The God Of Small Things [Arundhati Roy]

It's easy to forget the greatness in things we haven't yet heard of.

Great resource for understanding: http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/anglophone/roy.html

***
"Never again will a single story be told
as though it's the only one."
-John Berger
 ***

Table of Contents
1) Paradise Pickles & Preserves
2) Pappachi's Moth
3) Big Man the Laltain, Small Man the Mombatti
4) Abhilash Talkies
5) God's Own Country
6) Wisdom Exercise Notebooks
8) Welcome Home, Our Sophie Mol
9) Mrs. Pillai, Mrs. Eapen, Mrs. Rajagopalan
10) The River in the Boat
11) The God of Small Things
12) Kochu Thomban
13) The Pessimist and the Optimist
14) Work is Struggle
15) The Crossing
16) A Few Hours Later
17) Cochin Harbor Terminus
18) The History House
19) Saving Ammu
20) The Madras Mail
21) The Cost of Living

***
1) Paradise Pickles & Preserves

18:
It was, they whispered to each other, as though she didn't know how to be a girl.
They weren't far off the mark.
Oddly, neglect seemed to have resulted in an accidental release of the spirit.

19:
...exploited cheap student labor to render their presentation drawings and to blame when things went wrong.

19:
There goes a jazz tune, Larry McCaslin thought to himself, and followed her into a bookshop, where neither of them looked at books.

20:
He was exasperated because he didn't know what that look meant. He put it somewhere between indifference and despair. He didn't know that in some places, like the country Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, infeasible, public turmoil of a nation. The Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy, contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening.

So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. He whistled, kicked stones. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune. He climbed into people's eyes and became an exasperating expression.

What Larry McCaslin saw in Rahel's eyes was not despair at all, but a sort of enforced optimism. And a hollow where Esta's words had been. He couldn't be expected to understand that. That the emptiness in one twin was only a version of quietness in the other. That the two things fitted together. Like stacked spoons. Like familiar lovers' bodies.

33:
That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made.
The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.
And how much.

***
2) Pappachi's Moth

36:
Ammu said Chacko had never stopped loving Margaret Kochamma. Mammachi disagreed. She liked to believe that he had never loved her in the first place.

37:
Ammu was considering reverting to her maiden name, though she said that choosing between her husband's name and her father's name didn't give a woman much of a choice.

Rahel's new teeth were waiting inside her gums, like words in a pen.

Rahel's toy wristwatch had the time painted on it. Ten to two. One of her ambitions was to own a watch on which she could change the time whenever she wanted to (which according to her was what Time was meant for in the first place). 

38:
Everyone was so used to it that they didn't bother to nudge each other or exchange glances. Chacko had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and was permitted excesses and eccentricities nobody else was.

She was twenty-seven that year, and in the pit of her stomach she carried the cold knowledge that, for her, life had been lived. She had had one chance. She made a mistake. She married the wrong man.

39:
He wore old-fashioned spectacles that made him look earnest and completely belied his easygoing charm and juvenile but totally disarming sense of humor. He was twenty-five and had already been working on the tea estates for six years. He hadn't been to college, which accounted for his schoolboy humor. He proposed to Ammu five days after they first met. Ammu didn't pretend to be in love with him. She just weighed the odds and accepted. She though that anything, anyone at all, would be better than returning to Ayemenem. She wrote to her parents informing them of her decision. They didn't reply.

Ammu had an elaborate Calcutta wedding. Later, looking back on the day, Ammu realized that the slightly feverish glitter in her bridegroom's eyes had not been love, or even excitement at the prospect of carnal bliss, but approximately eight large pegs of whiskey. Straight. Neat.

A congregation of mourners with lantern jaws and broken noses.

When Ammu and her husband moved to Assam, Ammu, beautiful, young and cheeky, became the toast of the Planters' Club. She wore backless blouses with her saris and carried a silver lame purse on a chain. She smoked long cigarettes in a silver cigarette holder and learned how to blow perfect smoke rings. Her husband turned out to be not just a heavy drinker but a full-blown alcoholic with all an alcoholic's deviousness and tragic charm. There were things about him that Ammu never understood. Long after she left him, she never stopped wondering why he lied so outrageously when he didn't need to. Particularly when he didn't need to. In a conversation with friends he would talk about how much he loved smoked salmon when Ammu knew he hated it. Or he would come home from the club and tell Ammu that he saw Meet Me in St. Louis when he'd actually screened The Bronze Buckaroo. When she confronted him about these things, he never explained or apologized. He just giggled, exasperating Ammu to a degree she never thought herself capable of.

She didn't notice the single Siamese soul.

42:
He apologized abjectly for the violence, but immediately began to badger her about helping with his transfer. This fell into a pattern. Drunken violence followed by postdrunken badgering.

Except that now she had two young children. And no more dreams.

Ammu loved her children (of course), but their wide-eyed vulnerability and their willingness to love people who didn't really love them exasperated her and sometimes made her want to hurt them - just as an education, a protection.

Ammu quickly learned to recognize and despise the ugly face of sympathy.

When she looked at herself in her old wedding photographs, Ammu felt the woman that looked back at her was someone else. ... she had permitted herself to be so painstakingly decorated before being led to the gallows. It seemed so absurd. So futile.
Like polishing firewood.

But for the rest of her life she advocated small weddings in ordinary clothes.

Occasionally, when Ammu listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside her. A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out of the wold like a witch, to a better, happier place. On days like this there was something restless and untamed about her. As though she had temporarily set aside the morality of motherhood and divorcee-hood. Even her walk changed from a safe mother-walk to another wilder sort of walk. She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank with her little plastic transistor shaped like a tangerine. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims.

What was it that gave Ammu this Unsafe Edge? This air of unpredictibility? It was what she ahd battling inside her. An unmixable mix. The infinte tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber.

...she lived in the penumbral shadows between two worlds, just beyond the grasp of their power. That a woman that they had already damned, now had little left to lose, and could therefore be dangerous.

Sometimes she was the most beautiful woman that Estha and Rahel had ever seen. And sometimes she wasn't.

The fate of the wretched Man-less woman...she had no position anywhere at all.
She expected from them some token of unhappiness. At the very least.

46:
He was seventeen years older than Mammachi and realized with a shock that he was an old man when his wife was still in her prime....He had always been a jealous man, so he greatly resented the attention his wife was suddenly getting.


47:
Every night he beat her with a brass flower vase.
...He never touched Mammachi again [after that]. But he never spoke to her either as long as he lived.
To some small degree he did succeed in further corroding Ayemenem's view of working wives.

48:
His life's greatest setback was not having the moth that he had discovered named after him.

It was too late for him to assert his claim to the discovery. His moth was named after the Acting Director of the Department of Entomology, a junior officer whom Pappachi had always disliked.

In the years to come, even though he had been ill-humored long before he discovered the moth, Pappachi's Moth was held responsible for his black moods and sudden bouts of temper. Its pernicious ghost - gray, furry and with unusually dense dorsal tufts - haunted every house that he ever lived in. It tormented him and his children and his children's children.

49:
At Pappachi's funeral, Mammachi cried and her contact lenses slid around in her eyes. Ammu told the twins that Mammachi was crying more because she was used to him than because she loved him. She was used to having him slouching around the pickle factory, and was used to being beaten from time to time. Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kinds of things they could get used to.

52:
A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.

"We're prisoners of War," Chacko said. "Our dreams have been doctored. We belong nowhere. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed to shore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter."

- was [all] no more than a blink of the Earth Woman's eye.

Twinkle was a word with crinkled, happy edges.

54:
Rahel learned how history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws.

a) Going to Oxford didn't necessarily make a person clever.
b) Cleverness didn't necessarily make a good prime minister.
c) If a person couldn't even run a pickle factory profitably, how was that person going to run a whole country?
d) All Indian mothers are obsessed with their sons and are therefore poor judges of their abilities.

57:
Rahel knew that this had happened because she had been hoping that it wouldn't.

59:
Rahel didn't know what she suffered from, but occasionally she practiced sad faces, and sighing in the mirror.

61:
This too he had lost (along with his mind)...
Numbers would do.
Numbness would be fine.

64:
Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the Church with the Party, and the form and purpose of the journey remained similar. An obstacle race, with a prize at the end.

Chacko studied his treatise on "The Peaceful Transition to Communism" with an adolescent's obsessive diligence and an ardent fan's unquestioning approval.

..."Shall we annihilate them? Surely students aren't People anymore?"

67:
A keg of ancient anger, lit with a recent fuse.

Hers too, was an ancient, age-old fear. The fear of being dispossessed. 

69:
Memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones - a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother's marble eyes. Quite sane in the way she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered.

It was a little like having to sweep your footprints away with a broom. Or worse, not being allowed to leave footprints at all.

75:
...because you can't order fear around.

76:
Rahel smiled back at him, pleased to have Chacko mistaken for her father. Like a normal family.

79:
Ammu had told them the story of Julius Caesar and how he was stabbed by Brutus, his best friend, in the Senate. And how he fell to the floor with knives in his back and said, "Et tu, Brute? - then fall, Caesar." 

"It just goes to show," Ammu said, "that you can't trust anybody. Mother, father, brother, husband, bestfriend. Nobody."

80:
Aristocrats were people who didn't blow spit bubbles or shiver their legs. Or gobble.

81:
"Sorry, Ammu," Rahel said.
"Sorry doesn't make a dead man alive," Estha said.

"Don't use the name of the Lord in vain," Baby Kochamma said.
"I'm not," Chacko said, "I'm using it for a very good reason."

***
3) Big Man the Laltain, Small Man the Mombatti

85:
There are big dreams and little ones.

***
4) Abhilash Talkies

91:
Rahel liked all this. Holding the handbag. Everyone pissing in front of everyone. Like friends. She knew nothing then, of how precious a feeling this was. Like friends. They would never be together like this again. Ammu, Baby Kochamma, and she.

93:
Baby Kochamma would not admit to herself that she was looking forward to the picture. She preferred to feel that she was only doing it for the children's sake. In her mind she kept an orgainized, careful account of Things She'd Done For People, and Things People Hadn't Done For Her.

Ammu explained that people always loved best what they identified with.

94:
Excitement Always Leads to Tears

Smells, like music, hold memories. She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity.

100:
lemon flavored fear

He pretended not to love them, but he did. He loved them.

could you love the little fellow with the orange in the smelly auditorium? ...but could you love him still?

106:
Rahel froze. She was desperately sorry for what she had said. She didn't know where those words had come from. She didn't know that she'd had them in her. But they were out now, and wouldn't go back in. They hung about that red staircase like clerks in a government office. Some stood, some sat and shivered their legs.

"Rahel," Ammu said, "do you realize what you have just done?"
Frightened eyes and a fountain looked back at Ammu.
"It's all right. Don't be scared," Ammu said. "Just answer me. Do you?"
"What?" Rahel said in the smallest voice she had.
"D'you know what happens when you hurt people?" Ammu said. "When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less."

A cold moth with unusually dense dorsal tufts landed lightly on Rahel's heart. Where its icy legs touched her, she got goosebumps. Six goosebumps on her careless heart.

108:
He knew that if Ammu found out about what he had done with the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man, she'd love him less as well. Very much less.

Baby Kochamma looked flushed and excited. She loved not being the cause of ill-feeling.

Chacko often said that his ambition was to die of overeating. Mammachi said it was a sure sign of suppressed unhappiness. Chacko said it was no such thing. He said it was Sheer Greed.

109:
"Ammu," Rahel said, "shall I miss dinner as my punishment?"
She was keen to exchange punishments. No dinner, in exchange for Ammu loving the same as before.
...
"Some things come with their own punishments"
 ...
"No thank you," Rahel said, hoping that if she could somehow effect her own punishment, Ammu would rescind hers. 

Chacko would slip out of bed with a torch and look at his sleeping child. To learn her. Imprint her on his memory. To ensure that when he thought of her, the child that he invoked would be accurate.










***
5) God's Own Country
6) Wisdom Exercise Notebooks
8) Welcome Home, Our Sophie Mol
9) Mrs. Pillai, Mrs. Eapen, Mrs. Rajagopalan
10) The River in the Boat
11) The God of Small Things
12) Kochu Thomban
13) The Pessimist and the Optimist
14) Work is Struggle
15) The Crossing
16) A Few Hours Later
17) Cochin Harbor Terminus
18) The History House
19) Saving Ammu
20) The Madras Mail
21) The Cost of Living