The God of Small Things Read online

  Praise for THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS

  “Brilliant … Magically written… One can only strongly recommend this extremely funny and enchanting and pretty much genius piece of debut fiction.”

  — The Spectator

  “Roy peels away the layers of her mysteries with such delicate cunning, such a dazzlingly adroit shuffle of accumulating revelations that to discuss the plot would be to violate it. Like a devotionally built temple, The God of Small Things builds a massive interlocking structure of fine, intensely felt details. A novel of real ambition must invent its own language, and this one does.”

  — John Updike, The New Yorker

  “The quality of Ms Roy’s narration is so extraordinary — at once so morally strenuous and so imaginatively supple — that the reader remains enthralled all the way to its agonising finish. A devastating first novel”

  — The New York Times Book Review

  “Saturated with whimsical inventiveness and lush, evocative description…. Arundhati Roy’s novel has a magic and mystery all its own.”

  — The Toronto Star

  “A masterpiece, utterly exceptional in every way… The joy of The God of Small Things is that it appeals equally to the head and the heart. It is clever and complex, yet it makes one laugh, and finally, moves one to tears.”

  — Harpers & Queen

  “A banquet for all the senses we bring to reading.”

  — Newsweek

  “The God of Small Things is a first novel of remarkable resonance and originality. Arundhati Roy has been compared to Salman Rushdie and the comparison is apt: like Rushdie she is a dazzling stylist, someone who loves the sound and play of words. Like Rushdie, too, she has a grand comedic sense: in its vision of a highly irrational world, The God of Small Things is both funny and insightful.”

  — The Edmonton Journal

  “The God of Small Things draws the reader into a mesmerising world, conjured up in a lush, lyrical prose that sets the nerves tingling.”

  — The Evening Standard

  “The God of Small Things offers such magic, mystery and sadness that, literally, this reader turned the last page and decided to re-read it. Immediately. It’s that hauntingly wonderful.”

  — USA Today

  “Remarkable.”

  — Globe and Mail

  “Heartbreaking and indelible.”

  — New York Times

  “From its mesmerising opening sequence, it is clear that we are in the grip of a delicious new voice… a voice of breathtaking beauty. The God of Small Things achieves genuine, tragic resonance. It is, indeed, a masterpiece.”

  — Observer

  “A gripping tale of love and loss… told with compelling wit, eroticism and consummate tenderness.”

  — Financial Times

  “A compelling story which somehow marries the deepest, smallest personal emotions with an epic narrative… There were times I had to stop reading this novel because I feared so much for the characters, or I had to re-read a phrase or a page to memorise its grace.”

  — Sunday Express

  “As memorable as a lover’s face.”

  — The Times

  “It is rare to find a book that so effectively cuts through the clothes of nationality, caste and religion to reveal the bare bones of humanity. A sensational novel.”

  — Daily Telegraph

  “Rhapsodic and breathtaking… New Delhi writer Arundhati Roy both delights the senses and engages the emotions. Drenched with poetic image and saturated with wisdom, the book’s rich tapestry is a tour de force in good storytelling, a book to savor and to remember.”

  — The London Free Press

  “This remarkable first novel by Arundhati Roy is daring in its scope, at once both traditional and innovative as it combines the best elements of contemporary writing while striving to push the envelope as the complex narrative weaves back and forth in time.”

  — The Kitchener Record

  “Roy weaves her tragedy from an explosive mix of fate, history… and the stubborn wills of her flawed and fascinating characters…. skilfully, irresistibly balancing foreboding and delight… Like Fall On Your Knees, The God of Small Things will win a lot of awards. It will deserve them.”

  — Now magazine

  For Mary Roy,

  who grew me up.

  Who taught me to say “excuse me”

  before interrupting her in Public.

  Who loved me enough to let me go.

  For LKC who, like me, survived.

  Never again will a single story be told

  as though it’s the only one.

  —JOHN BERGER

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Pradip Krishen, my most exacting critic, my closest friend, my love. Without you this book wouldn’t have been this book.

  Pia and Mithva for being mine.

  Aradhana, Arjun, Bete, Chandu, Golak, Indu, Joanna, Philip, Veena, Sanju and Viveka for seeing me through the years it took to write this book.

  Pankaj Mishra for flagging it off on its journey into the world.

  Alok Rai and Shomit Miner, for being the kind of readers that writers dream about.

  David Godwin, flying agent, guide and friend. For taking that impulsive trip to India. For making the waters part.

  Neelu, Sushma and Krishnan for keeping my spirits up and my hamstrings in working order.

  Nahid Bilgrami for arriving just in time.

  And finally but immensely, Dadi and Dada. For their love and support.

  Thank you.

  CONTENTS

  1. Paradise Pickles & Preserves

  2. Pappachi’s Moth

  3. Big Man the Laltain, Small Man the Mombatti

  4. Abhilash Talkies

  5. God’s Own Country

  6. Cochin Kangaroos

  7. Wisdom Exercise Notebooks

  8. Welcome Home, Our Sophie Mol

  9. Mrs. Pillai, Mrs. Eapen, Mrs. Rajagopalan

  10. The River in the Boat

  11. The God of Small Things

  12. Kochu Thomban

  13. The Pessimist and the Optimist

  14. Work Is Struggle

  15. The Crossing

  16. A Few Hours Later

  17. Cochin Harbor Terminus

  18. The History House

  19. Saving Ammu

  20. The Madras Mail

  21. The Cost of Living

  CHAPTER 1

  PARADISE PICKLES & PRESERVES

  May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.

  The nights are clear, but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.

  But by early June the southwest monsoon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with. The countryside turns an immodest green. Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom. Brick walls turn mossgreen. Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across the flooded roads. Boats ply in the bazaars. And small fish appear in the puddles that fill the PWD potholes on the highways.

  It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat. The walls, streaked with moss, had grown soft, and bulged a little with dampness that seeped up from the ground. The wild, overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives. In the und
ergrowth a rat snake rubbed itself against a glistening stone. Hopeful yellow bullfrogs cruised the scummy pond for mates. A drenched mongoose flashed across the leaf-strewn driveway.

  The house itself looked empty. The doors and windows were locked. The front verandah bare. Unfurnished. But the skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins was still parked outside, and inside, Baby Kochamma was still alive.

  She was Rahel’s baby grandaunt, her grandfather’s younger sister. Her name was really Navomi, Navomi Ipe, but everybody called her Baby. She became Baby Kochamma when she was old enough to be an aunt. Rahel hadn’t come to see her, though. Neither niece nor baby grandaunt labored under any illusions on that account. Rahel had come to see her brother, Estha. They were two-egg twins. “Dizygotic” doctors called them. Born from separate but simultaneously fertilized eggs. Estha—Esthappen—was the older by eighteen minutes.

  They never did look much like each other, Estha and Rahel, and even when they were thin-armed children, flat-chested, wormridden and Elvis Presley–puffed, there was none of the usual “Who is who?” and “Which is which?” from oversmiling relatives or the Syrian Orthodox bishops who frequently visited the Ayemenem House for donations.

  The confusion lay in a deeper, more secret place.

  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.

  Now, these years later, Rahel has a memory of waking up one night giggling at Estha’s funny dream.

  She has other memories too that she has no right to have.

  She remembers, for instance (though she hadn’t been there), what the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man did to Estha in Abhilash Talkies. She remembers the taste of the tomato sandwiches— Estha’s sandwiches, that Estha ate—on the Madras Mail to Madras.

  And these are only the small things.

  Anyway, now she thinks of Estha and Rahel as Them, because, separately, the two of them are no longer what They were or ever thought They’d be.

  Ever.

  Their lives have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers.

  Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they are as old as Ammu was when she died. Thirty-one.

  Not old.

  Not young.

  But a viable die-able age.

  They were nearly born on a bus, Estha and Rahel. The car in which Baba, their father, was taking Ammu, their mother, to hospital in Shillong to have them, broke down on the winding tea-estate road in Assam. They abandoned the car and flagged down a crowded State Transport bus. With the queer compassion of the very poor for the comparatively well off, or perhaps only because they saw how hugely pregnant Ammu was, seated passengers made room for the couple, and for the rest of the journey Estha and Rahel’s father had to hold their mother’s stomach (with them in it) to prevent it from wobbling. That was before they were divorced and Ammu came back to live in Kerala.

  According to Estha, if they’d been born on the bus, they’d have got free bus rides for the rest of their lives. It wasn’t clear where he’d got this information from, or how he knew these things, but for years the twins harbored a faint resentment against their parents for having diddled them out of a lifetime of free bus rides.

  They also believed that if they were killed on a zebra crossing, the Government would pay for their funerals. They had the definite impression that that was what zebra crossings were meant for. Free funerals. Of course, there were no zebra crossings to get killed on in Ayemenem, or, for that matter, even in Kottayam, which was the nearest town, but they’d seen some from the car window when they went to Cochin, which was a two-hour drive away.

  The Government never paid for Sophie Mol’s funeral because she wasn’t killed on a zebra crossing. She had hers in Ayemenem in the old church with the new paint. She was Estha and Rahel’s cousin, their uncle Chacko’s daughter. She was visiting from England. Estha and Rahel were seven years old when she died. Sophie Mol was almost nine. She had a special child-sized coffin.

  Satin lined.

  Brass handle shined.

  She lay in it in her yellow Crimplene bell-bottoms with her hair in a ribbon and her Made-in-England go-go bag that she loved. Her face was pale and as wrinkled as a dhobi’s thumb from being in water for too long. The congregation gathered around the coffin, and the yellow church swelled like a throat with the sound of sad singing. The priests with curly beards swung pots of frankincense on chains and never smiled at babies the way they did on usual Sundays.

  The long candles on the altar were bent. The short ones weren’t.

  An old lady masquerading as a distant relative (whom nobody recognized, but who often surfaced next to bodies at funerals—a funeral junkie? A latent necrophiliac?) put cologne on a wad of cotton wool and with a devout and gently challenging air, dabbed it on Sophie Mol’s forehead. Sophie Mol smelled of cologne and coffin-wood.

  Margaret Kochamma, Sophie Mol’s English mother, wouldn’t let Chacko, Sophie Mol’s biological father, put his arm around her to comfort her.

  The family stood huddled together. Margaret Kochamma, Chacko, Baby Kochamma, and next to her, her sister-in-law, Mammachi—Estha and Rahel’s (and Sophie Mol’s) grandmother. Mammachi was almost blind and always wore dark glasses when she went out of the house. Her tears trickled down from behind them and trembled along her jaw like raindrops on the edge of a roof. She looked small and ill in her crisp off-white sari. Chacko was Mammachi’s only son. Her own grief grieved her. His devastated her.

  Though Ammu, Estha and Rahel were allowed to attend the funeral, they were made to stand separately, not with the rest of the family. Nobody would look at them.

  It was hot in the church, and the white edges of the arum lilies crisped and curled. A bee died in a coffin flower. Ammu’s hands shook and her hymnbook with it. Her skin was cold. Estha stood close to her, barely awake, his aching eyes glittering like glass, his burning cheek against the bare skin of Ammu’s trembling, hymnbook-holding arm.

  Rahel, on the other hand, was wide awake, fiercely vigilant and brittle with exhaustion from her battle against Real Life.

  She noticed that Sophie Mol was awake for her funeral. She showed Rahel Two Things.

  Thing One was the newly painted high dome of the yellow church that Rahel hadn’t ever looked at from the inside. It was painted blue like the sky, with drifting clouds and tiny whizzing jet planes with white trails that crisscrossed in the clouds. It’s true (and must be said) that it would have been easier to notice these things lying in a coffin looking up than standing in the pews, hemmed in by sad hips and hymnbooks.

  Rahel thought of the someone who had taken the trouble to go up there with cans of paint, white for the clouds, blue for the sky, silver for the jets, and brushes, and thinner. She imagined him up there, someone like Velutha, barebodied and shining, sitting on a plank, swinging from the scaffolding in the high dome of the church, painting silver jets in a blue church sky.

  She thought of what would happen if the rope snapped. She imagined him dropping like a dark star out of the sky that he had made. Lying broken on the hot church floor, dark blood spilling from his skull like a secret.

  By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.

  Thing Two that Sophie Mol showed Rahel was the bat baby.

  During the funeral service, Rahel watched a small black bat climb up Baby Kochamma’s expensive funeral sari with gently clinging curled claws. When it reached the place between her sari and her blouse, her roll of sadness, her bare midriff, Baby Kochamma screamed an
d hit the air with her hymnbook. The singing stopped for a “Whatisit? Whathappened?” and for a Furrywhirring and a Sariflapping.

  The sad priests dusted out their curly beards with goldringed fingers as though hidden spiders had spun sudden cobwebs in them.

  The baby bat flew up into the sky and turned into a jet plane without a crisscrossed trail.

  Only Rahel noticed Sophie Mol’s secret cartwheel in her coffin.

  The sad singing started again and they sang the same sad verse twice. And once more the yellow church swelled like a throat with voices.

  When they lowered Sophie Mol’s coffin into the ground in the little cemetery behind the church, Rahel knew that she still wasn’t dead. She heard (on Sophie Mol’s behalf) the softsounds of the red mud and the hardsounds of the orange laterite that spoiled the shining coffin polish. She heard the dullthudding through the polished coffin wood, through the satin coffin lining. The sad priests’ voices muffled by mud and wood.

  We entrust into thy hands, most merciful Father,

  The soul of this our child departed.

  And we commit her body to the ground,

  Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  Inside the earth Sophie Mol screamed, and shredded satin with her teeth. But you can’t hear screams through earth and stone.

  Sophie Mol died because she couldn’t breathe.

  Her funeral killed her. Dus to dus to dus to dus to dus. On her tombstone it said A SUNBEAM LENT TO US TOO BRIEFLY.

  Ammu explained later that Too Briefly meant For Too Short a While.

  After the funeral Ammu took the twins back to the Kottayam police station. They were familiar with the place. They had spent a good part of the previous day there. Anticipating the sharp, smoky stink of old urine that permeated the walls and furniture, they clamped their nostrils shut well before the smell began.