The God of Small Things - Get a Free Blog

the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse
Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised
forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse
Things kept happening.
So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away
cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. He whistled, kicked stones.
The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his
misfortune. He climbed into people‟s eyes and became an
exasperating expression.
What Larry McCaslin saw in Rahel‟s eyes was not despair at
all, but a sort of enforced optimism. And a hollow where Estha‟s
words had been. He couldn‟t be expected to understand that. That
the emptiness in one twin was only a version of the quietness in the
other. That the two things fitted together. Like stacked spoons.
Like familiar lovers‟ bodies. –
After they were divorced, Rahel worked for a few months as
a waitress in an Indian restaurant in New York. And then for
several years as a night clerk in a bullet-proof cabin at a gas station
outside Washington, where drunks occasionally vomited into the
till, and pimps propositioned her with more lucrative job offers.
Twice she saw men being shot through their car windows. And
once a man who had been stabbed, ejected from a moving car with
a knife in his back.
Then Baby Kochamma wrote to say that Estha had been
reReturned. Rahel gave up her job at the gas station and left
America gladly. To return to Ayemenem. To Estha in the rain.
In the old house on the hill, Baby Kochamma sat at the
dining table rubbing the thick, frothy bitterness out of an elderly
cucumber. She was wearing a limp checked seersucker nightgown
with puffed sleeves and yellow turmeric stains. Under the table she
swung her tiny, manicured feet, like a small child on a high chair.
They were puffy with edema, like little foot-shaped air cushions. In
the old days, whenever anybody visited Ayemenem, Baby
Kochamma made it a point to call attention to their large feet. She