God of small things

Arundhati Roy, a young production designer from India and author of “The God of Small Things,” writes with refreshing precision...her work is an invaluable reference file for writers.

phrases and excerpts below:

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May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month.

nights are clear but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation (1)

walls, streaked with moss, had grown soft, and bulged a little with dampness (1)

hopeful yellow bullfrogs cruised the scrummy pond for mates (2)

leaf-strewn driveway (2)

In those early amorphous years when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was For Ever, Esthappen and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us. As though they were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities. (2)

…Anyway, now she thinks of Estha and Rahel as Them, because separately, the two of them are no longer what They were or ever thought They’d be.

Ever.

Their lives have a size and shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers. (3)


The queer compassion of the very poor for the comparatively well-off (3)

Zebra crossing

It’s true (and must be said)… (5)

Dark blood spillinf from his skull like a secret (6)

…the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze. (6)

Only Rahel noticed Sophie Mol’s secret cartwheel in her coffin (6)

The sharp, smoky stink of old urine (7)

Then he tapped her breasts with his baton. Gently. Tap, tap. As though he was choosing mangoes from a basket. (8)

Rahel could smell the sheaf of bus tickets and the sourness of the steel bus-rails on the conductor’s hands. (8)

Damp monsoon air…swollen cupboards creaked. Locked windows burst open. Books got soft and wavy between their covers. Strange insects appeared like ideas in the evening (9)

Still, tea-coloured puddles

The way memory bombs still, tea-coloured minds (10)

…it had been a gradual winding down and closing shop. A barely noticeable quieting. As though he had simply run out of conversation and had nothing left to say. Yet Estha’s silence was never awkward. Never intrusive. Never noisy. It wasn’t an accusing, protesting silence, as much as a sort of aestivation, a dormancy…(10)

…over time he had acquired the ability to blend into the background of wherever he was—into bookshelves, gardens, curtains, doorways, streets—to appear inanimate, almost invisible to the untrained eye. It usually took strangers a while to notice him even when they were in the same room with him. It took them even longer to notice that he never spoke. Some never noticed at all.

Estha occupied very little space in the world. (10-11)

He never bargained. They never cheated him. (11)

…the fact that something so fragile, so unbearably tender had survived, had been allowed to exist, was a miracle. A bird in flight reflected in an old dog’s balls. It made him smile out loud. (12)

He began to look wiser that he really was. Like a fisherman in a city. With sea-secrets in him. (13)

The banks of the river that smelled of shit, pesticides bought with World Bank loans

The new, freshly baked, iced, Gulf-money houses built by nurses, masons, wire-benders, and bank clerks who worked hard and unhappily in faraway places. (13)

Estha would walk past, not rude, not polite. Just quiet. (14)

Kochu Maria, the vinegar-hearted, short-tempered, midget cook (15)

The Loss of Sophie Mol stepped softly in the Ayemenem House like a quiet thing in socks. It hid in books and food. In Mamachi’s violin case…It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined. (16)

As permanent as a government job.

She was in jeans and a white T-shirt. Part of an old patchwork bedspread was buttoned around her neck and trailed behind her like a cape. Her wild hair was tied back to look straight though it wasn’t. A tiny diamond gleamed in one nostril. She had absurdly beautiful collarbones and a nice athletic run. (18)

…he didn’t know what that look meant…somewhere between indifference and despair. He didn’t know that in some places…various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country like she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening. (19)

So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. He whistled, kicked stones. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune. He climbed into people’s eyes and became an exasperating expression. (19)

…rubbing the thick, frothy bitterness out of an elderly cucumber. (20)

The silence sat between grand-niece and baby grand aunt like a third person. A stranger. Swollen. Noxious. (21)

They were a family of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history, and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away. He explained to them that history was like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside.

‘To understand history,’ Chacko said, ‘we have to go inside and listen to what they’re saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.’ (52)

…‘But we can’t go in,’ Chacko explained, ‘because we’ve been locked out. And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try to listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.’

…‘We’re Prisoners of War,’ Chacko said. ‘Our dreams have been doctored. We belong nowhere. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter.’ (53)

…he told them about the Earth Woman. He made them imagine that the earth—four thousand six hundred million years old—was a forty-six-year-old woman…It had taken the whole of the Earth Woman’s life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The Earth Woman was eleven years old, Chacko said, when the first single-celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty-five—just eight months ago—when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

‘The whole of human civilization as we know it,’ Chacko told the twins, ‘began only two hours ago in the Earth Woman’s life.’ (53-54)

While other children of their age learned other things, Estha and Rahel learned how history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws. They heard its sickening thud. They smelled its smell and never forgot it.
History’s smell.

Like old roses on a breeze.

It would lurk for ever in ordinary things. In coat-hangers. Tomatoes. In the tar on the roads. In certain colours. In the plates at a restaurant. In the absence of words. And the emptiness in eyes.

They would grow up grappling with ways of living with what happened. They would try to tell themselves that in terms of geological time it was an insignificant event. Just a blink of the Earth Woman’s eye. That Worse Things had happened. That Worse Things kept happening. But they would find no comfort in the thought. (55)

The sculpted hollows on either side of his taut, beautiful buns. Tight plums. Men’s bums never grow up. (93)

‘D’you know what happens when you hurt people?’ Ammu said. ‘When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.’
A cold moth with unusually dense dorsal tufts landed lightly on Rahel’s heart. Where its icy legs touched her, she got goose bumps. Six goose bumps on her careless heart. A little less her Ammu loved her. (112)

Splay-footed, cautious (124)

Fetid garbage

Squelchy, sucking mud of the exposed river bed

The History House (where map-breath’d ancestors with tough toe-nails once whispered) (125)

…smelliness, like other people’s poverty, was merely a matter of getting used to. (126)

the uninitiated

labeled with edifying placards

While fathers played sublimated sexual games with their nubile teenaged daughters (127)

…there are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot—that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways staring eyes (129)

mock dismay

The slow ceiling fan sliced the thick, frightened air into an unending spiral that spun slowly to the floor like the peeled skin of an endless potato (132)

A stainless-steel tray of boiled needles (133)

…her baby thought he was the Pope. He smiled and waved and smiled and waved. With his penis in a bottle. (139)

children’s whole-hearted commitment to life (165)

She was beautiful. Old, unusual, regal.

Blind Motor Widow with a violin. (166)

Kochu Maria was wary of other people’s 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. (170)