The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
This 1997 Man Booker Prize winner leaves you with a brooding
melancholy that will take some time to get rid off. Arundhati Roy wouldn’t pen
another novel for the next twenty years. Definitely it is a ‘first’ book like
no other.
Set in Ayemenem, the tale revolves around
Esthappen(Estha) and Rahel the twins of Ammu who has left her alcoholic husband
and come to live at her parents’ home. After her father’s (Pappachi) death, the
house and the estates and the Pickle Factory run by her mother Mammachi is
overseen by her Oxford educated brother Chacko. The family also includes Baby
Kochamma, an ex-nun and Ammu’s aunt who nurses within her a lingering animosity
towards Ammu and her children. Velutha (an Untouchable), Margaret Kochamma
(ex-wife of Chacko) and Sophie-mol (his daughter with Margaret), comprise the
rest of the characters whose hopes, dreams, desires and shattered lives come to
a harrowing climatic end in this haunting tale of love, loss and redemption.
There is a bittersweet darkness that envelops us as we begin
reading and it is relentless. There is an impending tragedy that hovers around
and doesn’t give up its hold on you as you read further. The narrative itself
is a bit messy, since it shifts from the present to the past quite quickly, and
in its fragments we gather bits and pieces as we tread across the painful
memories that the words are trying to bring up.
The prose is strangely more poetic than prosaic and hints are
given of things that have happened, but not in its entirety. For instance, we get to know on page 4 that
Sophie Mol dies. But the circumstances and the how and the why, slowly and
maddeningly unravels.
Somehow, everywhere around them is something that has a
haunting nastiness. There is Velutha, who is a tragic sacrifice waiting to
happen – he is a clever untouchable, a couple of years younger than Ammu.
The family pay for his education and he becomes indispensable at the factory
for maintaining the machines, though carpentry is his true skill. But in the
end he pays the price for his lowly birth in a caste ridden, fear soaked
society that doesn’t tolerate any difference in the established scheme of
things.
The theme of forbidden love is one of the many threads that
we can unknot from this narrative (others being communism, caste system, sexuality, gender roles, abuse of
power, trauma etc.) The love laws that pervade
their being are brought up again and again, lest we forget.
"They all broke the rules. They all crossed into
forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be
loved and how. And how much. And by whom.”
Arundhati
Roy’s use of language is very vivid, especially the descriptions and
comparisons drenched in similes and metaphors that are at times eye-opening but
as the novel continues can be tiresome too because of its unrelenting
intensity.
The book has left me with a character that I loathe for the hand she had in bringing together the things that happened, and the way it happened – Baby Kochamma. In the end, it is the small things that leave a haunting behind, because it led to the bigger things that no one could have seen coming.
The book is
not exactly something I will re-read. It is not easy to come back to this tale
where every dream is shattered and brutal reality pervades.
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