The God of Small things

The God of Small things As a Mallu (Malayali, Keralite) I had my reservations on reading ‘The God of Small Things’ by Arundhati Roy though it got the booker prize. So I did not bother to read it.. until last month when I grabbed it from the library. It is a typical case of ‘emic’ reading that is I am reading a story about my own people, just as someone studying his own culture. Sometimes it poses problems when you see at a peripheral level and find it difficult to believe that life is either too rosy or too bland or too much of romance or some such one sided extremes. This was what happened with the likes of muttath varky of the painkily ilk. I was fortunate that much of the things that Ms Roy speaks are identifiable to me. The portrayal is typical of the central Travancore especially the Kottayam area. But more than that, what is of literary and universal is that she uses metaphors of a rather personal and the subjective such as the movement of butterfly or a lizard or a dead frog on the roads , everyday scenes that are typical of this part of the world or may be every part of the world. One more step and I found that the mundane and the bizarre and many times the static give a richness of reality that only the native can understand and identify with. It also gives a picture of the social and the physical fabric of the place to even the foreign reader. That brings us to Macondo. Macondo is a city now famous for its place in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ ‘One hundred years of solitude’. I find the style very similar to Marquez and to me the place Aymanam is the Macondo of Kerala. The too mundane and the magical weave in what is now in the literary world called ‘magical realism’. And Roy’s novel stands out for this reason alone. I am not sure whether other critics have found such a parallel. But most of all the title has it captured everything about the little lives of this bizarre creature called Malayali. To my mind he has everything and aptly calls his country ‘God’s own country’ to which he himself has added ‘devil’s own people’. Imagine a people who had never had to go anywhere, never been invaded, had developed the wrong notion that if one has to have then someone else has to lose and then blissfully believes that life is all about drinking and reveling and add to it the never have gone out of Kerala attitude of forced ‘anotherness’ though he is very much like his neighbor..that has been captured in the novel and all those characters like Chacko and Margaret Kochamma are all just foils created by Ms. Roy to highlight this fact and the title comes alive that the Malayali’s concerns are too small and then he lords it over in a miserable life that need not be so……….