The God of Small Things

by Arundhati Roy

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. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening. So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. He whistled, kicked stones. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune. He climbed into people’s eyes and became an exasperating expression.

He couldn’t be expected to understand that. 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.

“What did you expect? Special treatment?

But then, what else could she have done? Had him on her hands for the rest of her life? Why should she? He wasn’t her responsibility. Or was he?

Baby Kochamma reminded herself to lock her bedroom door at night.

She’s living her life backwards, Rahel thought.

It was a curiously apt observation. Baby Kochamma had lived her life backwards. As a young woman she

had renounced the material world, and now, as an old one, she seemed to embrace it. She hugge...

in order to be able to denounce them intelligently.

He had young Baby Kochamma’s aching heart on a leash,

Baby Kochamma defied her father’s wishes and became a Roman Catholic. With special dispensation from the Vatican, she took her vows and entered a convent in Madras as a trainee novice. She hoped somehow that this would provide her with legitimate occasion to be with Father Mulligan. She pictured them together, in dark sepulchral rooms with heavy velvet drapes, discussing theology. That was all she wanted. All she ever dared to hope for. Just to be near him. Close enough to smell his beard. To see the coarse weave of his cassock. To love him just by looking at him.

remained a Roman Catholic.

Baby Kochamma returned from Rochester with a diploma in Ornamental Gardening,

the ornamental garden had been abandoned. Left to its own devices, it had grown knotted and wild, like a circus whose animals had forgotten their tricks. The weed that people call Communist Patcha (because it flourished in Kerala like Communism) smothered the more exotic plants. Only the vines kept growing, like toe-nails on a corpse.

The reason for this sudden, unceremonious dumping was a new love.

And so, while her ornamental garden wilted and died, Baby Kochamma followed American NBA league games, one-day cricket and all the Grand Slam tennis tournaments.

One’s hair snow white, the other’s dyed coal black.

Velutha

Her old fears of the Revolution and the Marxist-Leninist menace had been rekindled by new television worries about the growing numbers of desperate and dispossessed people. She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.

She didn’t even trust the twins. She deemed them Capable of Anything. Anything at all. 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. After all those years. Determined not to let the past creep up on her, she altered her thought at once. She. She might steal her present back.

The oil portraits of Reverend E. John Ipe and Aleyooty Ammachi (Estha and Rahel’s great-grandparents) were taken down from the back verandah and put up in the front one. They hung there now, the Little Blessed One and his wife, on either side of the stuffed, mounted bison head. Reverend Ipe smiled his confident-ancestor smile out across the road instead of the river.

Aleyooty Ammachi looked more hesitant. As though she would have liked to turn around but couldn’t. Perhaps it wasn’t as easy for her to abandon the river. With her eyes she looked in the direction that her husband looked. With her heart she looked away. Her heavy, dull gold kunukku earrings (tokens of the Little Blessed One’s Goodness) had stretched her earlobes and hung all the way down to her shoulders. Through the holes in her ears you could see the hot river and the dark trees that bent into it. And the fishermen in their boats. And the fish.

sense, the Ayemenem House still had a river-sense. A rushing, rolling, fishswimming sense.

Paradise Pickles & Preserves.

because according to their specifications it was neither jam nor jelly. Too thin for jelly and too thick for jam. An ambiguous, unclassifiable consistency, they said. As per their books. Looking back now, to Rahel it seemed as though this difficulty that their family had with classification ran much deeper than the jam-jelly question.

Perhaps Ammu, Estha and she were the worst transgressors.

They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, ...

when uncles became fathers, mothers lovers, and cousins die...

unthinkable became thinkable and the impossible ...

Even before Sophie Mol’s funeral, the police...

After it was all over, Baby Kochamma said, “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” As though she had nothing to do with the Sowing and the Reaping.

It was her idea that Estha be Returned.

She said nothing, but slapped Estha whenever she could in the days she was there before she returned to England.

two-egg twins were no different from ordinary siblings

tomato sandwiches.

He had terrible pictures in his head. Rain. Rushing, inky water. And a smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.

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 ...

It was the kind of time in the life of a family when something happens to nudge its hidden morality from its resting place and make it bubble to the surface and float for a while. In clear view. For everyone to see.

Ammu said that Chacko had never stopped loving Margaret Kochamma. Mammachi disagreed. She liked to believe that he had never loved her in the first place.

Ammu was considering reverting to her maiden name, though she said that choosing between her husband’s name and her father’s name didn’t give a woman much of a choice.

Chacko suddenly said: “Gatsby turned out all right at the end. It is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”

Chacko had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and was permitted excesses and eccentricities nobody else was.

the Family would have to pay him not to publish.

Before the Terror.

She was twenty-seven that year, and in the pit of her stomach she carried the cold knowledge that, for her, life had been lived.

She married the w...

Pappachi insisted that a college education was an unnecessary expense for a girl,

Ammu didn’t pretend to be in love with him. She just weighed the odds and accepted. She thought that anything, anyone at all, would be better than returning to Ayemenem.

She didn’t notice the single Siamese soul.

When his bouts of violence began to include the children, and the war with Pakistan began, Ammu left her husband and returned, unwelcomed, to her parents in Ayemenem.