The God of Small Things - Get a Free Blog

against visiting snakes. He had no sensation in his feet at all, and
only visual evidence assured him that they were still connected to
his body, and were indeed his own.
After Chella died, he was moved into her corner, the corner
that Kuttappen imagined was the corner of his home that Death
had reserved to administer her deathly affairs. One corner for
cooking, one for clothes, one for bedding rolls, one for dying in.
He wondered how long his would take, and what people who
had more than four corners in their houses did with the rest of their
corners. Did it give them a choice of corners to die in?
He assumed, not without reason, that he would be the first in
his family to follow in his mother‟s wake. He would learn
otherwise. Soon. Too soon.
Sometimes (from habit, from missing her), Kuttappen
coughed like his mother used to, and his upper body bucked like a
justcaught fish. His lower body lay like lead, as though it belonged
to someone else. Someone dead whose spirit was trapped and
couldn‟t get away.
Unlike Velutha, Kuttappen was a good, safe Paravan. He
could neither read nor write. As belay there on his hardbed, bits of
thatch and grit fell onto him from the ceiling and mingled with his
sweat. Sometimes ants and other insects fell with it. On bad days
the orange walls held hands and bent over him, inspecting him like
malevolent doctors, slowly, deliberately, squeezing the breath out
of him and making him scream. Sometimes they receded of their
own accord, and the room he lay in grew impossibly large,
terrorizing him with the specter of his own insignificance. That too
made him cry out.
Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an
expensive restaurant (lighting cigarettes, refilling glasses).
Kuttappen thought with envy of madmen who could walk. He had
no doubts about the equity of the deal; his sanity, for serviceable
legs.
The twins put the boat down, and the clatter was met with a