reviews:
‘Roy handles the shifting surfaces of past and present with extraordinary fineness and delicacy, producing a controlled, intricate narrative structure through which the themes of love, spite, betrayal, hatred and guilt run like a spider’s web. A remarkable achievement.’
SUPRIYA CHAUDHURI, Asian Age
‘The God of Small Things has it all: the echoes, calls and the cries of the Earth. But more importantly, an intellectual daring. This … is not just an extraordinary novel, but an uncoiling spring of human foreboding and inevitability. It’s quite simply unbeatable.’
RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR, Sunday Observer
‘A sad story, told very hilariously, very tenderly and very craftily.’
PAUL ZACHARIA, The Pioneer
‘The poetic intensity of Roy’s prose, her dynamic energy, her capacity to touch the combined strain of high jinks and pathos in childish humour, her presentation of characters through the children’s disturbing perspective have a function beyond that of holding the reader to the narrative. They create within the framework of Rahel’s desolation the magic of prelapsarian Eden, and make the fall from innocence doubly poignant.’
BHASWATI CHAKRAVORTY, The Telegraph (Calcutta)
‘A work of unusual range and depth and feeling, all the more remarkable for finding expression in a first novel. It is so well-paced, evocative and densely-plotted that it sustains the tension and tautness of a thriller. ’
SUNIL SETHI, Outlook
‘Arundhati Roy has stretched language and imagination to recreate the fun-filled, magical yet anguished world of childhood with poignant simplicity, directness and wit.’
MARIA COUTO, Frontline
For Mary Roy who grew me up.
Who taught me to say ‘excuse me’ before interrupting her in Public. Who loved me enough to let me go.
For LKC, who, like me, survived.
Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one.
JOHN BERGER
Contents
1 Paradise Pickles & Preserves
3 Big Man the Laltain, Small Man the Mombatti
8 Welcome Home, Our Sophie Mol
9 Mrs Pillai, Mrs Eapen, Mrs Rajagopalan
13 The Pessimist and the Optimist
1 Paradise Pickles & Preserves
May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.
The nights are clear but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.
But by early June the south-west monsoon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with. The countryside turns an immodest green. Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom. Brick walls turn mossgreen. Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across the flooded roads. Boats ply in the bazaars. And small fish appear in the puddles that fill the PWD potholes on the highways.
It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, ploughing it up like gunfire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat. The walls, streaked with moss, had grown soft, and bulged a little with dampness that seeped up from the ground. The wild, overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives. In the undergrowth a rat snake rubbed itself against a glistening stone. Hopeful yellow bullfrogs cruised the scummy pond for mates. A drenched mongoose flashed across the leaf-strewn driveway.
The house itself looked empty. The doors and windows were locked. The front verandah bare. Unfurnished. But the skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins was still parked outside, and inside, Baby Kochamma was still alive.
She was Rahel’s baby grand aunt, her grandfather’s younger sister. Her name was really Navomi, Navomi Ipe, but everybody called her Baby. She became Baby Kochamma when she was old enough to be an aunt. Rahel hadn’t come to see her, though. Neither niece nor baby grand aunt laboured under any illusions on that account. Rahel had come to see her brother, Estha. They were two-egg twins. ‘Dizygotic’ doctors called them. Born from separate but