The God of Small Things

by Arundhati Roy

  So Mammachi had the satisfaction of regarding Margaret Kochamma as just another whore, Aniyan the dhobi was happy with his daily gratuity, and of course Margaret Kochamma remained blissfully unaware of the whole arrangement.

  From its perch on the well, an untidy coucal called Hwoop-Hwoop and shuffled its rust-red wings.

  A crow stole some soap that bubbled in its beak.

  In the dark, smoky kitchen, short Kochu Maria stood on her toes and iced the tall, double-deckered WELCOME HOME OUR SOPHIE MOL cake. Though even in those days most Syrian Christian women had started wearing saris, Kochu Maria still wore her spotless half-sleeved white chatta with a V-neck and her white mundu, which folded into a crisp cloth fan on her behind. Kochu Maria’s fan was more or less hidden by the blue-and-white checked, frilled, absurdly incongruous housemaid’s apron that Mammachi insisted she wear inside the house.

  She had short, thick forearms, fingers like cocktail sausages, and a broad fleshy nose with flared nostrils. Deep folds of skin connected her nose to either side of her chin, and separated that section of her face from the rest of it, like a snout. Her head was too large for her body. She looked like a bottled fetus that had escaped from its jar of formaldehyde in a Biology lab and unshriveled and thickened with age.

  She kept damp cash in her bodice, which she tied tightly around her chest to flatten her unchristian breasts. Her kunukku earrings were thick and gold. Her earlobes had been distended into weighted loops that swung around her neck, her earrings sitting in them like gleeful children in a merry-go-(not all the way)-round. Her right lobe had split open once and was sewn together again by Dr. Verghese Verghese. Kochu Maria couldn’t stop wearing her kunukku because if she did, how would people know that despite her lowly cook’s job (seventy-five rupees a month) she was a Syrian Christian, Mar Thomite? Not a Pelaya, or a Pulaya, or a Paravan. But a Touchable, upper-caste Christian (into whom Christianity had seeped like tea from a teabag). Split lobes stitched back were a better option by far.

  Kochu Maria hadn’t yet made her acquaintance with the television addict waiting inside her. The Hulk Hogan addict. She hadn’t yet seen a television set. She wouldn’t have believed television existed. Had someone suggested that it did, Kochu Maria would have assumed that he or she was insulting her intelligence. Kochu Maria was wary of other peoples’ versions of the outside world. More often than not, she took them to be a deliberate affront to her lack of education and (earlier) gullibility. In a determined reversal of her inherent nature, Kochu Maria now, as a policy, hardly ever believed anything that anybody said. A few months ago, in July, when Rahel told her that an American astronaut called Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon, she laughed sarcastically and said that a Malayali acrobat called O. Muthachen had done handsprings on the sun. With pencils up his nose. She was prepared to concede that Americans existed, though she’d never seen one. She was even prepared to believe that Neil Armstrong might conceivably even be some absurd kind of name. But the walking on the moon bit? No sir. Nor did she trust the vague gray pictures that had appeared in the Malayala Manorama that she couldn’t read.

  She remained certain that Estha, when he said, “Et tu, Kochu Maria?” was insulting her in English. She thought it meant something like Kochu Maria, You Ugly Black Dwarf. She bided her time, waiting for a suitable opportunity to complain about him.

  She finished icing the tall cake. Then she tipped her head back and squeezed the leftover icing onto her tongue. Endless coils of chocolate toothpaste on a pink Kochu Maria tongue. When Mammachi called from the verandah (“Kochu Mariye! I hear the car!”) her mouth was full of icing and she couldn’t answer. When she finished, she ran her tongue over her teeth and then made a series of short smacking sounds with her tongue against her palate as though she’d just eaten something sour.

  Distant skyblue carsounds (past the bus stop, past the school, past the yellow church and up the bumpy red road through the rubber trees) sent a murmur through the dim, sooty premises of Paradise Pickles.

  The pickling (and the squashing, the slicing, boiling and stirring, the grating, salting, drying, the weighing and bottle sealing) stopped.

  “Chacko Soar vannu,” the traveling whisper went. Chopping knives were put down. Vegetables were abandoned, half cut, on huge steel platters. Desolate bitter gourds, incomplete pineapples. Colored rubber finger guards (bright, like cheerful, thick condoms) were taken off. Pickled hands were washed and wiped on cobalt-blue aprons. Escaped wisps of hair were recaptured and returned to white headscarves. Mundus tucked up under aprons were let down. The gauze doors of the factory had sprung hinges, and closed noisily on their own.

  And on one side of the driveway, beside the old well, in the shade of the kodam puli tree, a silent blue-aproned army gathered in the greenheat to watch.

  Blue-aproned, white-capped, like a clot of smart blue-and-white flags.

  Achoo, Jose, Yako, Anian, Elayan, Kuttan, Vijayan, Vawa, Joy, Sumathi, Ammal, Annamma, Kanakamma, Latha, Sushila, Vijayamma, Jollykutty, Mollykutty, Lucykutty, Beena Mol (girls with bus names). The early rumblings of discontent, concealed under a thick layer of loyalty.

  The skyblue Plymouth-turned in at the gate and crunched over the gravel driveway crushing small shells and shattering little red and yellow pebbles. Children tumbled out.

  Collapsed fountains.

  Flattened puffs.

  Crumpled yellow bell-bottoms and a go-go bag that was loved. Jet-lagged and barely awake. Then the swollen-ankled adults. Slow from too much sitting.

  “Have you arrived?” Mammachi asked, turning her slanty dark glasses towards the new sounds: car doors slamming, getting-outedness. She lowered her violin.

  “Mammachi!” Rahel said to her beautiful blind grandmother. “Estha vomited! In the middle of The Sound of Music! And …”

  Ammu touched her daughter gently. On her shoulder. And her touch meant Shhhh … Rahel looked around her and saw that she was in a Play. But she had only a small part.

  She was just the landscape. A flower perhaps. Or a tree.

  A face in the crowd. A Townspeople.

  Nobody said Hello to Rahel. Not even the Blue Army in the greenheat.

  “Where is she?” Mammachi asked the car sounds. “Where is my Sophie Mol? Come here and let me see you.”

  As she spoke, the Waiting Melody that hung over her like a shimmering temple elephant’s umbrella crumbled and gently fell about like dust.

  Chacko, in his What Happened to Our Man of the Masses? suit and well-fed tie, led Margaret Kochamma and Sophie Mol triumphantly up the nine red steps like a pair of tennis trophies that he had recently won.

  And once again, only the Small Things were said. The Big Things lurked unsaid inside.

  “Hello, Mammachi,” Margaret Kochamma said in her kindschoolteacher (that sometimes slapped) voice. “Thank you for having us. We needed so much to get away.”

  Mammachi caught a whiff of inexpensive perfume soured at the edges by airline sweat. (She herself had a bottle of Dior in its soft green leather pouch locked away in her safe.)

  Margaret Kochamma took Mammachi’s hand. The fingers were soft, the ruby rings were hard.

  “Hello, Margaret,” Mammachi said (not rude, not polite), her dark glasses still on. “Welcome to Ayemenem. I’m sorry I can’t see you. As you must know, I am almost blind.” She spoke in a slow deliberate manner.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” Margaret Kochamma said. “I’m sure I look terrible anyway.” She laughed uncertainly, not sure if it was the right response.

  “Wrong,” Chacko said. He turned to Mammachi, smiling a proud smile that his mother couldn’t see. “She’s as lovely as ever.”

  “I was very sorry to hear about … Joe,” Mammachi said. She sounded only a little sorry. Not very sorry.

  There was a short, Sad-About-Joe silence.

  “Where’s my Sophie Mol?” Mammachi said. “Come here and let your grandmother look at you.”

  Sophie Mol was led to Mammachi. Mammachi pushed
her dark glasses up into her hair. They looked up like slanting cat’s eyes at the moldy bison head. The moldy bison said, “No. Absolutely Not.” In Moldy Bisonese.

  Even after her cornea transplant, Mammachi could only see light and shadow. If somebody was standing in the doorway, she could tell that someone was standing in the doorway. But not who it was. She could read a check, or a receipt, or a banknote only if it was close enough for her eyelashes to touch it. She would then hold it steady, and move her eye along it. Wheeling it from word to word.

  The Townspeople (in her fairy frock) saw Mammachi draw Sophie Mol close to her eyes to look at her. To read her like a check. To check her like a banknote. Mammachi (with her better eye) saw redbrown hair (N … Nalmost blond), the curve of two fatfreckled cheeks (Nnnn … almost rosy), bluegrayblue eyes.

  “Pappachi’s nose,” Mammachi said. “Tell me, are you a pretty girl?” she asked Sophie Mol.

  “Yes,” Sophie Mol said.

  “And tall?”

  “Tall for my age,” Sophie Mol said.

  “Very tall,” Baby Kochamma said. “Much taller than Estha.”

  “She’s older,” Ammu said.

  “Still …” Baby Kochamma said.

  A little way away, Velutha walked up the shortcut through the rubber trees. Barebodied. A coil of insulated electrical wire was looped over one shoulder. He wore his printed dark-blue-and-black mundu loosely folded up above his knees. On his back, his lucky leaf from the birthmark tree (that made the monsoons come on time). His autumn leaf at night.

  Before he emerged through the trees and stepped into the driveway, Rahel saw him and slipped out of the Play and went to him.

  Ammu saw her go.

  Offstage, she watched them perform their elaborate Official Greeting. Velutha curtsied as he had been taught to, his mundu spread like a skirt, like the English dairymaid in “The King’s Breakfast.” Rahel bowed (and said “Bow”). Then they hooked little fingers and shook hands gravely with the mien of bankers at a convention.

  In the dappled sunlight filtering through the dark-green trees, Ammu watched Velutha lift her daughter effortlessly as though she was an inflatable child, made of air. As he tossed her up and she landed in his arms, Ammu saw on Rahel’s face the high delight of the airborne young.

  She saw the ridges of muscle on Velutha’s stomach grow taut and rise under his skin like the divisions on a slab of chocolate. She wondered at how his body had changed—so quietly, from a flat-muscled boy’s body into a man’s body. Contoured and hard. A swimmer’s body. A swimmer-carpenter’s body. Polished with a high-wax body polish.

  He had high cheekbones and a white, sudden smile.

  It was his smile that reminded Ammu of Velutha as a little boy. Helping Vellya Paapen to count coconuts. Holding out little gifts he had made for her, flat on the palm of his hand so that she could take them without touching him. Boats, boxes, small windmills. Calling her Ammukutty. Little Ammu. Though she was so much less little than he was. When she looked at him now, she couldn’t help thinking that the man he had become bore so little resemblance to the boy he had been. His smile was the only piece of baggage he had carried with him from boyhood into manhood.

  Suddenly Ammu hoped that it had been him that Rahel saw in the march. She hoped it had been him that had raised his flag and knotted arm in anger. She hoped that under his careful cloak of cheerfulness he housed a living, breathing anger against the smug, ordered world that she so raged against.

  She hoped it had been him.

  She was surprised at the extent of her daughter’s physical ease with him. Surprised that her child seemed to have a sub-world that excluded her entirely. A tactile world of smiles and laughter that she, her mother, had no part in. Ammu recognized vaguely that her thoughts were shot with a delicate, purple tinge of envy. She didn’t allow herself to consider who it was that she envied. The man or her own child. Or just their world of hooked fingers and sudden smiles.

  The man standing in the shade of the rubber trees with coins of sunshine dancing on his body, holding her daughter in his arms, glanced up and caught Ammu’s gaze. Centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment. History was wrong-footed, caught off guard. Sloughed off like an old snakeskin. Its marks, its scars, its wounds from old wars and the walking-backwards days all fell away. In its absence it left an aura, a palpable shimmering that was as plain to see as the water in a river or the sun in the sky. As plain to feel as the heat on a hot day, or the tug of a fish on a taut line. So obvious that no one noticed.

  In that brief moment, Velutha looked up and saw things that he hadn’t seen before. Things that had been out of bounds so far, obscured by history’s blinkers.

  Simple things.

  For instance, he saw that Rahel’s mother was a woman.

  That she had deep dimples when she smiled and that they stayed on long after her smile left her eyes. He saw that her brown arms were round and firm and perfect. That her shoulders shone, but her eyes were somewhere else. He saw that when he gave her gifts they no longer needed to be offered flat on the palms of his hands so that she wouldn’t have to touch him. His boats and boxes. His little windmills. He saw too that he was not necessarily the only giver of gifts. That she had gifts to give him, too.

  This knowing slid into him cleanly, like the sharp edge of a knife. Cold and hot at once. It only took a moment.

  Ammu saw that he saw. She looked away. He did too. History’s fiends returned to claim them. To re-wrap them in its old, scarred pelt and drag them back to where they really lived. Where the Love Laws lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.

  Ammu walked up to the verandah, back into the Play. Shaking.

  Velutha looked down at Ambassador S. Insect in his arms. He put her down. Shaking too.

  “And look at you!” he said, looking at her ridiculous frothy frock. “So beautiful! Getting married?”

  Rahel lunged at his armpits and tickled him mercilessly. Ickilee ickilee ickilee!

  “I saw you yesterday,” she said.

  “Where?” Velutha made his voice high and surprised.

  “Liar,” Rahel said. “Liar and pretender. I did see you. You were a Communist and had a shirt and a flag. And you ignored me.”

  “Aiyyo kashtam,” Velutha said. “Would I do that? You tell me, would Velutha ever do that? It must’ve been my Long-lost Twin brother.”

  “Which Long-lost Twin brother?”

  “Urumban, silly … The one who lives in Kochi.”

  “Who Urumban?” Then she saw the twinkle. “Liar! You haven’t got a Twin brother! It wasn’t Urumban! It was you!”

  Velutha laughed. He had a lovely laugh that he really meant.

  “Wasn’t me,” he said. “I was sick in bed.”

  “See, you’re smiling!” Rahel said. “That means it was you. Smiling means ‘It was you.’”

  “That’s only in English!” Velutha said. “In Malayalam my teacher always said that ‘Smiling means it wasn’t me.’”

  It took Rahel a moment to sort that one out. She lunged at him once again. Ickilee ickilee ickilee!

  Still laughing, Velutha looked into the Play for Sophie. “Where’s our Sophie Mol? Let’s take a look at her. Did you remember to bring her, or did you leave her behind?”

  “Don’t look there,” Rahel said urgently.

  She stood up on the cement parapet that separated the rubber trees from the driveway, and clapped her hands over Velutha’s eyes.

  “Why?” Velutha said.

  “Because,” Rahel said, “I don’t want you to.”

  “Where’s Estha Mon?” Velutha said, with an Ambassador (disguised as a Stick Insect disguised as an Airport Fairy) hanging down his back with her legs wrapped around his waist, blindfolding him with her sticky little hands. “I haven’t seen him.”

  “Oh, we sold him in Cochin,” Rahel said airily. “For a bag of rice. And a torch.”

  The froth of her stiff frock pressed rough lace flowers into Velutha’s bac
k. Lace flowers and a lucky leaf bloomed on a black back.

  But when Rahel searched the Play for Estha, she saw that he wasn’t there.

  Back inside the Play, Kochu Maria arrived, short, behind her tall cake.

  “Cake’s come,” she said, a little loudly, to Mammachi.

  Kochu Maria always spoke a little loudly to Mammachi because she assumed that poor eyesight automatically affected the other senses.

  “Kando, Kochu Mariye?” Mammachi said. “Can you see our Sophie Mol?”

  “Kandoo, Kochamma,” Kochu Maria said extra loud. “I can see her.”

  She smiled at Sophie Mol, extra wide. She was exactly Sophie Mol’s height. More short than Syrian Christian, despite her best efforts.

  “She has her mother’s color,” Kochu Maria said.

  “Pappachi’s nose,” Mammachi insisted. “I don’t know about that, but she’s very beautiful,” Kochu Maria shouted. “Sundari kutty. She’s a little angel.”

  Littleangels were beach-colored and wore bell-bottoms.

  Littledemons were mudbrown in Airport-Fairy frocks with forehead bumps that might turn into horns. With Fountains in Love-in-Tokyos. And backwards-reading habits.

  And if you cared to look, you could see Satan in their eyes.

  Kochu Maria took both Sophie Mol’s hands in hers, palms upward, raised them to her face and inhaled deeply.

  “What’s she doing?” Sophie Mol wanted to know, tender London hands clasped in calloused Ayemenem ones. “Who’s she and why’s she smelling my hands?”

  “She’s the cook,” Chacko said. “That’s her way of kissing you.”