Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things

Screams died in them and floated belly up, like dead fish. Cowering on the floor, rocking between dread and disbelief, they realized that the man being beaten was Velutha. Where had he come from? What had he done? Why had the policemen brought him here?

They heard the thud of wood on flesh. Boot on bone. On teeth. The muffled grunt when a stomach is kicked in. The muted crunch of skull on cement. The gurgle of blood on a man’s breath when his lung is torn by the jagged end of a broken rib.

Blue-lipped and dinner-plate-eyed, they watched, mesmerized by something that they sensed but didn’t understand: the absence of caprice in what the policemen did. The abyss where anger should have been. The sober, steady brutality, the economy of it all.

They were opening a bottle.

Or shutting a tap.

Cracking an egg to make an omelette.

The twins were too young to know that these were only history’s henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear-civilization’s fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of powerlessness.

Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.

Men’s Needs.

What Esthappen and Rahel witnessed that morning, though they didn’t know it then, was a clinical demonstration in controlled conditions (this was not war after all, or genocide) of human nature’s pursuit of ascendancy. Structure. Order. Complete monopoly. It was human history, masquerading as God’s Purpose, revealing herself to an under-age audience.

There was nothing accidental about what happened that morning. Nothing incidental. It was no stray mugging or personal settling of scores. This was an era imprinting itself on those who lived in it.

History in live performance.

If they hurt Velutha more than they intended to, it was only because any kinship, any connection between themselves and him, any implication that if nothing else, at least biologically he was a fellow creature-had been severed long ago. They were not arresting a man, they were exorcising fear. They had no instrument to calibrate how much punishment he could take. No means of gauging how much or how permanently they had damaged him.

Unlike the custom of rampaging religious mobs or conquering armies running riot, that morning in the Heart of Darkness the posse of Touchable Policemen acted with economy, not frenzy. Efficiency, not anarchy. Responsibility, not hysteria. They didn’t tear out his hair or burn him alive. They didn’t hack off his genitals and stuff them in his mouth. They didn’t rape him. Or behead him.

After all they were not battling an epidemic. They were merely inoculating a community against an outbreak.

In the back verandah of the History House, as the man they loved was smashed and broken, Mrs. Eapen and Mrs. Rajagopalan, Twin Ambassadors of God-knows-what, learned two new lessons.

Lesson Number One:

Blood barely shows on a Black Man. (Dum dum)

And

Lesson Number Two:

It smells though.

Sicklysweet.

Like old roses on a breeze. (Dum dum)

“ Madiyo? ” one of History’s Agents asked.

“ Madi aayirikkum, ”another replied.

Enough?

Enough.

They stepped away from him. Craftsmen assessing their work. Seeking aesthetic distance.

Their Work, abandoned by God and History; by Marx, by Man, by Woman, and-in the hours to come-by Children, lay folded on the floor. He was semi-conscious, but wasn’t moving.

His skull was fractured in three places. His nose and both his cheekbones were smashed, leaving his face pulpy, undefined. The blow to his mouth had split open his upper lip and broken six teeth, three of which were embedded in his lower lip, hideously inverting his beautiful smile. Four of his ribs were splintered, one had pierced his left lung, which was what made him bleed from his mouth. The blood on his breath bright red. Fresh. Frothy. His lower intestine was ruptured and hemorrhaged, the blood collected in his abdominal cavity. His spine was damaged in two places, the concussion had paralyzed his right arm and resulted in a loss of control over his bladder and rectum. Both his kneecaps were shattered.

Still they brought out the handcuffs.

Cold.

With the sourmetal smell. Like steel bus rails and the bus conductor’s hands from holding them. That was when they noticed his painted nails. One of them held them up and waved the fingers coquettishly at the others. They laughed.

“What’s this?” in a high falsetto. “AC-DC?”

One of them flicked at his penis with his stick. “Come on, show us your special secret. Show us how big it gets when you blow it up.” Then he lifted his boot (with millipedes curled into its sole) and brought it down with a soft thud.

They locked his arms across his back.

Click.

And click.

Below a Lucky Leaf. An autumn leaf at night. That made the monsoons come on time.

He had goosebumps where the handcuffs touched his skin.

“It isn’t him,” Rahel whispered to Estha. “I can tell. It’s his twin brother. Urumban. From Kochi.”

Unwilling to seek refuge in fiction, Estha said nothing.

Someone was speaking to them. A kind Touchable Policeman. Kind to his kind.

“Mon, Mol, are you all right? Did he hurt you?” And not together, but almost, the twins replied in a whisper. “Yes. No.”

“Don’t worry. You’re safe with us now.”

Then the policemen looked around and saw the grass mat. The pots and pans.

The inflatable goose.

The Qantas koala with loosened button eyes. The ballpoint pens with London’s streets in them. Socks with separate colored toes.

Yellow-rimmed red plastic sunglasses.

A watch with the time painted on it.

“Whose are these? Where did they come from? Who brought them?” An edge of worry in the voice.

Estha and Rahel, full of fish, stared back at him.

The policemen looked at one another. They knew what they had to do.

The Qantas koala they took for their children.

And the pens and socks. Police children with multicolored toes. They burst the goose with a cigarette. Bang. And buried the rubber scraps.

Yooseless goose. Too recognizable.

The glasses one of them wore. The others laughed, so he kept them on for awhile.

The watch they all forgot. It stayed behind in the History House. In the back verandah.

A faulty record of the time. Ten to two.

They left.

Six princes, their pockets stuffed with toys.

A pair of two-egg twins.

And the God of Loss.

He couldn’t walk. So they dragged him.

Nobody saw them.

Bats, of course, are blind.

At the police station, Inspector Thomas Mathew sent for two Coca-Colas. With straws. A servile constable brought them on a plastic tray and offered them to the two muddy children sitting across the table from the Inspector, their heads only a little higher than the mess of files and papers on it

So once again, in the space of two weeks, bottled Fear for Estha. Chilled. Fizzed. Sometimes Things went worse with Coke.

The fizz went up his nose. He burped. Rahel giggled. She blew through her straw till the drink bubbled over onto her dress. All over the floor. Estha read aloud from the board on the wall.

“ssenetiloP,” he said. “ssenetiloP, ecneidebO.”

“ytlayoL, ecnegilletnI,” Rahel said.

“ysetruoC.”

“ycneiciffE.”

To his credit, Inspector Thomas Mathew remained calm. He sensed the growing incoherence in the children. He noted the dilated pupils. He had seen it all before… the human mind’s escape valve. Its way of managing trauma. He made allowances for that, and couched his questions cleverly. Innocuously. Between When is your birthday, Mon? and What’s your favorite color, Mol?