The God of Small Things

by Arundhati Roy

In those early amorphous years when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was Forever, Esthappen and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us. As though they were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities.

she died. Thirty-one. Not old. Not young. But a viable die-able age.

Strange insects appeared like ideas in the evenings and burned themselves on Baby Kochamma’s dim 40-watt bulbs.

But with her she had brought the sound of passing trains, and the light and shade that falls on you if you have a window seat.

It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined.

Oddly, neglect seemed to have resulted in an accidental release of the spirit.

Rahel drifted into marriage like a passenger drifts towards an unoccupied chair in an airport lounge. With a Sitting Down sense. She returned with him to Boston.

That the emptiness in one twin was only a version of the quietness in the other. That the two things fitted together. Like stacked spoons. Like familiar lovers’ bodies.

The silence sat between grandniece and baby grandaunt like a third person. A stranger. Swollen. Noxious.

It was a time when the unthinkable became thinkable and the impossible really happened.

Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.

It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag.

That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.

HOWEVER, for practical purposes, in a hopelessly ...

To Ammu, her twins seemed like a pair of small bewildered frogs engrossed in each other’s company, lolloping arm in arm down a highway full of hurtling traffic. Entirely oblivious of what trucks can do to frogs. Ammu watched over them fiercely. Her watchfulness stretched her, made her taut and tense. She was quick to reprimand her children, but even quicker to take offence on their behalf.

When the British came to Malabar, a number of Paravans, Pelayas and Pulayas (among them Velutha’s grandfather, Kelan) converted to Christianity and joined the Anglican Church to escape the scourge of Untouchability. As added incentive they were given a little food and money. They were known as the Rice-Christians. It didn’t take them long to realize that they had jumped from the frying pan into the fire.

Mammachi ordered him to stop it but he couldn’t, because you can’t order fear around. Not even a Paravan’s.

A transparent spotted snake with a forked tongue floated across the sky.

television-enforced democracy,

It had been his dream to sing on the Donahue show, he said, not realizing that he had just been robbed of that too.

Smells, like music, hold memories.

She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity.

‘D’you know what happens when you hurt people?’ Ammu said. ‘When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.’

Both things had happened. It had shrunk. And she had grown.

Then someone threw a small stone at her, and her childhood fled, flailing its thin arms.

With a hunger for kappa and meen vevichathu that they hadn’t eaten for so long. With love and a lick of shame that their families who had come to meet them were so … so … gawkish. Look at the way they dressed! Surely they had more suitable airport wear! Why did Malayalis have such awful teeth?

She didn’t allow herself to consider who it was that she envied. The man or her own child. Or just their world of hooked fingers and sudden smiles.

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 love by night the man her children loved by day.

He walked on water. Perhaps. But could He have swum on land?

A yolk addressing a sea of boiled eggs.

It was human history, masquerading as God’s Purpose, revealing herself to an under-age audience.

Not Death. Just the end of living.

As though they knew that how far they went would be measured against how far they would be taken. So they held back. Tormented each other. Gave of each other slowly. But that only made it worse. It only raised the stakes. It only cost them more. Because it smoothed the wrinkles, the fumble and rush of unfamiliar love and roused them to fever pitch.