The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy) - Highlights

CHARACTERS 
# Estha

Estha, which is short for Esthappen Yako, is Rahel's twin brother. He is a serious, intelligent, and somewhat nervous child who wears "beige and pointy shoes" and has an "Elvis puff". His experience of the circumstances surrounding Sophie's visit is somewhat more traumatic than Rahel's, beginning when he is sexually abused by a man at a theater. The narrator emphasizes that Estha's "Two Thoughts" in the pickle factory, stemming from this experience—that "Anything can happen to Anyone" and that "It's best to be prepared"—are critical in leading to his cousin's death.

Estha is the twin chosen by Baby Kochamma, because he is more "practical" and "responsible", to go into Velutha's cell at the end of the book and condemn him as his and Rahel's abductor. This trauma, in addition to the trauma of being shipped (or "Returned") to Calcutta to live with his father, contributes to Estha's becoming mute at some point in his childhood. He never goes to college and acquires a number of habits, such as wandering on very long walks and obsessively cleaning his clothes. He is so close to his sister that the narrator describes them as one person, despite having been separated for most of their lives. He is repeatedly referred to as "Silent".

# Rahel

Rahel is the partial narrator of the story, and is Estha's younger sister by 18 minutes. As a girl of seven, her hair sits "on top of her head like a fountain" in a "Love-in-Tokyo" band, and she often wears red-tinted plastic sunglasses with yellow rims. An intelligent and straightforward person who has never felt socially comfortable, she is impulsive and wild, and it is implied that everyone but Velutha treats her as somehow lesser than her brother. In later life, she becomes something of a drifter; several times, the narrator refers to her "Emptiness". After the tragedy that forms the core of the story, she remains with her mother, later training as an architectural draftsman and engaging in a failed relationship with an American, elements of which parallel the author's own life story.

# Ammu

Ammu is Rahel's and Estha's mother. She married their father (referred to as Baba) only to get away from her family. He was an alcoholic, and she divorced him when he started to be violent toward her and her children. She went back to Ayemenem, where people avoided her on the days when the radio played "her music" and she got a wild look in her eyes. When the twins are seven, she has an affair with Velutha. This relationship is one of the cataclysmic events in the novel. She is a strict mother, and her children worry about losing her love.

# Velutha

Velutha is a Paravan, an Untouchable, who is exceptionally smart and works as a carpenter at the Ipe family's pickle factory. His name means white in Malayalam, because he is so dark. He returns to Ayemenem to help his father, Vellya Paapen, take care of his brother, who was paralyzed in an accident. He is an active member of the local Communist movement. Velutha is extremely kind to the twins, and has an affair with Ammu for which he is brutally punished.

# Chacko

Chacko is Estha's and Rahel's maternal uncle. He is four years elder to Ammu. He meets Margaret in his final year at Oxford and marries her afterward. They have a daughter, Sophie, whose death in Ayemenem is central to the story.

# Baby Kochamma

Baby Kochamma is the twins' maternal great aunt. She is of petite build as a young woman but becomes enormously overweight, with "a mole on her neck", by the time of Sophie's death. She maintains an attitude of superiority because of her education as a garden designer in the United States and her burning, unrequited love for an Irish Catholic priest, her relationship with whom is the only meaningful event in her life. Her own emptiness and failure spark bitter spite for her sister's children, further driven by her prudish code of conventional values. Her spite ultimately condemns the twins, the lovers, and herself to a lifetime of misery.

...

Navomi Ipe Kochamma, better known by her nickname Baby Kochamma, is an antagonist within the novel. She is the vindictive great aunt of the child protagonists Estha and Rahel. (Ref: https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Baby_Kochamma)

# Mammachi

Mammachi is Chacko and Ammu's mother and Estha and Rahel's grandmother. She's nearly blind and plays a mean violin. She founded Paradise Pickles and Preserves and built it into a successful business before turning it over to Chacko, who transformed it into, um, a less successful business. Mammachi is sort of your typical cranky old-lady figure – very stubborn and set in her beliefs and habits. Her ideas of how the world works are pretty much set in stone. She is prejudiced against the lower classes, always wants to make herself look important, and hates Margaret Kochamma with a passion.

# Pappachi

Pappachi is Estha and Rahel's grandfather, Ammu's father. He was once an Imperial Entomologist, which is a frou-frou way of saying that he studied bugs for the government. His biggest failure in life came from his biggest triumph: he discovered a rare breed of moth, but he didn't get credit or even naming rights for his discovery. Pappachi was an angry, jealous man who beat Mammachi regularly. He dies before the action of the novel really kicks off, so he's referred to mostly as a memory.

# Kochu Maria
Kochu Maria is Mammachi and Baby Kochamma's housekeeper. She is short and ugly. She doesn't speak English, so whenever the twins speak English around her, she thinks they're making fun of her (and, well, sometimes they are). (Ref 2)

# Comrade Pillai
Comrade K.N.M. Pillai is the leader of the Communist Party in Ayemenem. He runs the local printing press, and one of his big responsibilities is to print the labels for Paradise Pickles and Preserves. He has big political ambitions, so even though he gets a lot of business from Chacko for printing his labels, he tries to make Chacko look like a villain to the factory workers. He figures that this way, he can rustle up their political support. (Ref 3)

PLOT 

The story is set in Ayemenem, now part of Kottayam district in Kerala, India. The temporal setting shifts back and forth between 1969, when fraternal twins Rahel (girl) and Esthappen (boy) are seven years old, and 1993, when the twins are reunited.

Ammu Ipe is desperate to escape her ill-tempered father, known as Pappachi, and her bitter, long-suffering mother, known as Mammachi. She persuades her parents to let her spend a summer with a distant aunt in Calcutta. To avoid returning to Ayemenem, she marries a man there but later discovers that he is an alcoholic, and he physically abuses her and tries to pimp her to his boss. She gives birth to Rahel and Estha, leaves her husband, and returns to Ayemenem to live with her parents and brother, Chacko. Chacko has returned to India from England after his divorce from an English woman, Margaret, and the subsequent death of Pappachi.

The multi-generational family home in Ayemenem also includes Pappachi's sister, Navomi Ipe, known as Baby Kochamma. As a young girl, Baby Kochamma fell in love with Father Mulligan, a young Irish priest who had come to Ayemenem. To get closer to him, Baby Kochamma converted to Roman Catholicism and joined a convent against her father's wishes. After a few months in the convent, she realized that her vows brought her no closer to the man she loved. Her father eventually rescued her from the convent and sent her to America. Because of her unrequited love for Father Mulligan, Baby Kochamma remained unmarried for the rest of her life, becoming deeply embittered over time. Throughout the book, she delights in the misfortune of others and constantly manipulates events to bring calamity.

The death of Margaret's second husband in a car accident prompts Chacko to invite her and Sophie (Margaret's and Chacko's daughter) to spend Christmas in Ayemenem. En route to the airport to pick up Margaret and Sophie, the family visits a theater. On the way to the theater, they encounter a group of Communist protesters who surround the car and force Baby Kochamma to wave a red flag and chant a Communist slogan, thus humiliating her. Rahel thinks she sees Velutha, a servant who works for the family's pickle factory among the protesters. Later at the theater, Estha is sexually molested by the "Orangedrink Lemondrink Man", a vendor working the snack counter. Estha's experience factors into the tragic events at the heart of the narrative.

Rahel's assertion that she saw Velutha in the Communist mob causes Baby Kochamma to associate Velutha with her humiliation at the protesters' hands, and she begins to harbor enmity toward him. Velutha is a dalit (lower caste in India). Rahel and Estha form an unlikely bond with Velutha and come to love him despite his caste status. It is her children's love for Velutha that causes Ammu to realize her own attraction to him, and eventually, she comes to "love by night the man her children loved by day". Ammu and Velutha begin a short-lived affair that culminates in tragedy for the family.

When her relationship with Velutha is discovered, Ammu is locked in her room and Velutha is banished. In her rage, Ammu blames the twins for her misfortune and calls them "millstones around her neck". Distraught, Rahel and Estha decide to run away. Their cousin, Sophie also joins them. During the night, as they try to reach an abandoned house across the river, their boat capsizes and Sophie drowns. When Margaret and Chacko return from a trip, they see Sophie's body laid out on the sofa.

Baby Kochamma goes to the police and accuses Velutha of being responsible for Sophie's death. A group of policemen hunt Velutha down, savagely beat him for crossing caste lines, and arrest him on the brink of death. The twins, huddling in the abandoned house, witness the horrific scene. Later, when they reveal the truth to the chief of police he is alarmed. He knows that Velutha is a Communist, and is afraid that if word gets out that the arrest and beating were wrongful, it will cause unrest among the local Communists. He threatens to hold Baby Kochamma responsible for falsely accusing Velutha. To save herself, Baby Kochamma tricks Rahel and Estha into believing that the two of them would be implicated as having murdered Sophie out of jealousy and were facing sure imprisonment for them and their Ammu. She thus convinces them to lie to the inspector that Velutha had kidnapped them and had murdered Sophie. Velutha dies of his injuries overnight.

After Sophie's funeral, Ammu goes to the police to tell the truth about her relationship with Velutha. Afraid of being exposed, Baby Kochamma convinces Chacko that Ammu and the twins were responsible for his daughter's death. Chacko kicks Ammu out of the house and forces her to send Estha to live with his father. Estha never sees Ammu again. Ammu dies alone a few years later at the age of 31.

After a turbulent childhood and adolescence in India, Rahel gets married and goes to America. There, she divorces before returning to Ayemenem after years of working dead-end jobs. Rahel and Estha, now 31, are reunited for the first time since they were children. They had been haunted by their guilt and their grief-ridden pasts. It becomes apparent that neither twin ever found another person who understood them in the way they understand each other. Toward the end of the novel, the twins have sex. The novel comes to a close with a nostalgic recounting of Ammu and Velutha's love affair.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_of_Small_Things

WHY SHOULD YOU READ “THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS” BY ARUNDHATI ROY? - LAURA WRIGHT

A few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes and that when they do those few dozen hours like the salvaged remains of a burned clock must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. This is the premise of Arundhati Roy's 1997 novel The God of small things set in the town in Kerala, India called Ayemenem. The story revolves around fraternal twins Rahel and Estha who are separated for 23 years after the fateful few dozen hours in which their cousin drowns their mothers illicit affair has revealed and her lover is murdered while the book is set to the point of Rahel and Estha's reunions, the narrative takes place mostly in the past. Reconstructing the details around the tragic events that led to the separation. Roy's rich language and masterful storytelling earned her the prestigious Booker prize for the god of small things. In the novel, she interrogates the culture of her native India, including its social mores and Colonial history. One of our focuses is the caste system, a way of classifying people by hereditary social class that is thousands of years old. By the mid 20th century, the original five casts associated with specific occupations have been divided into some 3,000 sub-casts.

Brahmins / Priestly / Academic class
Kshatriyas / Rulers / Administrators / Warriors
Vaishyas / Artisans / Tradesmenm / Farmers / Merchants
Shudras / Servants / Manual laborers
Dalits / Street cleaners / Untouchables

Though the caste system was constitutionally abolished in 1950, it continued to shape social life in India routinely marginalizing people of lower castes. In the novel Rahel and Estha have a close relationship with the Velutha a worker in their family's Pickle Factory and member of the so-called Untouchable caste. When the Velutha and the twins mother Ammu embark on an affair, they violate what Roy describes as the love laws forbidding intimacy between different castes. Roy warns that the tragic consequences of their relationship would lurk forever in ordinary things like coat hangers, the tar on roads and the absence of words. Roy's writing makes constant use of these ordinary things bringing lush detail to even the most tragic moments. The book opens at the funeral of the twins half-British cousin Sophie after her drowning. As the family mourns, lilies curl and crisp in the hot Church, a baby bat crawls up a funeral. Sorry tears drip from a chin like raindrops from a roof. The novel forays into the past to explore the characters' struggles to operate in a world where they don't quite fit alongside their nation's political turmoil. Ammu struggles not to lash out at her beloved children when she feels particularly trapped in her parents small town home when neighbors judge and shun her for being divorced. The Velutha meanwhile balances his affair with Ammu and friendship with the twins not only with his employment to their family, but also with his membership to a budding communist counter-movement to Indira Gandhi's Green Revolution. In the 1960s, the misleadingly named Green Revolution introduced chemical fertilizers and pesticides and the damming of rivers to India. While these policies produced high yield crops that staved off famine, they also forced people from lower castes off their land and caused widespread environmental damage. When the twins return to Ayemenem as adults the consequences of the Green Revolution are all around them. The river that was bursting with life in their childhood greets them with a ghastly skull smile with holes where teeth had been and a limp hand raised from a hospital bed. As Roy probes the depth of human experience, she never loses sight of the way her characters are shaped by the time and the place where they live. In the world of the god of small things various kinds Of despair competed for primacy, personal despair could never be desperate enough. Personal turmoil dropped by at the Wayside Shrine of the vast violent circling driving ridiculous insane unfeasible public turmoil of a nation.
 
Ref: https://ed.ted.com/lessons/why-should-you-read-the-god-of-small-things-by-arundhati-roy-laura-wright

THEMES 

1. Family

The God of Small Things is probably more than anything else a novel about family. It explores the relationship between brother and sister, mother and child, grandparent and grandchild, aunt and niece/nephew, and cousins. It looks at the ways families are forced to stick together and also how they fall apart. Unconditional family love is a major issue on the table here. Sometimes we feel obligated to love our family members. On the other hand, just because you're related to someone doesn't mean you'll love them or that they'll have your back. Just like in real life, family relationships in the novel can be complicated, confusing, and frustrating.

Chew on This
- In The God of Small Things, "family" refers to people obligated to each other because of blood, regardless of whether or not they actually care about one another.

- In The God of Small Things, "family" refers to the people one cares about.

2. Society and class

The characters in The God of Small Things are constantly coming up against the forces of society and class. Indian society was structured for centuries according to very rigid social classes and boundaries, through what is known as the caste system. Even though the novel takes place after the caste system stopped being a legal social policy, its characters still find themselves limited by what is and isn't deemed socially acceptable for them. Social rules dictate who can love whom, which occupations people can adopt, and who is considered to be better than whom. (Sounds a little like an extreme version of high school, doesn't it?)

Chew on This
- The characters of The God of Small Things are ultimately constrained and held back by class boundaries.

- In the end, the characters of The God of Small Things show us that class boundaries are breakable.

3. Versions of reality

Throughout The God of Small Things, we get to see how things look from different characters' points of view – different versions of the same reality. We see Estha and Rahel at two very different points in their lives, 23 years apart. There is a stark difference between their perspectives as 7-year-olds and as 31-year-olds. As kids, we see them learning about the world as they go; as adults, they are trying to make sense of the past.

Chew on This
- Viewing one event from multiple perspectives helps us get at the one true story.

- Viewing one event from multiple perspectives shows us that there is no single "correct" version of things.

4. Memory and the past

Time in The God of Small Things doesn't unfold in a linear way; we don't start at Point A and watch the story progress until we get to Point B. Instead, we move back and forth between 1969 and 1993, with a few other episodes thrown in for flavor. The story is told through a series of memories and flashbacks. From the moment the novel begins, we know what's going to happen, we just don't know how. We start at the end, and the narrator uses the characters' memories to put the pieces together for us. (Check out "Writing Style" for more on this.)

Chew on This
- In The God of Small Things, memories tend to be extremely painful to recall.

- In The God of Small Things, memories of better times help the characters make sense of the troubles they're going through.

5. Guilt and Blame

Guilt and blame are a tricky duo in this book, lurking around every corner. Some really horrible things happen here: Estha is molested; Sophie Mol drowns; a family breaks apart. Even though the narrator sometimes suggests that these things might have been destined to happen, the only way for the characters to make sense of the tragedies they are living through is to find someone to blame. Margaret Kochamma, for instance, finds it easiest to blame Estha for Sophie Mol's death, while Chacko blames Ammu.

Along with blame, guilt is an emotion all too familiar to our characters. Unfortunately, we often see instances of guilt, or shame, where there should be none. For example, Estha feels incredibly guilty after the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man molests him, convinced that he did something wrong.

Chew on This
- Even though it was unintentional, one could argue that Estha and Rahel are directly responsible for Sophie Mol's death.

- There is no one person to blame for what happens to Sophie Mol; her death is a product of many circumstances.

6. Innocence

One of the most interesting aspects of The God of Small Things is how the narrator helps us see and understand the world from a kid's perspective. This ranges from everyday things (like what certain words mean) to the most shocking and horrific events imaginable (like Sophie Mol's death). Usually when we think about innocence, we think about a world of simplicity. When you're innocent, what you don't know can't hurt you – you can be blissfully naïve. This book puts a different spin on innocence – here, it's not about what Estha and Rahel don't know, but rather the way they make sense of what they do know, see, or experience.

Estha and Rahel, both separately and together, lose their innocence throughout the course of the novel. One of the most touching aspects of Estha's loss of innocence – when he is molested, and when he is forced to condemn Velutha – is how he tries to prevent the same thing from happening to Rahel. While both children undergo a loss of innocence through painful experiences, Estha is the more profoundly affected of the two. He watches his world change and tries to prevent his sister from having to share that experience.

Chew on This
- By portraying the twins as cute and innocent, the narrator shows us that they don't fully understand what's happening around them.

- Portraying the twins as cute and innocent helps emphasize how horrible the events happening to them are.

7. Love

"OK," you yawn, "another book with love as a theme. Can't anyone write anything different?" Well, friends, it's true, The God of Small Things is about love. The novel puts it right out there on the table, repeatedly invoking the "Love Laws" that dictate "who should be loved, and how. And how much" (1.209-210). Love and rules are constantly butting heads in the book. Ammu and Velutha's love is forbidden because of their caste (social status) differences. Rahel and Estha's love is expressed physically at the end of the book, resulting in the taboo of incest. Mammachi's feelings toward her son, Chacko, also blur the lines between familial and romantic love. (See "Family" under "Quotes by Theme.") And Baby Kochamma is in love with Father Mulligan, a priest who can never marry. In The God of Small Things, love constantly violates social rules.

Chew on This
- The God of Small Things is about what happens when love is thwarted and not allowed to flourish.

- Love that breaks "The Love Laws" is the only successful love.

8. Fear

In a novel in which so many bad things happen, it's not all that surprising that fear comes to the forefront. It's hard to think of even one character who doesn't demonstrate fear at some point. The thing to keep in mind about fear in The God of Small Things is that it isn't just a reaction to something scary; it's a powerful motivator that pushes characters to act in particular, often dangerous, ways.

Estha's fear of the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man and Rahel's fear that Ammu doesn't love her anymore provoke the twins to run away across the river. Baby Kochamma and Mammachi's fear of social disgrace push them to lock Ammu away and send the police after Velutha. Fear is a mechanism behind many of the major, life-changing moments of the novel, and the result is often more terrifying than the thing that was originally feared.

Chew on This
- In The God of Small Things, fear causes people to act in ways that lead to bad things happening.

- In The God of Small Things, fear is a natural response to bad things that are inevitable.

9. Identity

The question of identity ("Who am I?") is important to all the characters in The God of Small Things, but especially to Estha and Rahel. On one level, they have a very good idea of who they are: they are extensions of one another. When they are together, they are a whole being. Nevertheless, the more Estha and Rahel learn about the world around them, the more we see them taking on alternate identities and imagining themselves as someone else. Ambassador E. Pelvis, Ambassador Stick Insect, and The Airport Fairy are all versions of themselves they identify with in different situations. Part of what makes their reunion in 1993 so important is that for the first time in 23 years they can consider themselves whole again.

Chew on This
- As kids, Estha and Rahel share one identity.

- As kids, Estha and Rahel each have a separate identity that balances the other out.

10. Mortality

Mortality, or death, resonates throughout The God of Small Things. We find out from the very beginning that Sophie Mol is going to die, and our anticipation of and eventual reaction to her death keeps us on edge from the first to the very last page. But Sophie Mol isn't the only person who comes face to face with death; Velutha dies in an incredibly graphic and violent way, and Ammu's death scene is full of anguish and fear. The novel asks us to consider not just the experience of death, but also that of witnessing it.

Chew on This
- Sophie Mol's death has the greatest effect on the rest of Estha's life.

- Velutha's death has the greatest effect on the rest of Estha's life.

Ref: https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/god-of-small-things/themes#versions-of-reality-theme

QUOTES 

1. 
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.'

2.
“As Estha stirred the thick jam he thought Two Thoughts and the Two Thoughts he thought were these:
a) Anything can happen to anyone.
and
b) It is best to be prepared.”

3.
“There are things that you can't do - like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.”

4.
“People always loved best what they identified most with.”

5.
“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.”

6.
“If you are happy in a dream, Ammu, does that count? Estha asked. "Does what count?" "The happiness does it count?". She knew exactly what he meant, her son with his spoiled puff. Because the truth is, that only what counts, counts... "If you eat fish in a dream, does it count?" Does it mean you've eaten fish?”

7.
“Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away.”

8.
“Humans are animals of habit.”

9.
“The steel door of the incinerator went up and the muted hum of the eternal fire became a red roaring. The heat lunged out at them like a famished beast. Then Rahel's Ammu was fed to it. Her hair, her skin, her smile. Her voice. They way she used Kipling to love her children before putting them to bed: We be of one blood, though and I. Her goodnight kiss. The way she held their faces steady with one hand (squashed-cheeked, fish-mouthed) while she parted and combed their hair with the other. The way she held knickers out for Rahel to climb into. Left leg, right leg. All this was fed to the beast, and it was satisfied.

She was their Ammu and their Baba and she had loved them Double.”

10.
“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).”

Ref 1: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/810135-the-god-of-small-things?page=3
Ref 2: https://www.shmoop.com/god-of-small-things/kochu-maria.html
Ref 3: https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/god-of-small-things/comrade-knm-pillai