The God of Small Things

by Arundhati Roy

The steel door of the incinerator went up and the muted hum of the eternal fire became a red roaring. The heat lunged out at them like a famished beast. Then Rahel’s Ammu was fed to it. Her hair, her skin, her smile. Her voice. The way she used Kipling to love her children before putting them to bed: We be of one blood, ye and I. Her good night kiss. The way she held their faces steady with one hand (squashed-cheeked, fish-mouthed) while she parted and combed their hair with the other. The way she held knickers out for Rahel to climb into. Left leg, right leg. All this was fed to the beast, and it was satisfied.

Her ashes. The grit from her bones. The teeth from her smile. The whole of her crammed into a little clay pot. Receipt No. Q498673.

Rahel never wrote to him. There are things that you can’t do – like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.

It was a grand old house, the Ayemenem House, but aloof-looking. As though it had little to do with the people that lived in it. Like an old man with rheumy eyes watching children play, seeing only transience in their shrill elation and their whole-hearted commitment to life.

Like an old man with rheumy eyes watching children play, seeing only transience in their shrill elation and their whole-hearted commitment to life.

Nine steep steps led from the driveway up to the front verandah. The elevation gave it the dignity of a stage and everything that happened there took on the aura and significance of performance.

The afternoon was still and hot. The Air was waiting.

As she played, her mind wandered back over the years to her first batch of professional pickles. How beautiful they had looked! Bottled and sealed, standing on a table near the head of her bed, so they’d be the first thing she would touch in the morning when she woke up.

The day that Chacko prevented Pappachi from beating her (and Pappachi had murdered his chair instead), Mammachi packed her wifely luggage and committed it to Chacko’s care. From then onwards he became the repository of all her womanly feelings. Her Man. Her only Love.

Surprisingly, Baby Kochamma accepted this explanation, and the enigmatic, secretly thrilling notion of Men’s Needs gained implicit sanction in the Ayemenem House. Neither Mammachi nor Baby Kochamma saw any contradiction between Chacko’s Marxist mind and feudal libido.

So Mammachi had the satisfaction of regarding Margaret Kochamma as just another whore, Aniyan the dhobi was happy with his daily gratuity, and of course Margaret Kochamma remained blissfully unaware of the whole arrangement.

Chacko Saar vannu,’ the travelling whisper went. Chopping knives were put down. Vegetables were abandoned, half cut, on huge steel platters. Desolate bitter gourds, incomplete pine-apples. Coloured rubber finger-guards (bright, like cheerful, thick condoms) were taken off. Pickled hands were washed and wiped on cobalt-blue aprons. Escaped wisps of hair were recaptured and returned to white headscarves. Mundus tucked up under aprons were let down.

Achoo, Jose, Yako, Anian, Elayan, Kuttan, Vijayan, Vawa, Joy, Sumathi, Ammal, Annamma, Kanakamma, Latha, Sushila, Vijayamma, Jollykutty, Mollykuty, Lucykutty, Beena Mol (girls with bus names).

was very sorry to hear about . . . Joe,’ Mammachi said. She sounded only a little sorry. Not very sorry. There was a short, Sad-About-Joe silence.

‘Pappachi’s nose,’ Mammachi said. ‘Tell me, are you a pretty girl?’ she asked Sophie Mol. ‘Yes,’ Sophie Mol said. ‘And tall?’ ‘Tall for my age,’ Sophie Mol said. ‘Very tall,’ Baby Kochamma said. ‘Much taller than Estha.’ ‘She’s older,’ Ammu said. ‘Still . . .’ Baby Kochamma said.

When she looked at him now, she couldn’t help thinking that the man he had become bore so little resemblance to the boy he had been. His smile was the only piece of baggage he had carried with him from boyhood into manhood.

She was surprised at the extent of her daughter’s physical ease with him. Surprised that her child seemed to have a sub-world that excluded her entirely. A tactile world of smiles and laughter that she, her mother, had no part in.

Ammu saw that he saw. She looked away. He did too. History’s fiends returned to claim them. To rewrap them in its old, scarred pelt and drag them back to where they really lived. Where the Love Laws lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much. Ammu walked up to the verandah, back into the Play. Shaking.

‘See, you’re smiling!’ Rahel said. ‘That means it was you. Smiling means, “It was you.” ’ ‘That’s only in English!’ Velutha said. ‘In Malayalam my teacher always said, “Smiling means it wasn’t me.” ’

Littledemons were mudbrown in Airport Fairy frocks with forehead bumps that might turn into horns. With Fountains in Love-in-Tokyos. And backward-reading habits. And if you cared

And truth be told, it was no small wondering matter. Because Ammu had not had the kind of education, nor read the sorts of books, nor met the sorts of people, that might have influenced her to think the way she did. She was just that sort of animal.

In her growing years, Ammu had watched her father weave his hideous web. He was charming and urbane with visitors, and stopped just short of fawning on them if they happened to be white. He donated money to orphanages and leprosy clinics. He worked hard on his public profile as a sophisticated, generous, moral man. But alone with his wife and children he turned into a monstrous, suspicious bully, with a streak of vicious cunning. They were beaten, humiliated and then made to suffer the envy of friends and relations for having such a wonderful husband and father.

As she grew older, Ammu learned to live with this cold, calculating cruelty. She developed a lofty sense of injustice and the mulish, reckless streak that develops in Someone Small who has been bullied all their lives by Someone Big. She

Oh Esthapappychachen Kuttappen Peter Mon, Where, oh where have you gon?

Rahel’s heart sank. Afternoon Gnap. She hated those.

They were on their way to church. All dressed in red. They had to be killed before they got there. Squished and squashed with a stone. You can’t have smelly ants in church. The ants made a faint crunchy sound as life left them. Like an elf eating toast, or a crisp biscuit.

Then he’d go home to his wife, and (if’ she wasn’t dead) they’d have an Antly Afternoon Gnap.

It is only now, these years later, that Rahel with adult hindsight, recognized the sweetness of that gesture. A grown man entertaining three raccoons, treating them like real ladies. Instinctively colluding in the conspiracy of their fiction, taking care not to decimate it with adult carelessness. Or affection.

It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.

The rest of the recipe was in Estha’s new best handwriting. Angular, spiky. It leaned backwards as though the letters were reluctant to form words, and the words reluctant to be in sentences:

Apart from the spelling mistakes, the last line – Hope you will enjoy this recipe – was Estha’s only augmentation of the original text.

‘But communists don’t believe in ghosts,’ Estha said, as though they were continuing a discourse investigating solutions to the ghost problem. Their

‘Are we going to become a communist?

Things can change in a day. It was a boat. A tiny wooden vallom. The boat that Estha sat on and Rahel found. The boat that Ammu would use to cross the river. To love by night the man her children loved by day. So old a boat that it had taken root. Almost.

They knew the afternoon weed that flowed inwards from the backwaters of Komarakom. They knew the smaller fish. The flat, foolish pallathi, the silver paral, the wily, whiskered koori, the sometimes karimeen.

Here they studied Silence (like the children of the Fisher Peoples), and learned the bright language of dragonflies. Here they learned to Wait. To Watch. To think thoughts and not voice them. To move like lightning when the bendy yellow bamboo arced downwards.

A small procession (a flag, a wasp and a boat-on-legs) wended its knowledgeable way down the little path through the undergrowth.

He tried to hate her. She’s one of them, he told himself. just another one of them. He couldn’t. She had deep dimples when she smiled. Her eyes were always somewhere else. Madness slunk in through a chink in History. It only took a moment.

‘It’s an afternoon-mare,’ Estha-the-Accurate replied. ‘She dreams a lot.

‘If you’re happy in a dream, Ammu, does that count?’ Estha asked. ‘Does what count?’ ‘The happiness – does it count?’ She knew exactly what he meant, her son with his spoiled puff. Because the truth is, that only what counts counts. The simple, unswerving wisdom of children. If you eat fish in a dream, does it count? Does it mean you’ve eaten fish? The cheerful man without footprints – did he count?

She saw a wisp of madness escape from its bottle and caper triumphantly around the bathroom.

Ammu worried about madness. Mammachi said it ran in their family. That it came on people suddenly and caught them unawares. There was Pathil Ammai, who at the age of sixty-five began to take her clothes off and run naked along the river, singing to the fish. There was Thampi Chachen, who searched his shit every morning with a knitting needle for a gold tooth he had swallowed years ago. And Dr Muthachen, who had to be removed from his own wedding in a sack. Would future generations say, ‘There was Ammu – Ammu Ipe. Married a Bengali. Went quite mad. Died young. In a cheap lodge somewhere.

That afternoon – while in the bathroom the fates conspired to alter horribly the course of their mysterious mother’s road, while in Velutha’s backyard an old boat waited for them, while in a yellow church a young bat waited to be born – in their mother’s bedroom, Estha stood on his head on Rahel’s bum.

Lay Ter. A deep-sounding bell in a mossy well.

door slowly breaking. Isolated things that didn’t mean anything. As though the intelligence that decodes life’s hidden patterns – that connects reflections to images, glints to light, weaves to fabrics, needles to thread, walls to rooms, love to fear to anger to remorse – was suddenly lost.

Esthapappychachen Kuttappen Peter Mon.

So when he tells a story, he handles it as he would a child of his own. He teases it. He punishes it. He sends it up like a bubble. He wrestles it to the ground and lets it go again. He laughs at it because he loves it. He can fly you across whole worlds in minutes, he can stop for hours to examine a wilting leaf.

The Kathakali Man is the most beautiful of men. Because his body is his soul. His only instrument. From the age of three it has been planed and polished, pared down, harnessed wholly to the task of story-telling. He has magic in him, this man within the painted mask and swirling skirts. But

The flesh of her cheeks fell away on either side of her face, making her cheekbones look high and prominent, and pulling her mouth downwards into a mirthless smile that contained just a glimmer of teeth.

The rest of her expressions were growing back in a nascent stubble. Her face was flushed. Her forehead glistened. Underneath the flush, there was a paleness. A staved-off sadness.