An Abraham Verghese kind of writer
Fourteen years after Cutting from Stone, Abraham Verghese published The Covenant of Water. He told a rapt, standing-room-only audience at this year’s SALA festival in Palo Alto, that he didn’t intend to take ten years to write the book. What he took on instead was an ambitious story that played out over several generations.
“I wish I were the kind of writer who knows the whole story before I write it and I don’t,” said Verghese.
He used a whiteboard to create elaborate schemes for the story, but the characters took on their lives of their own and dictated the outcome or the turn of events, despite what Verghese may have planned for them.
“A character is determined by decisions taken under pressure,” he said. “I would put the character under some kind of pressure, and their response would be entirely different from the one that I thought.”
A story well-told
In a conversation with Dr. Ajit Singh, a Board member of SALA organizer ArtForum SF at the South Asian Literature and Arts Festival 2023, Verghese answered questions about his work as a doctor and a writer, and about the themes in his book. His mantra as a writer is a story well told, said Verghese, while his goal as a physician includes the idea of a physical exam.
Singh said he appreciated this idea of being next to a patient and seeing eye to eye. He called having a one-to-one relationship very powerful.
“Medicine is a science, but healing is still an art and you typify that,” Singh said to Verghese. “You are an artist not just in your writing, but also your medicine.”
Heroic, unheralded female characters
The Covenant of Water is a book about heroic women, he said – women like his grandmother and other grandmothers who are heroic but unheralded. The ones the world would never know of, but who, in their orbits, have weathered incredible tragedies. Verghese was humbled by the fact that the character of Big Ammachi resonated with readers.
As a child, said Verghese, he was fascinated and impressed by the idea of families having secrets. Every family has their versions of secrets. He also thought that in the period 1900 to 1970, a family would be very invested in their reputation because a bride or groom’s prospects could be tremendously affected by some secret.
“And in this book, I decided to give this family a secret that would really stand out in the sort of water culture of Kerala.”
A mental movie shaped by words
Verghese takes fiction very seriously. “I think the writer provides the words, the reader provides their imagination,” he said. “And somewhere in the middle space where these two things meet, a mental movie begins to shape in the reader’s mind, and it belongs to them.”
He also feels that fiction is a great way of dealing with justice, of taking the world in for its affairs and setting it right.
“Fiction is a great lie that tells the truth about how the world really is.”
“I always think that if you stop reading fiction,” he said. “if you don’t have the practice of taking the magical words on the page into your cortex and allowing them to make a mental movie, a part of your brain atrophies.”
On becoming a writer
Verghese was always an intense reader, he said, and didn’t really have a plan to be a writer. At a writer’s workshop in 1999, he took away that not everybody can be a great artist, a mathematician, or a writer, but anybody with a curiosity about the human condition and their fellow human beings or what it is to work hard could be a good physician.
Almost ironically, he said, a book brought him to medicine. Years later after medical school and training, he found himself in the thick of the HIV era.
An American story of migration
“I stumbled onto a unique American story of migration,” he said.
As he wrote a scientific paper on the phenomenon he felt that the language of science lacked the vocabulary to capture the tragic nature of this voyage, to capture the grief of the families whose sons were dying.
“It didn’t capture my own heartache, living through this again and again,” he said. “And for me, it was particularly moving because these were men my age.”
During that time, he said, he learned a lot about manhood and bravery. It is commonly said that a writer should write what they know, Verghese said, that medicine is what he knows. And medicine is life sometimes at its most tragic place and sometimes at its most exhilarated.
“Life is a terminal condition,” he said, eliciting laughter from his audience. “It ends.”
