The God of Small Things

by Arundhati Roy

It seemed such an over-familiar, intimate thing to have done. She wondered what had made her laugh so much. She knew it wasn’t the joke.

He made her feel as though the world belonged to them – as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.

In the year she knew him, before they were married, she discovered a little magic in herself, and for a while felt like a blithe genie released from her lamp. She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for Chacko was actually a tentative, timorous acceptance of herself.

Too much was happening in his life and Ayemenem seemed so far away. The river too small. The fish too few.

When she told him about Joe he had left sadly, but quietly. With his invisible companion and his friendly smile.

Even from a distance, it was obvious that she was dead. Not ill or asleep. It was something to do with the way she lay. The angle of her limbs. Something to do with Death’s authority. Its terrible stillness.

Margaret Kochamma never forgave herself for taking Sophie Mol to Ayemenem. For leaving her there alone over the weekend while she and Chacko went to Cochin to confirm their return tickets.

‘Because of you!’ Ammu had screamed. ‘If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t be here! None of this would have happened! I wouldn’t be here! I would have been free! I should have dumped you in an orphanage the day you were born! You’re the millstones round my neck!

They were both men whom childhood had abandoned without a trace. Men without curiosity. Without doubt. Both in their own way truly, terrifyingly adult. They looked out at the world and never wondered how it worked, because they knew. They worked it. They were mechanics who serviced different parts of the same machine.

Work is Struggle. Struggle is Work.

The chorus was in English, the rest of it in Malayalam. No vacancy! No vacancy! Wherever in the world a poor man goes, No no no no no vacancy!

His legs were already spindly and his taut, distended belly, like his tiny mother’s goitre, was completely at odds with the rest of his thin, narrow body and alert face. As though something in their family genes had bestowed on them compulsory bumps that appeared randomly in different parts of their bodies.

Comrade Pillai took off his shirt, rolled it into a ball and wiped his armpits with it. When he finished, Kalyani took it from him and held it as though it was a gift. A bouquet of flowers.

They sat beside each other on steel folding chairs, on the afternoon of the Day that Sophie Mol Came, sipping coffee and crunching banana chips. Dislodging with their tongues the sodden yellow mulch that stuck to the roofs of their mouths. The Small Thin Man and the Big Fat Man. Comic book adversaries in a still-to-come war.

By then, numbed by the loss of Sophie Mol, he looked out at everything with a vision smudged with grief. Like a child touched by tragedy, who grows up suddenly and abandons his playthings, Chacko dumped his toys.

Velutha didn’t go home. He went straight to the Ayemenem House. Though, on the one hand, he was taken by surprise, on the other, he knew, had known, with an ancient instinct, that one day History’s twisted chickens would come home to roost.

And there it was again. Another religion turned against itself. Another edifice constructed by the human mind, decimated by human nature.

His feet walked him to the river. As though they were the leash and he were the dog. History walking the dog.

‘What if Ammu finds us and begs us to come back?’ ‘Then we will. But only if she begs.

They ran along the bank calling out to her. But she was gone. Carried away on the muffled highway. Greygreen. With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night the broken yellow moon in it.

Just a quiet handing over ceremony. A boat spilling its cargo. A river accepting the offering. One small life. A brief sunbeam. With a silver thimble clenched for luck in its little fist.

They didn’t see someone else lying asleep in the shadows. As lonely as a wolf. A brown leaf on his black back. That made the monsoons come on time.

A sparrow lay dead on the back seat. She had found her way in through a hole in the windscreen, tempted by some seat-sponge for her nest. She never found her way out. No one noticed her panicked car-window appeals. She died on the back seat, with her legs in the air. Like a joke.

Rahel held by Ammu’s hand. A mosquito on a leash. A Refugee Stick Insect in Bata sandals. An Airport Fairy at a railway station. Stamping her feet on the platform, unsettling clouds of settled station-filth. Until Ammu shook her and told her to Stoppit and she Stoppited. Around them the hostling-jostling crowd.

Scurrying hurrying buying selling luggage trundling porter paying children shitting people spitting coming going begging bargaining reservation-checking.

A man sitting on a red weighing machine unstrapped his artificial leg (knee downwards) with a black boot and nice white sock painted on it. The hollow, knobbled calf was pink, like proper calves should be. (When you recreate the image of man, why repeat God’s mistakes?) Inside it he stored his ticket. His towel. His stainless-steel tumbler. His smells. His secrets. His love. His madness. His hope. His infinnate joy.

The Stationworld. Society’s circus. Where, with the rush of commerce, despair came home to roost and hardened slowly into resignation.

Past a deepblue beetle balanced on an unbending blade of grass. Past giant spider webs that had withstood the rain and spread like whispered gossip from tree to tree.

What Esthappen and Rahel witnessed that morning, though they didn’t know it then, was a clinical demonstration in controlled conditions (this was not war after all, or genocide) of human nature’s pursuit of ascendancy. Structure. Order. Complete monopoly. It was human history, masquerading as God’s Purpose, revealing herself to an under-age audience.

There was nothing accidental about what happened that morning. Nothing incidental. It was no stray mugging or personal settling of scores. This was an era imprinting itself on those who lived in it. History in live performance.

If they hurt Velutha more than they intended to, it was only because any kinship, any connection between themselves and him, any implication that if nothing else, at least biologically he...

Madiyo?’ one of History’s Agents asked. ‘Madi aayirikkum,’ another replied. Enough? Enough. They stepped away from him. Craftsmen assessing their work. Seeking aesthetic distance.

They left: Six princes, their pockets stuffed with toys. A pair of two-egg twins. And the God of Loss. He couldn’t walk. So they dragged him. Nobody saw them. Bats, of course, are blind.

There were bubbles inside the paperweight which made the man and woman look as though they were waltzing underwater. They looked happy. Maybe they were getting married. She in her white dress. He in his black suit and bow-tie. They were looking deep into each other’s eyes.

‘So!’ she said, with a bright, brittle smile, the strain beginning to tell in her voice. ‘What shall I tell the Inspector Uncle? What have we decided? D’you want to save Ammu or shall we send her to jail?’

In the years to come they would replay this scene in their heads. As children. As teenagers. As adults. Had they been deceived into doing what they did? Had they been tricked into condemnation? In a way, yes. But it wasn’t as simple as that. They both knew that they had been given a choice. And how quick they had been in the choosing! They

The Inspector asked his question. Estha’s mouth said Yes. Childhood tiptoed out. Silence slid in like a bolt. Someone switched off the light and Velutha disappeared.

Estha nodded down at Ammu’s face tilted up to the train window. At Rahel, small and smudged with station dirt. All three of them bonded by the certain, separate knowledge that they had loved a man to death.

A bottomless-bottomful feeling.

It was his fault that the faraway man in Ammu’s chest stopped shouting. His fault that she died alone in the lodge with no one to lie at the back of her and talk to her.

This was the stuff their dreams were made of. On the day that Estha was Returned. Chalk. Blackboards. Proper punishments.

They didn’t ask to be let off lightly. They only asked for punishments that fitted their crimes. Not ones that came like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. Not ones you spent your whole life in, wandering through its maze of shelves.

They lay like that for a long time. Awake in the dark. Quietness and Emptiness. Not old. Not young. But a viable die-able age.

Ammu leaned against the bedroom door in the dark, reluctant to return to the dinner table where the conversation circled like a moth around the white child and her mother as though they were the only source of light.

He could do only one thing at a time. If he touched her, he couldn’t talk to her, if he loved her he couldn’t leave, if he spoke he couldn’t listen, if he fought he couldn’t win.

She didn’t know what it was that made her hurry through the undergrowth. That turned her walk into a run. That made her arrive on the banks of the Meenachal breathless. Sobbing. As though she was late for something. As though her life depended on getting there in time. As though she knew he would be there. Waiting. As though he knew she would come. He did. Know. That knowledge had slid into him that afternoon. Cleanly. Like the sharp edge of a knife. When history had slipped up. While he had held her little daughter in his arms. When her eyes had told him he was not the only giver of gifts.

As he rose from the dark river and walked up the stone steps, she saw that the world they stood in was his. That he belonged to it. That it belonged to him. The water. The mud. The trees. The fish. The stars. He moved so easily through it. As she watched him she understood the quality of his beauty. How his labour had shaped him. How the wood he fashioned had fashioned him. Each plank he planed, each nail he drove, each thing he made, had moulded him. Had left its stamp on him. Had given him his strength, his supple grace.

She could see his smile in the dark. His white, sudden smile that he had carried with him from boyhood into manhood. His only luggage.

Leaving a boat-shaped patch of bare dry earth, cleared and ready for love. As though Esthappen and Rahel had prepared the ground for them. Willed this to happen. The twin midwives of Ammu’s dream.

At the moment that she guided him into her, she caught a passing glimpse of his youth, his youngness, the wonder in his eyes at the secret he had unearthed and she smiled down at him as though he was her child.