E-Book, Englisch, 736 Seiten
Verghese The Covenant of Water
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ISBN: 978-1-80471-044-9
Verlag: Grove Press UK
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
An Oprah's Book Club Selection
E-Book, Englisch, 736 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-80471-044-9
Verlag: Grove Press UK
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Abraham Verghese is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the author of books including My Own Country and The Tennis Partner. His most recent book, Cutting for Stone, spent 107 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than 1.5 million copies in the U.S. alone. It was translated into more than twenty languages and is being adapted for film by Anonymous Content. Verghese was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2016, has received five honorary degrees, and lives and practices medicine in Stanford, California where he is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
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CHAPTER 2
1900, Travancore, South India
The journey to the groom’s church takes almost half a day. The boatman steers them down a maze of unfamiliar canals overhung by flaming red hibiscus, the houses so close to the edge she could touch a squatting old woman winnowing rice with flicks of a flat basket. She can hear a boy reading the newspaper to a sightless ancient who rubs his head as if the news hurt. House after house, each a little universe, some with children her age watching them pass. “Where’re you going?” asks a bare-chested busybody through black teeth, his black index finger—his toothbrush—covered in powdered charcoal, frozen in midair. The boatman glares at him.
Out from the canals now, onto a carpet of lotus and lilies so thick she could walk across it. The flowers are opened like well-wishers. Impulsively she picks one blossom, grabbing the stem anchored deep down. It comes free with a splash, a pink jewel, a miracle that something so beautiful can emerge from water so murky. Her uncle looks pointedly at her mother, who says nothing though she worries that her daughter will dirty her white blouse and , or the with faint gold trim. A fruity scent fills the boat. She counts twenty-four petals. Pushing through the lotus carpet they emerge onto a lake so wide that the far shore is invisible, the water still and smooth. She wonders if the ocean looks like this. She has almost forgotten that she’s about to marry. At a busy jetty they transfer to a giant canoe poled by lean, muscled men, its ends curled up like dried bean pods. Two dozen passengers stand in the middle, umbrellas countering the sun. She realizes that she’s going so far away it won’t be easy for her to visit home again.
The lake imperceptibly narrows to a broad river. The boat picks up speed as the current seizes it. At last, in the distance, up on a rise, a massive stone crucifix stands watch over a small church, its arms casting a shadow over the river. This is one of the seven and a half churches founded by Saint Thomas after his arrival. Like every Sunday school child she can rattle off their names: Kodungallur, Paravur, Niranam, Palayoor, Nilackal, Kokkamangalam, Kollam, and the tiny half-church in Thiruvithamcode; but seeing one for the first time leaves her breathless.
The marriage broker from Ranni paces up and down in the courtyard. Damp spots at the armpits of his connect over his chest. “The groom should have been here long before,” he says.The strands of hair he stretches over his dome have collapsed back over his ear like a parrot’s plume. He swallows nervously and a rock moves up and down in his neck.The soil in his village famously grows both the best paddy and these goiters.
The groom’s party consists of just the groom’s sister, Thankamma. This sturdy, smiling woman grabs her future sisterin-law’s tiny hands in both of hers and squeezes them with affection. “He’s coming,” she says. The slips the ceremonial stole over his robes and ties the embroidered girdle. He holds out his hand, palm up, to wordlessly ask, No one responds.
The bride shivers, even though it is sultry. She isn’t used to wearing a and . From this day on, no more long skirt and colored blouse. She’ll dress like her mother and aunt in this uniform of every married woman in the Saint Thomas Christian world, white its only color. The is like a man’s but tied more elaborately, the free edge pleated and folded over itself three times, then tucked into a fantail to conceal the shape of the wearer’s bottom. Concealment is also the goal of the shapeless, short-sleeved V-neck blouse, the white .
Light from the high windows slices down, casting oblique shadows. The incense tickles her throat. As in her church, there are no pews, just rough coir carpet on red oxide floors, but only in the front. Her uncle coughs. The sound echoes in the empty space.
She’d hoped her first cousin—also her best friend—would come for the wedding. She had married the year before when she was also twelve, to a twelve-year-old groom from a good family. At the wedding the boy-groom had looked as dull as a bucket, more interested in picking his nose than in the proceedings; the had interrupted the to hiss, “Stop digging! There’s no gold in there!” Her cousin wrote that in her new home she slept and played with the other girls in the joint family, and that she was pleased to have nothing to do with her annoying husband. Her mother, reading the letter, had said, knowingly, “Well, one day all that will change.” The bride wonders if it now has, and what that means.
There’s a disturbance in the air. Her mother pushes her forward, then steps away.
The groom looms beside her and at once the begins the service— She gazes straight ahead.
In the smudged lenses of the ’s spectacles, she glimpses a reflection: a large figure silhouetted by the light from the entrance, and a tiny figure at his side—herself.
What must it feel like to be forty years old? He’s older than her mother. A thought occurs to her: if he’s widowed, why didn’t he marry her mother instead of her? But she knows why: a widow’s lot is only a little better than a leper’s.
Suddenly, the ’s chant falters because her future husband has pivoted to study her, his back turned—unthinkably—to the priest. He peers into her face, breathing like a man who has walked rapidly for a great distance. She dares not look up, but she catches his earthy scent. She can’t control her trembling. She shuts her eyes.
“But this is just a child!” she hears him exclaim.
When she opens her eyes, she sees her great-uncle put out a hand to stop the departing groom, only to have it flicked away like an ant off a sleeping mat.
Thankamma runs out after the runaway groom, her apron of belly fat swinging side to side despite the pressure of her hands. She overtakes him near a burden stone—a horizontal slab of rock at shoulder height, held up by two vertical stone pillars sunk into the ground, a place for a traveler to set down a head load and catch their breath. Thankamma presses her hands on her brother’s considerable chest, trying to slow him down as she walks backward before him. “,” she says, because he’s much younger, more like her son than her brother. “,” she pants. What has transpired is serious, but it is comical how her brother pushes her as if he were a plowman and she the plow, and she can’t help but laugh.
“Look at me!” she commands, still grinning. How often has she seen that frowning expression on his face, even as a baby? He was just four when their mother passed away and Thankamma took over her role. Singing to him and holding him helped unfurrow his forehead. Much later, when their eldest brother cheated him of the house and property that should have been his, only Thankamma stood up for him.
He slows down. She knows him well, this hoarder of words. If God miraculously unlocked his jaw, what might he say?
“, I understand,” she says, as if he spoken. “I know how it looks. But don’t forget, your mother and your grandmother married when they were just nine. Yes, they were children, and they kept being raised as children in another household, until they were no longer children. Does this not produce the most compatible and best of marriages? But forget all that and just for a moment think about that poor girl. Stranded before the altar on her wedding day? , what shame! Who’ll marry her after that?”
He keeps walking. “She’s a good girl,” Thankamma says. “Such a good family! Your little JoJo needs someone to look after him. She will be to him as I was to you when you were little. Let her grow up in your household. She needs Parambil as much as Parambil needs her.”
She stumbles. He catches her, and she laughs. “Even elephants struggle to walk backwards!” Only she would construe the faint asymmetry on his face as a smile. “ picked this girl for you, . Don’t give that broker too much credit. met the mother, and saw the girl, even if she didn’t know I saw her. Didn’t I choose well the first time? Your blessed first wife, God rest her soul, approves. So now, trust your once more.”
The marriage broker confers with the , who mutters, “What kind of business is this?”
Her father taught the young bride to say that when she was scared. A mysterious energy emanating from the altar now settles on her like a surplice, bringing a profound peace. This church is consecrated by one of the twelve; he stood on the ground where she stands, the one apostle who Christ’s wounds. She feels an understanding beyond imagination, a voice that speaks...
