IF YOU EAT FISH IN A DREAM, DOES IT COUNT?

DAY 71-72

Interesting question, one of the many conundrums dispersed throughout Arundhati Roy’s debut novel The God of Small Things, an insightful and tragic revelation of life within India’s caste system. The disenfranchisement of indigenous peoples, the unwritten laws of the Touchables and Untouchables, the power and powerlessness structured into the culture governing who can do what and how, or even who is permitted to love, and how.

The early rumblings of discontent, concealed under a thick layer of loyalty.

….despair came home to roost and hardened slowly to resignation.

Her characters come to life, in no small part through their description, such as with a frilly apron and a vinegar heart or she looked like a bottled foetus that had escaped from its jar…..and unshrivelled and thickened with age. What Roy also manages, is to get us to care about them, hate them, to fear for them, and to want to protect them as tragic events unfold and reach their logical conclusion with lifelong consequences.

He left behind a hole in the Universe through which darkness poured like liquid tar.

Childhood tiptoed out. Silence slid in like a bolt.

Roy’s adept descriptive skills unveil some beautiful images conjured up at moments seemingly at odds with the events occurring at the time.

There was no storm music. No whirlpool spun up from the inky depths…..Just a quick handing over ceremony. A boat spilling its cargo. A river accepting the offering.

Madness slunk in through a chink in History. It only took a moment.

Brown millipedes slept in the soles of their steel-capped, Touchable boots.

…Past giant spider webs that had withstood the rain and spread like whispered gossip from tree to tree.

And through it all, twins Estha and Rahel, inseparable brother and sister, caught up in the snowballing of the events around them, innocence and childhood sacrificed.

The moth with unusually dense dorsal fins spread its wings over both their hearts.

By playing out the drama of one family against the backdrop of a culture of contrasts at every level, Arundhati Roy has succeeded with her first novel in portraying a nation in very human terms.