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 by the sun.
The nights are clear, but suffuse with sloth and sullen expectation.
The God of Small Things
Opening lines, Chapter 1: Paradise Pickles
& Preserves.
|
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.
The God of Small Things
Chapter 1: Paradise Pickles & Preserves. |
Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant
old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still,
tea-colored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored
minds.
The God of Small Things
Chapter 1: Paradise Pickles & Preserves. |
It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for
so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined.
Over the years, as the memory of Sophie Mol ... slowly faded,
the Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. It was always
there. Like a fruit in season. Every season. As permanent as
a government job.
The God of Small Things
Chapter 1: Paradise Pickles & Preserves. |
Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less
it mattered the less it mattered. It was never important enough.
Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came
from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror
of peace Worse Things kept happening.
The God of Small Things
Chapter 1: Paradise Pickles & Preserves. |
Things can change in a day.
The God of Small Things
Chapter 1: Paradise Pickles & Preserves. |
Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted.
Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones
of a story.
The God of Small Things
Chapter 1: Paradise Pickles & Preserves. |
Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it
was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.
The God of Small Things
Chapter 2: Pappachi's Moth. |
His lightbrown eyes were polite yet maleficent, as though
he was making an effort to be civil to the photographer while
plotting to murder his wife.
The God of Small Things
Of photograph of Pappachi in Vienna, Chapter
2: Pappachi's Moth. |
A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.
The God of Small Things
Chacko, Chapter 2: Pappachi's Moth. |
They were a family of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction,
trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their
steps - because their footprints had been swept away.
The God of Small Things
Chacko tells this to the twins Estha and
Rahel, Chapter 2: Pappachi's Moth. |
They would grow up grappling with ways of living with what
happened. They would try to tell themselves that in terms of
geological time it was an insignificant event. Just a blink
of the Earth Woman's eye. That Worse Things had happened. That
Worse Things kept happening. But they would find no comfort
in the thought.
The God of Small Things
Of Estha and Rahel, Chapter 2: Pappachi's
Moth. |
This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors,
they knew just where it hurt.
The God of Small Things
Chapter 2: Pappachi's Moth. |
With the certitude of a true believer, Vellya Paapen had assured
the twins that there was no such thing in the world as a black
cat. He said that there were only black cat chaped holes in
the universe.
The God of Small Things
Chapter 2: Pappachi's Moth. |
When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That's
what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
The God of Small Things
Ammu, Chapter 4: Abhilash Talkies. |
Some things come with their own punishment.
The God of Small Things
Baby Kochamma, Chapter 4: Abhilash Talkies. |
Anything's possible in Human Nature ...Love. Madness. Hope.
Infinite joy.
The God of Small Things
Chacko, Chapter 4: Abhilash Talkies. |
And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at
times like these only the Small Things are ever said. The Big
Things lurk unsaid inside.
The God of Small Things
Chapter 6: Cochin Kangaroos. |
The steel door of the incinerator went up and the muted hum
of the eternal fire became a red roaring. The heat lunged out
at them like a famished beast. Then Rahels 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:
We be of one blood, thou and I! Her goodnight kiss. The way
she held their faces steady with one hand (squashed-cheeked,
fish-mouthed) while she parted and combed their hair with the
other. The way she held knickers out, for Rahel to climb into.
Left leg, right leg. All this was fed to the beast, and it was
satisfied.
She was their Ammu and their Baba and she had loved them Double.
The door of the furnace clanged shut. There were no tears.
The crematorium In-charge had gone down the road
for a cup of tea and didnt come back for twenty minutes.
Thats how long Chacko and Rahel had to wait for the pink
receipt that would entitle them to collect Ammus remains.
Her ashes. The grit from her bones. The teeth from her smile.
The whole of her crammed into a little clay pot. Receipt No.
Q498673.
The God of Small Things
Description of electric incineration of
Ammu, mother of Rahel and Estha. Chapter 7: Wisdom Exercise
Notebooks. |
It was a grand old house, the Ayemenem House, but aloof-looking.
As though it had little to do with the people who lived in it.
Like an old man with rheumy eyes watching children play, seeing
only transience in their shrill elation and their wholehearted
commitment to life.
The God of Small Things
Chapter 8: Welcome Home, Our Sophie Mol. |
Must we behave like some damn godforsaken tribe that's just
been discovered?
The God of Small Things
Ammu, Chapter 8: Welcome Home, Our Sophie
Mol. |
It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain
of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around
carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel
with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.
The God of Small Things
Chapter 9: Mrs. Pillai, Mrs. Eapen, Mrs.
Rajagopalan. |
As Estha stirred the thick jam he thought Two Thoughts and
the Two Thoughts he thought were these:
a) Anything can happen to anyone.
and
b) It is best to be prepared.
The God of Small Things
Chapter 10: The River in the Boat. |
Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an
expensive restaurant.
The God of Small Things
Of Kuttappan, Chapter 10: The River in
the Boat. |
He walked on water. Perhaps. But could he have swum on land?
In matching knickers and dark glasses? With his Fountain in
a Love-in-Tokyo? In pointy shoes and a puff? Would he have had
the imagination?
The God of Small Things
Rahel thinking, on the jewelled Jesus picture,
Chapter 10: The River in the Boat. |
He left no footprints in sand, no ripples in water, no image
in mirrors.
The God of Small Things
Of Ammu, Chapter 11: The God of Small Things. |
If you're happy in a dream, does that count?
The God of Small Things
Estha, Chapter 11: The God of Small Things. |
The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets.
The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear
again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably.
They dont deceive you with thrills and trick endings.
They dont surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as
familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lovers
skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you dont.
In the way that although you know that one day you will die,
you live as though you wont. In the Great Stories you
know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesnt.
And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and magic.
The God of Small Things
Kathakali discovered this long ago, Chapter
12: Kochu Thomban. |
Being with Chacko made Margaret Kochamma 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
though the world belonged to them - as though it lay before
them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be
examined.
The God of Small Things
Chapter 13: The Pessiminist and the Optimist. |
The
God of Small Things Chapters 14-21 |