Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read an excerpt from “The Covenant of Water” by Abraham Verghese, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about untying a knot.”

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The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

The group spent more and more time in the jungle, getting increasingly disillusioned. “Do you know that a fungus called blister blight did more for the class struggle than all the Naxalites put together? It wiped out tea estates. The owners abandoned the land to the tribals. It was their land in the first place.” Lenin said the immensity of the jungle silenced him and his comrades; they hardly spoke to each other.

	“An old tribal in Wayanad taught me how to sling a stone with a slender leader over the lowest branch of the tallest tree. Then, by tying a rope to the leader, I could loop the branch and make a sling for my body. He showed me a special knot, a secret one, that allowed me to pull myself up little by little—the rope locks so you don’t slide down. That friction knot, so hard to learn, is passed down by the tribals from generation to generation. People think of inheritance as being land or money. The old man gave his inheritance to me.”

	The fugitive Lenin winched himself up to the stars. He lived for days in the canopy with mushrooms, tree beetles, rats, songbirds, parrots, and the occasional civet cat to keep him company. “Every tree had its own personality. Their sense of time is different. We think they’re mute, but it’s just that it takes them days to complete a word. You know, Mariamma, in the jungle I understood my failing, my human limitation. It is to be consumed by one fixed idea. Then another. And another. Like walking in a straight line. Wanting to be a priest. Than a Naxalite. But in nature, one fixed idea is unnatural. Or rather, the one idea, the only idea is life itself. Just being. Living.

Credit: Verghese, Abraham, The Covenant of Water, Grove Press, NY, copyright 2023, p. 653