It is the only published novel of
Arundhati Roy. And within a novel she captured all of her emotions about life and particularly “Indian way of life and emotions in depth “.The book won the Booker Prize in 1997
I start with some famous quotes from the book which will give the depth of ideas and emotions.
“They had nothing. No future. So they stuck to small things.”
“Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.”
“Some things come with their own punishment.”
“The air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these only the Small Things are ever said. The Big Things lurk unsaid inside.”
“If you’re happy in a dream, does that count?”
“Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.”
and the best one is “What came for them? … Not Death. Just the end of living.”
Rahel and Estha are fraternal twins whose emotional connection to one another is stronger than that of most siblings:
Esthappen and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually as We or Us. As though they were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities.
Now, these years later, Rahel has a memory of waking up one night giggling at Estha’s funny dream.
She has other memories too that she has no right to have.
Their childhood household hums with hidden antagonisms and pains that only family members can give one another.
Blind Mammachi, the twins’ grandmother and founder of Paradise Pickles & Preserves, is a violin-playing widow who suffered years of abuse at the hands of her highly respected husband, and who has a fierce one-sided Oedipal connection with her son, Chacko. Baby Kochamma, Rahel and Estha’s grandaunt, nurses deep-seated bitterness for a lifetime of unrequited love, a bitterness that plays out slyly against everyone in the family; in her youth she fell in love with an Irish Roman-Catholic priest and converted to his faith to win him, while he eventually converted to Hinduism. Chacko, divorced from his English wife and separated from his daughter since her infancy, runs the pickle factory with a capitalist’s hand, self-deluding himself all the while that he is a Communist at heart even as he flirts with and beds his female employees. Ammu, the twins’ mother, is a divorcee who fled her husband’s alcoholism and impossible demands, a woman with a streak of wildness that the children sense and dread and that will be her and her family’s undoing.
The family’s tragedy revolves around the visit of Chacko’s ex-wife, widowed by her second husband, and his daughter, Sophie Mol. It is within the context of their visit that Estha will experience the one horrible thing that should never happen to a child, during their visit that Ammu will come to love by night the man the children love by day, and during their visit that Sophie Mol will die. Her death, and the fate of the twins’ beloved Untouchable Velutha, will forever alter the course of the lives of all the members of the family, sending them each off on spinning trajectories of regret and pain. The story reveals itself not in traditional narrative order, but in jumps through time, wending its way through Rahel’s memories and attempts at understanding the hand fate dealt her family.
Whether or not you fall in love with Roy’s style, the truth of the heartbreaking story she tells and the lovable/hate-able characters who people it make this novel an experience not to be missed.
Some criticized Roy for her views against Indian hypocrisy and recently for Moaist supporting articles but we can’t ignore this creation of her.It’s not for average fiction reader, it need a bend towards literature and more over feelings to understand human emotions.
“Anything’s possible in Human Nature …Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy.”
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