The god of small things in English

C H A P T E R 21 THE COST OF LIVING When the old house had closed its bleary eyes and settled into sleep, Ammu, wearing one of Chacko’s old shirts over a long white petticoat, walked out onto the front verandah. She paced up and down for awhile. Restless. Feral. Then she sat on the wicker chair below the moldy, button-eyed bison head and the portraits of the Little Blessed One and Aleyooty Ammachi that hung on either side of it. Her twins were sleeping the way they did when they were exhausted—with their eyes half open, two small monsters. They got that from their father

C H A P T E R 20 THE MADRAS MAIL And so, at the Cochin Harbor Terminus, Estha Alone at the barred train window. Ambassador E. Pelvis. A millstone with a puʃ. And a greenwavy, thickwatery, lumpy, seaweedy, ɻoaty, bottomless bottomful feeling. His trunk with his name on it was under his seat. His tiɽn box with tomato sandwiches and his Eagle ɻask with an eagle was on the little folding table in front of him

C H A P T E R 19 SAVING AMMU At the police station, Inspector Thomas Mathew sent for two CocaColas. With straws. A servile constable brought them on a plastic tray and oʃered them to the two muddy children sitting across the table from the Inspector, their heads only a little higher than the mess of ɹles and papers on it

C H A P T E R 18 THE HISTORY HOUSE A posse of Touchable Policemen crossed the Meenachal River, sluggish and swollen with recent rain, and picked their way through the wet undergrowth, the clink of handcuʃs in someone’s heavy pocket

C H A P T E R 17 COCHIN HARBOR TERMINUS In his clean room in the dirty Ayemenem House, Estha (not old, not young) sat on his bed in the dark. He sat very straight. Shoulders squared. Hands in his lap. As though he was next in line for some sort of inspection. Or waiting to be arrested. The ironing was done. It sat in a neat pile on the ironing board. He had done Rahel’s clothes as well.

C H A P T E R 16 A FEW HOURS LATER Three children on the riverbank. A pair of twins and another, whose mauve corduroy pinafore said Holiday! in a tilting, happy font

C H A P T E R 15 THE CROSSING It was past midnight. The river had risen, its water quick and black, snaking towards the sea, carrying with it cloudy night skies, a whole palm frond, part of a thatched fence, and other gifts the wind had given it.

C H A P T E R 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 ɻame from a large brass oil lamp ɻickered. The cloying smell of incense drifted through the doorway, over which a small wooden placard said Work is Struggle. Struggle is Work. Chacko was too big for the room. The blue

C H A P T E R 13 THE PESSIMIST AND THE OPTIMIST Chacko had moved out of his room and would sleep in Pappachi’s study so that Sophie Mol and Margaret Kochamma could have his room. It was a small room, with a window that overlooked the dwindling, somewhat neglected rubber plantation that Reverend E. John Ipe had bought from a neighbor. One door connected it to the main house and another (the separate entrance that Mammachi had installed for Chacko to pursue his “Men’s Needs” discreetly) led directly out onto the side mittam

C H A P T E R 12 KOCHU THOMBAN The sound of the chenda mushroomed over the temple, accentuating the silence of the encompassing night. The lonely, wet road. The watching trees. Rahel, breathless, holding a coconut, stepped into the temple compound through the wooden doorway in the high white boundary wall.

C H A P T E R 11 THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS That afternoon, Ammu traveled upwards through a dream in which a cheerful man with one arm held her close by the light of an oil lamp. He had no other arm with which to ɹght the shadows that ɻickered around him on the ɻoor. Shadows that only he could see. Ridges of muscle on his stomach rose under his skin like divisions on a slab of chocolate.

C H A P T E R 10 THE RIVER IN THE BOAT While the Welcome Home, Our Sophie Mol Play was being performed in the front verandah and Kochu Maria distributed cake to a Blue Army in the greenheat, Ambassador E. Pelvis/S. Pimpernel (with a puʃ) of the beige and pointy shoes, pushed open the gauze doors to the dank and pickle-smelling premises of Paradise Pickles. He walked among the giant cement pickle vats to ɹnd a place to Think in. Ousa, the Bar Nowl, who lived on a blackened beam near the skylight (and contributed occasionally to the ɻavor of certain Paradise products), watched him walk.

C H A P T E R 9 MRS. PILLAI, MRS. EAPEN, MRS. RAJAGOPALAN The green-for-the-day had seeped from the trees. Dark palm leaves were splayed like drooping combs against the monsoon sky The orange sun slid through their bent, grasping teeth. A squadron of fruit bats sped across the gloom. In the abandoned ornamental garden, Rahel, watched by lolling dwarfs and a forsaken cherub, squatted by the stagnant pond and watched toads hop from stone to scummy stone. Beautiful Ugly Toads.

C H A P T E R 8 WELCOME HOME, OUR SOPHIE MOL It was a grand old house, the Ayemenem House, but aloof-looking. As though it had little to do with the people who lived in it. Like an old man with rheumy eyes watching children play, seeing only transience in their shrill elation and their wholehearted commitment to life

C H A P T E R 7 WISDOM EXERCISE NOTEBOOKS In Pappachi’s study, mounted butterɻies and moths had disintegrated into small heaps of iridescent dust that powdered the bottom of their glass display cases, leaving the pins that had impaled them naked. Cruel. The room was rank with fungus and disuse. An old neon-green hula hoop hung from a wooden peg on the wall, a huge saint’s discarded halo. A column of shining black ants walked across a windowsill, their bottoms tilted upwards, like a line of mincing chorus girls in a Busby Berkeley musical. Silhouetted against the sun. Buʃed and beautiful.

C H A P T E R 6 COCHIN KANGAROOS At Cochin Airport, Rahel’s new knickers were polka-dotted and still crisp. The rehearsals had been rehearsed. It was the Day of the Play. The culmination of the What Will Sophie Mol Think? week. In the morning at the Hotel Sea Queen, Ammu—who had dreamed at night of dolphins and a deep blue—helped Rahel to put on her frothy Airport Frock. It was one of those baʀing aberrations in Ammu’s taste, a cloud of stiʃ yellow lace with tiny silver sequins and a bow on each shoulder. The frilled skirt was underpinned with buckram to make it ɻare. Rahel worried that it didn’t really go with her sunglasses.

C H A P T E R 5 GOD’S OWN COUNTRY Years later, when Rahel returned to the river, it greeted her with a ghastly skull’s smile, with holes where teeth had been, and a limp hand raised from a hospital bed. Both things had happened. It had shrunk. And she had grown

C H A P T E R 4 ABHILASH TALKIES

C H A P T E R 3 BIG MAN THE LALTAIN, SMALL MAN THE MOMBATTI Filth had laid seige to the Ayemenem House like a medieval army advancing on an enemy castle. It clotted every crevice and clung to the windowpanes.

C H A P T E R 2 PAPPACHI’S MOTH … it was a skyblue day in December sixty-nine (the nineteen silent). It was the kind of time in the life of a family when something happens to nudge its hidden morality from its resting place and make it bubble to the surface and ɻoat for a while. In clear view. For everyone to see.