by Abraham Verghese, 2023
Beautiful novel by the author of Cutting for Stone, and The Tennis Partner. Marney told me about it. It is 715 pages long! It is set in southern India, spanning almost the entire 1900’s. It concerns a family that lives on a small estate called Parambil, near the ocean on the southwestern side of India, the Kerala state. A young girl, 12 years old, is forced to leave her mom and family and move to Parambil to marry a man older than her. He is a widow and has a young son named Jojo. He’s a good man. He lets her grow up in his household, learning how to cook from the older women, and as she grows up, she falls in love with her husband and cares deeply for Jojo. The tale includes tragedies because many people in this family die from drowning. It’s called the Condition. Jojo dies drowning after he falls from a tree into a small amount of water. It breaks their hearts. They have a daughter of their own, Baby Mol. When she is about 5, someone comes to the house and says, What’s the matter with her! They take her to a doctor and find out she is a Down’s Syndrome child, I think, although that is never specified. They never saw anything wrong with her and love her so much. She is a beloved member of the family. Then, years later, they have a son together, name him Philipose. Philipose grows up and tries to go to college but he cannot hear the professors. He finally has a hearing test and discovers he is almost deaf. He returns home to Parambil and marries Elsie, a beautiful artist. They have a premature baby named Ninan. They nurse him and care for him and he lives and becomes a very precocious little boy. He dies very, very tragically, falling from the top of the tree that Elsie had asked Philipose to cut down when they first were married. Philipose finally has it cut part way down years later when Ninan is a little boy. But he doesn’t have the tree totally cut down, only partially – and it leaves sharp spikes all the way from top to bottom. Little Ninan climbs up and falls and is impaled on one of these branches. Tragic, ugly death. It destroys Elsie and Philipose. They each blame each other and grow to hate one another. Elsie leaves. Philipose becomes addicted to opium.
When Grandma (Big Ammachi) begs Elsie to return because Baby Mol is suffering and dying without her, Elsie does return. She has one night with Philipose and is pregnant. She stays until the baby is born. It almost kills her because the baby is breach and Elsie hemorrhages. But Big Ammachi and Anna Chedethi deliver the baby and then stop the bleeding and save Elsie. But Elsie never will hold the baby or even be in the same room with the baby. She disappears shortly after the baby is born. It appears she entered the river to bathe and drowned – never seen again. The baby girl is named Mariamma, Big Ammachi’s very own Christian name (they are Saint Thomas Christians in this part of India).
Mariamma grows up loved and beloved by Big Ammachi and Baby Mol and Anna Chedethi and eventually her father, Philipose. Philipose thought Mariamma was going to be a boy, that God was going to give them a boy to replace their beloved Ninan. But when Mariamma is born he says to his mom, Big Ammachi, that God has failed them again. Big Ammachi says to her son: “Look, an hour ago I could have come out to tell you that Elsie had convulsions and died. Forty minutes ago, I could have told you that the child was stuck upside down and mother and child had died. And ten minutes ago, I could’ve walked out to say Elsie bled to death. Do you understand? But I said none of those things. I said your wife lives, but barely. And what you see here is God’s grace manifest in this perfect, perfect child.”
Philipose gets off of opium because their servant, Shamuel, takes him up in the hills to live with a healer for about a month. They never leave his side the whole time. They nurse him through the withdrawal until he is completely off of the drugs. He realizes Mariamma is a gift and he loves her and raises her well.
We find out in the end, that Philipose is not Mariamma’s father, that a doctor from Scotland is her father. This doctor, Digby Kilgour, is a loving and good man with tragedies of his own. But the reason he couldn’t tell Mariamma that he was her father is because Elsie is alive and is a leper. He is taking care of her along with the other lepers in the leprosarium that Dr. Kilgour is now running. In the end, Mariamma comes to confront him and he tells her the leper out in the garden is her mom – she is blind and bent and no longer the beautiful woman, but still he takes care of her and loves her.
There is much, much more to this saga, and it is all rich and heart-warming and heart-rending. I hear they are making a movie of Cutting for Stone. I hope they also make a movie of this book. It would be fantastic.
Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:
Page 12, describing the area of India Parambil is in: “The home of the young bride and her widower groom lies in Travancore, at the southern tip of India, sandwiched between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats–that long mountain range that runs parallel to the western coast. The land is shaped by water and its people united by a common language: Malayalam.”
Page 15: “Legend has it that Saint Thomas arrived in 52 AD, disembarking close to present-day Cochin. He met a boy returning from the temple. “Does your God hear your prayers?” he asked. The boy said his God surely did. Saint Thomas tossed water into the air and the droplets remained suspended. “Can your God do that?” By such displays, whether magic or miracles, he converted a few Brahmin families to Christianity; later he was martyred in Madras. Those first converts–Saint Thomas Christians–stayed true to the faith and did not marry outside their community. Over time they grew, knitted together by their customs and their churches.”
Page 15 and 16: “The grandmother is certain of a few things: A tale that leaves its imprint on a listener tells the truth about how the world lives, and so, unavoidably, it is about families, their victories and wounds, and their departed, including the ghosts who linger; it must offer instructions for living in God’s realm, where joy never spares one from sorrow. A good story goes beyond what a forgiving God cares to do: it reconciles families and unburdens them of secrets whose bond is stronger than blood. But in their revealing, as in their keeping, secrets can tear a family apart.”
Page 197, the Swedish doctor, Rune, has just had a vision that he has been sent by God to help lepers. “The difference between him and the leper is no difference at all, they are just manifestations of the universal consciousness.
“In this new awareness, the restless chattering in his head abruptly ceases. Just as the ocean manifests as a wave or surf, but neither wave nor surf is the ocean, so also the Creator-God or Brahma-generates an impression of a universe that takes the form of a Swedish doctor, or a blind leper. Rune is real. The leper is real. The fishing net is real. Yet it is all maya, their separateness an illusion. All is one. The universe is nothing but a speck of foam on a limitless ocean that is the Creator. He feels euphoric and unburdened-the peace of God, which passeth all understanding.“
The caste system of India is part of the story. Some of the most beautiful people are pulayar, the lowest caste, and not able to eat with the household or go to school, own land. Philipose’s best friend is Shamuel’s son, Joppan. Joppan is a wonderful, talented, friendly, fun boy, but when he tries to go the village school with Philipose, he is beaten by the teacher.
When Philipose learns to read, he meets a man, Koshy Saar, that gives him great literature. The first book is Moby-Dick. In the year 1933, Philipose reads Moby-Dick out loud to his family. They fall in love with it. Koshy Saar gives him Great Expectations next.
Page 236: “”Koshy Saar doesn’t believe in God,” Philipose confesses the night he returns from his lesson with a new book. Clearly he has been keeping his mo=etor’s atheism a secret till they finished Moby-Dick. He looks guilty, fearful his mother will put an end to his visits, but eased of his troubled conscience.
“She hungrily eyed the new book in his hand–Great Expectations–the novel that will define 1934 just as Moby-Dick defined 1933. “Well, Koshy Saar may not believe in God, but it’s a good thing that God believes in that old man. Why else did he send him into your life?””
Page 237: “”Ammachi?” she hears from behind her, as her daughter stirs. She waits anxiously for what Baby Mol says next. Her daughter’s gift of announcing visitors ahead of their arrival extends to predicting bad weather, disaster, and death. “Ammachi, the sun is coming up!” Big Ammachi lets out her breath in relief. For twenty-eight years of Baby Mol’s life, the sun has never failed to come up, yet every morning she’s ecstatic at its return. To see the miraculous in the ordinary is a more precious gift than prophecy.”
Page 511, the night Baby Mol and her mother, Big Ammachi, go to sleep for the last time: “What is worry but fear of what the future holds? Baby Mol lives completely in the present and is spared all worry.”
There are Naxalites. One of them, Lenin, is Mariamma’s childhood friend and later her lover. He has the Condition, though, and it almost kills him before the police can kill him. Naxalites are rebels in India, against the injustices, corruption, abuse of the caste system and the British system.
Page 553: “She tries to recall what she actually knows of the Naxalite movement. She knows its name came from a small village–Naxalbari–in West Bengal. The peasants there, after slaving for the landlords, were given so little back of the harvest that they were starving. In desperation they took the harvest from the land they had tilled for generations. Armed police who were in the landlords’ pay arrived and fired on the peasants who had assembled for a dialogue, and a dozen or more, including women and children, were killed. That’s what she recalls. It dominated the news. Outrage at the massacre in Naxalbari spread like cholera all over India, and the “Naxalite” movement was born.”
Page 573, Big Ammachi (grandmother) has died and Mariamma has returned to Parambil for a break from medical school. She is sitting in the dark kitchen remembering her loving grandmother: “Mariamma finds the matchbox and lights one of Big Ammachi’s palm-sized oil lamps, the kind that her grandmother favored, and would take with her when she went to bed. Mariamma weeps unabashedly, picturing that kindly face bathed by the lamp’s soft glow. But her grandmother is with her always; these tears are for the past, for innocent times when she sat here and was fed by that loving hand, was entertained with stories, and knew she was cherished.”
Page 574, Philipose gives Mariamma, his daughter who is going to be a doctor, the following quote from Paracelsus: “Love the sick, each and every one, as if they were your own.”
Page 577, Philipose is saying goodbye to Mariamma as she boards the train to return to medical school. He is telling her that he has offered a deal to Joppan to run Parambil, not as good as the one he offered him 10 years ago which Joppan declined. Joppan is a pulayan, the lowest caste of India. But this family loves and appreciates him and needs him, just as they loved and needed his father, Shamuel, who served them whole-heartedly his entire life. “”Joppan may well find that the very thing he ran away from is what will save him and make him happy. You resist fate, but the hound finds you anyway. Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!””
Page 644: Mariamma and Lenin, who has become a Naxalite but the Condition, the anomaly in his ear, has almost killed him. He is secretly rushed to Mariamma, who removed some of the pressure by needle into the brain. He needs surgery, though, and right away, to save him. “A narrow shaft of sunlight filters through leaves, touches the bed. The God who never interferes with drownings or train wrecks likes to peer in on the human experiment at such moments of reckoning, touching the scene with a little celestial light. She’s impatient, waiting for Lenin’s answer.”
Page 648, at the Christian hospital where the surgeon is going to operate on Lenin: “There’s nothing emptier than a hospital bed to which a loved one might not return. She’s overcome, slumped on the chair, her face buried in her hands. The woman caring for her son in the next bed comes over to comfort her. To Mariamma’s surprise, a nurse comes and sits beside her and prays aloud. Faith at this institution is concrete, not abstract. After her father’s death she’d turned her back on religion, having lost faith. But she closes her eyes while the nurse prays. . . Lenin needs all the help he can get.”
Page 653, Lenin is describing to Mariamma how he lived in the tree canopy in the jungle: “The fugitive Lenin winched himself up to the stars. He lived for days in the canopy with mushrooms, tree beetles, rats, songbirds, parrots, and the occasional civet cat to keep him company. “Every tree had its own personality. Their sense of time is different. We think they’re mute, but it’s just that it takes them days to complete a word. You know, Mariamma, in the jungle I understood my failing, my human limitation. It is to be consumed by one fixed idea. Then another. And another. Like walking the straight line. Wanting to be a priest. Then a Naxalite. But in nature, one fixed idea is unnatural. Or rather, the one idea, the only idea is life itself. Just being. Living.””
Page 659, Mariamma is reading her father’s journals and discovers that he is not really her father, that Elsie was already pregnant when she returned to Parambil. He writes: “I had to scale the highest palm, just like my father, to see what had eluded me on the ground, to see what I didn’t want to see, what I have never put in these notes because if I did, I would be acknowledging what I knew in my bones, but I never wished to acknowledge. Thoughts can be pushed away. Words on a page are as permanent as figures carved in stone.” … “After Ninan’s death, my Elsie left. She was gone for just over a year. When she came back, Elsie was already with child….”
Page 677, when Elsie and Digby are falling in love: “Seventeen years Elsie’s senior, at that moment he felt they were equals. He was an expert on violent, tragic loss; now she had joined his ranks. He knew a simple truth: there was never anything healing one could say. One could only be. The best friends in such times were those who had no agenda other than to be present, to offer themselves, as Franz and Lena had done for him. Digby tendered himself silently.”
Page 682 – 683, Elsie and Digby are standing on top of a slab, on top of a mountain in the jungle, and Elsie has been near the edge. Digby is right behind her, terrified she is going to jump, but he can’t grab her for fear he’ll scare her and she’ll fall. All he could do was wait, terrified, and watch.
“He was certain she’d imagined stepping off, that she’d intended to shame God, shame that shameless charlatan whose hands stayed behind his back when children fell from trees, when silk saris caught fire; she’d imagined sailing out with outstretched wings just like the raptor, gathering speed and reaching that place where pain ended. He was suddenly furious with her, shaking with anger. How do you know you go to a better place? he thought. What if it’s a place where the horror that haunts you repeats itself every minute?”
They walk together back through the jungle and he unburdens himself to her, telling her all the pain and sorrow he’s experienced (which is extensive). “He described his months of despair, the many times despair returned, and his desire to end it just as she had wanted to end her own. “What stopped you?” she said, speaking for the first time.
“Nothing stops me. I turn a corner and there it is again, the choice to go on or not go on. But I have no confidence that ending my life would end the pain. And pride keeps me from choosing to leave as my mother did. She had people who loved her, who needed her. Me. I needed her!” The last words were like an explosion.”
Page 685: “In his third year at Gwendolyn Gardens, after the ghat road was finally complete, he’d been overcome by a profound melancholia during the big rains, with little desire to leave his bed. Cromwell would have none of it. He made Digby rise, dress in rain gear, and trudge to the fields in the steady downpour, to the far side of the estate, where runoff from the slope threatened to overflow the irrigation sluice. They dug drainage ditches. Later, Cromwell brought him to the shed. “He put me to work splitting wood. ‘Be useful,’ he said. I cut enough for three monsoon seasons.I noticed one of the logs take the shape of a toy soldier. I tried to refine it. I ended up with toothpicks. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was using my hands. Rune used to quote from the Bible: ‘Whatsoever they hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.’ Cromwell doesn’t know the bible, but he’s discovered the same principle…”
Page 706: Mariamma has learned that her mother, Elsie, is alive but is a leper. That is why she had to leave her. Digby is her father and he loves her and wanted to raise her, but babies are very susceptible to leprosy. Mariamma has run out of the leprosarium and down to the river and is standing in the canal that runs down to the river. “And now that daughter is here, standing in the water that connects them all in time and space and always has. The water she first stepped into minutes ago is long gone and yet it is here, past and present and future inexorably coupled, like time made incarnate. This is the covenant of water: that they’re all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone. She stays there listening to the burgling mantra, the chant that never ceases, repeating its message that all is one. What she thought was her life is all maya, all illusion, but it is one shared illusion. And what else can she do but go on.”