Response Paper on "the God of Small Things"

The War of Dreams Prisoners

When I first started reading The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy I found the novel very immersing and suspenseful in depicting the tragic love story, family relationships, social customs and mores of the Indian culture altered by British Colonization. The main event that organizes the structure of the narrative is the forbidden relationship between a woman and a man from different casts. Right from the beginning the author draws reader’s attention to the “Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits” that exist in the society (5), by thus prompting that the theme of the novel is violated “Love Laws”: “the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how” (33).

Another prominent conflict in The God of Small Things is the fray between dominant British and suppressed Indian cultures. The main characters of the novel twins: Estha and Rahel, live in Ayemenem, in the south Indian province of Kerala. Twin’s mother, Ammu, violated the laws of the cast and paid a high price for it. But, it is not only Ammu who was “the worst transgressor”, the whole family “crossed the forbidden territory”: “they all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how” (31). The family has very distinctive characteristic, it is in the transition state. Its members live in the intermediate space at the junction of several languages, religions and cultures. Everybody in the family “broke the rules” (31). Chacko, twins’ uncle, studied in Oxford and married a British woman Margaret, with whom he had a “half-one” daughter Sophie (17). Never-married Baby Kochama, forever living in her parents’ house, in her youth was in love with Father Mulligan and “defied her father’s wishes and became a Roman Catholic” (25). Twins’ mother, Ammu, lost any acceptable status as an Indian woman by divorcing her husband “from the intercommunity love marriage” soon after the twins were born, and returned back to her parents home where there was “constant, high, whining mewl of local disapproval” (43-45).

When Chacko’s former wife Margaret Kochamma and their daughter Sophie Mol are expected to arrive in Ayemenem, the family is thoroughly preparing to meet the important guests from the mother country. The children are dressed up in their best clothes: Estha is ”wearing his beige and pointy shoes and his Special Outing Elvis puff” and Rahel’s “Airport Frock was in Ammu’s suitcase” and “It had special matching knickers” (37). By this portrayal Roy ironically emphasizes how colonized Indian people are trying to look more westernized and refined as their colonizers. In addition, “that whole week” before the important meeting “Baby Kochamma eavesdropped relentlessly on the twins’ private conversations” and “whenever she caught them speaking in Malayalam, she levied a small fine which was deducted from their pocket money” (36). For speaking their native language the twins were forced to write: “I will always speak in English, I will always speak in English”, “a hundred times each” (36). Roy clearly portrays