The God
of Small Things is the debut novel of
Indian writer Arundhati Roy. It is a story about the
childhood experiences of fraternal
twins whose lives are destroyed. The book explores how the
small things affect people's behavior and their lives. It won the Booker Prize in
1997.
She began writing the manuscript for The
God of Small Things in 1992 and finished four years later, in 1996. It
was published the following year. The story is set in Ayemenem,
now part of Kottayam district in Kerala, India. Ammu Ipe is
desperate to escape her ill-tempered father, known as Pappachi, and her bitter,
long-suffering mother, known as Mammachi. She persuades her parents to let her
spend a summer with a distant aunt in Calcutta. To avoid returning to Ayemenem,
she marries a man there, but later discovers that he is an alcoholic, and he
physically abuses her and tries to pimp her to his boss. She gives birth to
Rahel and Estha, leaves her husband, and returns to Ayemenem to live with her
parents and brother, Chacko, who has returned to India from England after
his divorce from an English woman, Margaret, and the subsequent death of
Pappachi.
The multi-generational family home in Ayemenem
also includes Pappachi's sister, Navomi Ipe, known as Baby Kochamma. As a young
girl, Baby Kochamma fell in love with Father Mulligan, a young Irish priest,
who had come to Ayemenem. To get closer to him, Baby Kochamma converted
to Roman Catholicism and joined a convent
against her father's wishes. After a few months in the convent, she realized
that her vows brought her no closer to the man she loved. Her father eventually
rescued her from the convent and sent her to America.
Because of her unrequited love for Father Mulligan, Baby Kochamma remained
unmarried for the rest of her life, becoming deeply embittered over time.
Throughout the book, she delights in the misfortune of others and constantly
manipulates events to bring calamity.
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.
The God of Small Things
The death of Margaret's second husband in a car
accident prompts Chacko to invite her and Sophie (Margaret's and Chacko's
daughter) to spend Christmas in Ayemenem. En route to the airport to pick up
Margaret and Sophie, the family visits a theater. On the way to the theater,
they encounter a group of Communist protesters, who surround the car and force
Baby Kochamma to wave a red flag and chant a Communist slogan, thus humiliating
her. Rahel thinks she sees Velutha, a servant who works for the family's pickle
factory among the protesters. Later at the theater, Estha is sexually molested
by the "Orangedrink Lemondrink Man", a vendor working the snack counter.
Estha's experience factors into the tragic events at the heart of the
narrative.
Rahel's assertion that she saw Velutha in the
Communist mob causes Baby Kochamma to associate Velutha with her humiliation at
the protesters' hands, and she begins to harbor enmity toward him. Velutha is
a dalit (lower
caste in India). Rahel and Estha form an unlikely bond with Velutha and come to
love him despite his caste status. It is her children's love for Velutha that
causes Ammu to realize her own attraction to him, and eventually, she comes to
"love by night the man her children loved by day". Ammu and Velutha
begin a short-lived affair that culminates in tragedy for the family.
When her relationship with Velutha is discovered,
Ammu is locked in her room and Velutha is banished. In her rage, Ammu blames
the twins for her misfortune and calls them "millstones around her
neck". Distraught, Rahel and Estha decide to run away. Their cousin,
Sophie also joins them. During the night, as they try to reach an abandoned
house across the river, their boat capsizes and Sophie drowns. When Margaret
and Chacko return from a trip, they see Sophie's body laid out on the sofa.
Baby Kochamma goes to the police and accuses
Velutha of being responsible for Sophie's death. A group of policemen hunt
Velutha down, savagely beat him for crossing caste lines, and arrest him on the
brink of death. The twins, huddling in the abandoned house, witness the
horrific scene. Later, when they reveal the truth to the chief of police he is
alarmed. He knows that Velutha is a Communist, and is afraid that if word gets
out that the arrest and beating were wrongful; it will cause unrest among the
local Communists. He threatens to hold Baby Kochamma responsible for falsely
accusing Velutha. To save herself, Baby Kochamma tricks Rahel and Estha into
believing that the two of them would be implicated as having murdered Sophie
out of jealousy and were facing sure imprisonment for them and their Ammu. She
thus convinces them to lie to the inspector that Velutha had kidnapped them and
had murdered Sophie. Velutha dies of his injuries overnight.
After Sophie's funeral, Ammu goes to the police to
tell the truth about her relationship with Velutha. Afraid of being exposed,
Baby Kochamma convinces Chacko that Ammu and the twins were responsible for his
daughter's death. Chacko kicks Ammu out of the house and forces her to send
Estha to live with his father. Estha never sees Ammu again. Ammu dies alone a
few years later at the age of 31.
After a turbulent childhood and adolescence in
India, Rahel gets married and goes to America. There, she divorces before
returning to Ayemenem after years of working dead-end jobs. Rahel and Estha,
now 31, are reunited for the first time since they were children. They had been
haunted by their guilt and their grief-ridden pasts. It becomes apparent that
neither twin ever found another person, who understood them in the way they
understand each other. Toward the end of the novel, the twins have sex. The
novel comes to a close with a nostalgic recounting of Ammu and Velutha's love
affair.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_of_Small_Things
