Summer Read: The God of Small Things

And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these only the Small Things are ever said. The Big Things lurk unsaid inside. 

Chapter 6: Cochin Kangaroos.

Aside from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, no other book has compelled me to read it again while I’m still in the first chapter. Until I read Arundhati Roy’s debut novel, The God of Small Things (1997).

At the start of the novel, the readers learn that someone has died and someone has been returned. These two narrative lines are the major cords in which the other strands of the plot are weaved in. The details, however, are revealed fully in the latter chapters, tying loose ends of the narrative while at the same time making these the climax. Little details—clues—however, are littered in several chapters. This technique, which was also used in the film Never Let Me Go, sustains the reader’s interest because the question, ‘what happened?’ has not been answered.

The story is set in Kerala, India, which, a day after I finished reading the novel, I saw in the film Before the Rains. Now, Kerala is included in places I want to go to before the world ends. The way Roy describes it and the house reminds me of Macondo and the house in Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, sans the characters that are so many you get confused who’s who. In Roy’s novel, the matriarch Mamachi, the sinister spinster Baby Kochama, the TV junkie Kocha Maria, Mamachi’s children—Chacko, Ammu— and Ammu’s fraternal twins--Estha and Rahel--inhabit the house. Sometimes, the untouchable Velutha, a key character who is a worker in the family’s factory and a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, is permitted to put his feet inside the house.

Roy tells this story so beautifully, weaving in issues of the caste system, which laid down ‘Love Laws’ that order people “who should be loved. And how. And how much,” the Communist revolution, domestic violence, and incest among others. At its core, however, the novel is a story of the early loss of innocence of the fraternal twins after they crossed the river one rainy night with Sophie Mol, Chacko’s white daughter with the English, Margaret Kochama. After the incident, all their lives changed: Estha was returned to his father; Ammu left the house to look for work and save enough, so she can get her twins to live with her; Rahel was left at the house but eventually went to the US to marry and work as a waitress. Eventually, the twins returned to the house in Ayemenem to share their grief and desperation in a moment that violates the Love Laws.

This and another forbidden love between Velutha and Ammu explain the idea of the novel's title. As stated in the quote above, the Big Things--namely, the Love Laws, the class difference between the two adults--are left unsaid because they tend to complicate things, Small Things, like Love.

Stylistically, Roy is a genius. I haven’t read any novel in which I stop reading after almost every sentence to savor the beauty of her words, in which I smile at the surprising precision of description (“sour smell of steel,”  “sad hips”), in which I breathe deeply, amazed at the explosion of feelings that her poetry in prose invokes. In addition, the non-linear temporal structure of the novel attests to her mastery of the craft.

The God of Small Things is worth a read, perhaps twice or thrice. Too bad I only borrowed my copy. The second reading would have to be postponed for now.