The God Of Small Things

The God Of Small Things

Arundhati Roy

For Mary Roy who grew me up.

Who taught me to say 'excuse me' before interrupting her in Public.

Who loved me enough to let me go.

For LKC, who, like me, survived.

Never again will a single story be told as though it's the only one - John Begoer

In those early amorphous years when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and everything was For Ever.

Her tears made everything that had so far seemed unreal, real.

It was always there. Like a fruit in season. Every season. As permanent as a government job.

Neglect seemed to have resulted in an accidental release of the spirit. 

Though you couldn't see the River from the house any more, like a seashell always has a sea-sense,  the Ayemebem house still has a river-sense.

A rushing, rolling, fishswimming sense.

 They used to make pickles, squashes, Curry powders and canned pineapples. And Banana Jam (illegally) after the FPO (food products organization) banned it because according to their specifications it was neither Jam nor jelly. Too thin for jelly and too thick for jam ,an ambiguous unclassifiable consistency they said

As per their books.

Looking Back Now, to Rahel it seemed as though this difficulty that their family had with classification ran much deeper than the Jam-jelly question.

perhaps Ammu, Estha and she were the worst transgressors. but it wasn't just them. It was the others too. They all broke the rules. they all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. and how much.

 The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers Mothers, cousins cousins, Jam jam and jelly jelly.

It was a time when uncles became fathers, mothers lovers, and cousins died and had funerals.

It was a time when the unthinkable became thinkable and the impossible really happened.

Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.

Still, to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem is only one way of looking at it.

Equally, it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago. Long before the Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch Ascendency, before Vasco da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin's conquest of Calicut. Before three purple-robbed Syrian bishops murdered by the Portuguese were found floating in the sea, with coiled sea serpents riding on their chests and oysters knotted in their tangled beards. It could be argued that it began long before  Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag.

That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.

And how much

However, for practical purposes, in a hopelessly practical world...

It was the kind of time in the life of a family when something happens to nudge its morality from its resting place and make it bubble to the surface and float for a while. In a clear view. For everyone to see.

One of her ambitions was to own a watch on which she could change the time whenever she wanted to (which according to her was what time was meant for in the first place)

Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things they could get used to

Chacko told the twins that though he hated to admit it, they were all anglophiles. They were a family of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history, and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away. He explained to them that history was like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside.

"To understand history," Chacko said, " We have to go inside and listen to what they're saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells".

[...]

"But we can't go in", Chacko explained, "because we've been locked out. And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, becuase our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves."

[...]

"Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter"

This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurts.

The trees were still green, the sky still blue which counted for something.

She died alone. With a noisy ceiling fan for company and no Estha to lie at the back of her and talk to her. She was thirty-one. Not old, not young, but a viable, die-able age.

She had a deep blue sac under one eye that was bloated like a bubble. As though her eye had tried to do what her lungs couldn't.

It was odd driving through bright, busy streets with a dead Roman senator on the floor of the van. It made the blue sky bluer. Outside the van windows, people, like cutout paper puppets, went on with their paper-puppet lives. Real life was inside the van. Where real death was.

The door of the furnace clanged shut. There were no tears. The crematorium 'In-Charge' had gone down the road for a cup of tea and didn't come back for twenty minutes. That's how long Chacko and Rahel had to wait for the pink receipt that would entitle them to collect Ammu's remains. Her ashes. The grit from her bones. The teeth from her smile. The whole of her crammed into a little clay pot. Receipt No. Q498673

To be fair to comrade Pillai, he did not plan the course of events that followed. He merely slipped his ready fingers into history's waiting glove.

There was no storm-music. No whirlpool spun up from the only depths of the Meenachal. No shark supervised the tragedy. Just a quiet handing over ceremony. A boat spilling its cargo. A river accepting the offering. One small life. A brief sunbeam