Water is a source of life, but for one family it’s a source of death.
That’s the basic premise behind this book by Abraham Verghese, but as is usually the case with Verghese, this book is about so much more than that.
I loved Cutting for Stone, but I hesitated to read this one when it came out because it’s a doorstop at 700+ pages. People kept raving about it, but I just looked at it and thought, how am I ever going to find the time for all that book?
A few months ago I was in my library and happened across a shelf full of copies of this book. If there were that many sitting around, I knew I’d be able to renew the book as many times as I needed to finish it (I ended up renewing it twice.)
This book is so beautiful and absolutely worth the two months it took me to get through it.
It starts around 1900 when a young girl in southwestern India is married off to a man she’s never met. Her dad has just died and her uncle now owns all his property and controls her fate as well as the fate of her mother.
I don’t remember the girl’s name. At some point someone starts calling her “Big Ammachi” and the name sticks.
Despite still being a child herself, Big Ammachi finds herself a mother to Jojo, her adoptive son whose mother died under mysterious circumstances, although something is said about her having drowned.
Her death is the reason her husband sought out the marriage: he needs someone to look after his son and household while he’s running his considerable estate.
Fortunately for Big Ammachi, her husband is kind and they end up falling in love. But after a while, she notices something odd: he always avoids water.
He never gets on a boat or crosses a bridge.
He’ll walk miles to go around a body of water, even when it takes days out of his life.
Jojo exhibits a similar aversion to water until one day he drowns in a shallow pool.
It’s not until Big Ammachi goes to record his death in the family Bible that she notices all the names with water lines near them — symbolizing their death by drowning.
She confronts her husband about it, and he admits it’s a family curse, though it doesn’t seem to affect everyone.
Big Ammachi is understandably upset that she was kept in the dark about this. If she had known, she would have kept Jojo from water, but her husband insists she not do so. His mother tried to protect him by keeping him away from water. It meant he couldn’t go to school and his inability to read enabled his brother to cheat him out of his inheritance.
So Big Ammachi prays that, if she can’t figure out what’s wrong with her family, that God send someone who can.
Meanwhile, Dr. Digby Kilgour has recently arrived in Madras from Scotland, where he had studied to become a surgeon. With Scottish citizens still treated as second-class citizens by their English overlords, Digby is informed his best bet for getting some real surgical experience is to travel to another English colony: India.
I spent most of this book waiting for Big Ammachi’s storyline to intersect with Digby’s. Although I don’t think they ever meet, Big Ammachi’s son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter end up having significant experiences with him, but I won’t say more than that.
That said, there’s a whole lot of Digby’s life that could have been cut from this book without losing anything. As beautiful as this book is, and as much as I enjoyed reading it, it does not earn 700+ pages. It could easily have been 600, if not shorter.
I won’t give away the ending. I will say that I found it satisfying. Although Big Ammachi does not live to see her family’s curse broken, her granddaughter does find the cause, if not a solution. It’s a medical condition I’ve never heard of, but knowing Verghese’s experience as a medical professional, I don’t doubt it’s a real thing.
TW: A lot of people die in this book, including multiple children and there’s a rather graphic image of a very difficult birth and another scene in which a woman gets burned alive. Consider yourself warned.