Arundhati Roy: The God of Small Things

“As soon as I get a job. As soon as I can go away from here and get a job,” Ammu said. -

“But that will be never!” A wave of panic. A bottomless bottomful feeling.

The eating lady eavesdropped indulgently.

“See how nicely he speaks English,” she said to her children in Tamil.

“But that will be never,” her oldest daughter said combatively… “En ee vee ee aar. Never.”

By “never” Estha had only meant that it would be too far away. That it wouldn’t be now, wouldn’t be soon.

By “never” he hadn’t meant, Not Ever.

But that’s how the words came out

But that will be never!

For Never they just took the 0 and Tout of Not Ever.

They?

The Government.

Where people were sent to Jolly Well Behave.

And that’s how it had all turned out.

Never. Not Ever.

It was his fault that the faraway man in Ammu’s chest stopped shouting. His fault that she died alone in the lodge with no one to lie at the back of her and talk to her.

Because he was the one that had said it But Ammu that will be never! “Don’t be silly, Estha. It’ll be soon,” Ammu’s mouth said. “I’ll be a teacher. I’ll start a school. And you and Rahel will be in it.”

“And we’ll be able to afford it because it will be Ours!” Estha said with his enduring pragmatism. His eye on the main chance. Free bus rides. Free funerals. Free education. Little Man. He lived in a cara-van. Dum dum.

“We’ll have our own house,” Ammu said.

“A little house,” Rahel said.

“And in our school we’ll have classrooms and blackboards,” Estha said.

“And chalk.”

“And Real Teachers teaching.”

“And proper punishments,” Rahel said.

This was the stuff their dreams were made of. On the day that Estha was Returned. Chalk. Blackboards. Proper punishments.

They didn’t ask to be let off lightly. They only asked for punishments that fitted their crimes. Not ones that came like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. Not ones you spent your whole life in, wandering through its maze of shelves.

Without warning the train began to move. Very slowly.

Estha’s pupils dilated. His nails dug into Ammu’s hand as she walked along the platform. Her walk turning into a run as the Madras Mail picked up speed.

Godbless, my baby. My sweetheart. I’ll come for you soon!

“Ammu!” Estha said as she disengaged her hand. Prising loose small finger after finger.

“Ammu! Feeling vomity!”

Estha’s voice lifted into a wail.

Little Elvis-the-Pelvis with a spoiled, special-outing puff. And beige and pointy shoes. He left his voice behind.

On the station platform Rahel doubled over and screamed and screamed.

The train pulled out. The light pulled in.

Twenty-three years later, Rahel, dark woman in a yellow T-shirt, turns to Estha in the dark.

“Esthapappychachen Kuttappen Peter Mon,” she says.

She whispers.

She moves her mouth.

Their beautiful mother’s mouth.

Estha, sitting very straight, waiting to be arrested, takes his fingers to it. To touch the words it makes. To keep the whisper. His fingers follow the shape of it. The touch of teeth. His hand is held and kissed.

Pressed against the coldness of a cheek, wet with shattered rain.

Then she sat up and put her arms around him. Drew him down beside her.

They lay like that for a long time. Awake in the dark. Quietness and Emptiness.

Not old. Not young.

But a viable die-able age.

They were strangers who had met in a chance encounter. They had known each other before Life began.

There is very little that anyone could say to clarify what happened next. Nothing that (in Mammachi’s book) would separate Sex from Love. Or Needs from Feelings.

Except perhaps that no Watcher watched through Rahel’s eyes. No one stared out of a window at the sea. Or a boat in the river. Or a passerby in the mist in a hat.

Except perhaps that it was a little cold. A little wet. But very quiet. The Air.

But what was there to say?

Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons. Only that there was a snuffling in the hollows at the base of a lovely throat. Only that a hard honeycolored shoulder had a semicircle of teethmarks on it. Only that they held each other close, long after it was over. Only that what they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief.

Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.

On the roof of the abandoned factory, the lonely drummer drummed. A gauze door slammed. A mouse rushed across the factory floor. Cobwebs sealed old pickle vats. Empty, all but one-in which a small heap of congealed white dust lay. Bone dust from a Bar Nowl. Long dead. Pickled owl.

In answer to Sophie Mol’s question: Chacko, where do old birds go to die? Why don’t dead ones fall like stones from the sky?

Asked on the evening of the day she arrived. She was standing on the edge of Baby Kochamma’s ornamental pond looking up at the kites wheeling in the sky.

Sophie Mol. Hatted, bell-bottomed and Loved from the Beginning.

Margaret Kochamma (because she knew that when you travel to the Heart of Darkness [b] Anything can Happen to Anyone) called her in to have her regimen of pills. Filaria. Malaria. Diarrhea. She had no prophylaxis, unfortunately, for Death by Drowning.

Then it was time for dinner.

“Supper, silly,” Sophie Mol said when Estha was sent to call her.

At supper silly, the children sat at a separate smaller table. Sophie Mol, with her back to the grown-ups, made gruesome faces at the food. Every mouthful she ate was displayed to her admiring younger cousins, half-chewed, mulched, lying on her tongue like fresh vomit.

When Rahel did the same, Ammu saw her and took her to bed.

Ammu tucked her naughty daughter in and switched off the light. Her goodnight kiss left no spit on Rahel’s cheek and Rahel could tell that she wasn’t really angry.

“You’re not angry, Ammu.” In a happy whisper. A little more her mother loved her.

“No.”

Ammu kissed her again.

“Goodnight, sweetheart. Godbless.”

“Goodnight, Ammu. Send Estha soon.” And as Ammu walked away she heard her daughter whisper, “Ammu!”

“What is it?”

“ We be of one blood, Thou and I! ”

Ammu leaned against the bedroom door in the dark, reluctant to return to the dinner table, where the conversation circled like a moth around the white child and her mother as though they were the only source of light. Ammu felt that she would die, wither and die, if she heard another word. If she had to endure another minute of Chacko’s proud, tennis-trophy smile. Or the undercurrent of sexual jealousy that emanated from Mammachi. Or Baby Kochamma’s conversation that was designed to exclude Ammu and her children, to inform them of their place in the scheme of things.

As she leaned against the door in the darkness, she felt her dream, her Afternoon-mare, move inside her like a rib of water rising from the ocean, gathering into a wave. The cheerful one-armed man with salty skin and a shoulder that ended abruptly like a cliff emerged from the shadows of the jagged beach and walked towards her.

Who was he?

Who could he have been?

The God of Loss.

The God of Small Things.

The God of Goosebumps and Sudden Smiles.

He could do only one thing at a time.

If he touched her he couldn’t talk to her, if he loved her be couldn’t leave, if he spoke he couldn’t listen, if he fought be couldn’t win.

Ammu longed for him. Ached for him with the whole of her biology.

She returned to the dinner table.