Abraham Verghese

To be a wife, to care for a husband, to have children, is there anything more valuable? K

a married woman gives up her childhood home forever, and a widow’s fate is to remain in the home she married into.

a married woman gives up her childhood home forever, and a widow’s fate is to remain in the home she married into

a married woman gives up her childhood home forever, and a widow’s fate is to remain in the home she married into.

Lord, thank you . . .” she says in her prayers. “I won’t mention specifics. After all, what don’t you know about my life on earth? But I have a question. When my husband fled the altar four years ago, I heard your voice say to me, ‘I am with you always.’ Did you speak to him too? Did you say, ‘Turn back’? Did you say, ‘She is the one I chose for you’?”

She waits. “Because I am, Lord. I am the one.”

“May the living and the departed together cry out

Faith is to know the pattern is there, even though none is visible.”

Faith is to know the pattern is there, even though none is visible.”

before his brain digests these sights, his body—skin, nerve endings, lungs, heart—recognizes the geography of his birth. He never understood how much it mattered. Every bit of this lush landscape is his; its every atom contains him. On this blessed strip of coast where Malayalam is spoken, the flesh and bones of his ancestors have leached into the soil, made their way into the trees, into the iridescent plumage of the parrots on swaying branches, and dispersed themselves into the breeze.