The God of Small Things

by Arundhati Roy

He was studying Hindu scriptures, in order to be able to denounce them intelligently.

This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.

It was a little like having to sweep away your footprints without a broom. Or worse, not being allowed to leave footprints at all.

Her belly button protruded from her satiated satin stomach like a domed monument on a hill. Chacko laid his ear against it and listened with wonder at the rumblings from within. Messages being sent from here to there. New organs getting used to each other. A new Government setting up its systems. Organizing the division of labour, deciding who would do what.

‘Just trying to attract attention,’ Baby Kochamma said, and resolutely refused to have her attention attracted.

She said that she felt like a road sign with birds shitting on her.

She had a deep blue sac under one eye that was bloated like a bubble. As though her eye had tried to do what her lungs couldn’t.

A platoon of ants carried a dead cockroach sedately through the door, demonstrating what should be done with corpses. The

The man standing in the shade of the rubber trees with coins of sunshine dancing on his body, holding her daughter in his arms, glanced up and caught Ammu’s gaze. Centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment. History was wrong-footed, caught off guard. Sloughed off like an old snakeskin. Its marks, its scars, its wounds from old wars and the Walking-Backwards days all fell away. In its absence it left an aura, a palpable shimmering that was as plain to see as the water in a river or the sun in the sky. As plain to feel as the heat on a hot day, or the tug of a fish on a taut line. So obvious that no one noticed. In that brief moment, Velutha looked up and saw things that he hadn’t seen before. Things that had been out of bounds so far, obscured by history’s blinkers. Simple things. For instance, he saw that Rahel’s mother was a woman.

It was he who had introduced them to Raudra Bhima – crazed, bloodthirsty Bhima in search of death and vengeance. ‘He is searching for the beast that lives in him,’ Comrade Pillai had told them – frightened, wide-eyed children – when the ordinarily good-natured Bhima began to bay and snarl. Which beast in particular, Comrade Pillai didn’t say. Searching for the Man who lives in him was perhaps what he really meant, because certainly no beast has essayed the boundless, infinitely inventive art of human hatred. No beast can match its range and power.

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.

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

Not Death. Just the end of living.

All three of them bonded by the certain, separate knowledge that they had loved a man to death.

Leaving a boat-shaped patch of bare dry earth, cleared and ready for love.