Description
Most novels about forbidden love ask you to root for the lovers. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things asks something harder: it asks you to watch the machinery that will destroy them and understand, with horrible clarity, that every gear was oiled by someone who believed they were doing the right thing.
Set in Ayemenem, Kerala, the novel braids two timelines—1969 and the early 1990s—around the Ipe family, a Syrian Christian clan whose pickle factory, internecine resentments, and caste anxieties generate its gravitational field. At the center are the twins Estha and Rahel, seven years old in the earlier timeline, separated for twenty-three years by a catastrophe involving their mother Ammu’s affair with Velutha, an Untouchable carpenter, and the drowning of their English cousin Sophie Mol. Roy tells you the outcomes almost immediately. She spends the rest of the book making you feel how they happened.
What startles about the prose isn’t its lushness—which is considerable, almost oppressive—but its compound words. Roy fuses language the way a child does: “thunderdarkness,” “sicksweet,” “wetgreen.” These aren’t decorative. They reproduce a mode of perception in which categories haven’t yet hardened, in which the world arrives as a sensory blur before adults sort it into hierarchies. The twins think of themselves “together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us,” and the novel’s grammar tries to hold that pre-differentiated state even as history cleaves it apart. Roy’s invented vocabulary is the prose equivalent of a child’s refusal to accept that things must be separated: Touchable from Untouchable, legitimate from illegitimate, loved from unloved.
I spent three years working in rural Tamil Nadu before I came to literary criticism, and what Roy captures about caste isn’t the grand political architecture—she is surprisingly uninterested in that—but the daily texture of it. Mammachi, the family matriarch, is capable of genuine affection toward Velutha while paying him less than a Touchable carpenter and more than a Paravan laborer, a differential she considers generous. Baby Kochamma, the grandaunt, shudders at “a particular Paravan smell” with theatrical disgust that is also, Roy makes clear, entirely sincere. The novel’s most devastating insight is that caste doesn’t require malice. It runs on a kind of metabolized common sense, a set of reflexes so deeply internalized that Velutha’s own father, Vellya Paapen, offers to kill his son with his bare hands when he discovers the affair. He trembles, he weeps, he begs forgiveness for “having spawned a monster.” His gratitude to the family that gave him a glass eye has become indistinguishable from self-annihilation.
Roy calls the rules governing this “the Love Laws”—”the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.” The phrase recurs like a bell throughout the novel, and I want to argue with her about it. The repetition risks turning a social system into a poetic motif, something that sounds beautiful rather than something that kills. Each time the phrase appears, it arrives with the same incantatory rhythm, and by the fourth or fifth iteration I began to feel it doing the opposite of what Roy intends: aestheticizing the very violence she wants to indict. Though maybe that’s the trap she’s setting. Maybe she wants you to hear the music and then catch yourself enjoying it.
The temporal structure is the novel’s greatest technical achievement and also, at moments, its most frustrating quality. Roy circles the central trauma obsessively, pulling back just before the worst and lunging forward into aftermath. We learn early that Estha carries “the memory of a young man with an old man’s mouth. The memory of a swollen face and a smashed, upside-down smile.” The actual scene of police violence, when it arrives, has been so thoroughly anticipated that its horror feels both unbearable and strangely muted, as if the dread was always worse than the event. This is psychologically precise—trauma does work that way—but it means the novel’s middle chapters, with their accumulation of family backstory and Cochin sightseeing, can feel like delay rather than deepening. I found myself impatient through thirty pages of The Sound of Music screening before recognizing that Roy was doing something deliberate with that impatience, folding it into the children’s own restless, doomed afternoon.
The ending circles back not to catastrophe but to the beginning of the affair: Ammu arriving at the river, Velutha swimming toward her. Roy withholds their lovemaking until the final pages, placing consummation after we already know its cost—two destroyed children, a man beaten to death, a woman dead at thirty-one. The last word is “Tomorrow,” spoken in Malayalam: “Naaley.” It’s the smallest promise imaginable. And the novel has spent four hundred pages demonstrating exactly how much the world will charge for it.
What unsettles me most, weeks after finishing, is Estha’s silence. Not the plot of it—a traumatized boy who stops speaking—but the image Roy leaves of him as an adult: walking for hours, occupying “very little space in the world,” carrying inside him “the uneasy octopus” that squirts “its inky tranquilizer on his past.” I keep returning to a single, almost throwaway image: a bird in flight reflected in an old dog’s dying eyes, which makes Estha “smile out loud.” That a novel so saturated with loss would locate grace there—in something no one else would bother to notice—tells you everything about what Roy means by small things, and why they are the only gods worth having.
If you’d like to read the full book in EPUB or MOBI format, feel free to send me an email—I’d be happy to share a free copy with you. Please reach me at: thenovaleaf@gmail.com
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