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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He felt a little better. He put on his shoes and walked out of his room, laces trailing, down the corridor, and stood quietly outside Rahel’s door.

Rahel stood on a chair and unlatched the door for him. Chacko didn’t bother to wonder how she could possibly have known that Estha was at the door. He was used to their sometimes strangeness.

He lay like a beached whale on the narrow hotel bed and wondered idly if it had indeed been Velutha that Rahel saw. He didn’t think it likely. Velutha had too much going for him. He was a Paravan with a future. He wondered whether Velutha had become a card-holding member of the Marxist Party. And whether he had been seeing Comrade K. N. M. Pillai lately.

Earlier in the year, Comrade Pillai’s political ambitions had been given an unexpected boost. Two local Party members, Comrade J. Kattukaran and Comrade Guhan Menon had been expelled from the Party as suspected Naxalites. One of them-Comrade Guhan Menon-was tipped to be the Party’s candidate for the Kottayam by-elections to the Legislative Assembly due next March. His expulsion from the Parry created a vacuum that a number of hopefuls were jockeying to fill. Among them Comrade K. N. M. Pillai.

Comrade Pillai had begun to watch the goings-on at Paradise Pickles with the keenness of a substitute at a soccer match. To bring in a new labor union, however small, in what he hoped would be his future constituency; would be an excellent beginning for a journey to the Legislative Assembly.

Until then, at Paradise Pickles, Comrade! Comrade! (as Ammu put it) had been no more than a harmless game played outside working hours. But if the stakes were raised, and the conductor’s baton wrested from Chacko’s hands, everybody (except Chacko) knew that the factory already steeped in debt, would be in trouble.

Since things were not going well financially, the labor was paid less than the minimum rates specified by the Trade Union. Of course it was Chacko himself who pointed this out to them and promised that as soon as things picked up, their wages would be revised. He believed that they trusted him and knew that he had their best interests at heart.

But there was someone who thought otherwise. In the evenings, after the factory shift was over, Comrade K. N. M. Pillai waylaid the workers of Paradise Pickles and shepherded them into his printing press. In his reedy, piping voice he urged them on to revolution. In his speeches he managed a clever mix of pertinent local issues and grand Maoist rhetoric, which sounded even grander in Malayalam.

“People of the World,” he would chirrup, “be courageous, dare to fight, defy difficulties and advance wave upon wave. Then the whole world will belong to the People. Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed. You must demand what is rightfully yours. Yearly bonus. Provident fund. Accident insurance.”

Since these speeches were in part rehearsal for when, as the local Member of the Legislative Assembly, Comrade Pillai would address thronging millions, there was something odd about their pitch and cadence. His voice was full of green rice fields and red banners that arced across blue skies instead of a small hot room and the smell of printer’s ink.

Comrade K. N. M. Pillai never came out openly against Chacko. Whenever he referred to him in his speeches he was careful to strip him of any human attributes and present him as an abstract functionary in some larger scheme. A theoretical construct. A pawn in the monstrous bourgeois plot to subvert the revolution. He never referred to him by name, but always as “the Management” As though Chacko was many people. Apart from it being tactically the right thing to do, this disjunction between the man and his job helped Comrade Pillai to keep his conscience clear about his own private business dealings with Chacko. His contract for printing the Paradise Pickles labels gave him an income that he badly needed. He told himself that Chacko-the-client and Chacko-the-Management were two different people. Quite separate of course from Chacko-the-Comrade.

The only snag in Comrade K. N. M. Pillai’s plans was Velutha. Of all the workers at Paradise Pickles, he was the only card-holding member of the Party, and that gave Comrade Pillai an ally he would rather have done without. He knew that all the other Touchable workers in the factory resented Velutha for ancient reasons of their own. Comrade Pillai stepped carefully around this wrinkle, waiting for a suitable opportunity to iron it out.

He stayed in constant touch with the workers. He made it his business to know exactly what went on at the factory. He ridiculed them for accepting the wages they did, when their own government, the People’s Government, was in power.

When Punnachen, the accountant who read Mammachi the papers every morning, brought news that there had been talk among the workers of demanding a raise, Mammachi was furious. “Tell them to read the papers. There’s a famine on. There are no jobs. People are starving to death. They should be grateful they have any work at all.”

Whenever anything serious happened in the factory it was always to Mammachi and not Chacko that the news was brought. Perhaps this was because Mammachi fitted properly into the conventional scheme of things. She was the Modalali. She played her part. Her responses, however harsh, were straightforward and predictable. Chacko on the other hand, though he was the Man of the House, though he said “My pickles, my jam, my curry powders,” was so busy trying on different costumes that he blurred the battle lines.

Mammachi tried to caution Chacko. He heard her out, but didn’t really listen to what she was saying. So despite the early rumblings of discontent on the premises of Paradise Pickles, Chacko, in rehearsal for the Revolution, continued to play Comrade! Comrade!

That night, on his narrow hotel bed, he thought sleepily about pre-empting Comrade Pillai by organizing his workers into a sort of private labor union. He would hold elections for them. Make them vote. They could take turns at being elected representatives. He smiled at the idea of holding round-table negotiations with Comrade Sumathi, or, better still, Comrade Lucykutty; who had much the nicer hair.

His thoughts returned to Margaret Kochamma and Sophie Mol. Fierce bands of love tightened around his chest until he could barely breathe. He lay awake and counted the hours before they could leave for the airport.

On the next bed, his niece and nephew slept with their arms around each other. A hot twin and a cold one. He and She. We and Us. Somehow, not wholly unaware of the hint of doom and all that waited in the wings for them.

They dreamed of their river.

Of the coconut trees that bent into it and watched, with coconut eyes, the boats slide by. Upstream in the mornings. Downstream in the evenings. And the dull, sullen sound of the boatmen’s bamboo poles as they thudded against the dark, oiled boatwood.

It was warm, the water. Graygreen. Like rippled silk.

With fish in it.

With the sky and trees in it.

And at night, the broken yellow moon in it.

When they grew tired of waiting, the dinner smells climbed off the curtains and drifted through the Sea Queen windows to dance the night away on the dinner-smelling sea.

The time was ten to two.

Chapter 5.

God’s Own Country

Years later, when Rahel returned to the river, it greeted her with a ghastly skull’s smile, with holes where teeth had been, and a limp hand raised from a hospital bed.

Both things had happened.

It had shrunk. And she had grown.

Downriver, a saltwater barrage had been built, in exchange for votes from the influential paddy-farmer lobby. The barrage regulated the inflow of salt water from the backwaters that opened into the Arabian Sea. So now they had two harvests a year instead of one. More rice-for the price of a river.

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