The God of Small Things

“That the emptiness in one twin was only a version of the quietness in the other. That the two things fitted together. Like stacked spoons. Like familiar lovers’ bodies.” 

Here the narrator suggests the closeness of these fraternal twins: Rahel the Empty, Estha the Quiet. In their adult response to the events of Christmas 1969, they have opted for radically different strategies that are similar only in that they measure how entirely bound they both are to a past they cannot change. The suggestive simile of two lovers, however, foreshadows the closing taboo sexual encounter between the brother and sister.

“To understand history […] we have to go inside and listen to what they’re saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.” 

For the pseudo-intellectual Chacko, too eager to impose communism on the factory work force, too eager, that is, to control and direct history’s unfolding kinetics, here he espouses what for him is a Big Idea: Learn from the past. However, that approach, as the novel reveals, is a strategy for getting lost in history. The novel brings the world of 1969 to immediacy through just such a strategy as a way to suggest how the past haunts the present.

“Then a transparent Roman soldier on a spotted horse. The strange thing about Roman soldiers in the comics, according to Rahel, was the amount of trouble they took over their armor and their helmets, and then, after all that, they left their legs bear.” 

On the way back from the airport, with her aunt and cousin in tow, Rahel finds socializing awkward and prefers to stare out the window up into the sky and find images in the clouds. The imaginative flight of the Roman soldiers gives rise to deeper concerns over how vulnerable even the strongest are, a suggestion of the family’s fast-approaching tragedies.

“Big Man the Lantern. Small Man the Tallow Stick.” 

As Baby Kochamma watches reruns of Phil Donahue, she ponders the implications of this ancient Indian proverb. The proverb suggests a dark reality, how big, influential people with money and means

can dream big and achieve great things, their every step floodlit by lanterns. Little people, however, like the entire Ipe family, with little money and no means, live robbed of real opportunity. They live their lives, one terrified step at a time, lighted only by the feeblest of candles.

“She had in her the sadness of Sophie Mol coming. The sadness of Ammu’s loving her a little less. And the sadness of whatever the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man had done to Estha in Abhilash Talkies.”

The novel suggests that, despite being fraternal not identical twins, Rahel and Estha maintain a paranormal synchronicity. Here Rahel feels, against logic and without evidence, the disquiet of Estha just after he has been molested in the movie theater. She feels not only her own emotional distress over the arrival of her perky and beautiful British cousin and the recent fight she had with her mother but that of her brother as well. This connection foreshadows their closing lovemaking.

“Inside the curtain, Rahel closed her eyes and thought of the green river, of the quiet deep-swimming fish, and the gossamer wings of the dragonflies (that could see behind them) in the sun. She thought of her luckiest fishing rod that Velutha had made for her.”

The narrative, at unexpected moments, expands beyond plot and character to include images snatched from the real-time world. Hiding on the way back from the airport within the Plymouth’s protective draperies, Rahel escapes happily into thinking about the freedom of the river and its vibrant life, ironic given the accident on the same river within just days.

“Just outside Ayemenem they drove into a cabbage-green butterfly (or perhaps it drove into them.” 

Foreshadowing the drowning of Sophie and the beating death of Velutha, this quote suggests the impossibility of explanation. The narrator uses a most trivial moment, the family Plymouth squashing a butterfly, to suggest how the novel investigates moments from different angles. The novel interrogates an event until understanding it is impossible, defying the logic of causality to show that the world never provides clear sight.

“Then Rahel’s Ammu was fed to it. Her hair, her skin, her smile. Her voice. The way she used Kipling to love her children before putting them to bed.” 

Here the narrative collides Big Things like Death and Small Things like a mother reading to her children at bedtime. Because of Ammu’s divorce and her disgrace over her affair with an untouchable, she is denied church burial. She is cremated with only Chacko and Rahel in attendance. Rahel watches her mother being fed into the crematorium, sliding in with grotesque slowness as Rahel ponders the little things her mother did for her growing up.

“Ammu watched Velutha lift her daughter effortlessly as though she was an inflatable child, made of air. […] She saw the ridges of muscle on Velutha’s stomach grow taut and rise under his skin like the divisions on a slab of chocolate. She wondered at how his body had changed.” 

Here is one of those little matchflick moments, entirely unexpected, entirely unwanted, entirely unscripted, that in the end leads to a grand tragedy. Ammu, who happens to come outside at just the right moment, sees how muscular and fetching Velutha has become, the first step toward their incendiary and forbidden affair.

“A pair of actors trapped in a recondite play with no hint of plot or narrative. Stumbling through their parts, nursing someone else’s sorrow. Grieving someone else’s grief.” 

The adult Rahel ponders Estha sitting alone in his room staring through the barred windows of his old bedroom out into the hard wash of moonlight. It is so easy, she thinks, to shatter a story. She sees herself and her brother as actors in a play someone else wrote, suggesting how distant they have lived from authentic emotion and genuine human interaction, and how only the exorcism of their lovemaking might allow them to break through to the integrity of living.

“Because Anything can Happen to Anyone […] It’s Best to be Prepared.” 

These are the two lessons Estha learns from the incident in the movie theater followed by the drowning of his cousin and then the cruel manipulations of his great-aunt. That the two ideas are so completely antithetical—prepare, he decides, for what cannot be prepared for—accounts for his years of isolation and selected mutism, fearing any move can only bring catastrophe.

“If he held her, he couldn’t kiss her. If he kissed her, he couldn’t see her. If he saw her, he couldn’t feel her.” 

The twins watch as their mother twists and turns in the ecstasy of her dream. Ammu’s afternoon dream, as erotic as it is frustrating, reveals the irony of her passionate nature. She dreams of trying to make love with a one-armed man in a swift-moving river. Any way the desperate lovers move toward each other, the current or his disability stops them. It is hopeless save as a tempting and fetching impossibility. In a novel where dreams foretell the future or help explain the past, the dream foreshadows the impossible possible, the doomed nature of her affair with Velutha, the untouchable.

“Life had been lived. Her cup was full of dust. That the air, the sky, the trees, the sun, the rain, the light and darkness were all slowly turning to sand. That sand would fill her nostrils, her lungs, her mouth. Would pull her down, leaving on the surface a spinning swirl like crabs leave when they burrow downwards on a beach.” 

Ammu’s painfully honest confrontation with her own image in the mirror confirms her deepest fear: that the disastrous and calculated marriage to the abusive drunkard Baba will be her life’s only passion, the closest she will get to the fire of genuine love she burns to experience. With poetic imagery, the narrator creates Ammu’s helplessness by comparing her life, although she is still only in her late twenties, to being slowly swallowed by sand, a common symbol for the unstoppable passage of time.

“Trapped in a bog of a story that was and wasn’t theirs. That set out with the semblance of structure and order, then bolted like a frightened horse into anarchy.” 

The twins are both attending a traditional Indian theatrical performance, although significantly shortened and simplified to cater to the short attention spans of tourists. In a story-within-a-story, the performers act out the tragedy of a young handsome prince who loses his birthright and is killed by his own evil brother. The narrator juxtaposes that story with the emerging tragedy of the Ipe family, in which its own members act to destroy other members of the family.

“Being with Chacko made Margaret feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as if the world belonged to them.” 

In a novel that suggests that love invariably turns into tragedy and that passion cannot be sustained against the pressures of disappointment, here the narrator captures the first glowing days of Margaret and Chacko’s improbable whirlwind romance in London. He an Oxford student, she a waitress, they go through a Hollywood-style meet-cute and move quickly, too quickly, into marriage. Margaret grows disenchanted, even after they conceive a child, as Chacko grows more distracted and increasingly slovenly. The feeling here is as incandescent as it is ephemeral.

“If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be here! None of this would have happened! I wouldn’t be here! I would have been free! I should have dumped you in an orphanage the day you were! You’re the millstones around my neck.” 

Ammu’s furious and ill-considered outburst after her affair has been outed and her family has locked her in her bedroom reveals her desperation and anger over a life that confines her. She is helpless within the decisions she made, locked within the past. Her declamation, which triggers Estha’s decision to run away, reveals how for her the doomed affair with Velutha represents the freedom and the passion her life has long denied her.

“The God of Small Things. He left no footprints in sand, no ripples in water, no image in mirrors.” 

The narrator describes Velutha this way even as he runs desperate from first his expulsion from the Ipe family and then being chased by the local police on the trumped-up charges of rape and murder. He has been the spirit of engaging the moment, embracing the senses made vivid by the tonic shock of experience. He has lived without seeking to have consequence, the moment enough for him. He now faces the sort of consequences such simple joy over the small things ignores. The carpe diem vision means, ultimately, that the doomed Velutha himself will leave no imprint, will disappear tragically without stirring a ripple in the world, a foreshadowing of his ignominious death in the holding cell.

“He looked out on everything with a vision smudged with grief. Like a child touched by tragedy, who grows up suddenly and abandons his playthings, Chacko dumped his toys. Pickle Baron dreams and the people’s War joined the racks of broken airplanes in his glass-paned cupboard.” 

Chacko, the smug intellectual, living surrounded by bunkers of books in a dreamy world of supposition and theory, cannot handle his daughter’s death. That death is the intrusion of the real-time, real world that refuses to conform to his conceptions of a world that follows expectations and tight logic and causality, like the model airplanes he tirelessly fashions but that keep crashing into splinters against walls and trees, like his dream of setting himself up as the Pickle King. Everything works in his ideal world. His ideal world does not, really cannot, accept grief, the emotional response to profound loss without explanation.

“His feet walked him to the river. As though they were the leash and he was the dog. History walking the dog.” 

Velutha, now on the run, struggles to comprehend how his life can be so completely destroyed because of his society’s blind obeisance to an outdated system of discrimination and bigotry. Poetically, the narrator captures the essence of Velutha’s helplessness in the face of centuries of the Indian caste system. History dooms him to being an outcast, defines him, limits his identity. Despite his skill with carpentry, his charismatic charm, and his marvelously chiseled body, Velutha is as helpless as a beaten dog being led about on a heavy chain.

“Just a quiet handing-over ceremony. A boat spilling its cargo. A river accepting the offering. One small life. A brief sunbeam. With a silver thimble clenched for luck in its little fist.” 

Given the dramatic import of Sophie Mol’s drowning, the narrative account is decidedly muted. The narrative here, a sequence of unlinked fragments, suggests the nature of the accident itself. Poetically and structurally, the narrator recreates the boating accident itself, most notably how quiet a river drowning is, how, unlike other more brutal accidents, a river drowning is low-keyed, even gentle, and too easy to miss entirely.

“Scurrying hurrying buying selling luggage trundling porter paying children shitting people spitting coming begging bargaining reservation-checking. Echoing stationsounds. Hawkers selling coffee. Tea. Gaunt children, blond with malnutrition, selling smutty magazines and food they couldn’t afford to eat themselves”

Here the narrator uses language to recreate the fear building inside seven-year-old Estha as he is being taken to the train station to be sent off to live with his father, whom he barely remembers, all to ensure his great-aunt never faces prison. Words collapse into other words as the detailing is centered on the simplest sense-response to the train station chaos, much like a child too scared to do much more than look around, too terrified to think ahead. The repetition, the neologisms, and the scatter of random images recreate Estha’s apprehension and desperation as he is being hustled to the train.

“They watched, mesmerized by something that they sensed but didn’t understand. The sober, steady brutality, the economy of it all…Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear—civilization’s fear of nature […] power’s fear of powerlessness.” 

The twins, helpless, struggle to comprehend the brutality of the beating of their friend Velutha at the hands of the local police on the veranda of History House. The police do not know the children are witnessing their actions. This is raw violence committed by people the children would typically see as reassuring and reliable authority figures. The narrator’s ironic commentary underscores the vast difference between what a child sees and what an adult understands, specifically how the police action is part of a larger, wider, and far more disturbing social paradigm.

“The Inspector asked his question. Estha’s mouth said Yes.” 

In this single catastrophic moment, Estha cooperates with his great-aunt’s nefarious scheme and in so doing seals the death of Velutha. No one will ever be held accountable for beating an innocent man to death because of Estha’s complicity, his lie. In telling the inspector that the beaten Velutha, now moaning, prostrate, and bloody on the floor of the holding cell, is in fact the outlaw who kidnapped him and his sister and cousin, Estha moves in a single moment, with a single word, in a single lie, into the dark adult world of moral corruption, hypocrisy, and depthless venality.