The phrase – “They all crossed into
forbidden territory. They all tampered
with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much.” – is repeated throughout the novel. Discuss its force and its multiple meanings
in the narrative.
This is a massive
question – one which affects every character in The God of Small Things. That is to say, every character in some way
crosses, or transgresses, a boundary of some sort. This, of course, is necessarily a cursory
glance at the “forbidden transgressions” of most of the novel’s dominant
figures.
The God of Small
Things is, in many ways, a meditation on the kinds of violence that get
imposed when boundaries are crossed.
Baby Kochamma, Ammu, Velutha, Chacko, Margaret, Sophie Mol, Rahel, Estha
– all of them suffer at least a dislocation, and, in some cases, an internal or
external violence.
Ammu “tampers with the
laws” from the outset (of both the novel and her life, at twenty-seven years of
age) by marrying Pappachi, a charming alcoholic, but a terrible husband and
father. Of course, Ammu “didn’t pretend
to be in love with him. She just weighed
the odds and accepted. She thought that anything,
anyone at all, would be better than returning to Ayemenem. She wrote to her parents informing them of
her decision. They didn’t reply.” (39).
Worse, Ammu is seen
partially through the glinting, vicious eyes of Baby Kochamma, the “incumbent
baby grandaunt” (44). She resents Ammu
along religious boundaries – Ammu has produced two “Half-Hindu Hybrids whom no
self-respecting Syrian Christian would ever marry” (44) – but also because Ammu
quarrels with the “fate of the wretched Man-less woman” (45), a fate that
Kochamma outwardly claims to be untouched by.
Ammu quarrels with
this fate, we discover as the novel gathers tremendous speed, by taking on an
Untouchable (Velutha) as a lover. He is,
in many ways, the silent surrogate father to the twins; nevertheless, Ammu’s
“biologically-designed dance” (317) with Velutha imbricates her in the severe
systemic discrimination that the novel so powerfully laments. Ammu ends up exiled, from her children, from
herself, from her biological potential, and dies very alone.
Baby Kochamma refuses
to cross into forbidden territory. She
is a liminal figure in the novel, always hovering on the edges of the
narrative, manipulating and stroking Velutha while Mamacchi casts him into
oblivion, and then spitting poisonously all over him. She has a deep understanding and fear for the
way in which religion and sexuality are intertwined. She loves and fails to win Father Mulligan as
a younger woman, and is only happy when he dies, because – “if anything, she
possessed him in death in a way that she never had while she was alive. At least her memory of him was hers. Wholly hers. Savagely, fiercely, hers” (282).
Desire infiltrates her
body, and almost makes it burst from the inside out. She, above all, tampers with the laws that
lay down who should be loved and how.
She “loves” white Sophie Mol because she is “Other” to Ammu’s children. Herself a product of a hybrid union, Sophie
is used as a beating-stick by Kochamma: a stick that beats alienation and the
intensified feeling of otherness into the twins, both victims of erasure: one
of them “Quietness,” the other “Emptiness” (311). Sophie Mol is apparently “more loved” than
the twins – of particularly great concern to Rahel, who is told earlier on (by
means of a stern admonition from her Ammu) that a child is possibly loved just
a little less whenever they anger their parent.
Chacko, the twins’
uncle, is (or was) a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford who meets Margaret, a café
waitress at the time of their meeting.
Chacko has crossed into a forbidden white territory, but the novel takes
pains to say that he is deeply uncomfortable with his Ayemenem roots; he more
clearly identifies himself with White, educated, English life. He reaches Margaret through his laughter, and
thus forces an average woman (in her mind) to love herself more than she did
before she met him. But Chacko, too, is
a hybrid figure, a “tortured Marxist….at war with an impossible, incurable
Romantic” (232), and crosses the forbidden territory (as did his sister) of
marriage without parental consent (or knowledge, in his case). Inevitably, the marriage itself suffers the ultimate
Marxist fate, in that the seeds of its destruction were sowed in its
inception. Margaret turns to Joe (who we
really only know as a “Joe-shaped Hole in the Universe”), himself a clichéd
Englishman, and the opposite of Chacko, in that he is “Steady. Solvent. Thin”
(235).
But Chacko and
Margaret produce Sophie (Mol), and then they separate, and then Joe dies, and
then (understanding that this is the distillation of a novel) Margaret and
Sophie Mol cross into the forbidden territory of Ameyemenem – the forbiddenness
felt financially (“Margaret Kochamma broke her term deposit and bought two
airline tickets, London-Bombay-Kochin” [238]) and medically (Margaret brings
every preventative medicine possible, but she cannot immunize against drowning.
Appropriately, The
God of Small Things is concluded by two love-scenes of intense
forbidenness, one because it implies incest, the other because it crosses
heavily stratified class (caste) boundaries.
When the twins share one another at the end, it is clear that “what they
shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief” (311). Arundhati Roy follows that last statement
with the title quote to this paper. Only
now (repeated on multiple occasions in the novel), the statement about their
breaking the Love Laws is at least bitterly ironic, and – more to the point –
is heavily weighted with all the implications of the destructiveness of class,
sexual, and religious divisions. Estha
is called “Quietness” in this scene and Rahel “Emptiness.” In brief, Estha’s quietness is brought about
by his original crossing into the forbidden territory of the OrangeLemondrink
Man’s slimy parlor at Abhilash Talkies.
Rahel suffers emptiness in her eyes as a married woman in Washington;
she suffers vast inner violation as Estha is “deported” deported by train at
novel’s end; she has the fuzzy moth that flutters around her heart, nibbling
away at its perimeter, every time the woman who is “Of one blood” (312) seems
to love her a little less.
The last scene is one
where all the other boundaries get transgressed: Velutha literally crosses the
waters from the History House (a brilliant postmodern and postcolonial trope)
to the riverbank, to – for the first time in the novel – move beyond the
boundaries of how someone should be loved.
For the lovers, there is simply “Naaley” : tomorrow. Though Chappu Thamburan (the Lord of Rubbish
and spider who conceals himself) outlives Velutha, there is a deep, moving, and
profound sadness in the estranged idiom of the lovers: a verbal and physical
dance that suggests both the tragedy’s rootedness in its era and the imprint of
its commerce with futurity.
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