The God of Small Things

It was midmorning and about to rain again. The green—in the last moments of that strange, glowing, pre-shower light—was fierce.

A cock crowed in the distance and its voice separated into two. Like a sole peeling off an old shoe.

Rahel stood there with her tattered Wisdom Notebooks. In the front verandah of an old house, below a button-eyed bison head, where years ago, on the day that Sophie Mol came, Welcome Home, Our Sophie Mol was performed.

Things can change in a day.

Chapter 8. Welcome Home, Our Sophie Mol

It was a grand old house, the Ayemenem House, but aloof-looking. As though it had little to do with the people who lived in it. Like an old man with rheumy eyes watching children play, seeing only transience in their shrill elation and their wholehearted commitment to life.

The steep tiled roof had grown dark and mossy with age and rain. The triangular wooden frames fitted into the gables were intricately carved, the light that slanted through them and fell in patterns on the floor was full of secrets. Wolves. Flowers. Iguanas. Changing shape as the sun moved through the sky. Dying punctually, at dusk.

The doors had not two, but four shutters of paneled teak so that in the old days, ladies could keep the bottom half closed, lean their elbows on the ledge and bargain with visiting vendors without betraying themselves below the waist. Technically, they could buy carpets, or bangles, with their breasts covered and their bottoms bare. Technically.

Nine steep steps led from the driveway up to the front verandah. The elevation gave it the dignity of a stage and everything that happened there took on the aura and significance of performance. It overlooked Baby Kochamma’s ornamental garden, the gravel driveway looped around it, sloping down towards the bottom of the slight hill that the house stood on.

It was a deep verandah, cool even at midday, when the sun was at its scorching best.

When the red cement floor was laid, the egg whites from nearly nine hundred eggs went into it. It took a high polish.

Below the stuffed button-eyed bison head, with the portraits of her father-in-law and mother-in-law on either side, Mammachi sat in a low wicker chair at a wicker table on which stood a green glass vase with a single stem of purple orchids curving from it.

The afternoon was still and hot. The Air was waiting

Mammachi held a gleaming violin under her chin. Her opaque fifties sunglasses were black and slanty- eyed, with rhinestones on the corners of the frames. Her sari was starched and perfumed. Offwhite and gold. Her diamond earrings shone in her ears like tiny chandeliers. Her ruby rings were loose. Her pale, fine skin was creased like cream on cooling milk and dusted with tiny red moles. She was beautiful. Old, unusual, regal.

Blind Mother Widow with a violin.

In her younger years, with prescience and good management, Mammachi had collected all her falling hair in a small, embroidered purse that she kept on her dressing table. When there was enough of it, she made it into a netted bun which she kept hidden in a locker with her jewelry. A few years earlier, when her hair began to thin and silver to give it body, she wore her jet-black bun pinned to her small, silver head. In her book this was perfectly acceptable, since all the hair was hers. At night, when she took off her bun, she allowed her grandchildren to plait her remaining hair into a tight, oiled, gray rat’s tail with a rubber band at the end. One plaited her hair, while the other counted her uncountable moles. They took turns.

On her scalp, carefully hidden by her scanty hair, Mammachi had raised, crescent-shaped ridges. Scars of old beatings from an old marriage. Her brass-vase scars.

She played Lentement—a movement from the Suite in D/G of Handel’s Water Music. Behind her slanted sunglasses her useless eyes were closed, but she could see the music as it left her violin and lifted into the afternoon like smoke.

Inside her head, it was like a room with dark drapes drawn across a bright day.

As she played, her mind wandered back over the years to her first batch of professional pickles. How beautiful they had looked! Bottled and sealed, standing on a table near the head of her bed, so they’d be the first thing she would touch in the morning when she woke up. She had gone to bed early that night, but woke a little after midnight. She groped for them, and her anxious fingers came away with a film of oil. The pickle bottles stood in a pool of oil. There was oil everywhere. In a ring under her vacuum flask. Under her Bible. All over her bedside table. The pickled mangoes had absorbed oil and expanded, making the bottles leak.

Mammachi consulted a book that Chacko bought her, Homescale Preservations, but it offered no solutions. Then she dictated a letter to Annamma Chandy’s brother-in-law who was the Regional Manager of Padma Pickles in Bombay. He suggested that she increase the proportion of preservative that she used. And the salt. That had helped, but didn’t solve the problem entirely. Even now, after all those years, Paradise Pickles’ bottles still leaked a little. It was imperceptible, but they did still leak, and on long journeys their labels became oily and transparent. The pickles themselves continued to be a little on the salty side.

Mammachi wondered whether she would ever master the art of perfect preservation, and whether Sophie Mol would like some iced grape crush. Some cold purple juice in a glass.

Then she thought of Margaret Kochamma and the languid, liquid notes of Handel’s music grew shrill and angry.

Mammachi had never met Margaret Kochamma. But she despised her anyway. Shopkeeper’s daughter was how Margaret Kochamma was filed away in Mammachi’s mind. Mammachi’s world was arranged that way. If she was invited to a wedding in Kottayam, she would spend the whole time whispering to whoever she went with, “The bride’s maternal grandfather was my father’s carpenter. Kunjukutty Eapen? His great-grandmother’s sister was just a midwife in Trivandrum. My husband’s family used to own this whole hill.”

Of course Mammachi would have despised Margaret Kochamma even if she had been heir to the throne of England. It wasn’t just her working-class background Mammachi resented. She hated Margaret Kochamma for being Chacko’s wife. She hated her for leaving him. But would have hated her even more had she stayed.

The day that Chacko prevented Pappachi from beating her (and Pappachi had murdered his chair instead), Mammachi packed her wifely luggage and committed it to Chacko’s care. From then onwards he became the repository of all her womanly feelings. Her Man. Her only Love.

She was aware of his libertine relationships with the women in the factory, but had ceased to be hurt by them. When Baby Kochamma brought up the subject, Mammachi became tense and tight-lipped.

“He can’t help having a Man’s Needs,” she said primly.

Surprisingly, Baby Kochamma accepted this explanation, and the enigmatic, secretly thrilling notion of Men’s Needs gained implicit sanction in the Ayemenem House. Neither Mammachi nor Baby Kochamma saw any contradiction between Chacko’s Marxist mind and feudal libido. They only worried about the Naxalites, who had been known to force men from Good Families to marry servant girls whom they had made pregnant. Of course they did not even remotely suspect that the missile, when it was fired, the one that would annihilate the family’s Good Name forever, would come from a completely unexpected quarter.

Mammachi had a separate entrance built for Chacko’s room, which was at the eastern end of the house, so that the objects of his “Needs” wouldn’t have to go traipsing through the house. She secretly slipped them money to keep them happy. They took it because they needed it. They had young children and old parents. Or husbands who spent all their earnings in toddy bars. The arrangement suited Mammachi, because in her mind, a fee clarified things. Disjuncted sex from love. Needs from Feelings.

Margaret Kochamma, however, was a different kettle of fish altogether. Since she had no means of finding out (though she did once try to get Kochu Maria to examine the bedsheets for stains), Mammachi could only hope that Margaret Kochamma was not intending to resume her sexual relationship with Chacko. While Margaret Kochamma was in Ayemenem, Mammachi managed her unmanageable feelings by slipping money into the pockets