Glimmers in the Dark - the Big Picture?
Days after reading, my enthusiasm for ‘The God of small things’ is soaring. The after-taste beats the drinking.
All are fickle and survive in a universe of spasmodic betrayal and intolerance, where people ‘begin to love you less’. Characters aren’t simply two dimensional, good or evil, Virgil, except possibly the boy-god Velutha. As a divine creator, it is true of Velutha that 'god saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good'. He, like Jesus, was a carpenter - a maker 'of small things' - and a scapegoat who suffered, died and was buried…his footprints swept away.
Isaiah 53:3___He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him.
Religious and political ideologies – Catholic, Hindu or Communist – are ‘big things’ that fall victim to human nature and prove barren. Similarly, cultural practices, caste systems, moral standards, legal codes and Love Laws degrade rather than uplift and are flawed ‘for practical purposes, in a hopelessly practical world’. Even sons of the deities, Karna and Bhima, savage their relatives. I’m reminded of John Lennon’s ‘I just believe in me, Yoko and me, and that's reality’.
Authenticity ‘in small things’ is a consistent theme, extending to incest between Estha and Rahal or the Paravan paedophilia of Ammu – taboos broken by those with no legal standing, no ‘Locusts Stand-I'. If incest is not redemptive, Bouquin, at least flakes of kindness communicate between damaged souls stranded in silence and 'hideous grief': two, lonely fugitives from ‘the Heart of Darkness’ and its ‘Love Laws’. Are others more virtuous? Who?
Like it or not, a pathetic reality abides in the bitterness of Pappachi (John Ipe), an imperial entomologist robbed of a moth; the detachment of blind Mammachi; the meagre harvest of two sad paedophiles, the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man and Kari Saipu; the elicit consummation of the long-divorced Ammu; the unrealised hopes of Sophie Mol; the pathetic aspirations of Vellya Paapen, the drunk untouchable; the schadenfreude of the chronically disappointed Baby Kochamma; the shallow expediencies of Comrade Pillai and Inspector Thomas Mathew; the blinkered, mob violence of six Touchable Policemen; the betrayed beneficence of fifteen-year-old Velutha; the latter-day violence of the peacemaker Chacko, a Rhodes Scholar with Marxist ideals; the slapping, slapping Margaret Kochamma; and a silent, incestuous and hideous Holy Communion between the sensitive Estha (now re-Returned) and Rahal partaking of the sacrificed Paravan, Paschal lamb.
Mathew 7:1___Judge not, that ye be not judged.
Life rarely measures up. Taboos abound and many (characters and readers alike) stand ready to cast the first stone at glimmers of beauty, at shards of translucent, muted jade. Sensitive Estha, singing guilelessly during ‘The Sound of Music’, comes to see this too clearly and seeks shelter in silence: 'Prepare to prepare to be prepared'. Arundhati Roy never explicitly passes judgment on any character, preferring instead to say, “It wasn’t entirely their fault”.
That ‘Anything can happen to Anyone’ is also reflected in the seemingly haphazard structure and imagery of the novel. Even the words and sentences of Arundhati Roy sometimes solidify only in retrospect, just as repercussions for living are appreciated only in hindsight. We survive on hope.
‘Tomorrow’…at best.
