The God of Small Things - Get a Free Blog

Kochu Maria, in a bad mood for no particular reason, was in the
kitchen standing on her low stool savagely cleaning a large fish,
working up a smelly blizzard of fish scales. Her gold earrings
swung fiercely. Silver fish scales flew around the kitchen, landing
on kettles, walls, vegetable peelers, the fridge handle. She ignored
Vellya Paapen when he arrived at the kitchen door, drenched and
shaking. His real eye was bloodshot and he looked as though he
had been drinking. He stood there for ten minutes waiting to be
noticed. When Kochu Maria finished the fish and started on the
onions, he cleared his throat and asked for Mammachi. Kochu
Maria tried to shoo him away, but he wouldn‟t go. Each time he
opened his mouth to speak, the smell of arrack on his breath hit
Kochu Maria like a hammer. She had never seen him like this
before, and was a little frightened. She had a pretty good idea of
what it was all about, so she eventually decided that it would be
best to call Mammachi. She shut the kitchen door, leaving Vellya
Paapen outside in the back mittam, weaving drunkenly in the
driving rain. Though it was December, it rained as though it was
June. “Cyclonic disturbance,” the newspapers called it the next
day. But by then nobody was in any condition to read the papers.
Perhaps it was the rain that drove Vellya Paapen to the
kitchen door. To a superstitious man, the relentlessness of that
unseasonal downpour could have seemed like an omen from an
angry god. To a drunk superstitious man, it could have seemed like
the beginning of the end of the world. Which, in a way, it was.
When Mammachi arrived in the kitchen, in her petticoat and
pale pink dressing gown with rickrack edging, Vellya Paapen
climbed up the kitchen steps and offered her his mortgaged eye. He
held it out in the palm of his hand. He said he didn‟t deserve it and
wanted her to have it back. His left eyelid drooped over his empty
socket in an immutable, monstrous wink. As though everything
that he was about to say was part of an elaborate prank.
“What is it?” Mammachi asked, stretching her hand out,
thinking perhaps that for some reason Vellya Paapen was returning
the kilo of red rice she had given him that morning.