Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things

On Saturday we went to a bookshop in Kottayam to buy Ammu a present because her birthday is in 17th of novembre. We bore her a diary. We hid it in the coherd and then it began to be night. Then we said do you want to see your present she said, yes I would like to see it. and we wrote on the paper For a Little Ammu with Love from Estha and Rahel and we gave it to Ammu and she said what a lovely present its just what I whanted and then we talked for a little while and we talked about the diary then we gave her a kiss and went to bed.

We talked with each other and went of to sleep. We had a little dream.

After some time I got up and I was very thirsty and went to Ammu’s room and said I am thirsty. Ammu gave me water and I was just going to my bed when Ammu called me and said come and sleep with me. and I lay at the back of Ammu and talked to Ammu and went of to sleep. After a little while I got up and we talked again and after that we had a mi~~~ f~st. we had orange coffee bananana. afterwards Rahel came and we ate two more bananas and we gave a kiss to Ammu because it was her birthday afterwards we sang happy birthday. Then in the morning we had new cloths from Ammu as a back-present. Rahel was a maharani and I was Little Nehru.

Ammu had corrected the spelling mistakes, and below the essay had written: If I am Talking to somebody you may interrupt me only if it is very urgent. When you do, please say “Excuse me.” I will punish you very severely if you disobey these instructions. Please complete your corrections.

Little Ammu.

Who never completed her corrections.

Who had to pack her bags and leave. Because she had no Locusts Stand I. Because Chacko said she had destroyed enough already.

Who came back to Ayemenem with asthma and a rattle in her chest that sounded like a faraway man shouting.

Estha never saw her like that.

Wild. Sick. Sad.

The last time Ammu came back to Ayemenem, Rahel had just been expelled from Nazareth Convent (for decorating dung and slamming into seniors). Ammu had lost the latest of her succession of jobs-as a receptionist in a cheap hotel-because she had been ill and had missed too many days of work. The hotel couldn’t afford that, they told her. They needed a healthier receptionist.

On that last visit, Ammu spent the morning with Rahel in her room. With the last of her meager salary she had bought her daughter small presents wrapped in brown paper with colored paper hearts pasted on. A packet of cigarette sweets, a tin Phantom pencil box and Paul Bunyan-a Junior Classics Illustrated comic. They were presents for a seven-year-old; Rahel was nearly eleven. It was as though Ammu believed that if she refused to acknowledge the passage of time, if she willed it to stand still in the lives of her twins, it would. As though sheer willpower was enough to suspend her children’s childhoods until she could afford to have them living with her. Then they could take up from where they left off. Start again from seven. Ammu told Rahel that she had bought Estha a comic too, but that she’d kept it away for him until she got another job and could earn enough to rent a room for the three of them to stay together in. Then she’d go to Calcutta and fetch Estha, and he could have his comic. That day was not far off, Ammu said. It could happen any day. Soon rent would be no problem. She said she had applied for a UN job and they would all live in The Hague with a Dutch ayah to look after them. Or on the other hand, Ammu said, she might stay on in India and do what she had been planning to do all along-start a school. Choosing between a career in Education and a UN job wasn’t easy, she said-but the thing to remember was that the very fact that she had a choice was a great privilege.

But for the Time Being, she said, until she made her decision, she was keeping Estha’s presents away for him.

That whole morning Ammu talked incessantly. She asked Rahel questions, but never let her answer them. If Rahel tried to say something, Ammu would interrupt with a new thought or query. She seemed terrified of what adult thing her daughter might say and thaw Frozen Time. Fear made her garrulous. She kept it at bay with her babble.

She was swollen with cortisone, moonfaced, not the slender mother Rahel knew. Her skin was stretched over her puffy cheeks like shiny scar tissue that covers old vaccination marks. When she smiled, her dimples looked as though they hurt. Her curly hair had lost its sheen and hung around her swollen face like a dull curtain. She carried her breath in a glass inhaler in her tattered handbag. Brown Brovon fumes. Each breath she took was like a war won against the steely fist that was trying to squeeze the air from her lungs. Rahel watched her mother breathe. Each time she inhaled, the hollows near her collarbones grew steep and filled with shadows.

Ammu coughed up a wad of phlegm into her handkerchief and showed it to Rahel. “You must always check it,” she whispered hoarsely, as though phlegm was an Arithmetic answer sheet that had to be revised before it was handed in. “When it’s white, it means it isn’t ripe. When it’s yellow and has a rotten smell, it’s ripe and ready to be coughed out. Phlegm is like fruit. Ripe or raw. You have to be able to tell.”

Over lunch she belched like a truck driver and said, “Excuse me,” in a deep, unnatural voice. Rahel noticed that she had new, thick hairs in her eyebrows, long-like palps. Ammu smiled at the silence around the table as she picked fried emperor fish off the bone. She said that she felt like a road sign with birds shitting on her. She had an odd, feverish glitter in her eyes.

Mammachi asked her if she’d been drinking and suggested that she visit Rahel as seldom as possible.

Ammu got up from the table and left without saying a word. Not even good-bye. “Go and see her off,” Chacko said to Rahel.

Rahel pretended she hadn’t heard him. She went on with her fish. She thought of the phlegm and nearly retched. She hated her mother then. Hated her.

She never saw her again.

Ammu died in a grimy room in the Bharat Lodge in Alleppey, where she had gone for a job interview as someone’s secretary. She died alone. With a noisy ceiling fan for company and no Estha to lie at the back of her and talk to her. She was thirty-one. Not old, not young, but a viable, die-able age.

She had woken up at night to escape from a familiar, recurrent dream in which policemen approached her with snicking scissors, wanting to hack off her hair. They did that in Kottayam to prostitutes whom they’d caught in the bazaar-branded them so that everybody would know them for what they were. Veshyas. So that new policemen on the beat would have no trouble identifying whom to harass. Ammu always noticed them in the market, the women with vacant eyes and forcibly shaved heads in the land where long, oiled hair was only for the morally upright.

That night in the lodge, Ammu sat up in the strange bed in the strange room in the strange town. She didn’t know where she was, she recognized nothing around her. Only her fear was familiar. The faraway man inside her began to shout. This time the steely fist never loosened its grip. Shadows gathered like bats in the steep hollows near her collarbone.

The sweeper found her in the morning. He switched off the fan.

She had a deep blue sac under one eye that was bloated like a bubble. As though her eye had tried to do what her lungs couldn’t. Some time close to midnight, the faraway man who lived in her chest had stopped shouting. A platoon of ants carried a dead cockroach sedately through the door, demonstrating what should be done with corpses.

The church refused to bury Ammu. On several counts. So Chacko hired a van to transport the body to the electric crematorium. He had her wrapped in a dirty bedsheet and laid out on a stretcher. Rahel thought she looked like a Roman Senator. Et tu, Ammu? she thought and smiled, remembering Estha.