“The God of Small Things” is the God of small things.

Great stories.

“The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that, although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories, you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, and who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.” (Pg no. 229)

This quote from The God of Small Things sums up this book, and made me re-read the story. This review contains spoilers, but they don’t affect the reading experience. Even in the novel, the first few chapters describe all the major events that will happen later. This book does not concern itself with spoilers and plot twists; it wants to tell a story and demands our attention from the first page.

I read this book for the first time a long time ago. From a time when I was not prepared to understand several themes and poetic expressions, it offered. The story left me after I read it, and in its place, there was a void caused by an unexplainable emotion from an unlived childhood. A “The God of Small Things” shaped void in me. Though the story was forgotten, in the void that it left were the shattered and fragmented pieces of a long-forgotten lucid dream. Just like how someone wakes up from a dream and tries to get hold of it as they enter their reality, trying to remember it by gathering all the shattered fragments, I tried to find what this book made me feel when I read it for the first time. But that is the beauty of dreams, all it remains are the fragments of it. No matter how hard you try, it won’t fit into your coherent form of reality.

After 23 years of separation, the twins, Estha and Rahel, are reunited in their ancestral house. The Ayemenem house they came back to was waiting for them with green wet mosses that covered the walls. With a faint smell of vinegar and mashed pineapples that came from their grandmother’s old pickle factory. ‘Paradise Pickles and Preserves’. The house grew old with the smell of rain that lingered long after the monsoon had left, and the muddied riverbed near the house now only held a faint nostalgia of its once glorious past. The boat that once carried them across the river has taken root and gotten tangled in the twines. That big house did not welcome them, as the traumatic childhood of the twins has also taken its toll on the house.

This was how I felt when I started re-reading this book. Like going back to my grandmother’s house, where smaller things existed, and they collectively said their part of the story. A story that was never mine but always felt like one. A story that unfolded bit by bit, revealing only the smaller things but hiding the traumas. A story of an unlived childhood.

The Small Things.

When Velutha was beaten by the police, Roy doesn’t give us the details of the incident, like why Velutha was beaten or how brutally they beat him. Instead, the focus was on a centipede with a million legs that was crushed and got stuck on the boots of a policeman, and how Velutha noticed it when he was kicked by that policeman, who raised his leg to keep him down.

When Sophie Mol died, which was revealed in the first part of the story, we are not offered the details of her death. But the details are given in the smaller things, through the eyes of little Rahel, who got distracted by a bat that was flying inside the cathedral where Sophie Mol’s final rites are being held. The bat was flying straight into the window sills trying to find a way out, but it flew with great force that it dropped dead upon hitting the glass of the window.

 Upon being Returned to his father, after that one particular day That Changed Everything, Estha’s sadness and trauma were not mentioned, as it was. After getting accustomed to a long silence, the only thing he was affectionate with was a dog that he got to keep as a pet, and when that dog grew old and was about to die, he noticed something really small. It was the delicate and shiny balls of the tired dog. As he watched the balls rise up and down to the tired breathing, he could see the shining of the nearby window in it. He also saw the reflection of two pairs of birds that flew outside the window on his dog's balls. This made him envious of how such a delicate thing could survive in this harsh world, but not him.

This is how Roy is telling the story. By focusing on the smaller, shattered things through a whimsical child’s perspective. As if she is trying hard not to tell the details that weigh heavily on the readers. Or she is as afraid as the reader of how the trauma will be revealed. By letting the smaller details tell their stories and given importance, she paints a vivid picture, but the sooner you close the book, it flies away. Like how delicate things are hard to hold on to, these emotions waft away from you the moment you thought you seized them, leaving only their mere presence as a dream. The non-linear narration only enhances the dream-like experience that this book offered.

Estha’s silence in Rahel’s Hollow eyes.

A lot can change in a single day. However, that day was the culmination of centuries of History (caste and class), has affected the twins in similar ways. Though the ways they reacted to the trauma were very different, the reason for their reactions remained the same. Estha, who had been Returned to his father in Calcutta, disguised his withdrawal in a silence that went easily unnoticed. Nobody was aware that Estha was silent and had never spoken any words. As though the world has already become accustomed to his silence, like his words never meant anything to the world. He could effortlessly blend into his surroundings, bookshelves, walls, wardrobes, and mirrors, and nobody noticed his existence.

Rahel grew up to be rebellious. Her tantrums and anger were nicknamed by her Grand Aunt as the existence of Satan. In schools and colleges, she was the bully and not the one who got bullied. But one day, when her lover, who fell in love with her beauty and her noisy existence, saw something distorting in her eyes whilst making love for the first time. Her hollow eyes, eyes that showed no emotion, even in an intense, passionate sex. Her boyfriend left her with an unexplained fear of seeing a ghost.

Her hollow eyes are where the silence of Estha echoed louder. His silence and her eyes that showed no emotions were connected to a single emotion, and they both found solace in that space. Eshta’s silence is carried by her Hollow eyes like a vessel. The emotional connections of the twins are woven intricately by Roy. The best example is when Rahel is asked by her grandmother to write a letter, she asks herself a question about whether anyone would write a letter to their own heart, toes, or lungs. Writing a letter to her brother, whom she had been separated from at a young age, was as pointless as someone writing a letter to their body parts.

The History House.

There was a big house across the river. It was the ruined ancestral mansion of an old feudal lord who died long before the events of the novel. The Twins called that place the History House, because of the stories they heard about that house and the feudal lord. A ghost story is fabled by the adults about that place to keep children from roaming around the abandoned mansion. A story that the ghost of the old feudal lord is said to be tied to the trunk of a tree with a sickle that is struck to his throat, and the ghost always asks in a coarse voice for a cigar to all the passersby. The adults told these stories to their children as if they too believed everything about it, and The Twins also fell for it.

But when they had to find a place to hide away from the horrors of other stories that the adults lived in, stories they could not understand yet, they had to go to the History House. When Estha and Rahel discussed how they would tackle the ghost of Kari Sayipp (the feudal lord), Estha came up with a solution. He says, “We become communists. Communists do not believe in ghosts.” Roy uses the Twins to collect bits and pieces they find among the adult world and use their perception to fit them according to her imagination, where she plays with metaphors and ironies.

The History House is not just about a ruined mansion and a ghost story. It is the grand metaphor of the breathing prejudices of humans that has been alive for hundreds of years, even long before the existence of the House. Caste and Class discrimination. Though in a ruined state, that House merely became a physical form of its presence. After 23 years, with Rahel, we find that the mansion has been taken over by a private corporation and is now being run as a grand 4-star resort where tourists from all over the place come to enjoy their visit in Kerala. God’s Own Country, where History is pleasant, but when dug deeper, we find the ghost of Kari Sayipp (the feudal lord) asking for a cigar with a sickle stuck in his throat.

Velutha – the lower caste carpenter whom the twins loved by the day and their mother loved by the night- will pay the price for violating History’s sacred love laws. The love laws that order whom to love and how much to love them. And the twins will carry that scar for letting Velutha break the laws by loving him and allowing him to love them. In the front veranda of the History House, Velutha saw the centipede with a million legs on the sole of the boots of a Policeman.

The God of Small Things.

The God of Small Things is one such book that will go down in history as one of the greatest. Arundhati Roy did a masterful job by writing this novel, so much so that she doesn’t have to write more fiction to hold up her name as one of the greatest writers. This one book is enough to do that. It is layered in so many levels, covering up a load of themes, and it is architecturally brilliant to hold all the themes efficiently in a 300-page novel. Yes, it is a complex book as Roy is not trying to tell a story but to make us feel a story. By giving the attention this book demands, the reader will see that, between the lines, is where the beauty of this book lies. Roy uses metaphors and imagery like a child playing with a toy. She does it so effortlessly to evoke emotions that we can never put into words, and when the irony of the metaphors hits us, there is nothing much left to do but close the book and stare into a void.

Some Indians, particularly Malayalees, who are accustomed to their age-old prejudices, will always have a confused approach towards this book. The initial response upon its release makes it evident that a significant controversy was triggered among those who clung to their customs and beliefs. The customs and beliefs that this book scrutinizes have sent some conservatives reeling. However, when it won the Booker Prize, everyone wanted to claim it as the book from their land. Still, for some, Arundhati Roy and her book will always be a subject of judgment due to its boldness. They may label it as vulgar and inappropriate because it portrays a woman falling in love with a lower caste. It only strengthens this book by highlighting the deep scars left by society. Those with a broader mindset who read history as literature and literature as history will find this book to be an absolute gem.