The God of Small Things - Get a Free Blog

Memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she
sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most
unlikely ones-a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A
windscreen wiper. A mother‟s marble eyes. Quite sane in the way
she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered.
Her co-passenger‟s madness comforted Rahel. It drew her
closer into New York‟s deranged womb. Away from the other,
more terrible thing that haunted her.
A sour metal smell, like steel bus rails, and the smell of the
bus conductor‟s bands from holding them. A young man with an
old man‟s mouth.
Outside the train, the Hudson shimmered, and the trees were
the redbrown colors of fall. It was just a little cold.
“There‟s a nipple in the air” Larry McCaslin said to Rahel,
and laid his palm gently against the suggestion of protest from a
chilly nipple through her cotton T-shirt. He wondered why she
didn‟t smile.
She wondered why it was that when she thought of home it
was always in the colors of the dark, oiled wood of boats, and the
empty cores of the tongues of flame that flickered in brass lamps.
It was Velutha.
That much Rahel was sure of. She‟d seen him. He‟d seen
her. She‟d have known him anywhere, any time. And if he hadn‟t
been wearing a shirt, she would have recognized him from behind.
She knew his back. She‟d been carried on it. More times than she
could count. It had a light-brown birthmark, shaped like a pointed
dry leaf. He said it was a Lucky Leaf; that made the Monsoons
come on time. A brown leaf on a black back. An autumn leaf at
night.
A lucky leaf that wasn‟t lucky enough.
Velutha wasn‟t supposed to be a carpenter.
He was called Velutha–which means White in