Sitting last month in my grandmother’s garden in Bangalore, the red soil under my feet and the avocado trees casting half shadow, I thought about my return to India. The paint of her house had faded and the garden was growing wild, and I sat reading her old, worn copy of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. I read about Rahel’s return to India, after decades in America, to an aged home, an altered landscape and a family harrowed by disgrace and death.
The death of nine-year-old Sophie Mol, from the very beginning pages, haunts the novel. Roy’s narration seems to dance around the truth, with a non-linear chronology that whispers secrets to you, and unveils slowly and sensuously the tale of one terrible night that changed a family forever. Rahel and Estha, twins who have been separated for decades, both carry a heavy guilt from their past. Roy’s backward, illogical narration distorts time, and creates an anti-Bildungsroman style, where tragedy ensures the twins can never fully mature.
Roy blends beauty with havoc through her haunting, lyrical style. Amidst scenes of dangerous political turbulence in Kerala, the twins play carelessly in the river; against the traumas of sexual violence, they guzzle mango jam and converse in secret languages; amidst violent caste tensions that lay laws about who can love who, they love their Untouchable carpenter Velutha. Through her soft, sensuous language, Roy’s politics are still sharp and direct, as she challenges the caste system by revealing the devastation it causes. Roy interestingly challenges colonisation too, playing with word forms and corrupting grammatical rules in a subtle reappropriation of the English language.
Overall, I would highly recommend The God of Small Things, a beautiful depiction of a tragic tale, where love and loss seem always intertwined.
Book cover of The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
