The Covenant of Water | Abraham Verghese
All water is connected, and her world is limitless. He stands at the limits of his.
Professor Jamsetji Rustomji Cooper
“We know so little. What little we do know leaves me in awe.
Her voice is fragile and she’s speaking more to herself. Holding on with the greatest care as not to add to her burden
She washes up, still marveling at the connections in her world, invisible or forgotten, but there all the same., like a river linking people upstream with those below, whether they know it or not.
She’s overdone with sadness for him – for them. 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.
“Mariamma, when it’s all done, when life is almost over, what do you want to remember? “
She thinks of their one night together in Magabalipuram. She found him when she’d already lost him to a doomed cause. And it’s happening again. Finding him only to lose him. She doesn’t answer. She just holds his hand.
“What do you want to remember, Lenin?”
He doesn’t hesitate. “This. Here. Now. The sun on your face. Your eyes more blue than gray today. I want to remember this room, the remnant of biscuit in my mouth. Why wait for the world to show me anything better?” It is as though he is saying goodbye.
In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. But this is her truth, her revolutionary act for Lenin and for herself. Long live the revolution.
And now that daughter is here, standing in the water they 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 xo meant 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 burbling 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.