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 15-21Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 15-21 Summary
In the brief Chapter 15, Velutha, naked and on the run, completes his midnight swim across the swift and uncertain currents of the Meenachal River. His strokes are powerful and sure. His affair with Ammu exposed, his family denying him, his job gone, his life in jeopardy, he wants only to find refuge in the History House, where he and Ammu met for their assignations. Despite his anxiety, Velutha, the “God of Small Things,” is still defiantly optimistic, strangely happy, certain that somehow everything will work out.
Chapter 16 takes place a few hours later. It is after midnight. Sophie joined Estha and Rahel in running away, demanding she be allowed to go with them on their adventure as a way to make their parents feel even worse about driving them all away. The three sit in the dark along the river bank. They climb into the little boat that Velutha helped make seaworthy, and they set off across the river to their destination, History House. Just as the boat edges out into the deep water, however, it collides with a stray log floating downriver. The boat tips over and dumps the children into the fetid, swirling water. Rahel and Estha, separated in the swift current, find their way to the shore, but Sophie is gone. They call for her. Terrified, they push through the swampy grass to the refuge of the History House, where they collapse, exhausted, on the house’s massive veranda. They do not see the sleeping figure of Velutha just a few yards away in the shadows.
In Chapter 17, the novel returns to the present. Estha sits alone on his bed in the dark. Downstairs, Baby Kochamma writes, as she does every night, in her diary, each entry beginning with an inscription dedicated to the memory of the Irish monk she loved decades earlier but who died some four years earlier. Upstairs, Estha recalls the emotional day his uncle Chacko, in a monstrous rage over the death of his daughter, summarily kicked Ammu out of the house, blaming her assignation with Velutha for Sophie’s death. Indeed, local newspapers had trumpeted the details of the arrest of the renegade Paravan. The true story of Velutha’s arrest, the narrator intones, would never be told.
Chapter 18 returns to History House and centers on the arrest and brutal beating of Velutha. It begins with the posse of six police picking their way through the wet undergrowth along the river as they approach the darkened edifice of the History House in the early morning of the children’s reported disappearance. They find Velutha asleep on the veranda. They mercilessly beat him, kicking him repeatedly, striking him with wooden boards, cracking his bones, smashing his nose and cheeks, splintering his ribs, and puncturing his lungs. They work him over like machines: “The sober, steady brutality, the economy of it all” (292). Velutha puts up no struggle, and one officer handcuffs him early on. Unseen in the dark, the twins watch the beating in silent horror. When the officers, exhausted from beating Velutha, notice the children, they congratulate themselves for saving the children from this savage. They drag the unconscious Velutha to the waiting paddy wagon.
In Chapter 19, the family gathers at the police station just after Velutha has been brought in. Estha and Rahel have already told the captain that Velutha did not kidnap them nor is he responsible for the death of their cousin, which was an accident. The captain, furious that an innocent man is now in his jail beaten nearly to death for apparently no cause, confronts Baby Kochamma, whose original story began the manhunt. He threatens her with jail for filing a false report unless she can get the twins to corroborate her lie. Determined to scare the twins into lying for her, she tells the two that if they do not tell the police that Velutha is responsible, their mother and maybe even the two of them will go to prison. She tells them that Velutha is going to die anyway, so they need to help her to save their mother. Terrified, Estha accompanies the captain to Velutha’s dank, dark lock-up, where Velutha, gasping for breath, lays on the floor slippery with his blood and urine. When the captain asks Estha if this is the man who kidnapped them, Estha quietly says, “Yes.” At that moment, “Childhood tiptoed out” (303).
After Sophie’s funeral, when a grieving and desperate Ammu goes to the police station to try to clear Velutha’s name, Baby Kochamma realizes that she and Estha are still threats. The conniving old woman “gnawed like a rat into the godown of Chacko’s grief” until finally she coerces the distraught father to get rid of them both (305).
Chapter 20 follows Estha on the train ride to begin his time with a father he barely remembers. Rahel, at the train station, cannot suppress her anger, and as the train pulls away, she doubles over and screams. In the narrative present, now that he understands the role his mother played in the tragedy of both Sophie’s drowning and Velutha’s beating, Estha, sitting at the edge of his bed, still cannot forgive himself for the part he played, particularly the lie he told in the holding cell. Quietly, his sister joins him in the dark and puts her arm around him before drawing him down beside her. The narrator says, “There is very little that anyone could say to clarify what happened next” (311). The twins make love, driven not by happiness or lust but by rather by “hideous grief.”
The final chapter records one of the heated encounters between Velutha and Ammu in the empty rooms of the abandoned History House. Over the two weeks of their affair, the two make love in ways that transform the physical act into a profound spiritual experience for both of them. They delight in the sheer sensual impact of their coupling, their sweating bodies moving in a tight and tense choreography, made that much more exciting against the possibility of being discovered: “Biology designed the dance. Terror timed it” (317). Stirred by the emotional experience of their unchained lovemaking, they suddenly, inexplicably delight in the smallest things, like a spider that watches them from a corner. When the lovers depart from each other, they refuse to consider anything bigger than the tender promise that they will see each other tomorrow.
Chapters 15-21 Analysis
The novel to this point tracks as inevitable the slow spiral into a kind of hopeless helplessness. Each character comes to see the oppressive enormity of a dark world that refuses to permit heroic action and denies any gesture toward hope, a world that in turn makes into victims those who try to assert the dignity of purpose or the integrity of a moral identity. These closing chapters, however, deny that oppressive weight and work to offer decidedly unironic hope. In the emergence of Baby Kochamma as the novel’s twisted, malevolent villain, in the state-sanctioned execution of the innocent Velutha, and ultimately in two very different, yet equally potent and redemptive lovemaking scenes, the novel affirms that in a dark world driven by Big Things, contentment, peace, and hope come only from the Small Things.
At this point in the novel, the plot needs a villain. So much of the novel has been locked within a claustrophobic feeling of hopelessness. Characters are trapped by forces they cannot control. They are left to struggle with puny gestures of reacting to soured luck. Baby Kochamma, who seems to this point a comical character, emerges here as a dark, vindictive, and petty force driven by her own fantasies and paranoia, moving events to her malignant will. Her family nickname—Baby—belies her emergence here as an agent of willful and deliberate villainy. She emerges as the cause, directly and indirectly, of the drowning death of Sophie and the brutal beating of Velutha as well as the exile of Ammu and the return of Estha to a father he barely knows.
Motivated by her selfishness and hypocrisy, she quickly acts to condemn Ammu, who dares to have a taboo affair when she, Baby Kochamma, was denied her own taboo affair. Baby Kochamma cannot get to the police station quickly enough to file a bogus charge against Velutha because she thinks that Velutha might have been in the Communist street rally that swarmed the family’s Plymouth and embarrassed her by making her wave a workers’ flag as a joke. For that, and because she does not see untouchables as actual human beings with feelings and rights, she hatches the plot to destroy Velutha and, in the process, punish Ammu, an act that in turn spurs the departure of the children, which in turn makes inevitable the tragic crossing of the Meenachal. It is her direct manipulation of Estha, however, that defines her as the novel’s operating villain. With callous indifference to the psychological impact on a boy already traumatized by his role in his cousin’s death, Baby Kochamma, to avoid being arrested for filing a false report, threatens Estha and his sister and even their mother with jail time unless Estha, just seven years old, lies to the police and identifies his friend, the gentle and kind Velutha, beaten and now near death, as a kidnapper and murderer. Here at last a villain emerges, clear and defined, a critical narrative moment in a novel just beginning its arc toward hope.
Despair is not the last word. Before the closing chapter, reading the novel can seem like being trapped in a claustrophobic narrative space. In the end, the novel offers love itself as the single gesture of value and worth in a selfish, violent world driven by malevolent people and blind forces. In keeping with the novel’s dark tone, the love is denied value by the very toxic society that the novel depicts. Love is defined as shameful, taboo, a sin. The novel closes with two love scenes, one the quiet collapse into mutual need that pulls the twins together, a shocking but not entirely unexpected incestuous encounter, the other the passionate lovemaking session between Ammu and Velutha. The twins ease back into each other’s arms as Rahel, operating less out of carnal lust and more out of a grievous hurt and a “hideous grief,” reaches out for the only person who has ever entirely understood her, her twin. The sexual encounter is rendered here only in the most abstract way: “Awake in the dark. Quietness and Emptiness” (310). Even the narrator withholds judgment on the incestuous act: “What is there to say?” (311).
In a novel rife with emotionally charged dramatic moments, the novel’s climax is not the drowning death of Sophie Mol (that is a scarce sentence or two) nor the arrest and bloody execution of Velutha, but rather the lovemaking scene, at once tender and hungry, between Ammu and Velutha in History House. Unlike the scene between the twins, this scene is vivid, physical, sweaty, and slick: “She pressed the heat of his erection next to her eyelids. She tasted him, salty, in her mouth. She felt his belly tighten under her, hard as a board. She felt her wetness slipping on his skin” (318). The novel closes with the hungry lovers saying goodbye, preparing reluctantly to return to the very world that within days will render their love darkly ironic: They promise each other the smallest gesture of hope, the gift of a tomorrow. On that note, indeed, on that word, tomorrow, the novel closes. It is the only kind of love, the only kind of hope, a novel like this can tender: Tomorrow is at once fragile and unyielding, as perilous as it is reassuring, as much desperate as it is redemptive.
