Where should the story begin? With “Doubting” Thomas, who insisted on seeing Christ’s wounds before he’d believe? With other martyrs to the faith? What the child clamors for is the story of their own family, of the widower’s house into which her grandmother married, a landlocked dwelling in a land of water, a house full of mysteries. But such memories are woven from gossamer threads, time eats holes in the fabric, and these she must darn with myth and fable.
The preceding excerpt is found on page fifteen’s last paragraph of the current novel I am reading this month, The Covenant of Water. This 724 page novel was written by Abraham Verghese. My copy displays the seal stating Oprah’s Book Club 2023. The story begins around 1900. The setting, as stated in the flap of the dust-cover, is Kerala, on India’s Malabar Coast and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning- and in Kerala, water is everywhere. The novel begins with the introduction to a twelve year girl laying on a mat with her mother. Their home is in Travancore, South India. The mother speaks to her young daughter. The saddest day of a girl’s life is the day of her wedding. After that, God willing, it gets better.
Her daughter is betrothed to a man, thirty years her senior, whom she has yet to meet. Her father’s favorite chair is sought by her in the morning. I, the reader, am introduced to the first clue her father is no longer among the living when on page 4 it is written, She feels her father’s ghostly impression in the cane weave. Her late father’s brother had said the previous day, We found a good match for you!
I have read to the nineteenth year of this young lady’s life. She is the matriarch of a family tapestry of life that spans multi generations of family secrets -their curse, their legacy, and their cure. ( Dani Shapiro’s, author of Signal Fires, sentiment expressed on the dust jacket.) Each day, I look forward to continuing this page turning journey of The Covenant of Water.
As I pause here to share my thoughts and reflections this month, I have to wonder at the courage of young girls who live in cultures that arrange their marriages at such young ages to strangers that are decades older. I believe fear is an important ingredient to the recipe of courage.
I am blessed to have eleven grandchildren. My oldest granddaughter is sixteen and my youngest is a month and a half. Three of my granddaughters are twelve and older. I watch and listen to their young idealizations of careers in business and nursing. Their love of music, art, dance, track and soccer are worthy of my admiration. Their dedication to improving their skill sets is something to see. Sprinkled into their lives lately are pictures of the home coming dances with new young friends posed on their arms. My granddaughers’ pictured smiles seem to foreshadow another stage of their trip to adult hood. But marriage at twelve?
I have been blessed to have had a friend who began her life in a culture of arranged marriages. She shared with me her life as a teen where she had to break from her family’s wishes and marry a young man from America and emigrate here. Her courage to live in a culture so foreign to her native village is inspiring. She has a wonderful family of sons and grandchildren as a result of her courage!
Even here in the United States our culture, not too long ago, focused on different paths for sons and daughters. In my life time it has been practiced that son’s went to college and daughter’s studied the way of proper housekeeping and prepared to marry the son who was a college graduate. Maybe the daughters could go to school to be a teacher or maybe a nurse, but marriage at twelve?
Today, I pray that my granddaughters prosper from the less rigid gender scriptures that have been engineered by courageous women the past two hundred years of our Country’s existence. Glass ceilings are being shattered but beware that when shallow, misogynous, cowardly, egocentric men feel their entitlements are being threatened, they will bully their way back and try to build new glass ceilings!
This month as I lean against my metaphorical lighthouse, the storm waves continue to build. It is good for me to open my mind and read such a well written novel about a twelve year old girl’s marriage that works! The storm that is brewing, I like to believe, is over seas but why do I hear so many transport planes lumbering over head, heading out over the sea’s horizon? Why must we, as a country, have our hand in so many proxy wars? My father’s generation was labeled the Greatest Generation. World War II another war to end all wars. Not true! Our economy continues to be built as a war economy. Our weapons of mass destruction apparently need bloodshed! What is scarier, a twelve year old girl getting ready for marriage, or a twelve year old facing a life cut short by evil holding a trigger of a rifle that should never have been built.
Last month I touched on the aspect of the Great Principle, truth. This month, I echo Ferson’s Science of Being, published one hundred years ago in 1923. He writes that Love is the last aspect of the Great Principle. Life, Mind, Truth coming before the last- Love. He states if Life were not capable of Love, of Harmony, it would be set against itself, repelling instead of attracting, self -hating and therefor self destructive….it is Love alone that sets the seal of Eternity on all; it is Love alone that justifies Eternity and makes it what it should be, a blessing. Without Love, Eternity would be the most terrible hell imaginable.
To my youngest granddaughter, as I have given to your oldest cousins, I pledge my unconditional love! I only ask of you and your cousins that you always find harmony and love in your life,… always!
Thank you for reading.
Be in peace and joy!
Mark