The god of small things by Arundhati Roy

Author:Arundhati Roy [Roy, Arundhati]
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Unread
ISBN: 9780679457312
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1997-04-14T23:00:00+00:00

Nine steep steps led from the driveway up to the front verandah. The elevation gave it the dignity of a stage and everything that happened there took on the aura and significance of performance. It overlooked Baby Kochamma’s ornamental garden, the gravel driveway looped around it, sloping down towards the bottom of the slight hill that the house stood on. It was a deep verandah, cool even at midday, when the sun was at its scorching best. When the red cement floor was laid, the egg whites from nearly nine hundred eggs went into it. It took a high polish.

Below the stuffed button-eyed bison head, with the portraits of her father-in-law and mother-inlaw on either side, Mammachi sat in a low wicker chair at a wicker table on which stood a green glass vase with a single stem of purple orchids curving from it.

The afternoon was still and hot. The Air was waiting

Mammachi held a gleaming violin under her chin. Her opaque fifties sunglasses were black and slanty-eyed, with rhinestones on the corners of the frames. Her sari was starched and perfumed. Offwhite and gold. Her diamond earrings shone in her ears like tiny chandeliers. Her ruby rings were loose. Her pale, fine skin was creased like cream on cooling milk and dusted with tiny red moles. She was beautiful. Old, unusual, regal.

Blind Mother Widow with a violin.

In her younger years, with prescience and good management, Mammachi had collected all her falling hair in a small, embroidered purse that she kept on her dressing table. When there was enough of it, she made it into a netted bun which she kept hidden in a locker with her jewelry. A few years earlier, when her hair began to thin and silver to give it body, she wore her jet-black bun pinned to her small, silver head. In her book this was perfectly acceptable, since all the hair was hers. At night, when she took off her bun, she allowed her grandchildren to plait her remaining hair into a tight, oiled, gray rat’s tail with a rubber band at the end. One plaited her hair, while the other counted her uncountable moles. They took turns.

On her scalp, carefully hidden by her scanty hair, Mammachi had raised, crescent-shaped ridges. Scars of old beatings from an old marriage. Her brass-vase scars.

She played Lentement—a movement from the Suite in D/G of Handel’s Water Music. Behind her slanted sunglasses her useless eyes were closed, but she could see the music as it left her violin and lifted into the afternoon like smoke.

Inside her head, it was like a room with dark drapes drawn across a bright day. As she played, her mind wandered back over the years to her first batch of professional pickles. How beautiful they had looked! Bottled and sealed, standing on a table near the head of her bed, so they’d be the first thing she would touch in the morning when she woke up. She had gone to bed early that night, but woke a little after midnight.

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