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
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