Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things

Maybe they’re right, Ammu’s whisper said as she packed his trunk and hold-all. Maybe a boy does need a Baba.

The thicklipped man was in the coup‚ next to Estha’s. He said he’d try and change seats with someone once the train started.

For now he left the little family alone.

He knew that a hellish angel hovered over them. Went where they went Stopped where they stopped. Dripping wax from a bent candle.

Everybody knew.

It had been in the papers. The news of Sophie Mol’s death, of the police “Encounter” with a Paravan charged with kidnapping and murder. Of the subsequent Communist Party siege of Paradise Pickles & Preserves, led by Ayemenem’s own Crusader for Justice and Spokesman of the Oppressed. Comrade K. N. M. Pillai claimed that the Management had implicated the Paravan in a false police case because he was an active member of the Communist Party.

That they wanted to eliminate him for indulging in “Lawful Union Activities.”

All that had been in the papers. The Official Version.

Of course the thicklipped man with rings had no idea about the other version.

The one in which a posse of Touchable Policemen crossed the Meenachal River, sluggish and swollen with recent rain, and picked their way through the wet undergrowth, clumping into the Heart of Darkness.

A posse of Touchable Policemen crossed the Meenachal River, sluggish and swollen with recent rain, and picked their way through the wet undergrowth, the clink of handcuff in someone’s heavy pocket.

Their wide khaki shorts were rigid with starch, and bobbed over the tall grass like a row of stiff skirts, quite independent of the limbs that moved inside them.

There were six of them. Servants of the State.

Politeness.

Obedience.

Loyalty.

Intelligence.

Courtesy.

Efficiency.

The Kottayam Police. A cartoonplatoon. New-Age princes in funny pointed helmets. Cardboard lined with cotton. Hairoil stained. Their shabby khaki crowns.

Dark of Heart.

Deadlypurposed.

They lifted their thin legs high, clumping through tall grass. Ground creepers snagged in their dewdamp leghair. Burrs and grass flowers enhanced their dull socks. Brown millipedes slept in the soles of their steel-tipped, Touchable boots. Rough grass left their legskin raw, crisscrossed with cuts. Wet mud fatted under their feet as they squelched through the swamp.

They trudged past darter birds on the tops of trees, drying their sodden wings spread out like laundry against the sky. Past egrets. Cormorants. Adjutant storks. Sarus cranes looking for space to dance. Purple herons with pitiless eyes. Deafening, their wraark wraark wraark. Motherbirds and their eggs.

The early morning heat was full of the promise of worse to come. Beyond the swamp that smelled of still water, they walked past ancient trees cloaked in vines. Gigantic mani plants. Wild pepper. Cascading purple acuminus.

Past a deepblue beetle balanced on an unbending blade of grass. Past giant spider webs that had withstood the rain and spread like whispered gossip from tree to tree.

A banana flower sheathed in claret bracts hung from a scruffy, torn-leafed tree. A gem held out by a grubby schoolboy. A jewel in the velvet jungle.

Crimson dragonflies mated in the air. Doubledeckered. Deft. One admiring policeman watched and wondered briefly about the dynamics of dragonfly sex, and what went into what. Then his mind clicked to attention and Police Thoughts returned.

Onwards.

Past tall anthills congealed in the rain. Slumped like drugged sentries asleep at the gates of Paradise.

Past butterflies drifting through the air like happy messages.

Huge ferns.

A chameleon.

A startling shoeflower.

The scurry of gray jungle fowl running for cover.

The nutmeg tree that Vellya Paapen hadn’t found.

A forked canal. Still. Choked with duckweed. Like a dead green snake. A tree trunk fallen over it. The Touchable Policemen minced across. Twirling polished bamboo batons.

Hairy fairies with lethal wands.

Then the sunlight was fractured by thin trunks of tilting trees.

Dark of Heart neS~ &-tiptoed 4fl to the Heart of Darkness. The sound of stridulating crickets swelled.

Gray squirrels streaked down mottled trunks of rubber trees that slanted towards the sun. Old scars slashed across their bark. Sealed. Healed. Untapped.

Acres of this, and then, a grassy clearing. A house.

The History House.

Whose doors were locked and windows open.

With cold stone floors and billowing, ship-shaped shadows on the walls.

Where waxy ancestors with tough toe-nails and breath that smelled of yellow maps whispered papery whispers.

Where translucent lizards lived behind old paintings.

Where dreams were captured and re-dreamed.

Where an old Englishman ghost, sickled to a tree, was abrogated by a pair of two-egg twins-a Mobile Republic with a Puff who had planted a Marxist flag in the earth beside him. As the platoon of policemen minced past they didn’t hear him beg. In his kindmissionary voice. Excuse me, would you, umm… you wouldn’t happen to umm… I don’t suppose you’d have a cigar on you? No?… No, I didn’t think so.

The History House.

Where, in the years that followed, the Terror (still-to-come) would be buried in a shallow grave. Hidden under the happy humming of hotel cooks. The humbling of old Communists. The slow death of dancers. The toy histories that rich tourists came to play with.

It was a beautiful house.

White-walled once. Red-roofed. But painted in weather-colors now. With brushes dipped in nature’s palette. Mossgreen. Earthbrown. Crumbleblack. Making it look older than it really was. Like sunken treasure dredged up from the ocean bed. Whale-kissed and barnacled. Swaddled in silence. Breathing bubbles through its broken windows.

Deep verandah ran all around. The rooms themselves were recessed, buried in shadow. The tiled roof swept down like the sides of an immense, upside-down boat. Rotting beams supported on once-white pillars had buckled at the center, leaving a yawning, gaping hole. A History-hole. A History-shaped Hole in the Universe through which, at twilight, dense clouds of silent bats billowed like factory smoke and drifted into the night.

They returned at dawn with news of the world. A gray haze in the rosy distance that suddenly coalesced and blackened over the house before it plummeted through the History-hole like smoke in a film running backwards.

All day they slept, the bats. Lining the roof like fur. Spattering the floors with shit.

The policemen stopped and fanned out. They didn’t really need to, but they liked these Touchable games.

They positioned themselves strategically. Crouching by the broken, low stone boundary wall.

Quick piss.

Hot foam on warm stone. Police-piss.

Drowned ants in yellow bubbly.

Deep breaths.

Then together, on their knees and elbows, they crept towards the house. Like Film-policemen. Softly, softly through the grass. Batons in their hands. Machine guns in their minds. Responsibility for the Touchable Future on their thin but able shoulders.

They found their quarry in the back verandah. A Spoiled Puff. A Fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo. And in another corner (as lonely as a wolf)-a carpenter with blood-red nails.

Asleep. Making nonsense of all that Touchable cunning.

The Surprise Swoop.

The Headlines in their heads.

Desperado Caught in Police Dragnet

For this insolence, this spoiling-the-fun, their quarry paid. Oh yes.

They woke Velutha with their boots.

Esthappen and Rahel woke to the shout of sleep surprised by shattered kneecaps.