The God of Small Things

by Arundhati Roy

Pappachi would not believe her story—not because he thought well of her husband, but simply because he didn’t believe that an Englishman, any Englishman, would covet another man’s wife.

but their wide-eyed vulnerability and their willingness to love people who didn’t really love them exasperated her and sometimes made her want to hurt them—just as an education,

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 offense on their behalf.

there would be no more chances. There was only Ayemenem now.

When she looked at herself in her wedding photographs, Ammu felt the woman that looked back at her was someone else. A foolish jeweled bride.

She went to the village goldsmith and had her heavy wedding ring melted down and made into a thin bangle with snake heads that she put away for Rahel.

when Ammu listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside her. A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out of the world like a witch, to a better, happier place. On days like this there was something restless and untamed about her. As though she had temporarily set aside the morality of motherhood and divorcée-hood. Even her walk changed from a safe mother-walk to another wilder sort of walk. She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank with her little plastic transistor shaped like a tangerine. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims.

It was what she had battling inside her. An unmixable mix. The infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber. It was this that grew inside her, and eventually led her to love by night the man her children loved by day. To use by night the boat that her children used by day.

The boat that Estha sat on, and Rahel found.

So on the days that the radio played Ammu’s songs, people avoided her, made little loops around her, because everybody agreed that it was best to just Let Her Be.

In the way that the unfortunate sometimes dislike the co-unfortunate, Baby Kochamma disliked the twins, for she considered them doomed, fatherless waifs. Worse still, they were Half-Hindu Hybrids whom no self-respecting Syrian Christian would ever marry.

Baby Kochamma resented Ammu, because she saw her quarreling with a fate that she, Baby Kochamma herself, felt she had graciously accepted. The fate of the wretched Man-less woman. The sad, Father Mulligan-less Baby Kochamma. She had managed to persuade herself over the years that her unconsummated love for Father Mulligan had been entirely due to her restraint and her determination to do the right thing.

As for a divorced daughter—according to Baby Kochamma, she had no position anywhere at all. And as for a divorced daughter from a love marriage, well, words could not describe Baby Kochamma’s outrage. As for a divorced daughter from a intercommunity love marriage—Baby Kochamma chose to remain quiveringly silent on the subject.

But most of all, she grudged them the comfort they drew from each other. She expected from them some token unhappiness. At the very least.

Emperors of the Realm of Taste—which was Comrade K. N. M. Pillai’s unsolicited contribution.

Ammu said that the kathakali dancer was a Red Herring and had nothing to do with anything. Chacko said that it gave the products a Regional Flavor and would stand them in good stead when they entered the Overseas Market. Ammu said that the billboard made them look ridiculous. Like a traveling circus. With tailfins.

Pappachi would not help her with the pickle-making because he did not consider pickle-making a suitable job for a high-ranking ex-Government official.

He had always been a jealous man, so he greatly resented the attention his wife was suddenly getting.

Every night he beat her with a brass flower vase.

The beatings weren’t new. What was new was only the frequency with which they took place. One night Pappachi broke the bow of Mammachi’s violin and threw it in the river.

the evenings, when he knew visitors were expected, he would sit on the verandah and sew buttons that weren’t missing onto his shirts, to create the impression that Mammachi neglected him. To some small degree he did succeed in farther corroding Ayemenem’s view of working wives.

He wouldn’t allow Mammachi or anyone else in the family to use it, or even to sit in it. The Plymouth was Pappachi’s revenge.

Pappachi had been an Imperial Entomologist at the Pusa Institute. After Independence, when the British left, his designation was changed from Imperial Entomologist to Joint Director, Entomology. The year he retired, he had risen to a rank equivalent to Director. His life’s greatest setback was not having had the moth that he had discovered named after him.

Pappachi had retired and moved to Ayemenem. It was too late for him to assert his claim to the discovery. His moth was named after the Acting Director of the Department of Entomology, a junior officer whom Pappachi had always disliked.

Pappachi’s Moth was held responsible for his black moods and sudden bouts of temper.

haunted every house that he ever lived in.

It tormented him and his children and his chil...

On his dressing table, next to his cologne and silver hairbrush, he kept a picture of himself as a young man, with his hair slicked down, taken in a photographer’s studio in Vienna, where he had done the six-month diploma course that had qualified him to apply for the post of Imperial Entomologist.

It was during those few months they spent in Vienna that Mammachi took her first lessons on the violin. The lessons were abruptly discontinued when Mammachi’s teacher Launsky-Tieffenthal made the mistake of telling Pappachi that his wife was exceptionally

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. You only had to look around you, Ammu said, to see that beatings with brass vases were the least of them.

CCP, which was short for chhi-chhipoach and in Hindi meant shit-wiper. Chacko said that the correct word for people like Pappachi was Anglophile. He made Rahel and Estha look up Anglophile in the Readers Digest Great Encyclopaedic Dictionary. It said: Person well disposed to the English. Then Estha and Rahel had to look up dispose. It said: (1) Place suitably in particular order. (2) Bring mind into certain state. (3) Do what one will with, get off ones hands, stow away, demolish, finish, settle, consume (food), kill, sell. Chacko said that in Pappachi’s case it meant (2) Bring mind into certain state. Which, Chacko said, meant that Pappachi’s mind had been brought into a state which made him like the English.

They were a family of Anglophiles.

Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away. He explained to them that history was like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside. “To

understand history,” Chacko said, “we have to go inside and listen to what they’re saying. And look at the books and the pictures...

Kari Saipu’s house. The Black Sahib. The Englishman who had “gone native.” Who spoke Malayalam and wore mundus. Ayemenem’s own Kurtz. Ayemenem his private Heart of Darkness.

The History House.

“But we can’t go in,” Chacko explained, “because we’ve been locked out. And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.”

Chacko said that in the context of the war he was talking about— the War of Dreams—Despise meant all those things.

“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.”

Chacko himself would sorely lack), he told them about the Earth Woman. He made them imagine that the earth—four thousand six hundred million years old—was a forty-six-year-old woman—as old, say, as Aleyamma Teacher, who gave them Malayalam lessons. It had taken the whole of the Earth Woman’s life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The Earth Woman was eleven years old, Chacko said, when the first single-celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty-five—just eight months ago—when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

“And we, my dears, everything we are and ever will be are just a twinkle in her eye,” Chacko said grandly, lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling.

Ammu called them his Oxford Moods.

Later, in the light of all that happened, twinkle seemed completely the wrong word to describe the expression in the Earth Woman’s eye. Twinkle was a word with crinkled, happy edges.

it was the History House—so much closer at hand—that really fascinated them. They thought about it often. The house on the other side of the river. Looming in the Heart of Darkness. A house they couldn’t enter, full of whispers they couldn’t understand. They didn’t know then that soon they would go in. That they would cross the river and be where they weren’t supposed to be, with a man they weren’t supposed to love. That they would watch with dinner-plate eyes as history revealed itself to them in the back verandah.

While other children of their age learned other things, Estha and Rahel learned how history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws. They heard its sickening thud. They smelled its smell and never forgot it. History’s smell. Like old roses on a breeze. It would lurk forever in ordinary things. In coat hangers. Tomatoes. In the tar on roads. In certain colors. In the plates at a restaurant. In the absence of words. And the emptiness in eyes.

That Worse Things had happened. That Worse Things kept happening. But they would find no comfort in the thought.

Chacko said that going to see The Sound of Music was an extended exercise in Anglophilia. Ammu said, “Oh come on, the whole world goes to see The Sound of Music. It’s a World Hit.” “Nevertheless, my dear,” Chacko said in his Reading Aloud voice, “Never. The. Less.”

Like your famous airplanes.” Ammu said that the sad but entirely predictable fate of Chacko’s airplanes was an impartial measure of his abilities. Once a month (except during the monsoons), a parcel would arrive for Chacko by VPP. It always contained a balsa aeromodeling kit. It usually took Chacko between eight and ten days to assemble the aircraft, with its tiny fuel tank and motorized propeller. When it was ready, he would take Estha and Rahel to the rice fields in Nattakom to help him fly it. It never flew for more than a minute. Month after month, Chacko’s carefully constructed planes crashed in the slushgreen paddy fields into which Estha and Rahel would spurt, like trained retrievers, to salvage the remains. A tail, a tank, a wing. A wounded machine. Chacko’s room was cluttered with broken wooden planes. And every month, another kit would arrive. Chacko never blamed the crashes on the kit.

Though Ammu did as much work in the factory as Chacko, whenever he was dealing with food inspectors or sanitary engineers, he always referred to it as my Factory, my pineapples, my pickles. Legally this was the case, because Ammu, as a daughter, had no claim to the property.