The God of Small Things - Get a Free Blog

The bedroom with blue curtains and yellow wasps that
worried the windowpanes. The bedroom whose walls would soon
learn their harrowing secrets.
The bedroom into which Ammu would first be locked and
then lock herself. Whose door Chacko, crazed by grief, four days
after Sophie Mol‟s funeral, would batter down.
“Get out of my house before I break every bone in your
body!”
My house. My pineapples. My pickle.
After that for years Rahel would dream this dream: a fat
man, faceless, kneeling beside a woman‟s corpse. Hacking its hair
off. Breaking every bone in its body. Snapping even the little ones.
The fingers. The ear bones cracked like twigs. Snapsnap the soft
sound of breaking bones. A pianist killing the piano keys. Even the
black ones. And Rahel (though years later, in the Electric
Crematorium, she would use the slipperiness of sweat to slither out
of Chacko‟s grasp) loved them both. The player and the piano.
The killer and the corpse.
As the door was slowly battered down, to control the
trembling of her hands, Ammu would hem the ends of Rahel‟s
ribbons that didn‟t need hemming.
“Promise me you‟ll always love each other,” she‟d say, as
she drew her children to her.
“Promise,” Estha and Rahel would say. Not finding words
with which to tell her that for them there was no Each, no Other.
Twin millstones and their mother. Numb millstones. What
they had done would return to empty them. But that would be
Later.
Lay Ter. A deep-sounding bell in a mossy well. Shivery and
furred like moth‟s feet.
At the time, there would only be incoherence. As though
meaning had slunk out of things and left them fragmented.
Disconnected. The glint of Ammu‟s needle. The color of a ribbon.
The weave of the cross-stitch counterpane. A door slowly
breaking. Isolated things that didn‟t mean anything. As though the