The God of Small Things - Get a Free Blog

had gone) to divest his sister-in-law of her salary and drive the
Plymouth around to keep its battery charged. When she took up
television, Baby Kochamma dropped the car and the garden
simultaneously. Tutti-frutti.
With every monsoon, the old car settled more firmly into the
ground. Like an angular, arthritic hen settling stiffly on her clutch
of eggs. With no intention of ever getting up. Grass grew around
its flat tires. The PARADISE PICKLES & PRESERVES
signboard rotted and fell inward like a collapsed crown.
A creeper stole a look at itself in the remaining mottled half
of the cracked driver‟s mirror.
A sparrow lay dead on the backseat. She had found her way
in through a hole in the windscreen, tempted by some seat-sponge
for her nest. She never found her way out. No one noticed her
panicked car-window appeals. She died on the backseat, with her
legs in the air. Like a joke.
Kochu Maria was asleep on the drawing-room floor, curled
into a comma in the flickering light of the television that was still
on. American policemen were stuffing a handcuffed teenaged boy
into a police car. There was blood spattered on the pavement. The
police-car lights flashed and a siren wailed a warning. A wasted
woman, the boy‟s mother perhaps, watched fearfully from the
shadows. The boy struggled. They had used a mosaic blur on the
upper part of his face so that he couldn‟t sue them. He had caked
blood all over his mouth and down the front of his T-shirt like a
red bib. His babypink lips were lifted off his teeth in a snarl. He
looked like a werewolf. He screamed through the car window at
the camera.
“I‟m fifteen years old and I wish I were a better person than I
am. But I‟m not. Do you want to hear my pathetic story?”
He spat at the camera and a missile of spit splattered over the
lens and dribbled down.
Baby Kochamma was in her room, sitting up in bed, filling in