Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things

Hooded in her own hair, Ammu leaned against herself in the bathroom mirror and tried to weep.

For herself.

For the God of Small Things.

For the sugar-dusted twin midwives of her dream.

That afternoon-while in the bathroom the fates conspired to horribly alter the course of their mysterious mother’s road, while in Velutha’s backyard an old boat waited for them, while in a yellow church a young bat waited to be born-in their mother’s bedroom, Estha stood on his head on Rahel’s bum.

The bedroom with blue curtains and yellow wasps that worried the windowpanes. The bedroom whose walls would soon learn their harrowing secrets.

The bedroom into which Ammu would first be locked and then lock herself. Whose door Chacko, crazed by grief, four days after Sophie Mol’s funeral, would batter down.

“Get out of my house before I break every bone in your body!”

My house. My pineapples. My pickle.

After that for years Rahel would dream this dream: a fat man, faceless, kneeling beside a woman’s corpse. Hacking its hair off. Breaking every bone in its body. Snapping even the little ones. The fingers. The ear bones cracked like twigs. Snapsnap the soft sound of breaking bones. A pianist killing the piano keys. Even the black ones. And Rahel (though years later, in the Electric Crematorium, she would use the slipperiness of sweat to slither out of Chacko’s grasp) loved them both. The player and the piano.

The killer and the corpse.

As the door was slowly battered down, to control the trembling of her hands, Ammu would hem the ends of Rahel’s ribbons that didn’t need hemming.

“Promise me you’ll always love each other,” she’d say, as she drew her children to her.

“Promise,” Estha and Rahel would say. Not finding words with which to tell her that for them there was no Each, no Other.

Twin millstones and their mother. Numb millstones. What they had done would return to empty them. But that would be Later.

Lay Ter. A deep-sounding bell in a mossy well. Shivery and furred like moth’s feet.

At the time, there would only be incoherence. As though meaning had slunk out of things and left them fragmented. Disconnected. The glint of Ammu’s needle. The color of a ribbon. The weave of the cross-stitch counterpane. A door slowly breaking. Isolated things that didn’t mean anything. As though the intelligence that decodes life’s hidden patterns-that connects reflections to images, glints to light, weaves to fabrics, needles to thread, walls to rooms, love to fear to anger to remorse-was suddenly lost.

“Pack your things and go,” Chacko would say, stepping over the debris. Looming over them. A chrome door handle in his hand. Suddenly strangely calm. Surprised at his own strength. His bigness. His bullying power. The enormity of his own terrible grief.

Red the color of splintered doorwood.

Ammu, quiet outside, shaking inside, wouldn’t look up from her unnecessary hemming. The tin of colored ribbons would lie open on her lap, in the room where she had lost her Locusts Stand I.

The same room in which (after the Twin Expert from Hyderabad had replied) Ammu would pack Estha’s little trunk and khaki holdall: 12 sleeveless cotton vests, 12 half-sleeved cotton vests. Estha, here’s your name on them in ink. His socks. His drainpipe trousers. His pointy-collared shirts. His beige and pointy shoes (from where the Angry Feelings came). His Elvis records. His calcium tablets and Vydalin syrup. His Free Giraffe (that came with the Vydalin). His Books of Knowledge Vols. 1-4. No, sweetheart, there won’t be a river there to fish in. His white leather zip-up Bible with an Imperial Entomologist’s amethyst cuff-link on the zip. His mug. His soap. His Advance Birthday Present that he mustn’t open. Forty green inland letter forms. Look, Estha, I’ve written our address on it. All you have to do is fold it. See if you can fold it yourself. And Estha would fold the green inland letter neatly along the dotted lines that said Fold here and look up at Ammu with a smile that broke her heart. Promise me you’ll write? Even when you don’t have any news?

Promise, Estha would say. Not wholly cognizant of his situation. The sharp edge of his apprehensions blunted by this sudden wealth of worldly possessions. They were His. And had his name on them in ink. They were to be packed into the trunk (with his name on it) that lay open on the bedroom floor.

The room to which, years later, Rahel would return and watch a silent stranger bathe. And wash his clothes with crumbling bright blue soap.

Flatmuscled, and honey colored. Sea-secrets in his eyes. A silver raindrop on his ear.

Esthapappychachen Kutappen Peter Mon.

The sound of the chenda mushroomed over the temple, accentuating the silence of the encompassing night. The lonely, wet road. The watching trees. Rahel, breathless, holding a coconut, stepped into the temple compound through the wooden doorway in the high white boundary wall.

Inside, everything was white-walled, moss-tiled and moonlit. Everything smelled of recent rain. The thin priest was asleep on a mat on the raised stone verandah. A brass platter of coins lay near his pillow like a comic-strip illustration of his dreams. The compound was littered with moons, one in each mud puddle. Kochu Thomban had finished his ceremonial rounds, and lay tethered to a wooden stake next to a steaming mound of his own dung. He was asleep, his duty done, his bowels empty, one tusk resting on the earth, the other pointed to the stars. Rahel approached quietly. She saw that his skin was looser than she remembered. He wasn’t Kochu Thomban anymore. His tusks had grown. He was Vellya Thomban now. The Big Tusker. She put the coconut on the ground next to him. A leathery wrinkle parted to reveal a liquid glint of elephant eye. Then it closed and long, sweeping lashes re-summoned sleep. A tusk towards the stars.

June is low season for kathakali. But there are some temples that a troupe will not pass by without performing in. The Ayemenem temple wasn’t one of them, but these days, thanks to its geography, things had changed.

In Ayemenem they danced to jettison their humiliation in the Heart of Darkness. Their truncated swimming-pool performances. Their turning to tourism to stave off starvation.

On their way back from the Heart of Darkness, they stopped at the temple to ask pardon of their gods. To apologize for corrupting their stories. For encashing their identities. Misappropriating their lives.

On these occasions, a human audience was welcome, but entirely incidental.

In the broad, covered corridor-the colonnaded kuthambalam abutting the heart of the temple where the Blue God lived with his flute, the drummers drummed and the dancers danced, their colors turning slowly in the night Rahel sat down cross-legged, resting her back against the roundness of a white pillar. A tall canister of coconut oil gleamed in the flickering light of the brass lamp. The oil replenished the light. The light lit the tin.

It didn’t matter that the story had begun, because kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.