The God of Small Things - Get a Free Blog

Those last few tortured nights before he left her, Chacko
would slip out of bed with a torch and look at his sleeping child.
To learn her. Imprint her on his memory. To ensure that when he
thought of her, the child that he invoked would be accurate. He
memorized the brown down on her soft skull. The shape of her
puckered, constantly moving mouth. The spaces between her toes.
The suggestion of a mole. And then, without meaning to, he found
himself searching his baby for signs of Joe. The baby clutched his
index finger while he conducted his insane, broken, envious,
torchlit study. Her belly button protruded from her satiated satin
stomach like a domed monument on a hill. Chacko laid his ear
against it and listened with wonder at the rumblings from within.
Messages being sent from here to there. New organs getting used
to each other. A new government setting up its systems.
Organizing the division of labor, deciding who would do what.
She smelled of milk and urine. Chacko marveled at how
someone so small and undefined, so vague in her resemblances,
could so completely command the attention, the love, the sanity of
a grown man.
When he left, he felt that something had been torn out of
him. Something big.
But Joe was dead now. Killed in a car crash. Dead as a
doorknob. A Joe-shaped Hole in the Universe.
In Chacko‟s photograph, Sophie Mol was seven years old.
White and blue. Rose-lipped, and Syrian Christian nowhere.
Though Mammachi, peering at the photograph, insisted she had
Pappachi‟s nose.
“Chacko?” Rahel said, from her darkened bed. “Can I ask
you a question?”
“Ask me two,” Chacko said.
“Chacko, do you love Sophie Mol Most in the World?”
“She‟s my daughter,” Chacko said.
Rahel considered this.
“Chacko? Is it Necessary that people HAVE to love their
own children Most in the World?”