Early in The Covenant of Water, Big Ammachi’s granddaughter and namesake, Mariamma, “begs for a story about their ancestors.” This request, like much of the novel’s 715-page answer, was inspired by Verghese’s own mother. In 1998, Mariam Verghese was asked by her granddaughter (middle name: Mariam), “Ammachi, what was it like when you were a girl?” Verghese’s mother responded by filling 157 pages of a spiral notebook with intricate illustrations and written memories of her girlhood in Kerala. He used several of the stories from this notebook in the novel, but, he writes, “more precious to me were the mood and voice that came through in her words, which I supplemented with my own recollections of summer holidays with my grandparents in Kerala, and later visits when I was in medical school.” Here, Verghese shares his personal family photographs from those visits and explains how his own experience influenced his fictional world.
A real Parambil house
Verghese loosely based the architecture of the fictional Parambil house on his grandparents’ home, with the same “red oxide floor” and “thin wooden bars across the windows allow the breeze to pass freely” described in the novel. “But then,” Verghese admits, “all homes had these features when I was a child.” Indeed, shortly after her marriage, Big Ammachi notes that her new home appears much like a bigger version of the one she grew up in: “Every thachan, or carpenter, follows the same ancient Vastu rules, from which neither Hindu nor Christian will deviate.” Today, things are changing. The colored photograph above, taken by the author on a trip, shows the home of a friend who took great pains to preserve its traditional design. On the right of this photograph is an even older section of the house that is reminiscent of the old section of the Parambil home, where Big Ammachi and Elsie gave birth. The fictional home has a broader veranda, with a two-person table. “On such a veranda, Baby Mol would have looked out on the world,” the author explains. The high foundation is designed to keep out little critters as well as flood water—an especially important feature for a family with a history of drowning!
More From Oprah Daily
Big Ammachi
This top family photograph was taken at a studio near the author’s maternal grandmother’s home in Kerala. A very young Verghese stands to the right of his parents and seated grandparents, with his brother George on the far left. Though Abraham’s mother, Mariam, appears unsmiling in the back left of the photo, in real life, she was a chatty extrovert—not unlike the fictional Big Ammachi of Covenant!
Verghese’s parents met after they had both received master’s degrees in physics—a far cry from the unforgettable wedding scene that opens the novel. But the author did draw the idea of marriage between a 12-year-old girl and a 40-year-old widower from his own family; this was the situation his great-grandmother found herself in when she was a girl.
Connection to Kerala
Like many of the characters in The Covenant of Water, Verghese comes from a long line of Saint Thomas Christians from Kerala, although the author himself was raised in Ethiopia, where his parents both worked as schoolteachers. But growing up, Verghese made many trips back to the land of door-to-door fishmongers and coconut trees he so powerfully evokes in the novel. His younger brother, Philip, photographed here in the arms of his grandmother, was born on one such vacation to Kerala in 1967.
The image on the bottom left shows Verghese’s grandmother seated outside on the veranda of her home in Kerala, which was remodeled around 1971.
Water everywhere
One of Kerala’s longest rivers, the Pamba, features prominently in The Covenant of Water; this is the river that takes the young bride to the home of her new widower husband at the start of the novel. She is surprised to see that her new home isn’t on—or even close to—the Pamba’s lush banks and wonders why would her husband situate it so far from the water.
Later in the book, once Big Ammachi learns of “the Condition,” she will travel by river to the town of Mannar, where Verghese’s cousin Thomas took this photo on a 2011 trip. Mannar is the hometown of Verghese’s father and the location of the Parumala Church, where St. Gregorios, the only saint of the Saint Thomas Christians, is entombed. Big Ammachi makes the long journey to pray that this saint will keep her son away from water.
Medical history
Taken on another summer vacation to Kerala, the top photo shows the author being hugged by his older cousin Jacob Matthew, while his grandfather plays Indian chess in the background. At the time this picture was taken, Matthew was a medical student; Verghese would soon follow in his cousin’s footsteps, enrolling in medical school back home in Ethiopia. But halfway through his degree, Emperor Haile Selassie was ousted, and the university shuttered. Eventually, Verghese resumed his medical training in India, enrolling at the Madras Medical College. The image on the bottom right shows his student ID photo from his medical school days! We won’t give any spoilers, but it’s safe to say that the Madras Medical College features quite prominently in the novel. The stunning scenes of surgery, childbirth, and disease treatment that punctuate the novel are drawn from Verghese’s own experiences or from those of his Madras Medical College classmates.
Changing traditions
These so-called Chinese fishing nets, iconic in the Keralan city of Cochin, are “said to be the legacy of sailors and traders who brought the technique to Kerala, perhaps from the court of Kublai Khan,” Verghese explains. While these ancient structures are rapidly disappearing from the Keralan shores, they are immortalized, according to the author, in “every tourist’s camera roll”—including his own! Verghese took this photo on a trip, but he may have captured the nets even more stunningly in the pages of Covenant: Illuminated by the moon, “the poles crane out over the water like long-necked shore birds, while the netting billows like the sails of dhows.”
Charley is a Books Editor at Oprah Daily where she writes about authors, writing, and reading. She is also a freelance writer and audio journalist whose work has been featured in the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review, Agni, and on the Apple News Today podcast. She is currently completing an MFA in creative nonfiction at NYU and working on an essay collection about the intersection of grief, landscape, and urban design.