.::Gorgeous, psycho-permeating fiction::. Review on God Of Small Things, The - Arundhati Roy

Now this is more like it. My hunt for that one fiction where fiction magnified life into pupil-dilating, nerve-writhing detail ends here. Where words encompassed such insuperable strength that small experiences came thumping out with muscular chests, where sentences jacketed small feelings with such bubbling boiling life that they pricked and where pages swallowed and gobbled small lives, small deaths without a sound. And I love it like this. Small but beautiful. Minor but signature. Like the small mole above Rekha’s lip, like the small dimple on Preity’s cheek. Below are jotted some untamed nimble thoughts that riotously took the anatomy of this review.

God of Small Things, linearly speaking, commences in a plebeian household in Ayemenem, Kerala in 1969 when Estha, Rahel (the story’s dizygotic protagonists), Ammu (their divorced mother), Chacko (their uncle) and Baby Kochamma (their grand-aunt) are travelling to Cochin to receive Margaret Kochamma (Chacko’s ex-wife) and her daughter, Sophie Mol. Shortly after their welcome to Ayemenem, surfaces Ammu’s affair with an Untouchable known to the family (Velutha), which, quite expectantly causes a brouhaha in the family.

A spit of rage from the emotionally-clobbered and exhausted mother sends off her two twins, alongwith their cousin, fleeing. The cousin drowns during their canoed-escapade and the blame’s deftly rolled to the shoulders of Velutha, who after a sanguinary thrashing, gives in to death. Funeral of Sophie Mol marks the separation of the two twins as Estha’s submitted to his father. Cut to present, where life again brings the twins face to face in circumstances that are far more lonelier, paler, and bloated with grief. A symbolic reunification (at baser levels) befalls and as a character puts it, laws are tampered. Laws that are laid down for who should be loved, and how.

One can easily fingerpoint that the visible, protruding circumference of the novel’s circle is the continuous tragic fate that a family encounters when some members question and push the boundaries of the conventions, the rules of society but are slapped back, bruised back and strangled. We have Ammu, who first, out of suffocation from the bitterness and the orthodoxies of her matrilineal kin weds in haste but alcoholism of her spouse means she’s back and unrequited emotions and physical needs lead her into an affair with an Untouchable (Velutha). And Ammu breaks laws. And Ammu’s punished.

This backbone of the book spotlights wonderfully on an individual with a disturbed childhood who was a victim of deprivation (Notice how her father shreds her new gumboots, beats her mother with brass vases). How being at the receiving end distorts her schemas and expectations of relationships (in her version of Bear stories, Father Bear beat Mother Bear with brass vases) and sculpts an individual with a definite unsafe, adventurous edge that the adamant society is all the more reluctant to accept.

In the eldest of all, Mammachi, one sees another woman rewriting the society’s laws by being a successful pickle-factory manageress and violinist. One isn’t surprised when every night she coils at one corner and bears brass-vase blows from her husband (Pappachi) who vents out his frustration of being denied his discovery of a moth and thanks to fossilised, ingrained beliefs of male-domination, can’t come to terms with her wife’s success. The complex relationship between Mammachi and her son (who acts as her saviour) and her regality in communication when dedication leaves her blind (through playing a violin) is soul-stirring.

In Pappachi’s sister, Baby Kochamma, one visits a curmudgeon who’s early rejection in love trails so deep that heaps of acerbity and tartness makes her grudge even a speckle of happiness in others (watch her pinching out tiny moments of comfort from the twins imparting small punishments, or secretly relishing the moment when truth about Ammu’s affair unfurls, or brainwashing Chacko and Mammachi to Ammu’s doom and indoctrination of naïve twins).

Probably this whole critique would remain futile if the children of the book didn’t deserve a mention. Roy has dealt with their developmental psychology with such finesse, has imparted so much flesh and blood to these characters that one chortles with every “small” pleasure they receive, and is finally moved to tears when separation and tragedy do them apart.

Considering the malleable psyches they possess reminiscent of their age, there isn’t any surprise how their brains race to make esoteric, iconic connections with the unseen, beguiling world too huge for their reach (notice them referring to a squashed frog as a stain in Universe, or death of a relative as a relative-shaped h-o-l-e in the Universe). Even the overactivity of the olfactory perception to preserve memories (notice Rahel when she breathes deep in theatre to bottle up the sweet memory) or the giggling fun they derive from their theories (notice them heave a sigh as Ms.Mitten, who hated them for reading backwards is killed by a reversing van) and language (Notice them coying with the word Nictitating, or going ‘ickilee ickilee’ for tickling) is highly identifiable. Heart-rending is the way they leap and spring at the rare, joyous moments (Like when Chacko and Ammu handshake over a joke or when a communist accidently refers to Chacko as the twins’ daddy).

The gamut of insecurities they face being fatherless and their constant urge to keep the world around them in control is highly ecologically valid. (Watch Rahel’s head-slapping haplessness after an innocent blurt-out—how she yearns for a proper punishment to break even as she thinks she won’t ever be loved much again!) Or the way in which these insecurities lead them to discriminate their existence (Can anyone forget Rahel snapping Velutha’s eyes shut to prevent him glancing at Sophie?) or how they quickly take refuge in fiction on seeing Velutha’s body (Those vague assumptions; that innocent, queer thought-process—Roy churns out all of it with seldom-seen grace and indulgence. And probably that’s what makes God of Small Things so special.

While Rahel’s voice resonates all through (she being the narrator), its Estha’s silence that haunts. ”With sea-secrets in him”, while on one hand his vulnerability is heartbreaking (just read him drinking lemonade with one hand and masturbating the drink-vendor—who lures him--with another), equally jolting are his reactions (him carrying his forelimb in a disconnected fashion after molestation or his unceasing fear of being kidnapped by the drink-vendor which leads him into finding a boat). And the author doesn’t shy away from touching margins of magic–realism in the unique Siamese-like bond the twins share.

But did such a unique attachment, where intuition took the power of speech, needed the incestuous climax (however symbolic it might be)? Did the transgression of the society’s rules, which is symbolised all through by working mothers and having affairs with Untouchables needed such an extreme breakaway? In the book’s language, yes. Yes, because GOST primarily is about distortion of schemas of the twins whose childhood was blotted with tragedies, which budded from trespassing the Society’s laws. More than the fact that the Love laws were broken, it projected how incomplete (as individuals) they proved to be.

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