The book starts in the year 1900. A twelve year old girl in the southern Indian kingdom of Travancore travels on water to a church away from her own village. It's the day of her marriage, she is to be the second wife of a forty year old landowner and a mother to his two year old son. Over the course of the book this girl from an impoverished background is transformed to big ammachi, the matriarch of the five hundred acre Parambil estate. The book is as much about three generations of ammachi's family as it is about Parambil and the families that own and serve it.
In the second chapter suddenly we are in Scotland and checking if its the same book that we are reading. Digby, a dancing girl's son overcomes obstacles and becomes a doctor and comes to practise in colonial Madras. He is adjusting to the new sights and sounds of Madras and also the customs and hierarchies of the colonial white society in the city. There is also a Swedish doctor who has devoted his life to caring for leprosy patients.
Over the next sixty odd years , the story of the Parambil family mixes with that of these doctors and other myriad characters to produce this nine hundred page tome. The cast of characters includes several generations of ammachi's family including her children, grandchildren as well the various kochamma's, communists, naxalites, estate owners and opium eaters. There is also the mysterious affliction which affects a lot of the Parambil men. They are unable to navigate even shallow bodies of water and several of them die by drowning in shallow ditches.
Kerala, specifically the princely state of Travancore figure features as a major motif in the book. The author has done an exemplary work of evoking the rural catholic Kerala from the turn of the twentieth century. This includes the people, the customs, the food, the courtyards and kitchens to their caste prejudices. In the deep background India is getting its freedom.
With any such 'Kerala' English book the comparisons to Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things are inevitable. The books are similar in how they describe the physical beauty and touch upon the political landscape of Kerala, specifically caste discrimination. This book, by the strength of its size is both more detailed in the way its evokes the landscape and broader in its scope. There could be possibly five to six GOSTs within this book. Though I think the characters in GOST were sharper and came in all shades, many more of them in darker hues. In this book we struggle to identify any mean, bad or ill intentioned people at all.
Actually the author and book that this book most reminds me of is Vikram Seth and the Suitable Boy. While the story lines are completely different it is similar in the sense of a wonderfully written, multigenerational, early 20th century story. Vikram Seth along with V.S Naipaul and Rohinton Mistry have been the trinity of my Indian authors who write in English. ( All NRIs....hmmm). I can't think of any reason why Verghese is not right up there- will have to read more of him to confirm.
