“Estha and Rahel had
no doubt that the house Chacko meant was the house on the other side of the
river, in the middle of the abandoned rubber estate where they had never been.
Kari Saipu’s house. The Black Sahib. The Englishman who had ‘gone native.’ Who
spoke Malayam and wore mundus. Ayemenem’s own Kurtz. Ayemenem his private Heart
of Darkness. He had shot himself through the head ten years ago, when his young
lover’s parents had taken the boy away from him and sent him to school.”
The God of Small
Things centers on the lives of Rahel Ipe and her brother Estha, displaced
fraternal twins who are thirty-one years old in the narrative present, but
who cannot stop revisiting the traumatic events that took place in
1969 in their home town of Ayemenem, situated in India’s southwestern Kerala
state. Rahel and Estha are the children of Ammu Ipe, a woman who elopes
with a man from Calcutta to escape her overbearing father, only to discover
that her husband is an abusive alcoholic who wants to advance himself by
forcing her to become his boss’s mistress. Choosing the lesser of two evils,
Ammu returns home in disgrace to raise her children on her family’s estate. While
living in Ayemenem, twins Estha and Rahel form a close bond with Velutha, an
employee of the Ipes and a lowly “untouchable” in the Hindu caste system. A
forbidden romance soon develops between Velutha and Ammu, precipitating the
events that will haunt Rahel and Estha for the rest of their lives.
When I first read The
God of Small Things in my precocious undergraduate years, the experience
redefined the way I approached the misfortunes of other people. Before reading
this book, I reacted to the pain of the world with sympathy, which is to say that I thought caring for others meant
“feeling bad” for them. The God of Small
Things, though, helped me distinguish how empathy was something different – not the pity of sympathy, but a
shared suffering; the “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes” that
Atticus Finch would encourage us all to practice. In short, the book had a
pretty darn meaningful impact on my life. (Note: whether or not true empathy is
actually possible is a debate I leave to my undergraduate years; the discussion
will tell you little more than who’s cynical and who isn’t).
Thematically, The God
of Small Things delves into the crushing institutional prejudices that
persisted in 1960s India and historically stemmed from British colonialism,
patriarchal gender conventions, and the Hindu caste system, to name only a few. The book gives harrowing accounts of injustice, but makes its strongest
impact when it speaks of forbidden love, whether it be through the devotion
that Ammu and Velutha feel for one another, or the controversial bond
that forms between siblings Rahel and Estha, who are so emotionally close that
the novel often speaks of them as the same person.
In addition to her insightful understanding of human
emotion, Roy’s prose is superb, as is the masterful way in which she chooses to
structure her novel. Using a third-person omniscient narrator, the novel is non-linear in its time scheme,
following the associative routes of Rahel’s personal memories rather than reporting events in chronological order. The narrative returns to the past over
and over, yet each time from a different angle. In doing so, it mimics the same
movements our own minds make when we try to make sense of a profoundly
upsetting experience. Such an experience flashes into our minds when we walk down the street
and keeps us awake at night, provoking sudden cringes and quick breaths that
seem to go unnoticed by the world around us. We replay this bad experience for ourselves over and over, hoping that we will hit upon some idea that
will finally put it (and who knows, maybe our bodies) to bed.
“Blood spilled from
his skull like a secret. His face was swollen and his head looked like a
pumpkin, too large and heavy from the slender stem it grew from. A pumpkin with
a monstrous upside down smile. Police boots stepped back from a pool of urine
spreading from him, the bright bare electric bulb reflected in it.”
For many fans of the book, The God of Small
Things is just as interesting for its publication history as it is for its
content. In 1997, Roy was just 28-years old and a rookie to the world of novel writing.
Yet after an enthusiastic HarperCollins agent named Pankaj Mishra became a
champion for the book’s merits, Roy received more than 500,000 pounds in advances alone! History would prove
the publishers correct, as Roy’s novel would go on to win the 1997 Man Booker
Prize and sell over 6 million copies. All in all, I would say this is as much
of a feel-good story about the publishing industry as you will find anywhere. Yet the future would not be all roses for Roy, who
would face severe criticism on many fronts, as well as criminal charges for
obscenity in her home province of Kerala. If you haven’t read the book, I’ll
tease you a little and say that it’s not for her portrayal of sex alone that Roy faced these charges.
With all of this book’s profound empathy and its criticism
of injustice, it should not be surprising to discover that Arundhati Roy has
worked most of her life as an extremely influential human rights and
environmental activist. I feel compelled to mention this, though I’m not quite
sure how to follow it. What can I say? An incredible person wrote an incredible
book.
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