The God of Small Things

by Arundhati Roy

He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past.

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.

In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening.

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

“When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”