Seeing beauty with ‘The God of Small Things’

This Week’s Winner

B. Grant Cheng is an IT manager for Procter & Gamble. He graduated magna cum laude at De La Salle University with a degree in Manufacturing Engineering & Management. He has been to India several times and loves traveling, scuba diving, reading, and watching movies.

This book is so beautifully sad, so wonderfully melancholic that it moves you to tears when you read the last word and makes you want to read it all over again. To me, that is the magic of The God of Small Things. It is a book rich with irony, the kind that makes you question society and its constructs.

I was in India when I finished reading this book, a blessing that would further enhance my experience of reading it. I saw all around me the world Arundhati Roy depicted in her novel. I saw firsthand how the caste system is still so deeply ingrained in their culture that it practically governs people’s fate as soon as they are born. She repeatedly states that this society "tells us who to love, when… and how much." That’s the first irony. Love is something that cannot be constrained; love conquers all, yet society will do its best to dictate upon us who to love, when, and how much.

I am almost reluctant to write this review because I will reveal some of the plots in here, but I think the real joy you get is in actually experiencing how it unfolds as Roy wrote it. The language she uses is original; poetry in most cases. The story is not cohesive at first and you might get frustrated at reading it. But I found that patience in reading this book will pay off immensely. It will all make sense; it will all be beautiful. It’s like looking at a painting and she just shows you one square inch at first, then another in a completely separate portion, then another in the middle, until you begin to see the whole picture, and why it was important that she revealed it as she did.

The story is about love and its consequences when you try to go against society. It is love between a man and a woman who aren’t even supposed to touch each other. The woman is Ammu, who comes from a respectable Indian family whose standing in the community is jeopardized by her relationship with Velutha, a "paravan," an "Untouchable" in India. He belongs to the lower caste and cannot mingle with members of the upper caste. He is forever destined to do his job, which is carving wood, and live in a small shack in the forest.

They know their love cannot be carried out in the open. So they sneak off in the quiet embrace of the forest to rendezvous, where only nature’s protecting shade shields them from prying eyes. They are forced to meet secretly and after they make love they can only enjoy how the wind rustles the leaves, how an insect makes it home, how a spider can carry small leaves and twigs to its burrow in the ground — you know, small things. But he makes it so that they draw happiness and joy from watching these small things. He shows her how much beauty and wonder there are in small things.

The other stories that revolve around the central theme are just as rich and profound. There is the story of Baby Kochamma who once loved someone whom she is not supposed to love. She decided to keep her feelings bottled up and sacrifice her own happiness at the expense of propriety. Towards the end of the book, she does the most reviling deeds that make you want to curse her, but Roy preempts that by narrating her story first, of how she lost her innocence and replaced it with cynicism. So that we may be able to understand the irony of her actions.

Then there is the story of Uncle Chacko, who goes off and marries a white woman he meets when he studies as a Rhodes scholar in the UK. Here you see the contrast. While the woman is nothing extraordinary there, she is seen as someone whose approval and acceptance is of utmost importance to this family. There, she is a waitress at a diner. In India, she is someone whom the family must impress with Shakespearean mastery, or so they act that way.

And, of course, there is the story of the separate-egg twins, the children of Ammu. They are Estha and Rahel, whose travails through life must forever be cursed for the deed they performed as children. See, Velutha was not only their mother’s lover, he was also their good friend.

An accidental death is falsely blamed on Velutha; and the children are coaxed, cornered by Baby Kochamma to corroborate the story of Velutha’s guilt. This is their way to cover up the illicit affair and to preserve their name in the community. Their admission leads to Velutha’s death. And then you understand why, as they grow up, Estha confines himself to the silence of his mind, while Rahel is separated from the family.

Simple narration does no justice to the book’s beauty and magnificence, so surrender yourself to the style of Roy, immerse yourself in the tropical environment if India .

I can only hope you experience it as I did.