "Do you hear yourself? Your arrogance? You want me to give up my life? Follow you to a cave? Do you know why I shivered to hear your story? Shivered when the constables passed under the tree? I was terrified that the next thing you would say was that you killed Sivaraman because you felt it was justified. If you had had your gun, you would have, wouldn't you?"

"I've given everything to study the body. To heal, not to harm. Lenin, you understand? But my God, if you really thought I'd go down this path of bloodshed with you, this ... this stupid path you took, not a straight path at all. If you think that, then you don't know me at all."

"And let me tell you, there's nothing heroic about what you're doing. You want to help the downtrodden? Be a social worker! Or go into politics. Join your bloody Party and run for office. No, you're still standing on rooftops waiting for a lighting bolt, playing Manrake the Magician. Grow up!"

TO LIVE THE QUESTION
This scene shook me hard because though I've never condoned the Lenins of the world, I have also understood them. Just like I don't condone the actions taken by the modern day assassin Luigi Mangione, I understand how that sort of path emerges within the context of a dysfunctional health care system, and how individuals decide to get on that radicalized path. Same goes for the radicalized red and the radicalized blue. I don't like them and I understand them.

Prior to that dramatic scene, when Mariamma and Lenin exchange letters as pen pals, Lenin foreshadows the devastating paradox of the human condition, where the cruelty of a social system is answered simultaneously by the resolve of a Mariamma to work within it, and by the resolve of a Lenin or Luigi to destroy it. Writes Lenin on page 532: "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."

PATTERNS
On page 5 of the book, we are invited to consider the divine significance of patterns: The chaos and hurt in God's world are unfathomable mysteries, yet the Bible shows her that there is order beneath. As her father would say, "Faith is to know the pattern is there, even though none is visible."

Patterns sometimes emerge long after our patience and hope to see them dissipate. Long after the hope of understanding why her mother may have left her to be raised by her grandmother, Mariamma finds it back at a leprosarium where her mother Elsie has been living. A choice made to protect her daughter from contracting the disease, to give her a fighting chance at a brilliant life.

That brilliance can be found by many who view her long and impressively studied medical career. But really, the only brilliance of import is found by Mariamma and her mother at the leprosarium as they are able to move the immovable hurt aside and feel even through the glass that keeps them separate, their oneness, their love divine.