The God of Small Things

by Arundhati Roy

  Baby Kochamma put her heavy arm around Mammachi.

  “It must be true,” she said in a quiet voice. “She’s quite capable of it. And so is he. Vellya Paapen would not lie about something like this.”

  She asked Kochu Maria to get Mammachi a glass of water and a chair to sit on. She made Vellya Paapen repeat his story, stopping him every now and then for details—whose boat? How often? How long had it been going on?

  When Vellya Paapen finished, Baby Kochamma turned to Mammachi. “He must go,” she said. “Tonight. Before it goes any further. Before we are completely ruined.”

  Then she shuddered her schoolgirl shudder. That was when she said: How could she stand the smell? Haven’t you noticed? They have a particular smell, these Paravans.

  With that olfactory observation, that specific little detail, the Terror unspooled.

  Mammachi’s rage at the old one-eyed Paravan standing in the rain, drunk, dribbling and covered in mud was re-directed into a cold contempt for her daughter and what she had done. She thought of her naked, coupling in the mud with a man who was nothing but a filthy coolie. She imagined it in vivid detail: a Paravan’s coarse black hand on her daughter’s breast His mouth on hers. His black hips jerking between her parted legs. The sound of their breathing. His particular Paravan smell. Like animals, Mammachi thought and nearly vomited. Like a dog with a bitch on heat. Her tolerance of “Men’s Needs,” as far as her son was concerned, became the fuel for her unmanageable fury at her daughter. She had defiled generations of breeding (The Little Blessed One, blessed personally by the Patriarch of Antioch, an Imperial Entomologist, a Rhodes Scholar from Oxford) and brought the family to its knees. For generations to come, forever now, people would point at them at weddings and funerals. At baptisms and birthday parties. They’d nudge and whisper. It was all finished now.

  Mammachi lost control.

  They did what they had to do, the two old ladies. Mammachi provided the passion. Baby Kochamma the Plan. Kochu Maria was their midget lieutenant. They locked Ammu up (tricked her into her bedroom) before they sent for Velutha. They knew that they had to get him to leave Ayemenem before Chacko returned. They could neither trust nor predict what Chacko’s attitude would be.

  It wasn’t entirely their fault, though, that the whole thing spun out of control like a deranged top. That it lashed out at those that crossed its path. That by the time Chacko and Margaret Kochamma returned from Cochin, it was too late.

  The fisherman had already found Sophie Mol.

  Picture him.

  Out in his boat at dawn, at the mouth of the river he has known all his life. It is still quick and swollen from the previous night’s rain. Something bobs past in the water and the colors catch his eye. Mauve. Redbrown. Beach sand. It moves with the current, swiftly towards the sea. He sends out his bamboo pole to stop it and draw it towards him. It’s a wrinkled mermaid. A mer-child. A mere mer-child. With redbrown hair. With an Imperial Entomologists’ nose, and a silver thimble clenched for luck in her fist. He pulls her out of the water into his boat. He puts his thin cotton towel under her, she lies at the bottom of his boat with his silver haul of small fish. He rows home—Thaiy thaiy thakka thaiy thaiy thome—thinking how wrong it is for a fisherman to believe that he knows his river well. No one knows the Meenachal. No one knows what it may snatch or suddenly yield. Or when. That is what makes fishermen pray.

  At the Kottayam police station, a shaking Baby Kochamma was ushered into the Station House Officer’s room. She told Inspector Thomas Mathew of the circumstances that had led to the sudden dismissal of a factory worker. A Paravan. A few days ago he had tried to, to … to force himself on her niece, she said. A divorcée with two children.

  Baby Kochamma misrepresented the relationship between Ammu and Velutha, not for Ammu’s sake, but to contain the scandal and salvage the family reputation in Inspector Thomas Mathew’s eyes. It didn’t occur to her that Ammu would later invite shame upon herself—that she would go to the police and try and set the record straight. As Baby Kochamma told her story, she began to believe it.

  Why wasn’t the matter reported to the police in the first place, the Inspecror wanted to know.

  “We are an old family,” Baby Kochamma said. “These are not things we want talked about …”

  Inspector Thomas Mathew, receding behind his bustling Air India mustache, understood perfectly. He had a Touchable wife, two Touchable daughters—whole Touchable generations waiting in their Touchable wombs….

  “Where is the molestee now?”

  “At home. She doesn’t know I’ve come here. She wouldn’t have let me come. Naturally … she’s frantic with worry about the children. Hysterical.”

  Later, when the real story reached Inspector Thomas Mathew, the fact that what the Paravan had taken from the Touchable Kingdom had not been snatched, but given, concerned him deeply. So after Sophie Mol’s funeral, when Ammu went to him with the twins to tell him that a mistake had been made and he tapped her breasts with his baton, it was not a policeman’s spontaneous brutishness on his part. He knew exactly what he was doing. It was a premeditated gesture, calculated to humiliate and terrorize her. An attempt to instill order into a world gone wrong.

  Still later, when the dust had settled and he had had the paperwork organized, Inspector Thomas Mathew congratulated himself for the way it had all turned out.

  But now, he listened carefully and courteously as Baby Kochamma constructed her story.

  “Last night it was getting dark—about seven in the evening—when he came to the house to threaten us. It was raining very heavily. The lights had gone out and we were lighting the lamps when he came,” she told him. “He knew that the man of the house, my nephew Chacko Ipe, was—is—away in Cochin. We were three women alone in the house.” She paused to let the Inspector imagine the horrors that could be visited by a sex-crazed Paravan on three women alone in a house.

  “We told him that if he did not leave Ayemenem quietly we would call the police. He started off by saying that my niece had consented, can you imagine? He asked us what proof we had of what we were accusing him of. He said that according to the Labor Laws we had no grounds on which to dismiss him. He was very calm. ‘The days are gone,’ he told us, ‘when you can kick us around like dogs.’” By now Baby Kochamma sounded utterly convincing. Injured. Incredulous.

  Then her imagination took over completely. She didn’t describe how Mammachi had lost control. How she had gone up to Velutha and spat right into his face. The things she had said to him. The names she had called him.

  Instead she described to Inspector Thomas Mathew how it was not just what Velutha had said that had made her come to the police, but the way he said it. His complete lack of remorse, which was what had shocked her most. As though he was actually proud of what he had done. Without realizing it herself, she grafted the manner of the man who had humiliated her during the march onto Velutha. She described the sneering fury in his face. The brassy insolence in his voice that had so frightened her. That made her sure that his dismissal and the children’s disappearance were not, could not possibly be, unconnected.

  She had known the Paravan since he was a child, Baby Kochamma said. He had been educated by her family, in the Untouchables’ school started by her father, Punnyan Kunju (Mr. Thomas Mathew must know who he was? Yes, of course). He was trained to be a carpenter by her family, the house he lived in was given to his grandfather by her family. He owed everything to her family.

  “You people,” Inspector Thomas Mathew said, “first you spoil these people, carry them about on your head like trophies, then when they misbehave you come running to us for help.”

  Baby Kochamma lowered her eyes like a chastised child. Then she continued her story. She told Inspector Thomas Mathew how in the last few weeks she had noticed some presaging signs, some insolence, some rudeness. She mentioned seeing him in the march on the way to Cochin and the rumors that he was or had been a Naxalite. She didn’t notice the faint furro
w of worry that this piece of information produced on the Inspector’s brow.

  She had warned her nephew about him, Baby Kochamma said, but never in her wildest dreams had she thought that it would ever come to this. A beautiful child was dead. Two children were missing.

  Baby Kochamma broke down.

  Inspector Thomas Mathew gave her a cup of police tea. When she was feeling a little better, he helped her to set down all she had told him in her First Information Report. He assured Baby Kochamma of the full cooperation of the Kottayam Police. The rascal would be caught before the day was out, he said. A Paravan with a pair of two-egg twins, hounded by history—he knew there weren’t many places for him to hide.

  Inspector Thomas Mathew was a prudent man. He took one precaution. He sent a jeep to fetch Comrade K. N. M. Pillai to the police station. It was crucial for him to know whether the Paravan had any political support or whether he was operating alone. Though he himself was a Congress man, he did not intend to risk any run-ins with the Marxist government. When Comrade Pillai arrived, he was ushered into the seat that Baby Kochamma had only recently vacated. Inspector Thomas Mathew showed him Baby Kochamma’s First Information Report. The two men had a conversation. Brief, cryptic, to the point. As though they had exchanged numbers and not words. No explanations seemed necessary. They were not friends, Comrade Pillai and Inspector Thomas Mathew, and they didn’t trust each other. But they understood each other perfectly. They were both men whom childhood had abandoned without a trace. Men without curiosity. Without doubt. Both in their own way truly, terrifyingly adult. They looked out at the world and never wondered how it worked, because they knew. They worked it. They were mechanics who serviced different parts of the same machine.

  Comrade Pillai told Inspector Thomas Mathew that he was acquainted with Velutha, but omitted to mention that Velutha was a member of the Communist Party, or that Velutha had knocked on his door late the previous night, which made Comrade Pillai the last person to have seen Velutha before he disappeared. Nor, though he knew it to be untrue, did Comrade Pillai refute the allegation of attempted rape in Baby Kochamma’s First Information Report. He merely assured Inspector Thomas Mathew that as far as he was concerned Velutha did not have the patronage or the protection of the Communist Party. That he was on his own.

  After Comrade Pillai left, Inspector Thomas Mathew went over their conversation in his mind, teasing it, testing its logic, looking for loopholes. When he was satisfied, he instructed his men.

  Meanwhile, Baby Kochamma returned to Ayemenem. The Plymouth was parked in the driveway. Margaret Kochamma and Chacko were back from Cochin.

  Sophie Mol was laid out on the chaise longue.

  When Margaret Kochamma saw her little daughter’s body, shock swelled in her like phantom applause in an empty auditorium. It overflowed in a wave of vomit and left her mute and empty-eyed. She mourned two deaths, not one. With the loss of Sophie Mol, Joe died again. And this time there was no homework to finish or egg to eat. She had come to Ayemenem to heal her wounded world, and had lost all of it instead. She shattered like glass.

  Her memory of the days that followed was fuzzy. Long, dim, hours of thick, furry-tongued serenity (medically administered by Dr. Verghese Verghese) lacerated by sharp, steely slashes of hysteria, as keen and cutting as the edge of a new razor blade.

  She was vaguely conscious of Chacko—concerned and gentle-voiced when he was by her side—otherwise incensed, blowing like an enraged wind through the Ayemenem House. So different from the amused Rumpled Porcupine she had met that long-ago Oxford morning at the café.

  She remembered faintly the funeral in the yellow church. The sad singing. A bat that had bothered someone. She remembered the sounds of doors being battered down, and frightened women’s voices. And how at night the bush crickets had sounded like creaking stars and amplified the fear and gloom that hung over the Ayemenem House.

  She never forgot her irrational rage at the other two younger children who had for some reason been spared. Her fevered mind fastened like a limpet onto the notion that Estha was somehow responsible for Sophie Mol’s death. Odd, considering that Margaret Kochamma didn’t know that it was Estha—Stirring Wizard with a Puff—who had rowed jam and thought Two Thoughts, Estha who had broken rules and rowed Sophie Mol and Rahel across the river in the afternoons in a little boat, Estha who had abrogated a sickled smell by waving a Marxist flag at it. Estha who had made the back verandah of the History House their home away from home, furnished with a grass mat and most of their toys—a catapult, an inflatable goose, a Qantas koala with loosened button eyes. And finally, on that dreadful night, Estha who had decided that though it was dark and raining, the Time Had Come for them to run away, because Ammu didn’t want them anymore.

  Despite not knowing any of this, why did Margaret Kochamma blame Estha for what had happened to Sophie? Perhaps she had a mother’s instinct.

  Three or four times, swimming up through thick layers of drug-induced sleep, she had actually sought Estha out and slapped him until someone calmed her down and led her away. Later, she wrote to Ammu to apologize. By the time the letter arrived, Estha had been Returned and Ammu had had to pack her bags and leave. Only Rahel remained in Ayemenem to accept, on Estha’s behalf, Margaret Kochamma’s apology. I can’t imagine what came over me, she wrote. I can only put it down to the effect of the tranquilizers. I had no right to behave the way I did, and want you to know that I am ashamed and terribly, terribly sorry.

  Strangely, the person that Margaret Kochamma never thought about was Velutha. Of him she had no memory at all. Not even what he looked like.

  Perhaps this was because she never really knew him, nor ever heard what happened to him.

  The God of Loss.

  The God of Small Things.

  He left no footprints in sand, no ripples in water, no image in mirrors.

  After all, Margaret Kochamma wasn’t with the platoon of Touchable policemen when they crossed the swollen river. Their wide khaki shorts rigid with starch.

  The metallic clink of handcuffs in someone’s heavy pocket.

  It is unreasonable to expect a person to remember what she didn’t know had happened.

  Sorrow, however, was still two weeks away on that blue cross-stitch afternoon, as Margaret Kochamma lay jet-lagged and still asleep. Chacko, on his way to see Comrade K. N. M. Pillai, drifted past the bedroom window like an anxious, stealthy whale intending to peep in to see whether his wife (Ex-wife, Chacko!) and daughter were awake and needed anything. At the last minute his courage failed him and he floated fatly by without looking in. Sophie Mol (A wake, A live, A lert) saw him go.

  She sat up on her bed and looked out at the rubber trees. The sun had moved across the sky and cast a deep house-shadow across the plantation, darkening the already dark-leafed trees. Beyond the shadow, the light was flat and gentle. There was a diagonal slash across the mottled bark of each tree through which milky rubber seeped like white blood from a wound, and dripped into the waiting half of a coconut shell that had been tied to the tree.

  Sophie Mol got out of bed and rummaged through her sleeping mother’s purse. She found what she was looking for—the keys to the large, locked suitcase on the floor, with its airline stickers and baggage tags. She opened it and rooted through the contents with all the delicacy of a dog digging up a flower bed. She upset stacks of lingerie, ironed skirts and blouses, shampoos, creams, chocolate, Sellotape, umbrellas, soap (and other bottled London smells), quinine, aspirin, broad-spectrum antibiotics. Take everything, her colleagues had advised Margaret Kochamma in concerned voices, you never know, which was their way of saying to a colleague traveling to the Heart of Darkness that: (a) Anything Can Happen To Anyone.

  So

  (b) It’s Best to be Prepared.

  Sophie Mol eventually found what she had been looking for.

  Presents for her cousins. Triangular towers of Toblerone chocolate (soft and slanting in the heat). Socks with separate multicolored toes. And
two ballpoint pens—the top halves filled with water in which a cut-out collage of a London streetscape was suspended. Buckingham Palace and Big Ben. Shops and people. A red double-decker bus propelled by an air bubble floated up and down the silent street. There was something sinister about the absence of noise on the busy ballpoint street.

  Sophie Mol put the presents into her go-go bag, and went forth into the world. To drive a hard bargain. To negotiate a friendship.

  A friendship that, unfortunately, would be left dangling. Incomplete. Flailing in the air with no foothold. A friendship that never circled around into a story, which is why, far more quickly than ever should have happened, Sophie Mol became a Memory, while The Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. Like a fruit in season. Every season.

  CHAPTER 14

  WORK IS STRUGGLE

  Chacko took the shortcut through the tilting rubber trees so that he would have to walk only a very short stretch down the main road to Comrade K. N. M. Pillai’s house. He looked faintly absurd, stepping over the carpet of dry leaves in his tight airport suit, his tie blown over his shoulder.

  Comrade Pillai wasn’t in when Chacko arrived. His wife, Kalyani, with fresh sandalwood paste on her forehead, made him sit down on a steel folding chair in their small front room and disappeared through the bright pink, nylon-lace curtained doorway into a dark adjoining room, where the small flame from a large brass oil lamp flickered. The cloying smell of incense drifted through the doorway, over which a small wooden placard said Work is Struggle. Strugle is Work.

  Chacko was too big for the room. The blue walls crowded him. He glanced around, tense and a little uneasy. A towel dried on the bars of the small green window. The dining table was covered with a bright flowered plastic tablecloth. Midges whirred around a bunch of small bananas on a blue-rimmed white enamel plate. In one corner of the room there was a pile of green unhusked coconuts. A child’s rubber slippers lay pigeon-toed in the bright parallelogram of barred sunlight on the floor. A glass-paned cupboard stood next to the table. It had printed curtains hanging on the inside, hiding its contents.