Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things

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This highly stylized novel tells the story of one very fractured family from the southernmost tip of India. Here is an unhappy family unhappy in its own way, and through flashbacks and flashforwards The God of Small Things unfolds the secrets of these characters' unhappiness. First-time novelist Arundhati Roy twists and reshapes language to create an arresting, startling sort of precision. The average reader of mainstream fiction may have a tough time working through Roy's prose, but those with a more literary bent to their usual fiction inclinations should find the initial struggle through the dense prose a worthy price for this lushly tragic tale.
Rahel and Estha are fraternal twins whose emotional connection to one another is stronger than that of most siblings:
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.
Now, these years later, Rahel has a memory of waking up one night giggling at Estha's funny dream.
She has other memories too that she has no right to have.
Their childhood household hums with hidden antagonisms and pains that only family members can give one another.
Blind Mammachi, the twins' grandmother and founder of Paradise Pickles & Preserves, is a violin-playing widow who suffered years of abuse at the hands of her highly respected husband, and who has a fierce one-sided Oedipal connection with her son, Chacko. Baby Kochamma, Rahel and Estha's grandaunt, nurses deep-seated bitterness for a lifetime of unrequited love, a bitterness that plays out slyly against everyone in the family; in her youth she fell in love with an Irish Roman-Catholic priest and converted to his faith to win him, while he eventually converted to Hinduism. Chacko, divorced from his English wife and separated from his daughter since her infancy, runs the pickle factory with a capitalist's hand, self-deluding himself all the while that he is a Communist at heart even as he flirts with and beds his female employees. Ammu, the twins' mother, is a divorcee who fled her husband's alcoholism and impossible demands, a woman with a streak of wildness that the children sense and dread and that will be her and her family's undoing.
The family's tragedy revolves around the visit of Chacko's ex-wife, widowed by her second husband, and his daughter, Sophie Mol. It is within the context of their visit that Estha will experience the one horrible thing that should never happen to a child, during their visit that Ammu will come to love by night the man the children love by day, and during their visit that Sophie Mol will die. Her death, and the fate of the twins' beloved Untouchable Velutha, will forever alter the course of the lives of all the members of the family, sending them each off on spinning trajectories of regret and pain. The story reveals itself not in traditional narrative order, but in jumps through time, wending its way through Rahel's memories and attempts at understanding the hand fate dealt her family.
The God of Small Things has been favorable reviewed all over the place, generating a lot of excitement in the current literary establishment. What you think of it will depend heavily on your opinion of Roy's prose style – is it ostentatious, or is it brilliant? Whether or not you fall in love with her style, the truth of the heartbreaking story she tells and the lovable/hate-able characters who people it make this novel an experience not to be missed.

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Baby Kochamma rolled the red flag up and put it on the ledge behind the backseat. She put her rosary back into her blouse where she kept it with her melons. She busied herself with this and that, trying to salvage some dignity

After the last few men walked past, Chacko said it was all right now to roll down the windows.

“Are you sure it was him?’ Chacko asked Rahel.

`Who?” Rahel said, suddenly cautious.

“Are you sure it was Velutha?”

“Hmmm…?” Rahel said, playing for time, trying to decipher Estha’s frantic thought signals.

“I said, are you sure that the man you saw was Velutha?” Chacko said for the third time.

“Mmm… nyes… m… m… almost,” Rahel said.

“You’re almost sure?” Chacko said.

“No… it was almost Vehitha,” Rahel said. “it almost looked like him…”

“So you’re not sure then?”

“Almost not.” Rahel slid a look at Estha for approval.

“It must have been him,” Baby Kochamma said. “It’s Trivandrum that’s done this to him. They all go there and come back thinking they’re some great politicos.”

Nobody seemed particularly impressed by her insight.

“We should keep an eye on him,” Baby Kochamrna said. “If he starts this Union business in the factory… I’ve noticed some signs, some rudeness, some ingratitude. The other day I asked him to help me with the rocks for my scree bed and he-”

“I saw Velutha at home before we left,” Estha said brightly. “So how could it be him?”

“For his own sake,” Baby Kochamma said, darkly, “I hope it wasn’t. And next time, Esthappen, don’t interrupt.”

She was annoyed that nobody asked her what a scree bed was.

In the days that followed, Baby Kochamma focused all her fury at her public humiliation on Velutha. She sharpened it like a pencil. In her mind he grew to represent the march. And the man who had forced her to wave the Marxist Party flag. And the man who christened her Modalali Mariakutty. And all the men who had laughed at her.

She began to hate him.

From the way Ammu held her head, Rahel could tell that she was still angry. Rahel looked at her watch. Ten to two. Still no train. She put her chin on the windowsill. She could feel the gray gristle of the felt that cushioned the window glass pressing into her chinskin. She took off her sunglasses to get a better look at the dead frog squashed on the road. It was so dead and squashed so flat that it looked more like a frog-shaped stain on the road than a frog. Rahel wondered if Miss Mitten had been squashed into a Miss Mitten-shaped stain by the milk truck that killed her.

With the certitude of a true believer, Vellya Paapen had assured the twins that there was no such thing in the world as a black cat. He said that there were only black cat-shaped holes in the Universe.

There were so many stains on the road.

Squashed Miss Mitten-shaped stains in the Universe.

Squashed frog-shaped stains in the Universe.

Squashed crows that had tried to eat the squashed frog-shaped stains in the Universe.

Squashed dogs that ate the squashed crow-shaped stains in the Universe.

Feathers. Mangoes. Spit.

All the way to Cochin.

The sun shone through the Plymouth window directly down at Rahel. She closed her eyes and shone back at it. Even behind her eyelids the light was bright and hot. The sky was orange, and the coconut trees were sea anemones waving their tentacles, hoping to trap and eat an unsuspecting cloud. A transparent spotted snake with a forked tongue floated across the sky Then a transparent Roman soldier on a spotted horse. The strange thing about Roman soldiers in the comics, according to Rahel, was the amount of trouble they took over their armor and their helmets, and then, after all that, they left their legs bare. It didn’t make any sense at all. Weatherwise or otherwise.

Ammu had told them the story of Julius Caesar and how he was stabbed by Brutus, his best friend, in the Senate. And how he fell to the floor with knives in his back and said, “Et tu, Brute? -then fall, Caesar.”

“It just goes to show;” Ammu said, “that you can’t trust anybody. Mother, father, brother, husband, bestfriend. Nobody.”

With children, she said (when they asked), it remained to be seen. She said it was entirely possible, for instance, that Estha could grow up to be a Male Chauvinist Pig.

At night, Estha would stand on his bed with his sheet wrapped around him and say “‘Et tu, Brute?-Then fall, Caesar!’” and crash into bed without bending his knees, like a stabbed corpse. Kochu Maria, who slept on the floor on a mat, said that she would complain to Mammachi.

“Tell your mother to take you to your father’s house,” she said. “There you can break as many beds as you like. These aren’t your beds. This isn’t your house.”

Estha would rise from the dead, stand on his bed and say, “Et tu, Kochu Maria?-Then fall, Estha!” and die again.

Kochu Maria was sure that Ettu was an obscenity in English and was waiting for a suitable opportunity to complain about Estha to Mammachi.

The woman in the neighboring car had biscuit crumbs on her mouth. Her husband lit a bent after-biscuit cigarette. He exhaled two tusks of smoke through his nostrils and for a fleeting moment looked like a wild boar. Mrs. Boar asked Rahel her name in a Baby Voice.

Rahel ignored her and blew an inadvertent spit bubble.

Ammu hated them blowing spit bubbles. She said it reminded her of Baba. Their father. She said that he used to blow spit bubbles and shiver his leg. According to Ammu, only clerks behaved like that, not aristocrats.

Aristocrats were people who didn’t blow spit bubbles or shiver their legs. Or gobble.

Though Baba wasn’t a clerk, Ammu said he often behaved like one.

When they were alone, Estha and Rahel sometimes pretended that they were clerks. They would blow spit bubbles and shiver their legs and gobble like turkeys. They remembered their father whom they had known between wars. He once gave them puffs from his cigarette and got annoyed because they had sucked it and wet the filter with spit.

“It’s not a ruddy sweet!” he said, genuinely angry.

They remembered his anger. And Ammu’s. They remembered being pushed around a room once, from Ammu to Baba to Ammu to Baba like billiard balls. Ammu pushing Estha away. Here, you keep one of them. I can’t look after them both. Later, when Estha asked Ammu about that, she hugged him and said he mustn’t imagine things.

In the only photograph they had seen of him (which Ammu allowed them to look at once), he was wearing a white shirt and glasses. He looked like a handsome, studious cricketer. With one arm he held Estha on his shoulders. Estha was smiling, with his chin resting on his father’s head. Rahel was held against his body with his other arm. She looked grumpy and bad-tempered, with her babylegs dangling. Someone had painted rosy blobs onto their cheeks.

Ammu said that he had only carried them for the photograph and even then had been so drunk that she was scared he’d drop them. Ammu said she’d been standing just outside the photograph, ready to catch them if he did. Still, except for their cheeks, Estha and Rahel thought it was a nice photograph

“Will you stop that!” Ammu said, so loudly that Murlidharan, who had hopped off the milestone to stare into the Plymouth, backed off, his stumps jerking in alarm.

“What?” Rahel said, but knew immediately what. Her spit bubble.

“Sorry, Ammu,” Rahel said.

“Sorry doesn’t make a dead man alive,” Estha said.

“Oh come on!” Chacko said. “You can’t dictate what she does with her own spit!”

“Mind your own business,” Ammu snapped.

“It brings back Memories,” Estha, in his wisdom, explained to Chacko.

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