“The home… lies in Travancore, at the southern tip of India, sandwiched between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats… The land is shaped by water and its people united by a common language: Malayalam.”
And so we enter the world of Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water. The year is 1900, and a 12-year-old girl takes a boat to get married to a 40-year-old widower. She goes on to become Big Ammachi, the matriarch of the estate of Parambil. Over the course of seven decades, she will be the unwavering centre of this land and its community. She will discover that there is a curse, a “Condition” that runs in the family – a drowning in every generation – that no one can explain and everyone prays a doctor will find a cure for.
