The God of Small Things

History House figures as a central location in the novel. It is a physical place, a rambling, reputedly haunted home in Ayemenem just off the Meenachal River, an imposing edifice, a remnant of more than a century of British colonial rule. It is also a symbol, a metaphor of how a culture, indeed individuals, are defined by and even trapped by their own history.

As a literal place, History House symbolizes both safety and risk, both protection and vulnerability. The house symbolizes how in the end no place is safe. The abandoned house serves as the meeting place for Ammu and Velutha’s clandestine assignations during their two-week affair in 1969. Far from the judgmental eyes and the very real dangers of the town, they make love in many of the house’s great empty rooms. When the affair is exposed and Velutha fears for his life, he seeks the isolation and protection of the house. In addition, when Estha searches for a safe haven after his molestation, a place where the creepy snack vendor cannot reach, he determines the History House, which to that point is only an element of town legend, offers the safe sanctuary he needs. In the end, the house provides neither character the safety they need. The affair is exposed when Velutha’s own father sees his son with Ammu; the police squad swarms the house grounds in search of Velutha and beats him to death on the house’s wide, dark veranda; and Estha’s odyssey to the house is upended after the accident in the river crossing. The house symbolizes there is no refuge from history.

Chacko, an intellectual given to bloviating about Big Ideas, rambles to young Rahel and Estha, unable to follow his metaphor, about the nature of history itself. He says India as a culture was locked into a house of its own making. India, he says, is trapped within a history that dates back centuries, the vestigial manifestation of which is the logic of the caste system and India’s long and difficult emergence from the influence of colonialism when the continent was a satellite of Great Britain:

Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away. He explained that history was like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside (51).

Although Chacko’s philosophizing is beyond the understanding of his niece and nephew, his argument shapes the logic of the novel. As both a place and a symbol, History House suggests history cannot be ignored. To understand the present, one must pay attention to the smallest details of the past and listen to what those details speak. Only then can the present be fully appreciated for its dark complexity.

Sex emerges as a symbol of both liberation and enslavement, both damnation and salvation. In keeping with the novel’s complex view that demands embracing multiple and contradictory versions of both events and people, the novel’s investigation into sexuality defines sex as both toxic and corrosive, sinful and shameful yet redemptive and reanimating, a celebration of the highest expression of the physical and an affirmation of the spiritual. However, sex can be weaponized to subjugate and humiliate someone vulnerable and weak. When not used for procreation, sex is redefined by India’s conservative religion and its culture as an expression of the basest animal nature. For Ammu, for Velutha, for Margaret, even for Rahel and Estha, sex can be relished as freedom at last from the drudgery of the everyday and the tortuous prison of dust and lust.

The novel uses three tipping point events, each centered on sex, to structure this complex vision: the molestation of young Estha by the snack vendor in the movie theater; the passionate affair between the beautiful, sex-starved Ammu and her powerful Black paramour Velutha, an untouchable; and the incestuous interlude between the twins, now in their thirties, each desperate for the simplest consolation of closeness. Extrapolating from those events a simple and easy reading of sex as a symbolic act is clearly frustrated. The snack vendor manipulates a helpless boy, coaxing Estha, at first curious and then ashamed, into helping him masturbate during the long and boring afternoon working the concession stand. Even as the man gratefully acknowledges the boy’s help and the cleansing relief of his orgasm, the act haunts Estha. He is physically sick on the way home from the theater. He reconstructs it in his memory as a threat, and his fear of the vendor’s return compels him to orchestrate the exodus from the home that leads, in the end, to the death of his cousin. Ammu pursues the forbidden Velutha spurred as much by her longing as by her reckless and crazy spirit of freedom, which sees in that forbidden relationship a powerful gesture of independence and empowerment. In addition, the sex is tectonic. That relationship, however, is directly responsible for multiple catastrophes. Sex in this case, powerful and cleansing, topples the first domino in what quickly becomes a chain of causality that ends with the drowning of her niece, the brutal death of Velutha, and Ammu’s precipitous exile from her home and her children.

Certainly the intimacy between Estha and Rahel disturbs, even though the narrator cautions that the two are driven into each’s arms more by “hideous grief” and unhealable hurt than by lust. The twins make love not as brother and sister but rather like “strangers who had met in a chance encounter” (310). Sex rescues the two. As the narrator acknowledges, “There is very little that anyone can say to clarify what happened” (310). At once immoral and illegal, sex nevertheless revivifies and consoles and as such represents a compassionate, if desperate, gesture of hope. That paradox summarizes Roy’s vision of sex.

Identical twins have long been used in pop culture and in literature to explore the dimensions of behavior itself, how a single person can sustain multiple, often contradictory, identities, and how fragile and unreliable is any attempt to define a person. The symbolical import of two people created from a single egg means they are regarded as aspects of a single person or as interchangeable psychologies. Unlike identical twins conceived in a single egg that splits, Rahel and Estha are fraternal, or dizygotic, twins, that is two distinct people birthed from two separate eggs fertilized by two separate sperm. They do not much resemble each other physically. They are easy to tell apart. They develop different interests, explore entirely different dress styles and musical tastes, and perform academically at different levels.

They are in fact entirely different types, Rahel outgoing, sensitive, impulsive, and easily hurt; Estha introspective, buoyant, stoic, bookish, and aloof. This biological characteristic allows the novel to examine how multiple perceptions of the same set of events make ironic the concept of reliable and fixed truth. Truth here is plural.

Early on Rahel feels emotionally tied to her twin despite their lack of physical similarities and their different genders. The narrator explains:

In those early amorphous years when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was Forever. Esthappen and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us. As though they were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities (5).

The paradox of that shared/split identity suggests the novel’s larger argument about truth, history, and memory. The fragmented, disjointed narrative, with its multiple perspectives and its constant movement between past and present and its retelling of events from different vantage points and from different moments, suggests how any one event can never be entirely contained within a single perception. Thus, despite their long separation, the twins never entirely lose that sense of connection even as they move into separate lives. Separate but united, two yet one, at once me and we, the twins symbolize the fragmented yet unified perception of events sustained by the novel itself. History is at best a collision of valid perceptions, and any truth is at best truth enough.