The God of Small Things

♣♣♣♣/♣♣♣♣♣

After two decades of separation, once inseparable twins Rahel and Estha are reunited at their childhood home in Ayemenem, but under not so ideal circumstances. Accompanied by the family’s loyal house servant, their maternal great-aunt Baby Kochamma is all who’s left at the once jampacked family estate. The house has borne witness not only to the long-anticipated reunion of the twins but also to the lives of its previous inhabitants, among them: Ammu, the twins’ divorced mother; Chacko, their divorced Oxford-educated uncle who is a closeted communist; Pappachi, their grandfather who vented out his career frustrations on his wife Mammachi, their grandmother who had traded her dream of being a talented violinist for a life of questionable domestic bliss. Secrets abound within the house’s four walls which include a forbidden love affair, a covered-up murder as well as a fatal accident that will change the course of their lives forever.

One thing worth noting about the author’s literary style is the way she adapts a child’s worldview as they narrate their stories. This is prevalent not just through textual inconsistencies such as grammatical errors, unnecessary capitalization, and annoying repetition of words and phrases, but also through the way each anecdote is narrated with metaphors so simple yet juvenile that are unmistakable as streams of consciousness of a fragile and yet to develop mind. Once you read it, you will quickly understand what I am referring to, since all of us went through this phase once upon a time in our lives.

Talking about children’s perspectives, there is a child molestation subplot which is just hard to get through. We read stories like this and most of the time we no longer flinch, perhaps because of the mature perspective and exposition involved. Since some of the flashbacks are told from a young child’s perspective, the disruption of innocence and the way a young person’s mind would cope by conjuring extraordinary explanations for such inexplicable occurrences just make it all the more heartbreaking. In a way, the author has managed to verbalize child abuse and PTSD stemming from it the way a child theoretically might. It just hits differently.

This isn’t the only controversial subplot you will encounter in the novel. You also have domestic violence and incest. It is no wonder that the author was slapped with cases of obscenity when the book was first released. It was a different time back then before the 2000's after all. Nowadays, such subplots might raise an eyebrow but wouldn’t really give anyone a heart attack, unless they are too conservative to function. If anything, the storylines come across like an elegantly written screenplay for a soap opera, with all the requisite local color to present a case study of life in Kerala during that time.

Another interesting thing about this novel is how it introduces you to what used to be India’s caste system and how it worked, primarily through the romantic subplot between Ammu and Velutha. This isn’t my first foray into Indian literature but the difference in societal and religious norms still surprises me from time to time. In a way, reading stories set in the subcontinent can always be compared to those set in the Philippines if analyzed from a third-world lens, and yet the similarities end there, because culture and society quickly swoop in to mark a lot of differences. It’s like a world you thought you knew well, but apparently not.

One thing that is familiar in both countries, though, is the colonial experience, particularly the resulting colonial mentality brought about by a long period of British colonization; American, in the case of the Philippines. It is clear from the protagonists that they have a certain fascination with the English-speaking world, and it also appears that some of them believe as though being an Anglophile sets them apart, like being culturally superior, to everybody else. This is one concept that I can fully understand, from the perspective of the colonized.

The structure of the plot is non-linear, which means the reader is bombarded with events from all over the timeline. In fact, the ending can be found in the beginning, while the novel itself ends somewhere in the middle. This somehow lessens the impact of suspense, but meshes quite well with the author’s storytelling style, mostly via characters lost in thought and ending up reminiscing upon seeing a certain object or finding themselves in a particular place. In a way, this is what makes this novel feel whimsical and nostalgic, like a hazy daydream that takes its reader not just to different places but also to different eras.