“The God of Small Things” By Arundhati Roy
3
Ever.
Their lives have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers.
Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on
their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End.
Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they are as old as Ammu was
when she died. Thirty-one.
Not old.
Not young.
But a viable die-able age.
They were nearly born on a bus, Estha and Rahel. The car in which Baba, their father,
was taking Ammu, their mother, to hospital in Shillong to have them, broke down on the
winding tea-estate road in Assam. They abandoned the car and flagged down a
crowded State Transport bus. With the queer compassion of the very poor for the
comparatively well off, or perhaps only because they saw how hugely pregnant Ammu
was, seated passengers made room for the couple, and for the rest of the journey Estha
and Rahel’s father had to hold their mother’s stomach (with them in it) to prevent it from
wobbling. That was before they were divorced and Ammu came back to live in Kerala.
According to Estha, if they’d been born on the bus, they’d have got free bus rides for
the rest of their lives. It wasn’t clear where he’d got this information from, or how he
knew these things, but for years the twins harbored a faint resentment against their
parents for having diddled them out of a lifetime of free bus rides.
They also believed that if they were killed on a zebra crossing, the Government would
pay for their funerals. They had the definite impression that that was what zebra
crossings were meant for. Free funerals. Of course, there were no zebra crossings to
get killed on in Ayemenem, or, for that matter, even in Kottayam, which was the nearest
town, but they’d seen some from the car window when they went to Cochin, which was
a two-hour drive away.
The Government never paid for Sophie Mol’s funeral because she wasn’t killed on a
zebra crossing. She had hers in Ayemenem in the old church with the new paint. She
was Estha and Rahel’s cousin, their uncle Chacko’s daughter. She was visiting from
England. Estha and Rahel were seven years old when she died. Sophie Mol was almost
nine. She had a special child-sized coffin.
Satin lined.
Brass handle shined.
She lay in it in her yellow Crimplene bell-bottoms with her hair in a ribbon and her
Made-in-England go-go bag that she loved. Her face was pale and as wrinkled as a
dhobi’s thumb from being in water for too long. The congregation gathered around the
coffin, and the yellow church swelled like a throat with the sound of sad singing. The
priests with curly beards swung pots of frankincense on chains and never smiled at
babies the way they did on usual Sundays.
The long candles on the altar were bent. The short ones weren’t. An old lady
masquerading as a distant relative (whom nobody recognized, but who often surfaced
next to bodies at funerals-a funeral junkie? A latent necrophiliac?) put cologne on a wad
of cotton wool and with a devout and gently challenging air, dabbed it on Sophie Mol’s
forehead. Sophie Mol smelled of cologne and coffinwood.
Margaret Kochamma, Sophie Mol’s English mother, wouldn’t let Chacko, Sophie Mol’s
biological father, put his arm around her to comfort her.
The family stood huddled together. Margaret Kochamma, Chacko, Baby Kochamma,
and next to her, her sister-in-law, Mammachi–Estha and Rahel’s (and Sophie Mol’s)
grandmother. Mammachi was almost blind and always wore dark glasses when she
went out of the house. Her tears trickled down from behind them and trembled along her
jaw like raindrops on the edge of a roof. She looked small and ill in her crisp off-white
sari. Chacko was Mammachi’s only son. Her own grief grieved her. His devastated her.
