Poured Over: Abraham Verghese on The Covenant of Water

By Jenna Seery / May 4, 2023 at 6:00 am

“I loved that sense of the slow evolution of a community and watching it happen under your eyes.”

Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone, returns with a long-awaited novel — The Covenant of Water, an inter-generational tale through the lives of a family in Southern India. Verghese joins us to talk about the long gap between his works, his career as a doctor, themes of finding home and more with Poured Over host, Miwa Messer. We end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Madyson.  

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.     

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.  

Featured Books (Episode):
The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
My Own Country by Abraham Verghese
The Tennis Partner by Abraham Verghese
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Featured Books (TBR):
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Abraham Verghese. Everyone has read Cutting for Stone, there is not a single person who has not read his earlier novel Cutting for Stone, wait until we get into it about The Covenant of Water. But this is also where I’m going to say, he’s also written a couple of really great nonfiction books and if you haven’t read them, you should go back and read those two, My Own Country came out in 1994 and The Tennis Partner came out in 1998. And we are going to go back there a little bit, but I do want to start with The Covenant of Water. This book is beautiful. It’s as long as it needs to be and that’s all I can say. It’s beautiful, though. And it starts with a story that your mom gave you.

Abraham Verghese
Indeed, first of all, it’s just great to be with you. Yeah, my mum, you know, was the inspiration for setting this story in Kerala. You know, I set the first novel I wrote in Ethiopia because I felt I knew it well. Although I knew Kerala pretty well, I was, you know, I didn’t grow up there, from summer vacations and medical school, and my mom left us this 100-page document that she’d handwritten for my five-year-old niece. When my niece asked her, Ammachi, what was it like when you grew up as a little girl and my, my mom was so taken with that question that she hand-wrote this and illustrated it and when I picked it up, it just reminded me of the richness of her life. And I knew those stories well, but it just reminded me that this was a great place to be setting a novel and that I should go on with it. And mom was of course very, very excited by that.

MM
Kerala is not necessarily as well-known maybe as Mumbai or Delhi, can you just set it up in present day terms, sort of what the history of Kerala is, and where in India it is?

AV
Kerala is at the southern tip of India on the West Coast sort of facing the Gulf if you like. And that’s significant, because there’s been a long history of a spice trade back and forth between Arabia and this area of India where spices have grown. In fact, I believe that that’s when St. Thomas the Apostle, landed in India in 52 AD, and my community traces its Christianity to that time. So Kerala is also walled off from the rest of India by this long mountain range called the Western Ghats, and therefore, has been spared the invasions and sometimes the political upheavals that take place elsewhere. It’s a very, very lush, tropical sort of climate, I often tell people well think of Hawaii, sort of like that, with the four rivers running to the ocean miles and miles of backwaters and lagoons. And so, you know, water is the natural metaphor that comes to mind when you think of people from Kerala, because there’s something very fluid about their gestures and their animation that, to me, has something to do with the water.

But you’ve also given us a family where in every generation, someone dies, because they’ve fallen into water.

Yeah, I thought that was an interesting sort of problem to set up. As a physician, I’m fascinated by rare conditions and there’s this one genetic entity where, you know, in every generation going back, several people have drowned accidentally, when they shouldn’t have drowned, that’s always stuck in the back of my mind. And as I set out this novel and began to sort of feel how big a role water played in it, it just organically became something to sort of incorporate into the novel. In every generation, someone dies from drowning and that’s a profound burden for a family to carry a secret.

But also, your sense of home. And I know you just said Kerala is where you spent summers, and it’s not where you grew up, but at the same time, and I’ve only ever been to Delhi and Lucknow and Uttar Pradesh, I’ve never been to southern India, and I would love to go sometime. But I felt very settled in the world that you’re creating for us and you know, I’ve said this on other shows, too, but world building should not be limited ever to just science fiction and fantasy. Every single novel has to build a world and you’re covering 70 years and three generations in a part of the world that I don’t know particularly well. But you get into the story, and you’ve got this great line early on, where you’re just like, well, if you tell the story well, people will know what you’re doing and how you’re doing it and they will live it alongside you. I’m paraphrasing you poorly, but that’s essentially what you say. And I really did feel that while I was reading so we know you’ve got your mother’s Dorie, we know you’ve got summers in Kerala. But when did you start writing this book because it’s 202 and Cutting for Stone came out 14 years ago and it’s kind of a big gap.

There is a gap, I think, by, by most writers’ standards, but I must confess that I have a day job that keeps me pretty busy. I also wasn’t in a hurry right after the last book to immediately embark on another one. So I think it took me two or three years to really get into writing the new novel. And then it took longer than it should, I think, unfortunately, I’m the sort of writer who wishes they knew the entire story before, but I’m so envious of people who seem capable of doing that. And so I have to sort of discover the story. In fact, I have on this whiteboard next to me, an elaborate blueprint of what the novel was meant to be, and then, you know, a couple of months into the writing, I would wind up going on to these tangents that I was led to by the characters. I think there’s a maxim in writing that character is determined by decisions made under pressure and so the character would come to a branch point and make a decision based on something that was happening to them and I couldn’t really argue with that. And so the blueprint would have to be wiped clean, and I’d start again. I think I had, I’m an inefficient novelist in that sense, but I’m not on I think there are many novelists I admire who I sense are of that style.

It seems to me too, that as much as you put your characters under quite a lot of pressure, you do quite like them a lot. You like all of them, there were a couple of where, like I understand why you’re here, but you are trying my patience and one of them might have been a doctor, we will get to but you know who I’m referring to, and I understand his role in the story and everything else, but boy, I wanted to pop him in the nose.

That’s interesting, you should say that my biggest struggle was with the middle character in the generation, Philipose, you know, and I and ironically, I kind of identify with him because he tries to be well meaning and he tries to do things for the right reasons or so he thinks, but he inevitably winds up getting into messes and doing the, the wrong thing, but he thinks he’s doing it for the right reason. It was a real struggle to make him likable because I didn’t want the reader to dislike really any of the characters. I mean, even your villain has to have a quality that at least is identifiable, if not likable.

Let’s get back to Philipose’s mom for a second, Big Ammachi, we meet her when she’s a child. I mean, she’s 12 and it’s the turn of the 21st century. So she’s being married to a much older man and he sort of looks at her and says, oh, no, this is not good. They go home and she lives her life until she’s an adult, essentially, even though she’s married to this man and part of me was surprised, by the way the book opens. But both of these characters are so smart and so genuine and I’m wondering if it’s sort of, as you said, earlier, you were saying you felt your way through the book, and you don’t always know quite where you’re going. But did they show up first?

Yea, they showed up first and that probably is the best part of the story that I did know best. I kind of liked playing against the grain because I think, you know, your instinct, when you hear of a 12-year-old being married is to think this is abysmal. This is you know, this, this does not portend well. But the truth is in the era that I’m talking about, 1900. It was not uncommon for an 11-year-old to be married to an 11-year-old boy in another household. And she just become one of the one of the, you know, children in the household. In fact, I was visiting a family member recently, and she was going through some photo albums. And she says, you see this girl, pointing to an older woman and she said when she was a little girl, she went to her mother in law who she adored and said, that boy is really annoying me can we get rid of him and she was talking about her husband, you know, that son of this woman so there was a certain innocence to this, nobody expected them to, you know, to consummate the marriage and it was all watched over pretty carefully. But that particular story of a 12-year-old marrying an older widower is the actual story of my great grandmother. My great grandmother married an old widower who already had three or four children. But they went on to have the most wonderful marriage and she bore more children. And you know, she obviously outlived him. Everybody who talked about that marriage from my mother to my aunts to my grandmother just were reverential and I love the idea of playing against the grain a little bit by going against readers expectations, we talked about, you know, conflict and putting characters under pressure. I also love the idea of, you know, just describing their ritual of everyday life without necessarily introducing conflict. Because whenever I visited my grandparents, I was struck by that by the richness of the ordinary by the, by the sort of grace and spirituality almost of the way they lived these repetitive lives but put such care into the little things they did, either whether it was stoking the fire or making the rice the same way they’d made it the previous day. But you know, every time the stakes were the same.

But also, the building of this community, I mean, big Ammachi’s husband is giving pieces of land to people who might not otherwise have it. Some of them are family, some of them are friends, but he’s really building a community and watching this unfold and the first piece of the book really does set the ground and it gives you a better idea of the stakes. I mean, we’re watching the community go from rather rural, and limited in some ways to really kind of bustling and a step away from Madras.

I think I love that sense of the sweep of time, you know, because in that era, 1900 to 1970, two world wars, but within India, you also have this incredible moment of liberation coming from, you know, centuries of colonial rule. But within Kerala, there was increasingly the formation of villages from what had been isolated dwellings with land around them and I just love that sense of the slow evolution of a community and you’re watching it happen under your eyes, so to speak.

And in some ways though Kerala has sort of held aside from colonialism and the in the really deep impact of colonialism, we do meet a character called Digby who’s a Scotsman by birth, who ends up in Madras and I’m not going to spoil all of the way. There’s a lot that we’re going to dance around, because this is a book you should enjoy yourself and not have spoiled for you on a podcast. But Digby ends up in Madras and his boss is the one I would like to bop on the nose. But I want to talk about Digby and colonialism for a second because colonialism is such a big piece of India’s story. And part of me is like, well, of course, we have to talk about colonialism, because it’s such a big piece of India’s story. And part of me is just like, oh, can’t we just keep these people out of it and just tell India’s story for India? I mean, you cover partition very carefully at one point in this book, but how do you feel about that?

Well, I think colonialism is sort of inescapable. You know, I think you think of my parents’ era, when they were in cities like Madras and Bombay, that the British were everywhere. And their professors were often British when they went to college. And so in my era, we still had a few British professors who chose to stay after independence, but you certainly had all the vestiges of the buildings and everything they left behind, which they like to think they enriched us with but you know, the true narrative is that every single railroad and every structure they built was with the intention of taking the goods that they were robbing the country of, to the ports to ship back to England. So it’s really Britain that got modernized, or the UK, and not India, it was modernized on the backs of Indians. But that said, you know, here we are, I’m speaking to you in the language of the colonizers. I’m the paradox of the fact that I think in English and so do many, you know, Indian writers, we are where we are. But I think we can have different interpretations of how good or bad colonialism was, there’s nothing that can apologize for it, but I think you can’t shun it, you can’t run away from it when you take on a novel in that period. It’s relevant, less relevant, perhaps than if you were in Bombay or elsewhere than you were in Kerala, but still relevant.

And Digby is in exile and big Ammachi before she really settles down, she’s an exile. Her mother is far away and this is not where she’s from. You’re writing about exile again, even when people think they’re home and Philipose at one point, leaves his home and he realizes he does not like this, he absolutely does not like a minute of it and never wants to leave again and that creates all sorts of complications that we will leave readers to discover but exile is still something that it seems like either you really like to write about or you just don’t want to let go of writing about that.

That’s a telling observation because I really have never had a home that I can call home, so I suppose I I’m always envious of people who have hometowns and reunions to go to and the rituals of Friday night football and possum pie or whatever your ritual happens to be. But conversely, I think what I admired about my grandmother or not admire but you know notice about my grandmother and parents was that my grandmother came to that house when she was 15, or younger, the house into which she married, and she was really saying goodbye to her family forever. I mean, she might get to see them now and then. But this is the house where her life was going to be played out and transport was not easy. And so I had the experience when I was I think 16 of taking a bus ride with my grandmother to the big city, she’d never been to a big city, she’d never been more than a 20 mile radius from the house we were in and to sort of watch her face and have a look out the window at, you know, buildings and it was clear that it was a bit unsettling to her that after my grandfather died, her daughter was preparing to move her to that city. And my grandmother passed away within a few weeks of the impending move. And I think the move would have killed her. And in a way it was sort of fortuitous that she and her life seemed to end in the place that she the only place she really could have called home and that was where she was married.

It’s not quite the equivalent but we do have a generation of people in the world now who’ve grown up sort of native to social media, they’ve grown up living on apps and online in ways that the rest of them like, I remember fighting with my little brother over who was going to get to use the phone. You know, now you don’t have to do that. But all of that kind of living virtually in a way that sort of keeps you untethered and a lot of ways but also tethers you to members of your community that may be scattered around so it’s a very weird space.

It is a very weird space. I mean, we are connected, because I can actually be chatting with people in India, with you, for example, but also with people in different time zones. So it’s wonderful. But you know, clearly there’s a, something beautiful and nostalgic about the past and describing even though we wouldn’t necessarily want to have all that back, there’s something beautiful about it, to admire and to celebrate.

Well, and home is a complicated idea. I mean, home isn’t just a place, I sort of define home as wherever I might be in the moment, and I find my space and my bearings, and not everyone can do that. And your characters, when they find home, it seems like it’s such a struggle that they don’t want to let it go. They do not want to let that idea go ever.

That might be a bit of my projection. I think, on the other hand, I think that you know, not having had a place to really call home, I’ve lived in three different continents. And within America, having lived you know, in four or five different cities or six different cities. It gives you a perspective that’s not comfortable for a writer, you’re always the perennial outsider looking in and one of the best compliments I ever received for My Own Country, or The Tennis Partner were people from Tennessee or El Paso, Texas saying to me, we’ve lived here all our lives. And we’ve we never saw this thing that you saw, we were just blind to it, it was right there. But you know, we took it for granted. And so it has some advantages, but I still feel I would give a lot to belong, you know, and have generations in that one spot.

For you, I mean, did you find your own sense of home while you were writing The Covenant of Water, did that become the experience of writing— is that how you manifested?

It helped me in a way I think was very insightful. I hadn’t quite thought of it that way. But it definitely felt very connected to my way that I wasn’t before much more appreciative of the rituals of faith and the rituals of you know, all the rituals, the rituals, kitchen. So, in a way I was embracing the sort of thing that when I was young, I had rejected. My brother and I growing up, were taken to the church and we had enough teachers from that small community in Ethiopia that we had our own church. And so we had these two and a half hour services, which when you’re a four year old child, just standing there in a language, which is Syriac, you know, which is ancient language that neither my parents nor anyone but the priest understood. It just seems so cruel. And so this book allowed me to sort of finally appreciate that in a different sort of way. And I had a strange experience recently of going to one of our church services in that language and just feeling chills because all the phrases, even though they remain to a peak, are extremely familiar. And, you know, you just sort of begin to accept that this is who we are communities need their rituals of faith and belonging. And I suppose that’s what the book was a lot about, about faith and about belonging.

And I think there are not necessarily a huge number of readers who know that there is actually a Christian population in India, I think people think, you know, Hindu and Muslim first and the Christian population is very, very small, but very, very old, if I’m right.

Yes, I mean, it’s small by Indian standards. I think the only novel that is well known, is the wonderful God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, starred in the very same community. There are many other writers, writing about the community. But I find that when I use that example, people immediately know what area I’m talking about, you know, that has echoes.

But you’ve always said that medicine was your first great love and you still practice, you’re a professor at Stanford, which I love the idea that you’re still teaching doctors how to be doctors, because I mean, we are standing in this very strange space. And you’ve even said this in Op Eds, where technology turns doctors into clerks, which is not what you’re meant to do. I’m wondering what the intersection of medicine and practicing medicine and teaching medicine and fiction is because I mean, you aren’t honestly the only doctor who’s also written books, but you have a really expansive worldview that shows up quite a lot in your fiction related to medicine.

Yeah, I mean, I must say, I always resist the notion of, you know, having two separate hats, the fiction hat and the doctor hat to me. I feel like I’m all physician, that was my first love and that is the identity that I embrace. And I’m bringing that same lens that I have at work in the hospital, it’s the same as I bring to whatever else I’m doing, I’m trying to write. And so I don’t see them as radically different, but clearly, they do influence each other. I think that my passion within medicine has always been for the patient experience. So dissecting their stories and making sure that we are reading their body as a text for the obvious things before sending them off, to be exposed to contrast and radiation and when the answer might be written on their body and has been something that physicians recognized, you know, even 100 years ago, clearly in great jeopardy of losing our skills, as technology becomes more and more sophisticated, you would think it would make us even better at the bedside. But the opposite has happened. But anyway, I think I bring that sensibility to both medicine and to writing the sense of paying attention to what’s in front of me and the, you know, the skill that we’re trained in to try and take disparate facts and tie them together into one whole one explanation, apply Occam’s razor, I see a lot of those parallels in, in both crafts. And sometimes I find myself sorting things out in the writing that I didn’t really understand till I began to write. You know, that was especially true in the nonfiction writing about HIV. Even in the novel, I think I began to understand more about things like leprosy and like childhood illnesses that I think came through the act of writing, which I think is a very different act than just thinking about something,

I think too, the compassion you have for your characters seems like something that’s just sort of hardwired into you as a human being, and that you would just need to have a great deal of compassion because you’re also seeing people at their most vulnerable.

Yeah, I think we’re seeing people at their most vulnerable, and I don’t think you can be a good physician, if you’re not, you know, sort of deeply curious about your fellow human beings. It’s not enough to be I think, just empathetic, you have to have this sense of curiosity and wonder about them. And you know, that leads you to a deeper relationship than if you’re just empathetic, whatever that signifies, I think, I’ve always had that sense of curiosity. In fact, I never thought that I was very good student. I never thought I was cut out for medicine, but I often talk about Of Human Bondage as being the book that brought me to medicine. You know, there’s one scene where the character Philip who tries to be an artist and fails and finally comes back to London, and pursues medical school and he arrives on the wards, finally, after two years of basic sciences and there’s a line there like Phillip saw humanity there in the rough, the artist’s canvas, and he thought to himself, this is something I can do, this is something I could be good at. And boy, those lines really spoke to me, you know, I just thought, you know this, this means that you don’t have to, not everybody can be a brilliant artists or mathematician, but anybody with an innate curiosity about the human condition about their fellow human beings, that’s what that line suggested, anybody that could work hard and be a pretty good physician, and that gave me faith.

Some people might not know that in 1991, you’ve left medicine temporarily to go to the Iowa Writers Workshop and I love that piece of your story and I’ve always loved that piece of your story. But how long have you been practicing medicine at that point, when you decided to go study writing?

I had finished residency, I finished my fellowship, and was, you know, five years into practicing in small town Tennessee and medical school, and really had no ambition to be a writer. But I was living through this extraordinary story in this small town, which was expected to have one or two HIV patients every year, instead of which, in a short time, I was following 100 people. And it turned out I’d stumbled onto a phenomenon of migration, you know, gay men leaving their hometowns coming back years later, because they were infected, and I wrote a scientific paper describing this migration. And, you know, it was true, not just in my small town, but all small towns as I suspected it would be. But I felt that the language of science didn’t begin to capture the heartache of the families or the tragic nature of the young men’s voice, it was mostly young men those days, my own grief at witnessing this, you know, people my own age, coming well before their time. And that was the moment that I decided I want to tell the story. And I told myself that I would do it somehow, I would either take a break from my tenured position and moonlight and try and write it or I would also apply to the our Iowa writers workshop, which the criteria then was two short stories and really not much else. And I applied and they took me, and I went, and so I think that was the moment I really was forced to take myself seriously as a writer because I cashed in my 401 K cashed in my tenure position and taken my wife and young kids all the way to Iowa on New Year’s Eve night in January.

Wait was Lilacs one of the stories you submitted?

Lilacs was a short story that came out of it.

Because that was the first piece, the first short story that was published in the New Yorker for you was Lilacs. But there’s already been, My Own Country had come out, then you’d sort of because I think there are people who think that Cutting for Stone is the first time you’ve ever written fiction. And you had just decided to switch gears and I was like, well, actually, no, there’s, there’s a little bit that came before. You’ve been doing this for a while.

When they published Lilacs in the New Yorker, the editosr at the time, were sort of curious about this foreign physician writing this short story that is so dark and about HIV. And they asked me to pitch a nonfiction piece about HIV in the homeland and I was very excited because you know, here was my opening to write some big nonfiction piece for them. I labored on the proposal. And to make a long story short, they turned it down for many reasons, because editor was leaving, Tina Brown, came on board and I wandered, doing other things for her but not so there I was with a nonfiction book. But for that, I think I would have kept writing fiction. That was my intention to tell the Tennessee story, your novel, because I really believe that was our way of telling the truth about something.

Yeah, I agree with you completely. I’m just very glad we got the other two books, as well, because I also remember how we talked about them. I mean, I was in New York, when My Own Country came out. And for some people, it was revelatory to hear that this was happening on the scale that was happening in a tiny corner of Tennessee, there were people who just were walking around in the world thinking AIDS was something that happened in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. And that was it and somehow, only those three cities were seeing what we saw when we saw it, and I was like, no diseases don’t work that way. They’re gonna go through a population and I remember being really excited when I read it, because also at that point, too, we didn’t have a lot of there was Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played on, there was you, Paul Monette did Becoming a Man right. So but there wasn’t a huge body of literature. I mean, certainly we’re better about it now and also with The Tennis Partner, you were also kind of on the forefront of this whole idea of writing about addiction in a way that wasn’t over the top, you just wrote about it in a very sort of matter of fact, beautiful, painful way. But it wasn’t like things were burning down or, you know, it wasn’t overly dramatic, I suppose, is what I’m looking for. And so you sort of changed the conversations that we were having, simply by wanting to tell a story?

Well, I mean, thank you for those kind words about both those books, I think they were important to me. But I must confess, they were hard to write in the sense that were more self-revealing than I had thought, you know, the great joy of nonfiction is you have the topic, it’s inherently interesting things really happen so the reader wants to know. But you know, every time the camera lens would swing to me, as my editor would say, you can’t just block the lens you have to, I’m happy with what I did reveal, because it’s not like I just announced this on public radio or something. It’s more like the reader has earned the right to know these things if they pick up the book and read the book. But I found that process hard and fiction has a lot of challenges, especially in terms of keeping the reader’s attention from page one, when they know this is a made-up story. But you do have you do have the freedom to just really roam anywhere you want to in fiction. And nonfiction, I found limiting in a positive way you could do the story, but I don’t think I could write nonfiction, where I wasn’t sort of a character because it always it’s my reaction to what I’m seeing that is the way I get to that piece, I think.

I think anyone who’s writing narrative nonfiction to anything they put on the page is their POV. So and sometimes that’s great. And sometimes it’s not. And sometimes you end up on the page, I just, I think that the kind of intimacy that you write with, it would be really hard for you to create the work that you created and stepping back further.

Yeah, I would struggle to write something about a topic that you know, that I wasn’t personally sort of, affected by or, or a character in some way. I mean, I mean, hats off to reporters who managed to, you know, parachute into a place and they just tell you what it is. And it’s powerful, but it’s a struggle for me.

And the publication of Cutting for Stone, if I remember correctly, it was it was an anticipated book. And I do remember people talking about I mean, this is 2009. So this was not yesterday, forgive me if I sound a little foggy about it, but it felt like it took a little build up for that book to become the two year bestseller, you know, almost 2 million copies worldwide kind of thing. I felt like it was a tiny bit more of a slow burn. Now, It’s just, you know, an unstoppable force of nature, but it took us a minute to get there. And I’m wondering how you remember the publication of that, and also when you knew it had really taken off and it wasn’t just a beautiful book that you had written?

No, you’re absolutely right. So, I had a publishing house that was 100% behind it and the great editor, Sonny Mehta, wasn’t my editor, but he called me up one morning and said, you know, I’ve been sitting at my breakfast table reading this book, and I look up and its lunchtime. So, then I call my editor, I said, Sonny Mehta called me and he doesn’t call anybody and, you know, I suddenly had this feeling that they’re going to get behind this book and they did. But then in hardback, we were sort of stopped in our tracks by, you know, I thought a very bad review in the New York Times, no other way to say it, an ungracious review. And it just I think it just killed the momentum, and then in paperback with a different cover, organically because of book clubs and it just began to build and build. And I mean, I didn’t really have much anticipation that it was doing this. And I remember I was doing a reading, I went to my reading and I couldn’t find parking and I was a little bit annoyed, and I finally found a spot. I walked in and the place is packed and this was for Cutting for Stone. And that was the point that I realized that something had just happened and, you know, gorgeous high after what had been a fairly disappointing start.

And Cutting for Stone to is going to be adapted for television or film. I can’t remember but it’s coming to the screen. Someone has optioned it.

Yeah, they’ve all been optioned and the only books wa made into movies. The first one honestly, between you and me, I don’t pay too much attention because until it actually happens. I’ve lost all understanding of the machinations of someone options it but then they need money from someone else and then they need this director, and all these people are in shifting worlds. It certainly doesn’t happen as neatly as a writer standing up Don’t try to write a book.

No, but I think whenever we can do to bring audiences to the book, and sometimes it helps to have an adaptation because then people get all in their feelings and either the adaptation is great or it’s terrible, or that people start talking and then people start picking up the book who may not have picked it up before.

Don’t get me wrong, I had wanted to see it happen and maybe I was spoiled with the rapidity with which the first book was made movie. But I think that you know, what, what makes it formidable, at least initially, then less. So now? Was that the idea of having a protagonist who was not someone like Brad Pitt or not, right, you know, Harrison Ford, if your protagonists are people of color, it’s a little more challenging and then if the whole thing is set in another land, it’s even more challenging. So I’m really gratified to see that that’s no longer true that, you know, I see great filmmakers taking on deals all over the world and wonderful films being made. You know, in every country, you can think of just astonishing stuff. So I’m hopeful.

We’re lucky, we’re really lucky. But can we talk about some of your literary influences for a second? I know, I mentioned that you’ve gone to the Iowa Writers Workshop. So certainly, you have opinions about books and writers, but let’s talk about some of the writers who made Abraham Verghese who you are on the page.

Well, I think we find the right people to imitate that is the best way I can say some writing resonates for you. Some people’s confidence is something you try and borrow. So for example, I got to know John Irving and I always admired and I had loved Garp, well before I met him and I just admired the commands he had over the storyline. And you know, how many months and maybe years he spends getting that command before he embarks on writing. But it’s the kind of writing that I sought to emulate was my biggest influences. I think we’re probably Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to some degree, Dickens and you know, just storytellers like Dostoevsky. I’m very drawn to long, epic multi-generational novels. I think that’s because I love this sense in a world where I’m always reminded that we’re mortal and time is valuable. The only instrument I know that, you know, cheats time is a big novel, you pick it up, and suddenly you’re in this world, and you’re living decades, and three generations go by, and you finally get to the end, and it’s Tuesday. I think my ambition is always to write, you know, substantial works that had to be as long as they could be. It’s not that I want to always write epic three generational novels, but just to make a case for, for that experience, which I think, you know, people tend to shy away from, but I had a very gratifying comment from a reader, who I’d never met before about this new book saying, I was just so caught up and I wanted to see how many pages are left and there were 100 pages left and I was disappointed, you know, so this person had got quite a ways through and they wanted it not end, well, that’s exactly what you want to do what you hope will happen, and you hope you can make that happen.

I also really appreciated the way you cut back and forth between different points of view and especially when I sort of felt like the narrative was starting to ramp up a little bit and we would flip back and forth between big Ammachi and Digby and Digby’s situation and part of me wants to say poor Digby. I mean big Ammachi has, in some ways, an easier time of things than Digby because she knows her community and knows what she wants. And Digby is Digby and I do like him as a character, but he’s Digby and I feel like I can’t say more than that without ruining it for someone else. But Digby, his boss is horrible that that I’m not spoiling but he’s horrible. He’s terrible and we needed him to be there but he’s terrible.

No, I have a thesis that many of us go into medicine to heal our wounds. You know, the wounds may not even be wounds we recognize and you know, there’s a quality that medicine lures you with and promises you it might be a complete illusion, it is an illusion, that if you give your all to this, then you don’t have to deal with whatever’s you have to work on yourself or the issues that you’re carrying. And so in a way Digby, has a bit of that he’s you know, he’s trying to sort of heal his woundedness by becoming a physician and nothing has changed. I still see that quite a bit and it’s always interesting. There’s nothing you can say you have to wait for the moment to come to that person as it did for me,

All of your characters have genuine arcs though. Some have longer arcs than others, but everyone has an arc. You mentioned the whiteboard that’s over your shoulder, all sorts of plotting and whatnot. As you’re feeling your way through this book, as the writer, you’re feeling your way through and understanding where the story is going. What was sort of the order of the cast, we know big Ammachi and her husband, Joe first, but then kind of who pops, I’m sort of dancing around the children a little bit because the children I feel give some stuff away. But I mean, was Digby next or?

You know, I think Digby, I began with big Ammachi and her husband, almost organically, because 1900 was her timeframe. And, you know, she would lead me to her children, the next generation and then to the next generation, but B came early on. And I had initially introduced him as an adult. And then I realized his childhood was important, his woundedness was very relevant to the way he was. And so it also get, as you said, it gave some relief to the reader from the intensity of the focus on Kerala to be suddenly in Glasgow, you know, like clearing your palate, and then to come back to Kerala then to go to Digby again. So I sort of enjoyed making those transitions, but I think it evolved pretty organically what took time was to see the connections that weren’t always apparent, and then once you see them very much like the novelist who plans everything ahead of time, and now that I see that, that I sort of reinforced the connection. So I think eventually, we, whether you plan your novel, or you write your way through to get to the same place, just wish that could be as efficient as the former process, you know. So I had an interesting experience, I’ll share with you if I may, that recorded the audio book for this book, which I auditioned to do because I sensed that with all the foreign names and pronunciation, I had as good a chance as anybody to do a better job than someone who never encountered the words. And it was humbling to learn how to really perform my book in a way that I always appreciated, but I had to do it now. But in the course of doing that, over two and a half weeks, I began to see yet another level of connections that I wasn’t even aware of, I certainly didn’t intentionally put them on the page. And it just leaves me in some awe of the subconscious mind and what it’s doing in the in the background, you know, it’s like, all the stuff it’s pulling off, and you think you have agency wow, you have some agency, there are some deep forces working beyond that.

You wrote the bulk of this book during lockdown, right?

I wrote the important, you know, sort of as it came together, COVID was happening, which was really poignant for me, because, you know, I was writing about illness and in, you know, the 1900s. And watching that unfold in our hospital and worldwide and seeing a lot of parallels. I mean, it was interesting how we have come a long way and medicine, obviously. But when you’re faced with mortal illness, when you’re faced with loss, it’s the same thing since antiquity, and you fall back on the same things, you fall back on family, you fall back on your faith, you question your faith, it was just astonishingly poignant to me, that we’ve come a long way in medicine, and we haven’t really come anywhere, because, you know, we’re still going to suffer some of these things and still find ourselves looking for the same kinds of relief. And they don’t come from medicine. They come from family, from love from, you know, from the empathy that your community gives you the support that your relatives give you as they rally around you, that nothing’s changed.

Would you consider yourself a romantic and sort of classic sense? No, in the classic sense of not, you know, not hallmarking kind of thing, but just in terms of a writer, it seems like you have quite a lot of faith in humanity. And you’re quite hopeful, ultimately, about our ability to move ourselves forward. It just, it seems to me that you are hopeful, and I really, I don’t mean romantic in a you know, a cutesy kind of way but you have this deep love for people.

I think that’s not inaccurate. I always think that I’m an incurable romantic for medicine. You know? A wonderful calling, a great adventure. And I suspect that’s another way of saying that I’m an incurable romantic for this miracle of, you know, human existence and all the variety of people that are around us. I’m an optimist. I really think that, you know, first of all, it doesn’t pay to be otherwise. But secondly, I really do think that when things are bad, the pendulum, at least in my lifetime, has always seemed to gradually swing back. And it can take a long time, you might not live to see it, but I think the pendulum does swing back. I like to find redemption in the characters. I like them to find their redemption. I like them to find atonement if they need it. No, I think that’s, I don’t know if that’s human nature, just my nature, I just gravitate to that.

As long as you keep putting it in books, we’re okay. And speaking of, have you thought about what the next thing might be? I mean, you’ve always taken your time between books, even at the shortest pace, I think it was, what, four years between the first two books. So it’s not as if you’re turning out a book a year, which, you know, we’re not asking you to do that. But have you started thinking about the next thing?

I’ve thought about in terms of, you know, I think, perhaps the most important decision about it, which is, I wrote my first novel about Ethiopia, the land of my birth, because I felt authority there. And the second one about Kerala, which is, you know, ethnically, that’s my, but you know, I’ve lived the longest time in America, and I’ve had such varied experiences from Boston to Johnson City, Tennessee, El Paso, San Antonio, I have now for you know, almost 15 years in California. So I’m pretty certain I’ll set it here. And I’m pretty certain that the time period will probably be contemporary, something that I seem to have shied away from for the most part and I really don’t know more about it than that. I think I spent a lot of time just sitting waiting for, you know, of the many, many ideas that I have, which ones may take, take root.

I have to say, I’m really possibly a little too excited to know that you’re thinking about setting it in the States. I mean, yeah, I just I would really like to see what you do with this place that we call home. It’s a complicated place.

Yeah, home is a place and also, you know, I’m an American citizen. I’m not ever far from being cynical about I escaped, you know, a country that was imploding in Ethiopia. I’ve seen the extremes of, you know, authoritarian rule, all over the place. So this is, even with everything going on and the challenges right now to, you know, all kinds of challenges. I still feel blessed to be here. I think, I didn’t feel like as an immigrant, I don’t know that I felt that I had the authority to write a story set in America. I also want to not take over a decade. I mean, I’m not in a great hurry to produce a novel tomorrow. They really feel like I’m doing myself a disservice to prolong something that much and so I am feeling the sense of let’s get more efficient at this. Let’s get quicker at this.

It also sounds like you came home. I know you’ve lived in lots of different places, but at the same time, America is big enough to hold us, America is big enough to be home for people like you and I, so I love the idea that you’re finally coming home. Abraham Verghese, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over, Cutting for Stone obviously has been out go read that if you’d like to, but do not miss The Covenant of Water. It is gorgeous and you do not want to miss this book. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for having me.