They live on their estate, Parambil, the labour handled dutifully by a man named Shamuel, who is part of the landless caste called the pulayan. By the time she is 17, she will give birth to her first child, a daughter named Baby Mol. And we are thus ushered into the next day and the girl’s journey on a boat far from her childhood home.īig Ammachi, as the girl will come to be known, will grow to love her husband he, in turn, will treat her like the child she is for several more years.
The body’s need for rest overtakes the mother’s anguish. Her mother reassures her but soon her voice ebbs, her breathing slows, and then she is asleep, leaving her daughter awake. She will do as she is told but she cannot imagine the future ahead. It is 1900 in Travancore, south India, today part of Kerala, and in the morning, the frightened girl is to marry a man who is 40 and a widower. T he physician-writer Abraham Verghese’s riveting, sprawling epic opens with a mother and her 12-year-old daughter crying.
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