Small is not ephemeral. Review on God Of Small Things, The - Arundhati Roy

I read the book four times. You can’t blame the book for it; it is Arundhati’s oeuvre of narration that simply traverses onto your mindscapes describing some of sensuous and dreamy subjects of life. The unmentionables are touched with little love, madness and hope. That’s why I read it in a continuation not to miss any small thing as – “Small is beautiful.” Not even me but there are many who would just love to dive into these little things of life and its times, the book lived. Besides problems of women in a patriarchal society, lives of rudderless children Estha and Rahel, a myriad of bees, blue sky, waters of river and the restless love that starves to seek shelter are mentioned. Always, everywhere, anytime. Ammu’s house at Ayemenem was inflicted with dominating Pappachi’s outbursts of physical violence on his wife, Mammachi. Chacko’s righteous or unrighteous claim over Pickles’ factory as ‘my factory, my pineapples, my pickles’ verbally snatches Ammu’s inheritance rights away. A male obsession. Ammu had no safe niche for herself and her ‘half-Hindu Hybrids’ after she left her Hindu-Bengali husband at Assam. His drunken and fiery furies over Ammu deny the blissfulness of a marriage. The characters were given space to evolve along the plot as they were growing within Roy. Roy’s keen insight into human nature gives unusual details. Her intellectual osmosis describes the abstract relationship between Ammu and Velutha. Ammu needed someone to lean on – an orb of love and only love. A small world of warmth and embrace is where Ammu breaks herself free – ‘Love me the most when I deserve it the least, that’s when I need it the most.’ And Velutha gives in plenty despite all constraints of caste and barriers of the social order – ‘What better aim Can one attain? Than to cure A human pain.’ Though ephemeral but Velutha’s meaningful gazes assuaged Ammu’s pain. The pain of desertion with the smallness of time and space Ammu loved the man in the night. Her children loved him in the day and played with Velutha on the boat shaped logs of the trees on the banks of river. Ammu’s death rationalized as - ‘Not old. Not young. But a viable die-able age.’ suggests Roy’s observations and strengthen the fact that anything ‘anything can happen to anyone. Things can change in a day.’ Doe-eyed Roy’s amazing phrases and the picturesque imagery are delivered with an innocence – ‘Small is beautiful.’ The book touches the hearts with a little act of love and inspiration that is otherwise destroyed because of intricacies of religion and partiality of gender. The characters live long in our memories even after you close the book. The impression that human life is lived simultaneously on small levels and conveys many meanings is very well expressed. After all it has to be felt with various significances in its multifarious but smaller facts. Even Ammu and Velutha preferred to stick to small things. They had no big things lurking inside them. Perhaps big is ephemeral and hence hurts big. ‘Stick to smallness. Each time they parted, they extracted only one small promise from each other. Tomorrow? Tomorrow.’