Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things and the Book Group

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (Flamingo 1997)

Before the meeting: After Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me gave us so much pleasure last month, this month’s Chooser met with general approval when he picked the novel that made her famous.

I first read The God of Small Things before I started blogging. Apart from a general sense of having enjoyed it, I retained just one image, of a group of policemen marching in long grass. It turns out that the image comes towards the end of the book, on page 304:

A posse of Touchable Policemen crossed the Meenachal river, sluggish and swollen with recent rain, and picked their way through the wet undergrowth, the clink of handcuffs in someone’s heavy pocket.
Their wide khaki shorts were rigid with starch, and bobbed over the tall grass like a row of stiff skirts, quite independent of the limbs that moved inside them.

There’s so much of the book in those two sentences. The starched shorts, so vividly present and so rich with metaphorical meaning; the initial capitals ‘Touchable Policemen’ marking a childlike personification of key concepts; the river, the undergrowth and the tall grass as part of the physical environment that is such a force in the book. Above all, the complex tone is characteristic: the soldiers are almost comic, puppet-like, yet the reader knows that they are about to do terrible things.

The rest of the book was fresh and new to me. It’s the story of twins Estha and Rahel, their mother Ammu (whose divorced status was scandalous in the mid 1960s, in the Syrian Christian community of their small village in Kerala), and their extended family: Ammu’s brother Chacko, her blind mother Mammachi, and Baby Kochamma. (The text is scattered with Malayalam words, only sometimes translated. I understood ‘Kochamma’ to mean ‘Auntie’, and a quick websearch just now gave ‘a woman who is to be respected like a mother’.) In spite of her cuddly name, Baby Kochamma is a nasty piece of work, disappointed in love by a priest when she was young, and now bitter, moralistic and vindictive. Chacko’s divorced wife, an Englishwoman, comes to visit with her daughter Sophie Mol (‘Mol’ means something like ‘daughter’), who is about the same age as Estha and Rahel.

We know from the beginning that there is to be a disaster. The narrative takes place in at least three time frames: before the disaster, the disaster, and a couple of decades after the disaster. We see Sophie Mol’s funeral before we know who she is, and there are plenty of hints of the other terrible incident – which isn’t revealed until the final pages, just after the scene with the starched shorts.

There’s another moment that has idiosyncratic resonance for me. There are a three or four guava trees on streets near my home. I recently went scrounging and picked from the trees and from the footpaths enough ripe and slightly bruised fruit to make a delicious jar of jam. The unusable fruit on the ground, and there was a lot of it, was a disgusting mess. So it was a personal pleasure when a day or so later, on page 205, Rahel and Estha approach the hut of Velutha, a servant whom they love:

Velutha wasn’t home. <snip> But someone was. A man’s voice floated out from inside and echoed around the clearing, making him sound lonely.
The voice shouted the same thing, over and over again, and each time it climbed into a higher, more hysterical register. lt was an appeal to an over-ripe guava threatening to fall from its tree and make a mess on the ground.

Pa pera-pera-pera-perakka
(Mr gugga-gug-gug-guava),
Ende parambil thooralley
(Don’t shit here in my compound).
Chetende parambil thoorikko
(You can shit next door in my brother’s compound),
Pa pera-pera-pera-perakka
(Mr gugga-gug-gug-guava.)

Exactly what I want to sing to the guavas of Enmore.

This is a book that cries out for quotation. You can feel Arundhati Roy’s glee as she comes up with similes, malapropisms and mondegreens, little asides, big digressions, wonderful descriptions of people. Page 79* is a good example. As it happens, it starts with Velutha and moves on to Baby Kochamma.

The family are driving to the nearest sizeable town, Cochin, to see The Sound of Music. It’s a long drive, interspersed with flashbacks, flashforwards and songs from the show. At page 78, already running late, they are held up by a demonstration – the street is full of workers, possibly including some Naxalites (the ‘extremists’ who Arundhati Roy was to spend time with in the jungle some decades later), carrying the red flag of Communism. The adults in the car have complex responses. Baby Kochamma is unequivocally on the side of capitalism; Chacko, though he effectively owns a pickle factory, identifies as a Marxist and theoretically is on the side of the workers; the twins’ mother says nothing, but later we realise that she has fellow feeling with the demonstrators. Rahel thinks she sees Velutha – as a former Untouchable, he usually goes shirtless, but the man Rahel sees is wearing a white shirt and waves a red flag.

Though we have met Velutha previously in stories of Ammu’s childhood, it’s here that we learn who he is from the twins’ point of view:

They would sit with him for hours, on their haunches – hunched punctuation marks in a pool of wood shavings – and wonder how he always seemed to know what smooth shapes waited inside the wood for him. They loved the way wood, in Velutha’s hands, seemed to soften and become as pliable as Plasticine. He was teaching them to use a planer. His house (on a good day) smelled of fresh wood shavings and the sun. Of red fish curry cooked with black tamarind. The best fish curry, according to Estha, in the whole world.
It was Velutha who made Rahel her luckiest ever fishing rod and taught her and Estha to fish.
And on that skyblue December day, it was him that she saw through her red sunglasses, marching with a red flag at the level crossing outside Cochin.

Then there’s a characteristic switch in perspective. The omniscient narrator steps in with a premonition. Rahel’s red-tinted glasses fill the world with the colour of danger. Birds of prey wheel above the demonstration, and Velutha’s black back with its distinctive leaf-shaped birthmark becomes a potential target:

Rahel could see pieces of red sky. And in the red sky, hot red kites wheeled, looking for rats. In their hooded yellow eyes there was a road and red flags marching. And a white shirt over a black back with a birthmark.
Marching.

Then the point of view comes right down to a close-up, and some characteristically tactile description. Where Rahel sees a friendly figure in the crows, Baby sees a threat:

Terror, sweat and talcum powder blended into a mauve paste between Baby Kochamma’s rings of neckfat. Spit coagulated into little white gobs at the corners of her mouth. She imagined she saw a man in the procession who looked like the photograph in the newspapers of the Naxalite called Rajan, who was rumoured to have moved south from Palghat. She imagined he had looked straight at her.

I love the final paragraph on the page. Rahel the child is aware that the man with ‘a face like a knot’ means to be unkind, but her preoccupations seize on his unintended normalising of her family.

A man with a red flag and a face like a knot opened Rahel’s door because it wasn’t locked. The doorway was full of men who’d stopped to stare.
‘Feeling hot, baby?’ the man like a knot asked Rahel kindly in Malayalam. Then unkindly, ‘Ask your daddy to buy you an Air Condition!’ and he hooted with delight at his own wit and timing. Rahel smiled back at him, pleased to have Chacko mistaken for her father. Like a normal family

I can’t say I know a lot about India. I’ve never been to Kerala. But at a railway station in Rajasthan, men did stop to stare unblinkingly at the young women in our group. It didn’t feel particularly aggressive or even deliberately impolite. We put it down to cultural difference. That experience helps me to visualise what Arundhati Roy is describing here, and to understand why Rahel isn’t particularly disturbed.

On the next page, the man with the flag turns his attention to Baby Kochamma and speaks to her in English, justifying her terror. But that’s another story, of the many told in this marvellous book.

The meeting: There were seven of us and as always we ate well and enjoyed each other’s company. We spoke as little as possible about Donald Trump, Iran, Israel, fuel and the tendency among younger generations to identify with self-diagnosed mental illness or neurodivergence. We gave passing glances to recent theatre and film pleasures, and to bodily pains, including severe side effects from statins that two of us have experienced, and the satisfaction of a third who convinced his specialist not to prescribe them for him.

One person had said on the WhatsApp group that he’d reach the halfway point of the book and was going to give up. I replied on the group that I loved the book and was looking forward to an interesting conversation – but it turned out that he had read the wrong Arundhati Roy book, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. He said at the meeting that there are some wonderful passages in it, but he found it very hard going.

Another person had read the right book in the 1990s and hadn’t been inclined to reread it. I don’t think this was from active dislike. As the single parent of a teenager, and the only one at the meeting still in full-time employment, I imagine he doesn’t have a lot of time for reading, let alone rereading.

One person was about halfway through the book, but intending to read the rest and not touchy about spoilers. I’m starting to think it would be good to have a designated non-finisher for every meeting. The non-finisher could then ask questions that lead the rest of the group to think about how things fit together. In this case, there’s a scene where Estha, the boy twin, is sexually molested. Our non-finisher wanted to know if this had a lasting effect on him as it seemed at the time that life just carried on. I replied blithely that it was a bit of a red herring – we were tempted to read this incident as explaining why the Estha we see many years later has become an alienated mute, but the real cause is the much worse incident that happens at the book’s climax. I was gently corrected: Estha’s terror of the incident being repeated set off a chain of events that leads to the climactic incident.

Of the other four, one had read the book reluctantly – feeling that he might have had enough Indian novels for a while (cue a brief digression as we enthused that Amitav Ghosh is scheduled to come to the Sydney Writers’ Festival in May), and it took a while but after the halfway point, once all the characters had been introduced and the plot got moving, the book won him over completely. We generally agreed that it was a bit of a struggle in the first half to keep track of the complex set of relationships. The time shifts, especially in the first half, were often confusing. It’s a book, someone said, that needs to be read in reasonably long sessions – not ten minutes at a time before you go to sleep at night. Nods all round.

Someone else said that when he was struggling with the language he read a passage out to his partner to see if she could make head or tail of it. When he heard the words aloud he realised they were crystal clear. From then on, he slowed down, letting the language play on his inner ear, and enjoyed the experience. (Sadly, he couldn’t find the passage to read it to us.) Conversation hovered around this: not universally seen as a virtue, the book is peppered with writerly quirks, turns of phrase or eccentric punctuation that draw attention to themselves and pull the reader out of the story for a moment. A young writer flexing her muscles, I think someone said. And why not? someone may have said back.

We left our host with the washing up and dispersed into a clear, warm, early Autumn night.

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I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time that has elapsed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British crown. The Book Group met on Gadigal land. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal, where yesterday’s sudden downpours show no sign of recurring today. I acknowledge Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.

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* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.