The God of Small Things - Get a Free Blog

could leave for the airport.
On the next bed, his niece and nephew slept with their arms
around each other. A hot twin and a cold one. He and She. We and
Us. Somehow, not wholly unaware of the hint of doom and all that
waited in the wings for them.
They dreamed of their river.
Of the coconut trees that bent into it and watched, with
coconut eyes, the boats slide by. Upstream in the mornings.
Downstream in the evenings. And the dull, sullen sound of the
boatmen‟s bamboo poles as they thudded against the dark, oiled
boatwood.
It was warm, the water. Graygreen. Like rippled silk.
With fish in it.
With the sky and trees in it.
And at night, the broken yellow moon in it.
When they grew tired of waiting, the dinner smells climbed
off the curtains and drifted through the Sea Queen windows to
dance the night away on the dinner-smelling sea.
The time was ten to two.
Chapter 5.
God’s Own Country
Years later, when Rahel returned to the river, it greeted her
with a ghastly skull‟s smile, with holes where teeth had been, and a
limp hand raised from a hospital bed.
Both things had happened.
It had shrunk. And she had grown.
Downriver, a saltwater barrage had been built, in exchange
for votes from the influential paddy-farmer lobby. The barrage
regulated the inflow of salt water from the backwaters that opened
into the Arabian Sea. So now they had two harvests a year instead
of one. More rice–for the price of a river.
Despite the fact that it was June, and raining, the river was