Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things

She was just that sort of animal.

As a child, she had learned very quickly to disregard the Father Bear Mother Bear stories she was given to read. In her version, Father Bear beat Mother Bear with brass vases. Mother Bear suffered those beatings with mute resignation.

In her growing years, Ammu had watched her father weave his hideous web. He was charming and urbane with visitors, and stopped just short of fawning on them if they happened to be white. He donated money to orphanages and leprosy clinics. He worked hard on his public profile as a sophisticated, generous, moral man. But alone with his wife and children he turned into a monstrous, suspicious bully, with a streak of vicious cunning. They were beaten, humiliated and then made to suffer the envy of friends and relations for having such a wonderful husband and father.

Ammu had endured cold winter nights in Delhi hiding in the mehndi hedge around their house (in case people from Good Families saw them) because Pappachi had come back from work out of sorts, and beaten her and Mammachi and driven them out of their home.

On one such night, Ammu, aged nine, hiding with her mother in the hedge, watched Pappachi’s natty silhouette in the lit windows as he flitted from room to room. Not content with having beaten his wife and daughter (Chacko was away at school), he tore down curtains, kicked furniture and smashed a table lamp. An hour after the lights went out, disdaining Mammachi’s frightened pleading, little Ammu crept back into the house through a ventilator to rescue her new gumboots that she loved more than anything else. She put them in a paper bag and crept back into the drawing room when the lights were suddenly switched on.

Pappachi had been sitting in his mahogany rocking chair all along, rocking himself silently in the dark. When he caught her, he didn’t say a word. He flogged her with his ivory-handled riding crop (the one that he had held across his lap in his studio photograph). Ammu didn’t cry. When he finished beating her he made her bring him Mammachi’s pinking shears from her sewing cupboard. While Ammu watched, the Imperial Entomologist shred her new gumboots with her mother’s pinking shears. The strips of black rubber fell to the floor. The scissors made snicking scissor-sounds. Ammu ignored her mother’s drawn, frightened face that appeared at the window. It took ten minutes for her beloved gumboots to be completely shredded. When the last strip of rubber had rippled to the floor, her father looked at her with cold, flat eyes, and rocked and rocked and rocked. Surrounded by a sea of twisting rubber snakes.

As she grew older, Ammu learned to live with this cold, calculating cruelty. She developed a lofty sense of injustice and the mulish, reckless streak that develops in Someone Small who has been bullied all their lives by Someone Big. She did exactly nothing to avoid quarrels and confrontations. In fact, it could be argued that she sought them out, perhaps even enjoyed them.

“Has she gone?” Mammachi asked the silence around her.

“She’s gone,” Kochu Maria said loudly.

“Are you allowed to say `damn’ in India?” Sophie Mol asked.

“Who said ‘damn’?” Chacko asked.

“She did,” Sophie Mol said. “Aunty Ammu. She said some damn godforsaken tribe.’”

“Cut the cake and give everybody a piece,” Mammachi said. “Because in England, we’re not,” Sophie Mol said to Chacko. “Not what?” Chacko said.

“Allowed to say Dee Ay Em En,” Sophie Mol said. Mammachi looked sightlessly out into the shining afternoon. “Is everyone here?” she asked.

“ Oower Kochamma,” the Blue Army in the greenheat said. “We’re all here.”

Outside the Play, Rahel said to Velutha: “We’re not here are we? We’re not even Playing.”

“That is Exactly Right,” Velutha said. “We’re not even Playing. But what I would like to know is, where is our Esthapappychachen Kuttappen Peter Mon?”

And that became a delighted, breathless, Rumpelstiltskin-like dance among the rubber trees.

Oh Esthapappychachen Kuttappen Peter Mon.

Where, oh where have you gon?

And from Rumpelstiltskin it graduated to the Scarlet Pimpernel.

We seek him here, we seek him there,

Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.

Is be in heaven? Is be in hell?

That demmedel-usive Estha -Pen?

Kochu Maria cut a sample piece of cake for Mammachi’s approval.

“One piece each,” Mammachi confirmed to Kochu Maria, touching the piece lightly with rubyringed fingers to see if it was small enough.

Kochu Maria sawed up the rest of the cake messily, laboriously, breathing through her mouth, as though she was carving a hunk of roast lamb. She put the pieces on a large silver tray.

Mammachi played a Welcome Home, Our Sophie Mol melody on her violin.

A cloying, chocolate melody. Stickysweet, and meltybrown. Chocolate waves on a chocolate shore.

In the middle of the melody, Chacko raised his voice over the chocolate sound.

“Mamma!” he said (in his Reading Aloud voice). “Mamma! That’s enough! Enough violin!”

Mammachi stopped playing and looked in Chacko’s direction, the bow poised in midair.

“Enough? D’you think that’s enough, Chacko?”

“More than enough,” Chacko said.

“Enough’s enough,” Mammachi murmured to herself. “I think I’ll stop now.” As though the idea had suddenly occurred to her.

She put her violin away into its black, violin-shaped box. It closed like a suitcase. And the music closed with it.

Click. And click.

Mammachi put her dark glasses on again. And drew the drapes across the hot day.

Ammu emerged from the house and called to Rahel. “Rahel! I want you to have your afternoon nap! Come in after you’ve had your cake!”

Rahel’s heart sank. Afternoon Gnap. She hated those.

Ammu went back indoors.

Velutha put Rahel down, and she stood forlornly at the edge of the driveway, on the periphery of the Play, a Gnap looming large and nasty on her horizon.

“And please stop being so over-familiar with that man!” Baby Kochamma said to Rahel.

“Over-familiar?” Mammachi said. “Who is it, Chacko? Who’s being over-familiar?”

“Rahel,” Baby Kochamma said.

“Over-familiar with who?” “With whom,” Chacko corrected his mother. “All right, with whom is she being over-familiar?” Mammachi asked.

“Your Beloved Velutha-whom else?” Baby Kochamma said, and to Chacko, “Ask him where he was yesterday. Let’s bell the cat once and for all.”

“Not now,” Chacko said.

“`What’s over-familiar?” Sophie Mol asked Margaret Kochamma, who didn’t answer.

“Velutha? Is Velutha here? Are you here?” Mammachi asked the Afternoon.

“ Oower , Kochamma.” He stepped through the trees into the Play.

“Did you find out what it was?” Mammachi asked.

“The washer in the foot-valve,” Velutha said. “I’ve changed it. It’s working now.”

“Then switch it on,” Mammachi said. “The tank is empty.”

“That man will be our Nemesis,” Baby Kochamma said. Not because she was clairvoyant and had had a sudden flash of prophetic vision. Just to get him into trouble. Nobody paid her any attention.

“Mark my words,” she said bitterly.

“See her?” Kochu Maria said when she got to Rahel with her tray of cake. She meant Sophie Mol. “When she grows up, she’ll be our Kochamma, and she’ll raise our salaries, and give us nylon saris for Onam.” Kochu Maria collected saris, though she hadn’t ever worn one, and probably never would.

“So what?” Rahel said. “By then I’ll be living in Africa.”

“Africa?” Kochu Maria sniggered. “Africa’s full of ugly black people and mosquitoes.”