The God of Small Things - Get a Free Blog

divisions on a slab of chocolate.
He held her close, by the light of an oil lamp, and he shone
as though he had been polished with a high-wax body polish.
He could do only one thing at a time.
If he held her, he couldn‟t kiss her. If he kissed her, he
couldn‟t see her. If he saw her, he couldn‟t feel her.
She could have touched his body lightly with her fingers, and
felt his smooth skin turn to gooseflesh. She could have let her
fingers stray to the base of his flat stomach. Carelessly, over those
burnished chocolate ridges. And left patterned trails of bumpy
gooseflesh on his body, like flat chalk on a blackboard, like a
swathe of breeze in a paddyfield, like jet streaks in a blue
church-sky. She could so easily have done that, but she didn‟t. He
could have touched her too. But he didn‟t, because in the gloom
beyond the oil lamp, in the shadows, there were metal folding
chairs arranged in a ring and on the chairs there were people, with
slanting rhinestone sunglasses, watching. They all held polished
violins under their chins, the bows poised at identical angles. They
all had their legs crossed, left over right, and all their left legs were
shivering.
Some of them had newspapers. Some didn‟t. Some of them
blew spit bubbles. Some didn‟t But they all had the flickering
reflection of an oil lamp on each lens.
Beyond the circle of folding chairs was a beach littered with
broken blue-glass bottles. The silent waves brought new blue
bottles to be broken, and dragged the old ones away in the
undertow. There were jagged sounds of glass on glass. On a rock,
out at sea, in a shaft of purple light, there was a mahogany and
wicker rocking chair, smashed.
The sea was black, the spume vomit-green.
Fish fed on shattered glass.
Night‟s elbows rested on the water, and falling stars glanced
off its brittle shards.
Moths lit up the sky. There wasn‟t a moon.
He could swim, with his one arm. She with her two.