There is a similar jolt of loss in The God of Small Things, another novel that uses the fragility of the body as both physical reality and cultural metaphor. Among the many sharp moments of loss in this tragic text, there is one I find especially poignant. It’s when Ammu, the twins’ mother and lover of Velutha, a woman whose beauty has so beguiled her children, comes back to the family home in Ayemenem after an interval of a few years, sick and swollen with cortisone and is “not the slender mother Rahel knew.” As the adult Rahel remembers the change, Ammu’s hair has lost its sheen, she coughs up vile-smelling phlegm and speaks “in a deep unnatural voice.”
In Roy’s non-chronological organization of the novel, the description of Ammu’s decline is placed for maximum impact. Coming in a chapter midway through the novel, it digresses from the book’s two main strands of narrative: that of the present in which the adult twins, Rahel and Estha, have returned to Ayemenem and the account of the 1969 “Terror,” occurring when the twins were seven, in which their cousin, the half-English Sophie Mol, drowned and Ammu’s lover, the untouchable carpenter Velutha, was brutally killed. In the present-time narrative, Rahel finds some childhood exercise books that trigger her memory of her altered mother. In the next chapter we return to the earlier events of 1969. But now, when we reencounter Ammu’s beauty, a beauty Roy, with her acute eye for corporeal details, makes so tangible, it is shadowed by our knowledge of its brevity. We also experience fully what it means for Ammu’s life to end at the “viable, die-able age” of thirty-one. The chapter “Wisdom Exercise Notebooks” ends with Rahel’s memory of Ammu’s beautiful body being “fed” piece by piece to the crematorium when Rahel was eleven.
Her hair, her skin, her smile. Her voice. The way she used Kipling to love her children before putting them to bed. We be of one blood, thou and I. Her goodnight kiss. The way she held their faces steady with one hand (squashed-cheeked, fish-mouthed) while she parted and combed their hair with the other. The way she held knickers out for Rahel to climb into. Left leg, right leg. All this was fed to the beast, and it was satisfied.
As a reader of the novel I wept at the death of Ammu and shuddered at the specificities of loss that stirred my own memories. It’s not that my mother died young; she lived to be eighty-four. But I, too, remember a child’s perception of a beautiful mother’s hair and skin and smile, the stories she read from The Jungle Book (we didn’t think of colonial implications), her goodnight kiss and the songs she sang to me at bedtime. My brother has said that as a little boy just sitting next to her was thrilling for him. Both of us huddled in the aura of her “radiance” and “animation,” wanting, I think, to stay there forever. We still speak to each other, sixty years later, of how we used to love getting into her bed in the morning—as Rahel and Estha love to be in bed with Ammu—to plan all those fun things to do. That was our haven, our world at its most compressed and most expansive.
And, of course, as all children do, we lost this paradise. Bow Wow intruded. My mother, as I’ve said, was never the same after him. She gained weight and seemed more volatile and unhappy. Or maybe much of this was just the passage of time. She grew older and I did, too. I saw things I hadn’t seen before.
When I read The God of Small Things for the first time, I couldn’t bear for my immersion in the book to end, and, as the young Susan Sontag did with The Magic Mountain, I immediately turned back from the last page to the first and started reading through it again. There are many reasons I love this book: its language that is at once lyrical and playful; its brilliant non-linear form, in which the whole story is cryptically compressed at the outset but only fully felt and understood by the end; its deft juggling of multiple layers of time; its rendition of the lush landscape of Kerala; its radical defense of the natural against the social, the oppressed—children, women and untouchables—against their oppressors; its insightful postcolonial critique; its earnest yet witty engagement with other literature from Hamlet and Heart of Darkness to Midnight’s Children; its visceral depiction of the body along with compassion for the body’s yearnings and weaknesses. But I think what most transfixes me is the story of Ammu and her twins, theirs an even more compelling tale, if that’s possible, than that of the untouchable Velutha—carpenter, lover, river God and Christ figure—who is betrayed and sacrificed and whose beautiful body, though not his soul, we also see destroyed. I can feel what it’s like to be in the position of Ammu and the twins, to be part of a truncated family unit that feels both less and more than other families. My mother used to say, as Ammu does to reassure her children, that she had to be for us both mother and father. She seemed all we had, and, in the same compensatory way that Ammu tries to love Rahel and Estha, I believe our mother did everything she could to love us “double.” There are also ways in which she failed us out of her own great, unmet needs stemming from that childhood in the orphanage. So we felt the cuts of her careless comments, the uncertainties of her labile moods, the limits of her capacity to protect and sustain herself, let alone emotionally shelter two young children. Roy’s novel evokes both the magic circle of my own childhood and the shattering of the magic, both the gift of our beautiful mother’s love for
