South India, family secrets; elephants who easily come to visit for lunch; mysterious spirits living underground; medicine, its romance and harsh reality; destructive passions and healing wisdom. And also adventures, dreams, a lot of colors, sounds, light, human stories woven into the history of India. It starts in 1900 and ends in the mid-1970s, although it doesn't really end at all. The story of several generations of a family of Indian Christians from Kerala, surprisingly connected with the story of a Scottish doctor originally from Glasgow, whom fate brought to India. But still, Abraham Verghese's novel is not just a family saga in exotic settings. This is a wise and kind story about how a family is created not by blood relationship, but by a common destiny; that there is always a choice, but you don’t always have the strength to make it; that we are all forever connected to each other by our actions and inactions and that no one is left alone.

Verghese uses the present tense to tell the story of the past, and this gives the story a universal, timeless character, and also refers to tradition oral storytelling in India. The author seems to peer into the past through a prism, focusing on what is now clearly condemned, but Verghese shows the other side of what now causes rejection. Here is a girl-bride who sincerely becomes attached to her husband, who is 30 years older than her; here representatives of the highest and lowest castes live together as a family, not separated by either humiliation or arrogance; here the colonial masters and their workers turn out to be close friends, helping each other in difficult situations; here is a Marxist revolutionary who regrets his activities because destruction was at his core; independence erases all the ills of colonialism, but gives rise to new ones. The characters in “The Testament of Water” are actually biblical, they are kind, they are majestic, they are beautiful, they are determined, they are ahead of their time. Verghese is not shy about painting his heroes in broad strokes, rewarding the virtuous and relegating the villains to obscurity. In his novel, meanness strives to redeem itself, debauchery is punished, forgiveness is granted, grief is overcome, and differences are sure to be overcome. But The Testament of Water is not only beautiful fiction at its best, but it is also an important book because it does so much to document a time gone by and places that most readers know nothing about. And of course, this is a hymn to medicine and science that changed people's lives.