Interview: Abraham Verghese, author, The Covenant of Water
On doing a lot o f research and being committed to writing the kind of book that he enjoys reading: an epic that covers multiple generations
The Covenant of Water has been a phenomenal success in the US. It’s got great reviews and it has been selected by Oprah’s Book Club. I’ve noticed it being talked about a great deal in India — especially (but not only) among Malayalis since it’s about three generations of a Kerala Christian family over seven decades. This is, of course, based only on anecdotal evidence, but I can’t remember the last time so many Indian readers were interested in a book. You were just at the Bangalore Literature Festival — how was the reception?
It was a bit overwhelming. There was so much enthusiasm for the book, I just wasn’t prepared... I think I was, at some level, worried that Indians would be super critical about a book set in India by somebody living [abroad]...
This seems even bigger than Cutting For Stone (2009), which sold more than a million copies.
Oh, it’s definitely bigger than Cutting For Stone.
Cutting For Stone didn’t do very well in hardback. We got killed in our tracks by a bad review in The New York Times by somebody unknown. And then, in paperback, through word-of-mouth and book clubs, it just slowly took off. But this, to be so successful in hardback, is just amazing. And if Bangalore is any measure of the enthusiasm, it was just wonderful.
It’s heartening also because this is a big book at 700 plus pages. We’re told that readers now have shorter attention spans. Covenant of Water is also a hefty one in terms of its subject matter. There’s the setting of Kerala and Madras starting in 1900 and going up to 1977. It contains so much more history, and medicine, and death. Were you thinking about the reader at all while writing this?
I’d like to think that I’m always thinking of the reader. There was this saying in in my writing program in Iowa — years after I became a physician, I went to the Writers Workshop — and Frank Conroy, who I really loved as a teacher used to say that the reader is like someone taking a backpack up a mountain. And you have to be really thoughtful about what you put in the backpack so when they get to the top of the mountain, they shouldn’t be pissed that you packed something they carried all the way up but didn’t need. So yeah, in that sense, I was thinking of the reader. But I was also committed to writing the kind of book that I enjoy reading: an epic that covered multiple generations.
And I had a sort of a chequered history with this book. I don’t know if you know, but I had a previous publisher and editor. I was slow to meet their deadline, which is always the case, but also the editor was just wedded to this vision of a book being a certain number of pages. And how sad for publishing if the criteria for publishing is that you have to meet this length! But it was more than that. I just felt that she didn’t share any vision of the book that I had. And so, at great peril, financial peril, I broke the contract... I was given a very hefty advance because Cutting For Stone had done so well. I was seen as the golden goose who was going to lay another egg. And I think I succumbed to that. I think I believed that myself and I won’t do that again. It’s a lot of pressure on you.
And so I had to shop this book around and I was tainted, you know, it was almost like a tainted commodity.
But it immediately clicked with Peter Blackstock at Grove — Grove is the last of the big five publishers, it’s really independently owned and not a conglomerate, and Peter is the one who edited The Sympathizer (Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize winning novel) and Shuggie Bain (Douglas Stuart’s 2020 Booker Prize winning novel) — he’s a half-Indian half-English guy. He immediately loved — we had a lot of shaping to do — but he loved what he saw. And one of the first things he said to me was, the book needs to be as long as it needs to be. That was a big load off my chest. I know it’s a long book, but I also wanted to cover three generations of a family because one of the joys of being in medicine as long as I’ve been now is that I have witnessed things that were just given a label but not understood. And then after a decade or two, the mechanism was well-understood, and then comes a diagnostic test. Then, another decade later comes breakthrough treatment. And I wanted to be able to have that play out in this family, in this setting, in this time period. So maybe it could have been done in a shorter way, but I tend to write long. And there’s still hundreds of pages that we cut because they were not helping in the backpack.
I always think an editor is so important. I actually think that editors should have their names on the front of the book — because you’ve lost all objectivity, you no longer know what’s good, what’s not, so you need someone you trust, someone who knows the publishing world and is also willing to break the norm.
Peter was telling me that Shuggie Bain, which is an unusual book, was rejected 20 times before it came to him.
How come? Was it because it was so sad?
I don’t know. I think it’s also because it was full of this Glaswegian vernacular and whatnot. And for whatever reason, I mean, I don’t see why it was rejected. Peter took it and shaped it and now people are presenting books to editors saying, well, this is kind of like Shuggie Bain. So I’m hoping that perhaps with my book, people will be more open to bigger books.
One of the interesting things that Oprah said to me, I think, in our very first conversation, which was a long conversation. She said, I got to a certain point and I looked to see how many pages were left, not in the sense of how much would I have to slog through, but she didn’t want it to end. And when she saw that it was just 200 left, she was really slowing down because she didn’t want it to end. And that’s exactly what you hope would happen.
There’s so much detail in the book. Not just in terms of landscape, but also histories, especially the histories of foreigners in Madras and Kerala. Digby Kilgour, one of your main characters, is a Scottish surgeon; Rune Orqvist, a Swedish doctor, runs a leprosy clinic. How much of it was research and were you, in some ways, also thinking of a writing a global book for your readers around the world?
So I was asked that question actually by someone else, whether by introducing Digby and Rune [a Swedish doctor] was like catering to a Western audience. But, you know, it’s kind of a strange question — I was asked that in India — because if you think about it, here we are speaking in English, you’re going to write this in English. The book is doing well in the States and in the Commonwealth... It’s doing well wherever people read in English. And one of the biggest audiences is in India. So no, I think I was just being true to the times. I did a lot of research and the entire Indian medical service was basically a British creation, all the professors in medical schools, the Indians were like the second strata. You really couldn’t write about that with any honesty if you didn’t have Western protagonist of some kind.
Similarly, the whole discovery of the estate regions of the of the Western Ghats, all these pockets, each one of them is some Western pioneer — a Swiss, a Swede, all kinds of people came. So I think I was just being true to the times. I didn’t model anybody based on any actual character, but I certainly modelled them based on what was happening at the time. The other reason for the maybe excessive detail is to create that sense of verisimilitude, that sense of this is a real world. Even though this is a fictional story, you need to populate it with very concrete structures and events so that the reader buys it. Authenticity, I suppose. Not just verisimilitude, but authenticity.
How much of it came from research, and how much of it did you already know?
I did a tremendous amount of research. There’s a lot that I didn’t know. But it helped that there was a lot that I did know. A part of my delight at being so well-received is that I always felt this little nagging sense of inadequacy that I wasn’t born here. Sure, I came every summer with my parents and spent two months in Kerala, and in medical school in Madras... Nevertheless, if I wasn’t born speaking Malayalam fluently and reading it, I’m missing the nuances of Malayalam culture, I’m sure. So that prompted the tremendous need to do a lot of research.
But ultimately, I was calling strongly on the memories of my childhood, especially my grandmothers. My two grandmothers were, in a way, very similar to Big Ammachi in the sense that they were heroic women — but the kind of heroism that’s unrecognized by the world, I mean, no one would ever know. Their families knew because they were the lynchpins, they held things together. They weathered tremendous trauma. My one grandmother lost her son to rabies at the age of 16, the oldest son of the family. Another lost her son to typhoid, the only son in the family. To come through those things and go on, there was a steadfastness about them, a tremendous rock solid faith, I think it is the envy of our generation that I was tapping into.
Is that where all the deaths in the family in the novel come from?
To some degree. But I think it’s also true to the times. You know, there was a tremendous amount of death. I also think that as a physician, I’m much more conscious of the fact that we are mortal beings. Life is a terminal condition, as John Irving says in The World According to Garp (1982). So, I see a lot more death than perhaps other people do.
And I think that people outside of medicine are often in a bit of denial about just how frequent and common it is for your life to be upended by something.
But you know, it’s interesting after the book has come out, I’ve heard about a lot of people in Kerala who painfully tell me that they lost siblings to drowning — because it’s a commoner form of suicide than I realized. I mean, I only know this anecdotally. But it’s striking to me how many people told me this. So the drowning wasn’t uncommon. Tragedy is not uncommon.
Death by drowning is the central plot line of the novel. Every generation of this family, going far back, has had deaths by drowning — they refer to it as the “condition” and I know different readers understood it differently. There’s a ghost in the cellar of this house and so it makes sense that the condition is a curse. But others sensed there was a more rational explanation: I found a forum online where doctors who had read the book were posting about what medical disorder they had thought “the condition” could be. Indian family stories often contain these “conditions” which lie in that space between magic realism and medical mystery: schizophrenia as a spiritual gift, for instance. How do you understand this connection between mythology and medicine?
Well, I think, a lot of what is magic in our lives, science has wound up demystifying. But not entirely. The very act of writing a novel is a bit of a mystery. If you think the conscious mind is in charge, I think it may try to be, but there are these connections that come about that, to me, God knows where they’re coming from, the muse speaking or the right brain or call it what you like, but it’s utterly mysterious.
I will say that I was being true to the nature of my grandmothers and the people I remember. They didn’t talk about ghosts, like, “Let me tell you a ghost story” — it was very concrete descriptions of things that they were convinced existed. And you as a child didn’t doubt them. I don’t think I was aiming for magical realism, if anything, I may be exaggerating — but not too much — a sense of that spirit world that’s out there that they certainly felt.
Your mother wrote a kind of memoir, by hand, 100 pages of family stories and memories along with illustrations. This became a source of your novel. Tell us more about your mother’s manuscript — what does it look like, and did you think of it as potential material when she was writing it?
Not at all. She actually wrote it when she was in her seventies. And at that point, I was writing My Own Country (1994). It was only when she was in her nineties — this document, this is sort of a treasured photocopy thing that all of us, all her children and her grandchildren had — I picked it up again. And I was reminded of her stories of her childhood, all of which were familiar, somewhat embellished in this new version. They reminded me of how rich a life she had led. And so Mum was in her nineties when I decided to set the novel there. She was very excited. It was of great help to me. Unfortunately, she didn’t live to see the end.
But just to give you an example of the difference between generations. My father is 96, gets on a treadmill twice a day for 30 minutes, very slowly. But I said to him casually, tongue-in-cheek, “Dad, the book is doing so great. I’m sure mum’s up there making sure this is all happening.” And he said to me somewhat indignantly, “Of course she is,” with a sort of a concreteness that speaks to the point you were asking me about ghosts and spirits. And I kind of believe she is every day. It’s a nice thing to believe. Can I prove it? Of course not.
So where did the novel begin?
Well, that was the inspiration, that book. It gave me the confidence to set the novel in India. Her notes just made me think, you know, between research and my memories, I think I can make this happen.
The first moment was really picturing the young bride on a wedding day (which is how the novel opens) because in reading about my mother’s anecdotes, I was reminded of her grandmother. My great grandmother was an extraordinary woman. She married, at the age of 9 or 10, an older widower. They had a couple of kids, and they went on to have a wonderful marriage, a sort of a rip-roaring, beautiful, you know, a funny marriage full of humour people just talked about. They became a model for my mother’s marriage and other marriages.
I like the idea of going against the grain, beginning with a situation that seems to portend something bad. And instead having something really magnificent come about, which is how people would talk about that marriage. That’s where I began... and then I kept pushing it forward.
What is your writing process — how do you take the time out?
I’ve been very lucky, that Stanford, for the last 15 year, has given me protected time to write, the same way they might give to my scientific colleagues to have time in the lab. So I have a separate office [to write] that I use with somebody else’s name on the door. But that said, I’m often my worst enemy and end up doing medical things in that time.
I typically write when I can, which is weekends and nights. I’m not a very disciplined writer. It comes in spurts.
Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.