The God of Small Things: A Novel by Arundhati Roy

Author:Arundhati Roy
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Tags: english
ISBN: 9781588367839
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 1997-10-14T23:00:00+00:00

From its perch on the well, an untidy coucal called Hwoop-Hwoop and shuffled its rust-red wings.

A crow stole some soap that bubbled in its beak.

In the dark, smoky kitchen, short Kochu Maria stood on her toes and iced the tall, double-deckered WELCOME HOME OUR SOPHIE MOL cake. Though even in those days most Syrian Christian women had started wearing saris, Kochu Maria still wore her spotless half-sleeved white chatta with a V-neck and her white mundu, which folded into a crisp cloth fan on her behind. Kochu Maria’s fan was more or less hidden by the blue-and-white checked, frilled, absurdly incongruous housemaid’s apron that Mammachi insisted she wear inside the house.

She had short, thick forearms, fingers like cocktail sausages, and a broad fleshy nose with flared nostrils. Deep folds of skin connected her nose to either side of her chin, and separated that section of her face from the rest of it, like a snout. Her head was too large for her body. She looked like a bottled fetus that had escaped from its jar of formaldehyde in a Biology lab and unshriveled and thickened with age.

She kept damp cash in her bodice, which she tied tightly around her chest to flatten her unchristian breasts. Her kunukku earrings were thick and gold. Her earlobes had been distended into weighted loops that swung around her neck, her earrings sitting in them like gleeful children in a merry-go-(not all the way)-round. Her right lobe had split open once and was sewn together again by Dr. Verghese Verghese. Kochu Maria couldn’t stop wearing her kunukku because if she did, how would people know that despite her lowly cook’s job (seventy-five rupees a month) she was a Syrian Christian, Mar Thomite? Not a Pelaya, or a Pulaya, or a Paravan. But a Touchable, upper-caste Christian (into whom Christianity had seeped like tea from a teabag). Split lobes stitched back were a better option by far.

Kochu Maria hadn’t yet made her acquaintance with the television addict waiting inside her. The Hulk Hogan addict. She hadn’t yet seen a television set. She wouldn’t have believed television existed. Had someone suggested that it did, Kochu Maria would have assumed that he or she was insulting her intelligence. Kochu Maria was wary of other peoples’ versions of the outside world. More often than not, she took them to be a deliberate affront to her lack of education and (earlier) gullibility. In a determined reversal of her inherent nature, Kochu Maria now, as a policy, hardly ever believed anything that anybody said. A few months ago, in July, when Rahel told her that an American astronaut called Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon, she laughed sarcastically and said that a Malayali acrobat called O. Muthachen had done handsprings on the sun. With pencils up his nose. She was prepared to concede that Americans existed, though she’d never seen one. She was even prepared to believe that Neil Armstrong might conceivably even be some absurd kind of name. But the walking on the moon bit? No sir.

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