Daily Times

The God of Small Things

By Arundhati Roy

Penguin Books; Pp 340

The secret of great stories is that they have no secrets. Great stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In a way it is just like you know that one day you will die but you live as though you won’t. In great stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love and who doesn’t; yet you want to know again.

That is their mystery and their magic.

The God of Small Things is one such great story. A story that would be told time and again. A story that has many stories nestling, sometimes struggling inside it. A story so achingly simple that its hidden complexities only manifest themselves as time peels its layers, one by one. A story so full of anguish from its inception to its hellish end that it becomes the saddest thing you ever read. A story so stunning in its narration that the storyteller seems like a magician, a spellbinder, one of a kind.

Roy, to me, stands proudly with three of the greatest writers, unarguably, of the 20th century — Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Milan Kundera and Salman Rushdie — because the sheer magic of storytelling, directness of prose, and literary wizardry one finds in One Hundred Years Of Solitude, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Midnight’s Children is very much a part of Roy’s The God of Small Things. This is not a point to be debated; it is personal, and simply exists because I love, and have loved all of these magnificent books for years.

The God of Small Things is special because of the uniqueness of Roy’s writing. The ordinary English words become extraordinary when used by her. Her usage of the most commonly used words is wickedly brilliant. The words become her personal property turning the age-old rules of language topsy-turvy. Cajoling them to do the unwanted. Twisting their ears like one does with a petulant child. Moulding them into fanciful shapes like playdough in the hands of an imaginative little girl. Making them march to her tune like the Pied Piper from Hamlin. Conjuring up a plethora of colours like a maniacal genius painting his biggest canvas. And the result is enchanting, mesmerising, hypnotising. Her words shine; her own individualistic way of conjoining them together for a deeper effect is something so rare, so riveting that her book about small things acquires the quality of monumental bigness. Her words simply overstep the traditional and the accepted, and mark an uncharted region, jealously and protectively as their own.

The book is vividly visual. Nothing escapes the eye of the narrator; everything is noticed and described with an electrifying clarity and enlarged sharpness. The dark and mysterious village ‘pretending’ to be a town is alive with the sounds of living beings — animals and human — and haunted with the whispers of ghosts from the past. The optically experienced stuff becomes almost tangible. The sensual images seem to leap off the page, tantalising the senses, gambolling along playfully. Unwittingly, the lucidly tactile sharply brings into focus the eerie stillness of the lives of men and women who are the unfortunate players of this grotesque black comedy orchestrated by gods.

Roy’s story is multilayered, yet unapologetically simple. There is a sense of dread, of something ominous right from the very first pages of the novel. The background hums with a haunting sense of what has already transpired, and what lurks in the shadows. The characters tread noiselessly, in the present, tiptoeing around the debris of their pasts. Estha and Rahel — the ‘dizygotic’ twins with ‘the single Siamese soul’ — return to their family house after 23 years of forced exile. The seven-year old twins after being estranged from each other and their beautiful, young, divorced mother return as ghosts of their once animated innocent selves. One is silent and the other one is empty — of words, of expression, of love, of desire, of life. Once upon a time in the Heart of Darkness by the river Meenachil they became entangled in a series of devastating events that wreaked havoc on their souls and destroyed their loved ones. They erred, and the repercussions lasted forever. Two innocent children lose all they love through evil perpetrated by the all-consuming powers of bitterness, unacceptability, rigidity, unrequited love and power games. Some become mute, others lose their sanity, and some become hollow. And their pain is so palpable there is no place to hide from it. You hurt with them, with unshed tears blurring the words, and tightness in your chest. Yet, you cannot let go of them, dreading what other horror there is in store for them.

Roy’s god of Small Things — of Loss, of Goosebumps and Sudden Smiles — Velutha, the Naxalite Paravan, haunts long after the book is finished. The man who is loved openly by the twins and secretly by their mother suffers because of his religion and his political beliefs. He stands tall and proud, thus defying the accepted and expected. The consequences are catastrophic and eternal.

The fatal error committed by all of them is the doing of the prohibited. “They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.”

Arundhati Roy’s book is of great importance. You love it or you don’t, it would not ever arouse indifference. It is forever — because of the absolute beauty of her prose, and the supreme authority of her unforgettable story.

“Never again will a single story be told as though it is the only one” — John Berger

The reviewer can be contacted at mehrt2000@gmail.com