The God of Small Things - Get a Free Blog

Kochu Maria used the opportunity to switch channels and
watch a bit of Prime Bodies .
Rahel followed Estha to his room. Ammu‟s room. Once.
The room had kept his secrets. It gave nothing away. Not in
the disarray of rumpled sheets, nor the untidiness of a kicked-off
shoe or a wet towel hung over the back of a chair. Or a half-read
book. It was like a room in a hospital after the nurse had just been.
The floor was clean, the walls white. The cupboard closed. Shoes
arranged. The dustbin empty.
The obsessive cleanliness of the room was the only positive
sign of volition from Estha. The only faint suggestion that he had,
perhaps, some Design for Life. Just the whisper of an
unwillingness to subsist on scraps offered by others. On the wall
by the window, an iron stood on an ironing board. A pile of folded,
crumpled clothes waited to be ironed.
Silence hung in the air like secret loss.
The terrible ghosts of impossible-to-forget toys clustered on
the blades of the ceiling fan. A catapult. A Qantas koala (from
Miss Mitten) with loosened button eyes. An inflatable goose (that
had been burst with a policeman‟s cigarette). Two ballpoint pens
with silent streetscapes and red London buses that floated up and
down in them.
Estha put on the tap and water drummed into a plastic bucket
He undressed in the gleaming bathroom. He stepped out of his
sodden jeans. Stiff. Dark blue. Difficult to get out of. He pulled his
crushed-strawberry T-shirt over his head, smooth, slim, muscular
arms crossed over his body. He didn‟t hear his sister at the door.
Rahel watched his stomach suck inwards and his rib cage
rise as his wet T-shirt peeled away from his skin, leaving it wet and
honeycolored. His face and neck and a V-shaped triangle at the
base of his throat were darker than the rest of him. His arms too
were doublecolored. Paler where his shirtsleeves ended. A
dark-brown man in pale honey clothes. Chocolate with a twist of
coffee. High cheekbones and hunted eyes. A fisherman in a