Why should you read The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy Laura Wright
“A few dozen hours can affect the
outcome of whole lifetimes/
And that when they do,
those few dozen hours,
like the salvaged remains
of a burned clock…
must be resurrected from the ruins
and examined.”
This is the premise of Arundhati Roy’s
1997 novel “The God of Small Things.”
Set in a town in Kerala, India called
Ayemenem,
the story revolves around fraternal
twins Rahel and Estha,
who are separated for 23 years
after the fateful few dozen hours
in which their cousin drowns, their
mother’s illicit affair is revealed,
and her lover is murdered.
While the book is set at the point of
Rahel and Estha’s reunion,
the narrative takes place mostly in
the past, reconstructing the details
around the tragic events that
led to their separation.
Roy’s rich language and masterful
storytelling
earned her the prestigious Booker prize
for “The God of Small Things.”
In the novel, she interrogates the culture
of her native India,
including its social mores
and colonial history.
One of her focuses is the caste system,
a way of classifying people by hereditary
social class
that is thousands of years old.
By the mid-20th century,
the original four castes associated
with specific occupations
had been divided into
some 3000 sub-castes.
Though the caste system was
Constitutionally abolished in 1950,
it continued to shape
social life in India,
routinely marginalizing people
of lower castes.
In the novel, Rahel and Estha have a
close relationship with Velutha,
a worker in their family’s pickle factory
and member of the so-called
“untouchable” caste.
When Velutha and the twins’ mother, Ammu,
embark on an affair,
they violate what Roy describes as the
“love laws”
forbidding intimacy between
different castes.
Roy warns that the tragic consequences
of their relationship
“would lurk forever in ordinary things,”
like “coat hangers,” “the tar on roads,”
and “the absence of words.”
Roy’s writing makes constant use of these
ordinary things,
bringing lush detail to even the most
tragic moments.
The book opens at the funeral of the
twins’ half-British cousin Sophie
after her drowning.
As the family mourns, lilies curl and
crisp in the hot church.
A baby bat crawls up a funeral sari.
Tears drip from a chin like
raindrops from a roof.
The novel forays into the past to explore
the characters’ struggles
to operate in a world
where they don’t quite fit,
alongside their nation’s
political turmoil.
Ammu struggles not to lash out at her
beloved children
when she feels particularly trapped in her
parents’ small-town home,
where neighbors judge and shun her
for being divorced.
Velutha, meanwhile, balances his affair
with Ammu and friendship with the twins
not only with his employment
to their family,
but also with his membership to a
budding communist countermovement
to Indira Ghandi’s “Green Revolution.”
In the 1960s, the misleadingly named
“Green Revolution”
introduced chemical fertilizers
and pesticides
and the damming of rivers to India.
While these policies produced high-yield
crops that staved off famine,
they also forced people from lower castes
off their land
and caused widespread
environmental damage.
When the twins return to Ayemenem
as adults,
the consequences of the Green Revolution
are all around them.
The river that was bursting with life
in their childhood
greets them “with a ghastly skull’s smile,
with holes where teeth had been,
and a limp hand raised
from a hospital bed.”
As Roy probes the depths of human
experience,
she never loses sight of the way her
characters are shaped
by the time and the place where they live.
In the world of “The God of Small Things,”
“Various kinds of despair competed
for primacy…
personal despair could never be
desperate enough…
personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside
shrine of the vast, violent, circling,
driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible
public turmoil of a nation.”