50 pages • 1 hour read
Arundhati RoyThe God of Small Things
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 1-2 Summary
It is late spring 1993. Rahel Ipe, now in her early thirties, flies home to Ayemenem, along the southwestern coast of India, to reunite with her twin, Estha. It has been nearly 25 years since the two last saw each other. Only Rahel’s ancient great-aunt, known as Baby Kochamma, a corpulent old woman who spends most of her days watching television, still lives in the family’s home.
The narrative shifts to 1969, to the funeral of Sophie Mol, Rahel’s eight-year-old British cousin who came to visit just before Christmas with her mother, Margaret, the ex-wife of Rahel’s uncle Chacko. Only seven at the time, Rahel believes that her cousin is not actually dead: “Inside the earth Sophie Mol screamed, and shredded satin with her teeth” (9). After the service, Rahel’s mother, Ammu, takes the twins to a police station to tell the police a terrible mistake has been made, but the police turn her away. She is inconsolable, and says cryptically, “He’s dead […] I’ve killed him” (10). Two weeks later, Estha is sent away to live with his father, Baba, in faraway Calcutta. He grows up distant and isolated, seldom talking to anyone. He is “inanimate, almost invisible to the untrained eye” (12), given to taking meandering walks. Although well read, he opts not to attend university. When, more than 20 years later, in 1993, Baba retires and moves to Australia, Estha returns to Ayemenem. That is the occasion for Rahel’s return to India.
Rahel has a difficult adolescence after the death of her cousin. After her mother abruptly leaves shortly after the funeral, Rahel struggles through a succession of schools. She is a discipline problem. She lacks ambition and focus—she studies architecture in Delhi for more than eight years but never finishes the degree. She meets an American doctoral student while in Delhi, indifferently marries him, moves to Boston, and indifferently divorces him. She is working as a cashier in an all-night gas station when her great-aunt calls to tell her Estha is coming home.
Years earlier, her great-aunt, known as Baby Kochamma, fell in love with a visiting Irish monk when she was 18. Her obsession with the handsome, if unattainable, priest drove her to convert to Catholicism and even take vows as a nun and join a convent just to be near him. The obsession collapsed of its own irony. After two years, still pining for the monk, she renounced the convent, obtained a degree in ornamental gardening, and returned to Ayemenem. Over the years, her carefully designed gardens for the family home have fallen into neglect, and Baby Kochamma, now in her eighties, spends her days watching American television reruns.
Rahel, preparing to reunite with her twin brother, thinks back to 1969 and decides that “it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem” (32). Things, she now realizes, can change in a single day. Maybe, though, it is more accurate to say that the family’s tragedy dates not to the girl’s death but rather to the day, decades before, when India enacted the Love Laws, which strictly define which social class can marry which class—in effect “who should be loved, and how” (33).
The narrative then returns to 1969. The family is crowded into their boxy powder-blue Plymouth on the way to the airport in Cochin to pick up Margaret and Sophie. Devasted by the sudden death of her second husband in a car accident, Margaret accepted Chacko’s invitation to spend the weeks around the approaching Christmas holidays in Ayemenem. The family, however, plans to stop along the way to the airport to see, for the third time, The Sound of Music. The twins are excited about meeting their cousin for the first time. In the years after his marriage ended, Chacko, a Rhodes scholar with an intense interest in history and political theory, returned to Ayemenem to take over the family’s pickle and preserves factory. He is fond of saying, “To understand history, we have to go inside and listen to what they’re saying” (51). His room is stacked with books on communism, and he believes bringing that message to the workers in the chutney factory would revolutionize its production. In his spare time, Chacko fashions model airplanes, his room cluttered with the flimsy broken balsam models.
His sister, the beautiful Ammu, the twins’ mother, fled Ayemenem shortly after high school for Calcutta, where she met and married an assistant manager of a tea estate. The marriage was a disaster. They had the twins, but the marriage was stormy. Her husband was a heavy drinker and beat her regularly. When his manager threatened to terminate him, Baba actually offered sex with Ammu as an incentive for him to stay on. Outraged, Ammu left her husband and returned to the family home with the twins. In the eyes of her conservative family and town, however, she was unwelcome, a disgrace: “[A] married daughter had no position in her parents’ home” (45).
On the way to the theater, the family’s Plymouth is engulfed by a swarming crowd from a communist rally. They wave red flags and chant revolutionary slogans. Someone opens the door of the Plymouth and sticks a flag into the hands of a stunned and embarrassed Baby Kochamma and taunts her into repeating one of the workers’ slogans. The old woman is humiliated. At the height of the encounter, Rahel thinks she sees in the crowd a friend of the twins’, Velutha, a young, strapping Black man who works as a carpenter and handyman at the pickle factory. Despite being a Paravan, the lowest social class and thus considered untouchable, Velutha had gained the twins’ trust and confidence for his patience and gentle wisdom. Years later Rahel remembers Velutha’s father coming to their house enraged, offering to kill his own son “to destroy what he had created” (75). As the crowd moves away, the family heads to the movie theater.
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
These two chapters bring the focus not on the story but rather on how this story will be told. In a traditional narrative, the opening chapters offer exposition—critical background information about the principal characters and what a reader needs to know before the action begins. That action moves forward, compelled by suspense and sustained by causality, toward a closing dramatic high point through a carefully designed series of linked events that work through foreshadowing to make that dramatic end inevitable and logical. The story here begins after that dramatic moment, with the funeral of young Sophie Mol. The reader has no idea how the girl has died or even the context of the death, but only the grotesque storytelling through the perception of a young Rahel, who does not believe the girl is dead. Then the novel teleports to several years later, when Rahel’s mother dies. Then the story of the great-aunt’s doomed infatuation with a visiting Irish monk is shared. The effect may be dizzying for readers.
The two chapters move backward and forward through large splices of time. The challenge is not to reassemble the narrative into some traditional linear sequence but rather, like Sophie Mol herself in the turbulent river, to be immersed in the kinetics of non-linear time. The movement introduced here upends the traditional storytelling devices of suspense and foreshadowing, plot and causality. Even before Sophie Mol arrives in the narrative, the reader knows she dies, and this knowledge colors any happy moments in the storyline: The storytelling form creates fear and dread as the reader knows what will happen before the characters know.
In addition to introducing the novel's non-linear storytelling, the first two chapters reveal how the novel will use setting. The opening pages recreate Ayemenem, a remote town in the state of Kerala along India’s southwestern coast. In these opening pages, the town emerges as a kind of character that, much like the characters themselves, is both animal and civilized, untamed and disciplined, past and present. On the first page, the narrator notes how the brick walls turn “moss green” in the early summer heat; the “wild creepers” lace the roads; even small fish from the nearby Meenachal River, which freely overruns its shore, flop about helplessly stranded in road puddles. The novel investigates the tragedy inevitable when people, otherwise educated and civilized, yield to their animal instincts, most notably violence and sex. Later, the narrator shares that Baby Kochamma had a degree in garden design, and yet that splendid symmetrical design of her original plans has yielded to wild growth. The narrative moves into more civilized settings: the university, the church, city hall, police headquarters, where people are thoughtful, intellectual, and reasonable. Even there, however, passion upends, disturbs, or implodes. The setting of the town, thus, warns that reason and passion are in tension and that the threat emerges when the primitive, the sensual, the biological, or the wild get free rein. The doomed relationship between Baby Kochamma and the priest related here foreshadows other doomed relationships driven by obsession uncomplicated by reason, most notably the affair between Ammu and Velutha and the taboo late-night interlude between the grown-up twins. For now, the novel introduces a palpable sense of that tension.
The opening chapters then provide a quick primer on how to read the novel itself by shuttling between plot points separated at times by entire decades. Confusion during the first reading is understandable, even inevitable. The key to the novel is not to focus on the lives of the Ipe family or even the tragic deaths that begin the family’s dissolution—by the end of these two chapters, the novel has shared only that the British girl Sophie will die and that someone else, identified by a grieving Ammu only as “him,” will also be dead. Given the complex formal structure, the novel has little interest in generating traditional suspense over what happened.
Rather, these opening chapters focus on bits of memories, snatches of realistic scenery, fragments of conversations: a ride to an airport; an old, morbidly obese woman munching peanuts and watching television, an enthusiastic communist street rally; a middle-aged man making model airplanes—less a story, more bits of stories, or what the narrator calls: “Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story” (32). These chapters move toward what seems an equally minor, decidedly non-dramatic plot point: The family heads to a movie theater to watch, for the third time no less, The Sound of Music. In her efforts to make the 20-mile drive more friendly, Baby Kochamma starts to sing one of the show’s melodies, “So Long, Farewell,” whose lyrics, quoted as Chapter 2 ends, celebrate with a giddy sort of silliness the swift passage of time, the happy movement from day to night. Ironically, that show tune announces the very theme, the passage of time and how easy getting lost in the past can be, that will define the tragedy of the lives of the family happily crowded into the powder-blue Plymouth.
