The God of Small Things - Get a Free Blog

And a pair of two-egg twin hearts sank and settled on the
step above the sixth.
The deep-swimming fish covered their mouths with their fins
and laughed sideways at the spectacle.
A white boat-spider floated up with the river in the boat,
struggled briefly and drowned. Her white egg sac ruptured
prematurely, and a hundred baby spiders (too light to drown, too
small to Swim), stippled the smooth surface of the green water,
before being swept out to sea. To Madagascar, to start a new
phylum of Malayali Swimming Spiders.
In a while, as though they‟d discussed it (though they
hadn‟t), the twins began to wash the boat in the river. The
cobwebs, the mud, the moss and lichen floated away. When it was
clean, they turned it upside down and hoisted it onto their heads.
Like a combined hat that dripped. Estha uprooted the red flag.
A small procession (a flag, a wasp, and a boat-on-legs)
wended its knowledgeable way down the little path through the
undergrowth. It avoided the clumps of nettles, and sidestepped
known ditches and anthills. It skirted the precipice of the deep pit
from which laterite had been quarried, and was now a still lake
with steep orange banks, the thick, viscous water covered with a
luminous film of green scum. A verdant, treacherous lawn, in
which mosquitoes bred and fish were fat but inaccessible.
The path, which ran parallel to the river, led to a little grassy
clearing that was hemmed in by huddled trees: coconut, cashew,
mango, bilimbi. On the edge of the clearing, with its back to the
river, a low hut with walls of orange laterite plastered with mud
and a thatched roof nestled close to the ground, as though it was
listening to a whispered subterranean secret. The low walls of the
hut were the same color as the earth they stood on, and seemed to
have germinated from a house-seed planted in the ground, from
which right-angled ribs of earth had risen and enclosed space.
Three untidy banana trees grew in the little front yard that had been
fenced off with panels of woven palm leaves.