The God of Small Things

by Arundhati Roy

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

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.

He didn’t know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation.

They might even steal their present back, she thought, and realized with a pang how quickly she had reverted to thinking of them as though they were a single unit once again.

But worst of all, he carried inside him the memory of a young man with an old man’s mouth. The memory of a swollen face and a smashed, upside-down smile. Of a spreading pool of clear liquid with a bare bulb reflected in it. Of a bloodshot eye that had opened, wandered and then fixed its gaze on him. Estha. And what had Estha done? He had looked into that beloved face and said: Yes.

The word Estha’s octopus couldn’t get at: Yes. Hoovering didn’t seem to help. It was lodged there, deep inside some fold or furrow, like a mango hair between molars. That couldn’t be worried loose.

And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house – the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture – must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for.

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 practical world …

Ammu told the twins that Mammachi was crying more because she was used to him than because she loved him.

Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things they could get used to.

‘We’re Prisoners of War,’ Chacko said. ‘Our dreams have been doctored. We belong nowhere. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter.’

The real secret was that Communism crept into Kerala insidiously. As a reformist movement that never overtly questioned the traditional values of a caste-ridden, extremely traditional community. The Marxists worked from within the communal divides, never challenging them, never appearing not to. They offered a cocktail revolution. A heady mix of Eastern Marxism and orthodox Hinduism, spiked with a shot of democracy.

‘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.’

Chacko marvelled at how someone so small and undefined, so vague in her resemblances, could so completely command the attention, the love, the sanity, of a grown man.

She was thirty-one. Not old, not young, but a viable, die-able age.

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.

She was their Ammu and their Baba and she had loved them Double. The door of the furnace clanged shut. There were no tears.

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.