Remapping The Small Things PDF

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國立中山大學外國語文學系研究所
碩士論文
A THESIS SUBMITTED TO
THE GRADUATE INSTITUTE OF
FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE
NATIONAL SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY
重組微物：阿蘭達蒂‧洛伊《微物之神》中的地方和生活空間
Remapping the Small Things: Place and Life Space in
Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
研究生：孫筱菁撰
By: Sun Siao Jing
指導教授：洪敏秀博士
Advisor: Dr. Min-hsiou Rachel Hung
中華民國九十八年七月
July 2009
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to several people who help me so much in
my study life of graduate school. First and foremost, my advisor Dr. Min-hsiou
Rachel Hung for her patience and kindness encourages me to complete the thesis.
Without her guidance and assistance, I could not finish the thesis with consistency.
I am also very grateful for my committee members, Professor Hsin-ya Huang
and Professor Jade Tsui-Yu Lee, for their thorough reading and insightful comments.
Professor Huang and Prof. Lee are also my dearest and respected teachers who
instructed and inspired me to study literature when I was a college student in National
Kaohsiung Normal University.
Moreover, I would like to give my special thanks to Professor Ting-yao Luo who
inspires me to study the small things of the novel and provides me many perceptive
and useful suggestions.
During my school life, I am most thankful to Professor Yu-san Yu whose
kindness supports me to complete my thesis. Finally, I would like to thank my best
friend Yu-li Lin who often inspires me when I suffer in writer’s block and
accompanies me through my entire student life.

論文名稱：重組微物：阿蘭達蒂．洛伊《微物之神》中的地方和生活空間
校所組別：國立中山大學外國語文學系研究所
畢業年度與提要別：九十七學度第二學期碩士學位論文提要
研究生：孫筱菁
指導教授：洪敏秀博士
論文內容提要：
阿蘭達蒂．洛伊的《微物之神》描述微小事物構成的世界，任一微小事物和
生活在當地阿耶門連的人們都有重要關連性，特別是對故事中主角雙胞胎瑞海兒
和艾斯沙而言。本論文藉由重組阿耶門連此地散落各處的微小事物來審視地方、
空間與人三者間的交織關係。地方之所以具有意義是因為生活在其中的人們，其
個人歷史、社會關係和個人經驗對地方產生了生活空間的認知感。因此，地方的
意義，應該取決於個人對地方的體驗，而不是單純地受外在環境和官方敘事的描
述所主宰。個人對地方的認同來自於個人的生活空間，人對於微小事物的感受和
認知形成了生活空間。
本論文第一章旨在探討人們對地方的認知主要是受到個人歷史和個人經驗
所影響，而非單純的隨著地理外在形貌的改變而有所變更。雙胞胎瑞海兒和艾斯
沙被維魯沙之死所遺留的微小事物禁制於當時的時空。儘管地景外貌已變，人事
已非，雙胞胎對地方的認知卻始終停滯在當時悲劇發生的空間。第二章透過討論
微物之神維魯沙以其賤民身份在阿耶門連上所遇到的困境和壓迫，企圖重現地方
和人之間的社會關係。第三章重組地方上微小的事物再現人們對地方的認知，並
呈現當地的生活空間。本章著重生活空間因地方和人之間的交互運作而生，而人
的生活經驗和生活空間同時也建構人對地方的認知。
關鍵字：生活經驗、地方、微小事物、社會關係、空間
Abstract
In The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy depicts a world constituted by small
things, and each small thing attaches its significance with those who live in
Ayemenem, especially for the twins Rahel and Estha. By remapping the small things
scattered in Ayemenem, this thesis aims to explore the interrelation between place,
people, and space. Place is meaningful for those who live there when their personal
history, social relation, and personal experience produce life space and thus have the
sense of place. Therefore, place is defined by the personal experience, not the changes
of landscape or political history. The sense of place is developed from life space
which is formed by small things that people perceive and conceive.
Chapter One focuses that place is identified by personal history and experience,
not by the changes of landscape. The twins are traumatized by the small things that
trace Velutha’s death and are confined in the space constructed by the past memories.
Even though the landscape and people of Ayemenem become different, the twins still
sense Ayemenem consistent with its past. The small things are left in Ayemenem by
the god of small things, Velutha, who belongs to subaltern group. Chapter two
illustrates the social relation between place and people through the dilemma and
oppression he faces. By remapping the small things of the novel, Chapter Three
represents how people identify place to produce their life space. Life space is
produced from the interrelation between people and place, while the sense of place is
constructed by people’s life experience and life space.
Key words: life experience, personal history, place, small things, social relation, space
Table of Contents
Introduction………………………………………………………..……..1
Chapter One
Place and Personal History………………………………………..….....17
Chapter Two
Subaltern Identities in Small Things…………………...……………..…43
Chapter Three
Small Things and Life Space…………………………………………....65
Conclusion…………………...…….…………………………………....86
Works Cited………...…………………………………….……………..92
Introduction
The flying moth, monsoon, and smell are some of the small things that keep
recurring in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, and these small things
scattering in the novel construct a world which needs to be examined: “Little events,
ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they
become the bleached bones of a story” (32). The flying moth, once discovered by
Pappachi, haunts him and his children. As an Imperial Entomologist at the Pusa
Institute in New Delhi, Pappachi repines at the truth that the moth does not name after
him, for when he first discovers the moth, the moth is confirmed as a “slightly unusual
race of a well-known species” (48). However, twelve years later, because of a radical
taxonomic reshuffle, Pappachi’s moth becomes “a separate species and genus hitherto
unknown to science” and is named after other person (48). The regret thus torments
Pappachi, and his “black moods and sudden bouts of temper” are embodied in the
moth transmitting to Ammu, Rahel and Estha. Beside the new species of Indian moth,
the brooding monsoon with heavy rainfall penetrates the whole novel (48). It is
raining when Rahel returns to Ayemenem in 1992, and she almost forgets how damp
the monsoon air could be. Because of the unusual rain in December, 1969, Sophie
Mol is drawn in the river which overturns the small boat. It is also in the rain when
Velutha crosses the river, meets his fate, and is beaten by the policemen in 1969. The
rain thus plays a crucial part in the novel. Monsoon, in fact, represents the typical
climate in India.
Ayemenem, the place where the story of The God of Small Things happens, is in
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Kottayam, one of the 14 districts in the state of Kerala, the southeast India. In Kerala,
most of the rivers are small due to environmental factors. Kerala’s rivers thus face
many problems, including summer droughts, the building of large dams, sand mining,
and pollution. Since the small rivers are entirely fed by monsoon rains, monsoon is
very important for Kottayam people. Without raining, droughts would cause the
famine as the situation happens in the novel. In Kottayam, there are two monsoon
seasons, the south-west monsoon and the north-east monsoon. The south-west
monsoon is from June to August. The north-east monsoon starts from October and
ends in November. December, January and February are cool, while March, April and
May are hot. In The God of Small Things, Rahel returns with the June rain, the rain on
Estha who could not feel it, for he is confined in the space of the “sicksweet” smell,
“like old roses on a breeze” (32). This smell like a ghost haunts Rahel and Estha
through the novel and hides in ordinary things around them. They learn this “History
smell” from Velutha, the god of small things for Rahel and Estha. It is the smell that
only exists in Rahel and Estha’s history with Velutha. The “History” means a
particular period of time when Rahel and Estha smell Velutha’s blood, and they
remember it as History smell. This History smell connects the past and the present of
the twins with Ayemenem where they witness how Velutha is beaten by the police to
near death.
From the special Indian moth, monsoon, and smell, it seems that there is a
relation interweaving behind these small things, and they all relate to the place,
Ayemenem. Besides moths, monsoon, and smell, many small things scatter in
Ayemenem, including cupboards, holes, footprints, and toys, etc. By remapping the
small things in place, this thesis aims to discover the meaning behind the small things
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and the interrelation between the small things and place. Actually, small things are
people’s life experience connecting people with place. People experience different
small things to situate themselves in place. Moth, monsoon, and smell are some
examples that people sense and perceive from the place, Ayemenem. People live with
these small things in place and experience them in place. The different senses for
small things form different life experiences for people, and life experiences also shape
how people feel about place. Their life experiences thus form their sense of place that
produce space where people live and experience. For instance, the sicksweet smell
that Rahel and Estha sense becomes space confining both Rahel and Estha in the
terrifying past when they witness the violence of the police. Space thus is formed by
people’s life experience from place where people live to gain their sense of place.
To elaborate what place and space are how they are interrelated, this thesis starts
with the definition of place from Lucy Lippard’s The Lure of the Local and J. Hillis
Miller’s Topographies. For the interrelation between people and place, the ideas from
Tim Cresswell’s Place: A Short Introduction and Doreen Massey’s “A Global Sense
of Place” would be examined. The difference and interrelation between place and
space would be clarified from Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place. The concepts of space
and the ideas how space connects with people’s life experience would be introduced
from Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space and Edward W. Soja’s Thirdspace. In
addition to clarifying the ideas of place, this thesis also analyzes how place and space
connect with people’s life experience from the small things in Arundhati Roy’s The
God of Small Things.
According to Lucy Lippard, place is “temporal and spatial, personal and
political,” for place is “a layered location” involving time, history, and memory that
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connect human life (7). Place is temporal because place records the events and the
histories of human life. Following the changes of the landscape, history is layered by
the time. For example in The God of Small Things, Meenachal River in Ayemenem is
a wide river in the 1960s, while it becomes a small stream because the dam blocks the
water in the 1990s. One can tell the difference and the history of a place from its
changes of appearance. Place is spatial since place forms the space that people
conceive, perceive and live in. Place is personal because people know where they live
from their own senses and experience. Place is also political while place is
constructed by social relation. Place undergoes the social process and connects people
with their life experience and forms the space where people live and have the sense of
place.
Miller’s idea on Topography indicates that the name of place implies the history
of place. From the name of place, one can tell the story and history behind the place.
Miller explains how this word, Topography, is formed: it “combines the Greek word
topos, place, with the Greek word graphein, to write” (3). The meaning of
Topography transforms several times. First, Topography means “the art of mapping by
graphic signs rather than words” (3). Then, it becomes “the name for what is mapped,
apparently without any reference to writing or other means of representation” (3). In
the final transformation, as “the name of the map,” Topography is carried “to name
what is mapped” (4). The power of naming is so great that it could even project the
landscape in front of people’s eyes.
We see the landscape as though it were already a map, complete with place
names and the names of geographical feature. [. . .] You can get to the
place by way of its name. Place names make a site already the product of a
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virtual writing, a topography, or, since the names are often figures, a
“topotropography.” (Topography 4)
Therefore, from the name of place, the history of the place has been recorded. Place
reveals its own history.
Both Lippard and Miller point out that place implies the human history. Place
inscribes human life and history, which provides the idea for Chapter One in which
Ayemenem where the story of The God of Small Things happens represents the life
and history for those who live there. To study place, Cresswell analyzes that place
could be approached at three levels through the history of place studies in Place: A
Short Introduction. The first level is a descriptive approach. This approach is based on
the common sense that the world is constructed by places, so each place could be a
unique subject to study. Regional geographers often use the “ideographic” approach to
study the place with the concerns of “the distinctiveness and particularity,” such as the
study of “The Geography of the North of England” or “The Soul of San Francisco”
(Cresswell 51). This approach focuses on the particularity of one place, but the
general idea of place is not sufficient. This thesis does not exclusively appropriate
Cresswell’s theory to explore the particularity of Ayemenem, but rather by researching
the small things of Ayemenem as the examples of place’s particularity, the thesis aims
to unveil the interrelation between small things and people, people and place, and
place and space. Therefore, this thesis focuses on the social relation of a place as
Cresswell’s social constructionist approach by using the distinctiveness and
particularity of the place as examples to support to explore the social relation of the
place.
In a study of place, it requires examining the relation between people and place.
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Therefore, the second level of Cresswell’s place study helps to explore the connection
between Ayemenem and those who live there. The second level is a social
constructionist approach. This approach still concerns the distinctiveness and
particularity of places but only as examples of the social process. Marxists, feminists
and post-structuralists might take this approach to study the social structure of the
places which explain the uniqueness of the places and to pinpoint how the places are
formed under “capitalism, patriarchy, heterosexism, post-colonialism and a host of
other structural conditions” (Cresswell 51). Therefore, Chapter Two tries to reveal the
social relation between people and place by representing the dilemma of subaltern
group under the social structure of Ayemenem.
In studying place by constructionist approach, Doreen Massey tries to explore
how the social process of place is formed in the article entitled “A Global Sense of
Place.” Cresswell indicates that Massey’s definition of place comes from her
challenge to David Harvey’s idea of time-space compression. According to Harvey,
“Place, in whatever guise, is like space and time, a social construct” in “From Space
to Place and Back Again” (293). Cresswell points out that Harvey discovers that place
is under time-space compression due to the “political economy of place construction
under capitalism” (Cresswell 57). In short, following Harvey’s explanation, Cresswell
agrees, the global flows of people, information, products and capital are the reasons of
anxiety and need to be resisted (Cresswell 71). Therefore, at the beginning of
Massey’s paper, she questions the assumptions of time-space compression and
globalization.
Massey indicates that the idea of time-space compression is the product from the
perspective of capitalism, which ignores gender and race that are also factors of global
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processes. By using examples of people’s movement, she observes that some people
are forced to move, some move whenever they want, and while others are forced to
stay. Massey explains that if we only focus on the binarism between the fixity of place
and the flows of capital, we would miss the particularity of people’s movement. She
points out:“Power-geometry of time-space compression, different social groups and
individuals are placed diversely” (Massey 149). From the point of power-geometry, it
not only concerns about who moves and who cannot move but also involves the
power of flows and movement. Most of the time, those who can move around and
with the place communicate simultaneously own the power of control in some ways.
They could be businessmen who distribute movies, control news, organize
investments and the international currency transactions. They belong to a social group
who really dominates time-space compression. They could use it and turn into their
advantages, and thus time-space compression also increases their power and influence.
Massey indicates that this way to think time-space compression makes us return to the
question of what place or a sense of place is. This is the reason why she asks “how do
we think about ‘locality?’” (151).
To answer the question that she proposes, Massey redefines the idea of place.
She analyzes Kilburn in the north-west of London as an example. Though Kilburn
may have its own “character,” it is not a “seamless, coherent identity, a single sense of
place which everyone shares” (Massey 153). The routes that people come here, the
favorite place they like to visit, and the connection they made (the way using the
phone or email, or the way connecting memory and imagination with this place)
between Kilburn and other places in the world are all varied. Massey proposes that if
people have multiple identities, one could also confirm the multiple identities of a
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place. What gives a place its particularity is not some kind of long internalized history
implying political history, but the interrelation between a specific place and its social
relation. Therefore, Massey urges not to view places as areas with borders but to
imagine place as “moments in networks of social relations and understandings” (154).
Massey emphasizes that the significance of place is its social relation with people.
While reviewing Velutha’s social dilemma due to his subaltern identity, this thesis
would apply Massey’s definition of place. Massey concludes her paper with three
concepts of place. First, places in process are not “static.” Places have their
interrelation with society. These interrelations are certainly not frozen in time but are
processes. Second, place has multiple identities and history. Place does not have a
“single, unique identity.” In fact, place is “full of internal conflicts” such as the
conflicts between social groups in Ayemenem. Third, the uniqueness of place is
defined by its interrelation with society, but not by its long internalized history
(Massey 155-56). As a result, Massey defines place as processes constructed by social
interrelations, but Massey’s social relations are not just confined in capitalism. Her
social structure is more open and takes into consideration other elements, such as race
or gender.
Cresswell, Harvey, and Massey all indicate that place is a social process. Place
connects people with social relations. In the social structure of a place, the social
relations could be demonstrated from the structure of class. Therefore, by illustrating
the social dilemma Velutha encounters, the social relation of Ayemenem is represented.
However, in Lippard’s explanation, place is not only political and social but also
personal and spatial. Therefore, to study place, one need not only research the social
relation between people and place but also the interrelation between personal
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experiences and place. Thus, Cresswell’s third level of approach for place study could
further interpret the interrelation between people and place by focusing on personal
experiences with the idea of space and place.
Cresswell’s third level of place study is a phenomenological approach. The
essence of human existence is necessary. Human geographers who use this approach
concern “Place” rather than “places” (Cresswell 51). Place represents how people face
the world by focusing on “subjectivity” and “experience,” not “the cool, hard logic of
spatial science” (Cresswell 20). Yi-Fu Tuan remarks that the main concern of his book
Space and Place is how humans experience and understand the world. Tuan defines
place through a comparison with space. He points out the relations of space and place:
“‘Space’ is more abstract than ‘place’” (Tuan 6). Place has a sense of value and
belonging, while space is for abstract discussions of special science. He elaborates
that a sense of space is open and allows “movement,” while place is “pause” (Tuan 6).
“Each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place”
(Tuan 6). To understand place, one could know it through “experience” (Tuan 6).
“Experience can be direct and intimate, or it can be indirect and conceptual” (Tuan 6).
For example, people know their home intimately, and they could only know their
country is large. People could also know a place conceptually as well as intimately.
They could explain concepts but may not express well from his senses of “touch, taste,
smell, hearing, and even vision” (Tuan 6). Personal experiences thus are significant,
while people identify place through their sensory experiences as what Rahel and Estha
perceive in their home town, Ayemenem.
In Space and Place, Tuan tries to define what place is instead of focusing on the
“cultural particularities” of places (Tuan 5). He aims to figure out the concept of place.
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He explains that since place is a “pause,” place could exist at many scales: “At one
extreme a favorite armchair is a place, at the other extreme the whole earth” (Tuan
149). Cresswell points out a phenomenological approach for place, but Tuan suggests
that one could study place from their homes because home is most intimate for people,
and feminists argue that home for women or children could be the source of horror.
Indeed some places are “oppressive and exploitative,” they are still the way how
people “experience the world—through and in place” (Cresswell 50). Therefore,
personal experience is significant for place studies. This idea of place could be
applied on reading Rahel and Estha, for their life experience and personal history
form their sense of the place, Ayemenem.
In studying place, Cresswell points out that a social constructionist approach and
a phenomenological approach relate to each other since the place people
live—favorite rooms, neighbors, and nations—could be analyzed as the product of
social processes, and these places are also examples to demonstrate an understanding
that human has to live in place. Place has complex relationships with people, and
people experience the world through place (Cresswell 50). Place has close
relationships with people who live in it, and there are two approaches to study place,
from the social structure or from the interrelation with people. Therefore, to study
place, one needs to know the interrelation between place and people. Cresswell thus
concludes in Place: A Short Introduction that while researching and writing place, one
needs to understand “the physical world, both ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’, the processes of
meaning production and the practices of power that mark relations between social
groups (122). Place is produced by those who constitute a “society,” while place is
also the key that produce human relations. In other word, place is the center of human
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beings (Cresswell 123). A study of place explains how people experience the world
and express their interrelation with place. Therefore, in order to study the small things
scattering all over Ayemenem, it is necessary to explore how small things are
connected with those who live in Ayemenem. People experience the small things
through place. It is essential to study the social relation between people and place and
how people conceive and perceive the small things from the place. Place thus is
personal and political at the same time. Place is personal, for people have their life
experience with place, while place is political since place relates to people with its
social relations.
In fact, place is not only personal and political but also temporal and spatial. In
the definition of place, Lippard points out that the place is spatial. Yi-Fu Tuan
explains the difference between place and space and points out that space is as
important as place, while place and space both relate to peoples’ life experience.
Lefebvre also emphasizes the significance of experience. He remarks that sensory
experience of human body constructs space. “Within the senses (from the sense of
smell to sight, treated as different within a differentiated field) prefigure the layers to
social space and their interconnections” (Lefebvre 405). Therefore, personal
experience is significant for both place and space. Since people experience small
things from place to produce their sense of place, place forms the space that people
conceive, perceive and live in. Therefore, to study the place, one also needs to study
its spatiality.
Based on Lefebvre’s space theory, Soja has developed the “trialectics of
spatiality” in order to break the binary notions of spatiality, including the oppositions
of objective versus subjective, material versus mental, real versus imagined, and space
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versus place. Thirdspace is thus the term emphasized in Soja’s study of spatiality. Soja
indicates that there are Firstspace, Secondspace, and Thirdspace in the “trialectics of
spatiality.” Soja explains that Firstspace, perceived space (espaca perçu) in Lefebvre’s
term, is “a material and materialized ‘physical’ spatiality that is directly
comprehended in empirically measurable configurations,” such as “sites and
situations,” “multitude of materialized phenomena across spaces and places,” and “the
concrete and mappable geographies” (74-75). Firstspace accents objectivity and
materiality. Firstspace is the traditional domain of human geography to explore “the
historicality and sociality of spatial forms” and inquiry how human spatiality are
socially produced (Soja 76). Relatively human geographers thus seek the social
production of Firstspace either in “individual and collective psychologies” or in “the
social processes and practices presumed to be underlying and structuring the
production of material spatialities.” Marxist geographers explain the uneven
development of the material worlds through appeals to “class analysis, the labor
theory of value, and the evolving historical effects of the interplay between social
relations of production and the development of the productive force” (Soja 77). Thus,
the study of Firstspace tends to focus on “presumably non-spatial variables, behaviors,
and social activity such as historical development, class consciousness, cultural
preferences, and rational economic choice” (Soja 77).
In contrast to the materiality of Firstspace, Secondspace is a conceived space
(espace conçu) that is “primarily produced through discursively devised
representations of space, through the spatial workings of mind” (Soja 79).
Secondspace is subjective and imagined. “Secondspace is the interpretive locale of the
creative artist and artful architect, visually or literally re-presenting the world in the
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image of their subjective imaginaries” (Soja 79). Despise the binary oppositions of
perceived space and conceived space, Soja and Lefebvre propose the “trialectics of
spatiality.” “Space is social morphology: it is to lived experience what form itself is to
the living organism, and just as intimately bound up with function and structure”
(Lefebvre 94). In Soja’s explanation, this lived space (espace vécu) is his Thirspace,
the space “as directly lived, with all its intractability intact, a space that stretches
across the images and symbols that accompany it, the space of ‘inhabitants’ and
‘users’” (67). Thirdspace is “comprised of all three spatialities—perceived, conceived,
and lived—with no one inherently privileged a priori” (Soja 68).
Soja’s idea of Thirdspace actually includes all the spatialities, Firstspace and
Secondspace. This thesis would adopt Soja’s idea of Thirdspace by using the term
“life space” instead of “Thirdspace” because the thesis aims to focus on life
experience that people perceive, conceive, and live. Life means “the sequence of
physical and mental experiences that make up the existence of an individual” and
“one or more aspects of the process of living” in the definition of Merriam-Webster
Online Dictionary (2009). The meaning of life space is literally more specific than the
term “Thirdspace,” and life space focuses on people’s life experiences. Life space is a
space where people live, experience and practice. In The God of Small Things, the
small things that Rahel and Estha experience form their life space, a unique space
confining them in quiescent time and thus influencing their sense of place.
By remapping the small things of the novel, this thesis discovers that the small
things relate to the characters with the place and their life space. The small things are
local as the examples above, the Indian moth, monsoon, and smells. These small
things all relate to the place, Ayemenem in Kottayam, the district of Kerala, the
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southeast India. Based on the small things, there is a story, a history that connects
people with place. Therefore, Chapter One focuses on the histories with the place by
adopting Miller’s and Lippard’s ideas of place. Miller indicates that place conveys its
own history. From the name of place or the changes of place, one can retell the history
of place. However, place is not only historical but also personal and political in
Lippard’s view. In the place, there is a history representing its interrelation between
people and place. By demonstrating the past and the present of three main locations of
the novel, this chapter argues that place is identified with personal experience and
personal history, not by the changes of outer landscape or political history. In The God
of Small Things, there are many small things relating to the twins Rahel and Estha
who are traumatized by the memory of the tragedy for the god of small things,
Velutha. The twins are forced to separate from each other and lose their ability to
sense the world, so their sense of place thus maintains in the past in spite of the
changes of place. To conceive the world once again, the twins need to be united in
order to complete each other’s emptiness because they share joint identities of a single
Siamese soul. Until they fill each other’s emptiness, the frozen time begins to flow,
and they regenerate their sense of place for Ayemenem.
In studying the small things of The God of Small Things, the thesis aims to
explore the connections between the small things and people in Ayemenem. Chapter
One focuses on the small things and the twins in Ayemenem, and Chapter Two
examines the small things and Velutha since he is the god of small things for the twins,
leaving the traces of small things that traumatize the twins. He is also the god of small
things for Ayemenem. Because of his subaltern identity, he is a nonentity as the
insignificant small things. By representing Velutha’s dilemma as subaltern, Chapter

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Two aims to reveal the social relation of the place, Ayemenem, to see how the caste
system and Marxism influence this place. By adopting Massey’s definition of place
and Cresswell’s constructionist approach, especially the second level of his place
study, Chapter Two continues to work on the interrelation between people and place.
People develop their sense of place from society. Place represents the social relation
between people and place in society which could be displayed by its social structure,
especially the structure of class. Ayemenem exemplifies the representations of the
social structure of class. Under the social structure of Ayemenem, the life of subaltern
group expresses the sense of place and the unique meaning of place for those who live
here. Belonging to the subaltern group under the caste system, the dilemma that
Velutha faces reveals the social relation between people and place in Ayemenem.
Following Chapter Two on the relation between place and people, Chapter Three
remaps the small things of the novel. By analyzing each small thing, Chapter Three
tries to figure out how the small things produce life spaces of people in Ayemenem.
The small things are classified into three categories. The first one is the sensory
experience, including smell, taste, sunglass, and goosebumps. The second one is the
relics of the history, including stains, footprints, and toys. The third one is the roots of
place, including monsoon and moth. Tuan’s and Lefebvre’s theories help to elaborate
the significance of human experience. Tuan indicates that people form their sense of
place from experience, while Lefebvre points out that experience constructs space, the
space where people conceive, perceive, and live. Human experience thus constructs
life space where people live, experience, and practice. From the small things that
Rahel and Estha feel and experience, Chapter Three tries to represent the interrelation
between people and place to see how people’s life experience from the place they live
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in to construct their life space.
By remapping the small things with the place, the thesis aims to manifest the
interrelations of people and place. From the connection of small things and the twins,
the thesis reveals that place is identified by personal experience. With the dilemma of
the god of small things, place as processes constructed by social relation is
represented. People’s life experience that connects small things with the place
constitutes their life space. The sense of place thus is formed by personal experience
and life space through the social relation between people and place.
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Chapter One
Place and Personal History
A story begins with its characters, settings, and events. When writers tell stories,
they depict the landscape. The landscape thus shapes the story, and the story depicts
the landscape. Arundhati Roy begins her story, The God of Small Things with a place,
Ayemenem: “May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month” (3). How is this place
related to those who live here? In Topographies, J. Hillis Miller introduces:
“Topographical setting connects literary works to a specific historical and
geographical time. This establishes a cultural and historical setting within which the
action can take place” (6-7). What Roy depicts Ayemenem involves its particular
culture, histories, and memories. Following the time, the landscape changes its figure
by the forces of nature or artificiality. Could the changes of landscape’s appearance
represent the history of place? By representing the past and the present of the three
main locations in Ayemenem, this chapter aims to figure out how place is identified
with those who live there. Ayemenem House, Meenachal River, and History House
are the three locations that the story of The God of Small Things takes place. Small
things left in these locations have been haunting the twins Rahel and Estha since
Velutha’s death. Despite the official history that describes the reason of Velutha’s
death, the twins bear in mind the sullen truth: they are also persecutors who kill
Velutha. Even though the landscape of Ayemenem becomes different in 1992, the
twins are stuck in the traumatic memory of Velutha’s death. Their sense of place for
Ayemenem remains in 1969. Until they fill each other’s emptiness, the frozen time
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begins to flow, and they regenerate their sense of place for Ayemenem. Through the
twins’ sense of place, this chapter explores the sense of place which is formed by
personal history. Rahel and Estha’s sense of Ayemenem is constructed by their life
experience, their traumatic memory for Velutha, not by the outer changes of landscape
in Ayemenem.
To unveil the meaning of the places in Roy’s The God of Small Things, this
chapter adopts Miller’s idea of Topography and Lucy Lippard’s definition of place.
Miller’s Topography means that place conveys its own history. The name of place
retells the changes of landscapes. Moreover, topography could function as “parable or
allegory,” which personifies the figure of landscape (Topography 4). Miller further
explains what involves in the naming of places. That is “the politics of nationalism”
when the place names “involve border demarcations and territorial appropriations”
(Topography 5). Names of places depict the landscape, while the power of naming is
so strong that the name even replaces the figure of the landscape in people’s mind. It
is quite interesting to find that illustrative metaphors, despite their original spatial and
material reference, transform into conceptual terms, so Miller questions that place
names such as “Key West,” “Egdon Heath,” and “The Quiet Woman Inn,” would
“have a function beyond that of mere setting or metaphorical adornment” (7).
Therefore, to find out the meaning under the place is crucial. One could figure out the
story behind the place from its history, culture, and memory. Lawrence Buell also
suggests that “place-making” is a “culturally inflected process” in which nature and
culture are mutuality (67). Place is a process involving landscape and its people.
Place as Miller and Buell describe has interrelation with those who live there.
Miller points out the history of place layers by time as one could retell the history of
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place from its changes of landscape, while Lippard proposes that place is not only
temporal but also spatial, personal and political. Place is layered by the history of
those who live there. “It is about connections, what surrounds it, what formed it, what
happened there, what will happen there” (Lippard 7). In the definition of place,
Massey also confirms that the particularity of place is defined by its interrelation with
people. However, Lippard’s connection of place involves more: the layering history of
place with personal experience. Ayemenem of 1969 is certainly different Ayemenem
of 1992. The history of place is not only told by the appearance of landscape but also
by people’s sense of place. From The God of Small Things, the political history of
Ayemenem is represented by the changes of landscape in Ayemenem House,
Meenachal River, and History House, while the personal history is told from what had
happened to Rahel and Estha from 1969 to 1992. Through Rahel and Estha’s sense of
place, this chapter unveils that place is identified by personal history and life
experience.
Ayemenem House, Meenachal River, and History House
From Miller’s point of view, the story of The God of Small Things could be told
from its setting. For place reveals its own history, the changes of landscape’s
appearance retell the story that happened here. One could pinpoint how Roy sets The
God of Small Things in Ayemenem, where the history had live performance in front of
seven-year-old-twins. The story begins with Rahel’s return after the terror happened
twenty-three years later. She is one of the twins who witnessed Velutha’s death, the
man she, her brother Estha, and her mother Ammu loved. Twenty-three years ago,
Ammu divorced and brought the twins back to Ayemenem, where she had no legal
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right as a married daughter. According to Baby Kochamma, Ammu’s aunt, “a married
daughter had no position in her parents’ home” (45). All the properties belonged to her
brother, Chacko, as he said, “What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is also mine” (56).
The twins were too young to understand their mother’s position in the family. They
were just like two naïve and happy frogs to learn the world. There were simple
happiness when “a dragonfly they’d caught lifted a small stone off their palms with its
legs, or when they had permission to bathe the pigs, or they found an egg hot from a
hen” (45). It seemed the disappearance of their father left the windows of their hearts
that were wildly open and welcomed to everyone. They were willing “to love people
who didn’t really love them” (42), so Ammu sometimes hurts them just for “an
education, a protection” (42). For her, the twins are like a pair of small frogs passing a
highway, easily to get hurt by trucks that obliviously would hurt them.
When Ammu was eight months pregnant of the twins, it was October of 1962.
The war was going to break out between India and China, so in the rumors of
“Chinese occupation and India’s impending defeat,” Ammu gave birth to the twins.
She was happy to have them, but she was not aware of “the single Siamese soul” in
her two egg twins (40). In fact, no one discovers the truth that the two egg twins
possess the single Siamese soul. They are like two “stacked spoons” and cannot be
separated (311). “They were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but
with joint identities” (5). To them, there are only “me” and “us” but no separated “he”
and “she” as other people perceive. The twins are made of one soul. “The confusion
lay in a deeper, more secret place” (4). However, even the twins themselves do not
recognize this confusion. From the instinct, they know themselves as one, but they do
not really understand the importance of being together. Only when they are forced to
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separate, they would know why it is essential for them to get together. Therefore,
when they are young, as normal two eggs twins, they have different personalities.
From their appearance or their personalities, no one would get confused to define who
is who.
As Roy says, this story could be told in various ways. “[T]o say that it all began
when Sophie Mol, the daughter of the twins’s uncle Chacko and his British ex-wife
Margaret came to Ayemenem is only one way of looking at it” (32). Brinda Bose thus
expresses: “All histories, as we all know now, are re-told in various ways. There is no
one story that endures; who tells the tale and who listens is almost as important as
who broke the Laws in the first place” (67). As Roy begins this book with Ayemenem,
the Ayemenem House is the primary stage where all the characters had their
performance. Here Ayemenem House is just a setting in the story. It has not yet made
the sense of place for the twins. When Sophie Mol’s came in December, 1969, the
Ayemenem House was in its prime time: “Nine steep steps led from the driveway up
to the front verandah. The elevation gave it the dignity of a stage and everything that
happened there took on the aura and significance of performance” (158). This
beautiful grand house belonged to an Anglophile family who had the generations of
good breeding and reputation. Converted to Syrian Christianity, this classic bourgeois
family owned lands of Ayemenem and the “Paradise Pickles and Preserves” factory
founded by Mammachi, the twins’ grand mother. In 1876, the twins’ grand grand
father, Baby Kochamma’s father, Reverend E. John Ipe had been blessed by the
Syrian Bishop and thus was known as “Punnyan Kunju—Little Blessed One” (23).
The twins’ grand father, Pappachi, “had been an Imperial Entomologist at the Pusa
Institute. After Independence, when the British left, his designation was changed from
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imperial Entomologist to Joint Director, Entomology” (47-48). The twins’ uncle,
Chacko, an Oxford scholar, has divorced a British woman Margaret and has a
daughter, Sophie Mol. This is a noble Touchable family having Syrian religion, good
education, and even British relatives. Now all the members of the family, Mammachi,
Baby Kochamma, Ammu, and the twins are all in their position welcoming Sophie
Mol, a girl who has Pappachi’s (the Imperial Entomologist) nose in Mammachi’s
opinion.
The grand play of welcoming Sophie Mol began at the Ayemenem House: “on
one side of the driveway, beside the old well, in the shade of the kodam puli tree, a
silent blue-aproned army gathered in the greenheat to watch” (164), the workers of the
factory all waited for Sophie Mol. In this grand play, the Ayemenem House watched
people who live inside as the outsider “[a]s though it had little to do with the people
who lived in it. Like an old man with rheumy eyes watching children play, seeing only
transience in their shrill elation and their wholehearted commitment to life” (157).
Susan Strehle also indicates the Ayemenem House is “distant and detached, indifferent
to the inhabitants” (131). The Ayemenem House represents the grand history and
watches coldly what happened and would happen to the family. “The old
man/house/nation takes the long view from a great age, overlooking the transient
children immersed in time: they are small things to a family priding itself in its
grandness and antiquity” (Strehle 132). For the grand history, they are just small lives.
While the show of welcoming Sophie Mol was playing, the house was
constructed with orders. It seems like an old decent gentleman with his clean suit, just
like Pappachi wearing his “well-pressed three-piece” in the “stifling Ayemenem heat,”
sweat inside the suit (48). Secrets exist inside the house as Roy depicts the house:
Sun 23
The steep tiled roof had grown dark and mossy with age and rain. The
triangular wooden frames fitted into the gables were intricately carved, the
light that slanted through them and fell in patterns on the floor was full of
secrets. Wolves. Flowers. Iguanas. Changing shape as the sun moved
through the sky. (157)
Simon G. Barnabas thus indicates that the Ayemenem House symbolizes the moral
decadence of Ayemenem. From the earl indifferent appearance of the Ayemenem
House, the horrible secrets of the family members reveal from their “hypocrisy, vanity,
brutishness, male chauvinism, sexual jealousy, despicable colonial feelings,
callousness” (Barnabas 300). Strehle also points out that this description uncovers
“the legacies of patriarchal arrogance, caste racism, and gender oppression that run
through several generations of Ipes” (132). However, these secrets did not damage it
because at that time, everything still functioned well and followed the social law. A
man beating his wife and daughter, as Pappachi did, is allowed in this patriarchal
society. The grand appearance of the house represents Pappachi’s behavior. Outside
the house, Pappachi “was charming and urbane with visitors, and stopped just short of
fawning on them if they happened to be white” (171). He acted as a nice man and
even “donated money to orphanages and leprosy clinics. However, inside the house,
“alone with his wife and children he turned into a monstrous, suspicious bully, with a
streak of vicious cunning” (171-72). With “cold, flat eyes,” he beat Mammachi with a
brass flower vase and cut Ammu’s new gumboots. Mammachi and Ammu “were
beaten, humiliated and then made to suffer the envy of friends and relations for having
such a wonderful husband and father” (172). But all these insults are allowed in the
social order of patriarchy society. Beating wives or children does not cross the
Sun 24
boundary of patriarchy orders. Therefore, when welcoming Sophie Mol’s play
performed, the Ayemenem House still had its decent look.
In this play, Sophie Mol is the leading actress welcomed by Mammachi. Rahel
only had a very small part in the play. “She was just the landscape. A flower perhaps.
Or a tree. A face in the crowd. A townspeople” (164). She was the background behind
the stage, but when Sophie Mol came, no one expected Rahel would be in the core of
the play. Since Rahel was not so important in Sophiel Mol’s play, she ran away to
Velutha who performed special greeting to her and gently hold her up on his shoulder
(166). He had the power not to smash children’s dream but comfortably played with
them in their dream. When Rahel, Estha, and Sophie Mol tried to dress like Hindu
ladies, wearing saris, having red bindis on their foreheads, Velutha “greeted them with
the utmost courtesy,” gave them coconut juice, chatted about the weather, introduced
them to his surly hen, and showed them his carpentry tools (181). Only when Rahel
grew up, she realized how precious it was, “[a] grown man entertaining three raccoons,
treating them like real ladies” (181). Velutha kindly took care of the children’s dreams,
not to smash them “with adult carelessness” (181).
It was after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To
ruin a fragment of a dream being carried abound carefully like a piece of
porcelain.
To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to
do. (181)
When the twins come back to Ayemenem with Ammu, Veltha and they become best
friends. They visit Velutha’s house even though the adults forbade them. They love to
learn the knowledge of wood with Velutha.

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They would sit with him for hours, on their haunches—hunched
punctuation marks in a pool of wood shavings—and wonder how he
always seemed to know what smooth shapes waited inside the wood for
him. [. . .] It was Velutha who made Rahel her luckies-ever fishing rod and
taught her and Estha to fish. (75)
It is Velutha who fits in the window of the twins’ heart, treating them with the warm
and kindness. Therefore, when Estha makes his plan and rowed the jam, they bring
the boat they find to Velutha and ask him to fix it. It is Estha’s idea that “[a]nything
can happen to Anyone,” so “It’s best to be prepared.” When he stirs the red banana
jam and tries to pickle his memory of The Orangedrink Lemondrink Man’s sexual
abuse, Estha rows the jam and has a third thought to get a boat to row across the river.
The memory of sexual abuse Estha tris to seal happened just before Sophie Mol’s
arrival. Chacko drives the car and sent Baby Kochamma, Ammu, and the twins to the
movie theater to see The Sound of Music. After the motive, they would stay in a hotel
nearby, so they can pick up Sophie Mol next morning in the airport. The twins had
seen The Sound of Music several times, and they were familiar with the plot and can
even sing all the songs of the movie. Therefore, when Estha sees the movie, he could
not stop singing, so Ammu sends him out alone. Estha “EXITED” the door with”
EXIT in a red light” (96). This was Estha’s first step to exit his life and to seal himself
in quiescent time, a world of silence, for later he met The Orangedrink Lemondrink
Man. He would row the boat to cross the river, but Sophie Mol is accidentally
drowned. He would witness Veluta’s death and memorizes the smell of Velutha’s
blood symbolizing the smell of history forever, and he would officially exit his life by
train to be returned to his father. In several days, Estha, a seven-year-old boy would
Sun 26
lurch these steps of his life and exited. For his first step to exit the life, his song
irritates The Orangedrink Lemondrink Man who offers Estha a bubbled Lemon drink
asked Estha to hold his penis, “[h]ard, hot, veiny” (98). He held Estha’s hand up and
down until “Estha’s hand was wet and hot and sticky” with white egg (99). From then
on, Estha held an invisible sticky orange in his hand. It was why Estha went to the
pickle factory, rowed the jam, and tried to pickle his invisible orange. He began to be
prepared for running, for The Orangedrink Lemondrink may come to Ayemenem to
find him. He prepared the boat to cross the river.
The Meenachal, the river behind the Ayemenem House was wild and full of lives
when the twins were young. Barnabas points out that the Meenachal River provides
childhood dreams and pleasant memories for the twins (298). The river was gray
green with fish in it. The twins were familiar with the first third of the river, for they
learned to fish and study silence like real fishermen. They also learned to swim and
even crossed the river several times. The second third of the river “was where the
Really Deep began” with swift and certain current: “downstream when the tide was
out, upstream, pushing up from the backwaters when the tide was in” (194). The third
part of the river was shallow with brown water and mud, “[f]ull of weeds and darting
eels and slow mud that oozed through toes like toothpaste” (194). The river was full
of strength and power. Kutappen, Velutha’s elder brother confirmed: “You must be
careful, [. . .] This river of ours—she isn’t always what she pretends to be” (201). He
explained that the river pretended to be “a little old churchgoing ammooma, quiet and
clean . . . idi appams for breakfast, knji and meen for luch. Minding her own business.
Not looking right or left” (201).
However, the river was “really a wild thing” as Kutappen convinced: “I can hear
Sun 27
her at night-rushing past in the moonlight, always in a hurry” (201). The river was so
powerful and could be dangerous for even adults. Kutappen warned the twins to be
aware of the river. Even Velutha asked the twins to promise not to play stupid games
in the river when he helped to fix the boat. The twins thought the river was their
friend, for they learn and play in it, but they did not fully understand the river. They
did not know that the river has its power to decide to terminate one’s life or not until
the night they crossed the river. It was purely an accident for the twins, for Sophie
Mol insisted to cross the river with them.
[She] had convinced the twins that it was essential that she go along too.
That the absence of children, all children, would heighten the adults’
remorse. [. . .] Her clinching argument was that if she were left behind she
might be tortured and forced to reveal their hiding place. (276)
The river, however, was already full of water of last night’s rain and turned over their
boat when they passed the really deep part. The twins, but not Sophie Mol, knew how
to swim but not Sophie Mol. The river brought Sophie Mol’s life away: “Just a quiet
handing-over ceremony. A boat spilling its cargo. A river accepting the offering. One
small life. A brief sunbeam” (277). In the dark, the twins arrived at the back verandah
of the History House, “numb with fear, waiting for the world to end” (278). They
knew they would go to jail for Sophie Mol’s death, but they did not perceive yet that
they would have to pay higher price than that.
The live history performance thus began at the History House. At the History
House, the twins would witness how history embodies in the policemen and punishes
the one who does not follow the social rule. The twins would learn that the smell of
Velutha’s blood is the smell of history, for history teaches them the social lesson they
Sun 28
must obey. Barnabas points out that the History House represents “the moral
corruption and spiritual degeneration” of the place, Ayemenem (299), for Kari Saipu
displays his own dark history here. The History House that the twins believed was
actually Kari Saipu’s house. Roy introduces him as “Ayemenem’s own Kurtz,” for
Ayemenem is “his private Heart of Darkness” (51). Kari Saipu, “[t]he Englishman,
who had “gone native,” “spoke Malayalam, and wore mundus,” shot himself when
“his young lover’s parents had taken the boy away from him” in 1959 (51). The house
had been empty for several years, for his cook and secretary had fought for the
property in the court. Very few people went to the house. Vellya Paapen, Velutha’s
father told the twins that it was a ghost house, as he claimed that he pinned Kari
Saipu’s ghost on a rubber tree near the house, but he did not know Kari Saipu’s house
is also a History House (191). It was when Chacko explained what history was, the
twins mistook Kari Saipu’s house as the presence of the history. He said,
[H]istory was like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And
ancestors whispering inside. To understand history, [. . .] we have to go
inside and listen to what they’re saying. And look at the books and the
pictures on the wall. And smell the smells. [. . .] But we can’t go in, [. . .]
because we’ve been locked out. (51-52)
The twins immediately associated the history with Kari Saipu’s house as “the History
House” (52).
Although the twins had not yet seen Kari Saipu’s house, it was not difficult for
the twins to picture it as a ghost house with its doors locked and windows open. The
ancestors whispered inside in the language that they could not understand. It was
where dreams were captured and re-redreamed. When the history had its live
Sun 29
performance, the twins would see The History House which was actually a beautiful
house: “White-walled once. Red-roofed. But painted in weather-colors now. With
brushed dipped in nature’s palette. Mossgreen. Earth-brown. Crumbleblack. Making it
look older than it really was” (290-91). Strehle points out that the History House
portraits “a colonial heritage” and “old ancestors supervising the life below” (134).
The History House was where the twins witnessed that Velutha was beaten by the
police nearly death. They learned two lessons here:
Lesson Number One:
Blood barely shows on a Black Man. (Dum dum)
And
Lesson Number Two:
It smells though,
Sicksweet.
Like old roses on a breeze. (Dum dum) (293)
Rahel refused to believe the unconscious man on the ground was Velutha, so she said
to Esthat that it was not Velutha. It was Velutha’s twins brother, but Estha was
“[u]nwilling to seek refuge in fiction, so [he] said nothing” (295). The police took the
twins back to the police office. They collected and brought home the toys that the
twins left near the History House, but they all forgot to pick Rahel’s toy watch with
permanent time on ten to two. “It stayed behind in the History House. In the back
verandah. A faulty record of the time. Ten to two” (295). The time thus was frozen at
that moment. Sophie Mol was dead. Velutha was dying and the twins were the
persecutor who confirmed Velutha’s false charge.
In the police office, Inspector Thomas Mathew found Baby Kochamma’s censure
Sun 30
was wrong. Baby Kochamma accused Velutha who came to the the Ayemenem House
and threatened them and thus a beautiful girl was dead and the twins were missing,
but now the twins said that they crossed the river by their own wills and the boat was
turned over, so the girl was drowned in accident. The Kottayam Police basically
abused “a technically innocent man” to “Death in Custody”:
True, he was a Paravan. True, he had misbehaved. But these were troubled
times and technically, as per the law, he was an innocent man. There was
no case. (298)
Therefore, Baby Kochamma menaced the twins. She accused them as murders who
killed Sophie Mol, and the police would sent them and their mother to jail. If they
wanted to save their mother, they had to confirm the false the charge. Estha was sent
into the small room. There Velutha “was naked” and “[b]lood spilled from his skull
like a secret”:
His face was swollen and his head look liked a pumpkin, too large and
heavy for the slender stem it grew from. A pumpkin with a monstrous
upside-down smile. (303)
Estha confirmed the false crime, and thus he sent away the childhood and let the
silence stay. “The Inspector asked his question. Estha’s mouth said Yes. Childhood
tiptoed out. Silence slid in like a bolt” (303).The twins did not admit the truth that
Velutha was beaten to death. Estha agreed with Rahel that it was not Velutha. “Until
the next morning, when Ammu shook it out of them. But by then it was too late. [. . .]
Velutha didn’t live through the night” (304). As for this little family, death did not
come, “[j]ust the end of living” (304).

Sun 31
The Sense of Place Stuck in the Past
Estha’s sense of place for Ayemenem is stuck in the past, for he could not feel the
changes of the outside world. He is confined in his own silent world where the
traumatic memory of Veltuha’s death haunts him. After The Orangedrink
Lemondrink Man’s sexual abuse, Sophie Mol’s funeral, and Velutha’s death, Estha
was returned to his father by train. Now as the millstone, Estha had dragged Sophie
Mol and Velutha to death and dragged away from his mother and sister with a feeling
of a drowning person in the water. Deep in mind he knew he was the murderer who
sent Velutha to death, and now he had to accept the punishment to be sent away.
Alone on the train, Estha was returned to his father, and he was also sent to the abyss
of silence.
Estha’s silence was never awkward. Ever intrusive. Never noisy. It wasn’t
an accusing, protesting silence as much as a sort of estivation, a dormancy,
the psychological equivalent of what lungfish do to get themselves through
the dry season except that in Estha’s case the dry season looked as though
it would last forever. (12)
No one found out when he stop talking. “It had been a gradual winding down and
closing shop” (12).
Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. [. . .] It stripped
his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and
naked. Unspeakable. Numb. [. . .] Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew
from the world.
The past for Estha was too painful and left a hole in his heart, an “Estha-shaped Hole
in the Universe” (149). These painful memories, The Orangedrink Lemondrink Man’s
Sun 32
sexual abuse and the guilt of Velutha’s death are the millstones that drag him into the
silence of sea.
His silence as falling into a long summer sleep, Estha sleeps quietly, numbly with
his nightmare, the man with “a swollen face and a smashed, upside-down smile” in
the “sicksweet” smell like “old roses on a breeze” (32). After twenty-tree years, Estha
was “re-Returned” by his father to Ayemenem (11). He is silent and does not speak to
anyone. He dose the house work and bought the daily grocery as though it was his job.
Every day he follows the same routine. After his old dog died, he begins to walk. He
walks all over Ayemenem.
Some days he walked along the banks of the river that smelled of shit
and pesticides bought with World Bank loans. Most of the fish had died.
The ones that survived suffered from fin-rot and had broken out in boils.
Other days he walked down the road. Past the new, freshly baked, iced,
Gulf-money houses built by nurses, masons, wire-benders and bank clerks,
who worked hard and unhappily in faraway places. (14)
Basically, he is a walking dead. He walked without feelings.
And Estha, walking on the riverbank, couldn’t feel the wetness of the rain,
or the suddenshudder of the cold puppy that had temporarily adopted him
and squelched at his side. (16)
He himself was like a mirror that only reflects what he sees but without his own
opinions as though his time is frozen. He seems to live in a glass ball where the time
is permanently frozen. No matter how the outside changed, nothing has to do with
him. He was stuck in the past, at the moment that he confirmed Velutha’s censure. His
world is completely quiet. Nothing, at least nothing from the outside world bothers
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him. The memories that he suffers are buried in the deep of his heart, and from time to
time these traumatic memories are embodiment of the “smell of old roses” (14). He
only walks but never talks, not even in his mind. He walks pat the old houses. These
old houses are like the Ayemenem House that has its own history. Once they were
grand, but now only the corruption and relics left. Just like those bourgeois fall down
in the historic stream of the rise of communists, naxalism, and terrorism. These old
houses including the Ayemenem House all have been through this historic moment. To
take the Ayemenem House as an example, one could read the newspaper that printed
the official history. There was a scandal between an Untouchable man and a woman
whose family has ancient history and good reputation.
Everybody knew.
It had been in the papers. The news of Sophie Mol’s death, of the police
“Encounter” with a Paravan charge with kidnapping and murder. Of the
subsequent Communist Party siege of Paradise Pickles & Preserves, led by
Ayemenem’s own Crusader for Justice and Spokesman of the Oppressed.
Comrade K. N. M. Pillai claimed that the Management had implicated the
Paravan in a false police case because he was an active member of the
Communist Party. (286)
What not every one knew are those “sea-secrets” that are carried by Estha, walking
quietly “[l]ike a fisherman in a city” (14). He, Rahel, and Ammu, “[a]ll three of them
bonded by the certain, separate knowledge that they had love a man to death. That
wasn’t in the papers” (307).
Estha locked his world in the numbness until Rahel returned from America.
Although he still keeps silent and Baby Kochamma was pleased that he does not
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recognize Rahel, the noises from the outside world begin to flood into his head.
It had been quiet in Estha’s head until Rahel came. But with her she had
brought the sound of passing trains, and the light and shade world, locked
out for years, suddenly flooded in, and now Estha could hear himself for
the noise. Trains. Traffic. Music. The stock market. A dam had burst and
savage waters swept everything up in a swirling. Comet, violins, parades,
loneliness, clouds, beards, bigot, lists, flags, earthquakes, despair were all
swept up in a scrambled swirling. (16)
The twins have been separated for twenty-tree years. Now “they are as old as Ammu
was when she died. Thirty-one. Not old. Not young. But a viable die-able age” (5).
Estha did not see how Ammu died. His memory of Ammu stays in the moment when
he was sent away in the train station. He “never saw her like that, [w]ild, [s]ick,
[s]ad,” “with asthma and a rattle in her chest that sounded like a faraway man
shouting” (151-152), but Rahel did. Rahel knew how Ammu became “swollen with
cortisone, moonfaced, not the slender mother” she once knew (153). After Ammu died,
the church refused to bury her because of the scandal that everyone knew from the
newspaper, so Chacko and Rahel took Ammu to the electric crematorium where
“beggars, derelicts and the police-custody dead were cremated” (155). After Ammu
died, “[t]here was hum in Rahel’s head, and for the rest of the day Chacko had to
shout at her if he wanted to be heard” (155). Just like Estha, Rahel had lost in a world
of numbness but only a while for she grew up in a different way. Rahel stayed in
Ayemenem and was sent to study in the boarding school where she corrupted in a
“civil, solitary form” (18). The neglect of her family (Chacko, Mammachi, and Baby
Kochamma) “seemed to have resulted in an accidental release of the spirit” and

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created a liberal space in her heart” (18). Unlike Estha who locked himself in the
quietness and secluded himself from the outside world, those past memories left an
empty space in Rahel’s heart, and enquiring the outside world is the way for Rahel to
survive. She married to Larry McCasin with her empty heart and divorced in America.
After she got Baby Kochamma’s letter that said Estha’s return, she “left America
gladly [t]o return to Ayemenem [t]o Estha in the rain” (21).
Rahel carries her empty heart back to Ayemenem where the “Unfurnished” house
and the blocked river are waiting for her. “The old house on the hill wore its steep,
gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat” (4). Strehle points out that the
Ayemenem House represents “the unhoming promise implicit in the image of the
aloof old man” (134). It seems that the Ayemenem House has been in estivation for a
long time, wearing its “low hat,” deep in its sleep as Estha in his silence. The house,
like a ghost house, has been abandoned: “The house itself looked empty. The doors
and windows were locked. The front verandah bare. Unfurnished” (4). Everything
seems to stop growing. It seems no lives inside the house, just like Rahel’s locked and
empty heart. The locked windows of the Ayemenem House as Rahel’s eyes are full of
emptiness. Her eyes, according to her husband, Larry, seem to belong to someone else:
“Someone watching. Looking out of the window at the sea. At a boat in the river. Or a
passerby in the mist in a hat” (20). Rahel’s eyes are the windows of Ayemenem House
that always memorize what had happened: from Mammachi and Baby Kochamma’s
point of view, a shameful affair between a man and a woman, an Untouchables with a
Touchable who had crossed the river, crossed the social boundary, and violated the
social law, “the Love Laws” that “lay down who should be loved, and how. And how
much” (33), for L. Chris Fox indicates: “Mammachi responds to the ‘idea’ of Ammu’s
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transgression with the ‘vomity’ reaction that is typically induced by contact with […]
the abject” (46). Both Mammachi and Baby Kochamma show their distaste for the
abject, wondering how Ammu bears Velutha’s particular Paravan smell. However,
when this happened, Rahel was too young to understand the roles of her mother,
Ammu and Velutha that played in the affair. While Growing up, Rahel was fed on
neglect, “largely ignored by Chako and Mammachi,” “largely ignoring Baby
Kochamma” (17). Rahel’s family “provided the care (food, clothes, fees), but
withdrew the concern” (17). Her eyes, bit by bit, grow to be swallowed by the despair,
an acknowledgement as her mother’s that “life had been lived” (38), yet even worse,
since for Rahel, “Worse Things had happened,” “Nothing mattered much. Nothing
much mattered” (20). Her eyes are “somewhere between indifference and despair” (20)
as Larry described. Locked in the traumatic memory, her heart is stuck between
indifference and despair and “poises forever between the terror of war and the horror
of peace, Worse Things kept happening” (20). What Larry sees in Rahel’s eyes,
according to Roy, are “a hollow where Estha’s words had been”, a hole of emptiness
(20).
The loss of Sophie Mol was also buried in this hollow. It is amazing “how the
memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it
purloined” (17). As “the memory of Sopie Mol” “slowly faded, the Loss of Sophie
Mol grew robust and alive” “[l]ike a fruit in season,” “[e]very season” (17). The Loss
of Sophie Mol as a dynamic and powerful vine climbs and strangles the Ayemenem
House and everyone lives in it. Like a ghost, the memory of Sophie Mol hides every
corners of the house:
The Loss of Sophie Mol stepped softly around the Ayemenem House like a
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quiet thing in socks. It hid in books and food. In Mammachi’s violin case.
In the scabs of the sores on Chacko’s shin that he constantly worried. In his
slack, womanish legs. (17)
The ghost of Shophie Mol is not only haunting in the Ayemenem House but also the
river where she lost her life, so when Rahel returns, its was the river behind the house
that “greeted her with a ghastly skull’s smile, with holes where teeth had been, and a
limp hand raised from a hospital bed” as though the river has been cursed by the ghost
of Sophie Mol (118). However, if one listens to the river careful, one may notice that
the ghost of the river is not only crying for Sohpie Mol and Velutha but also for itself.
The river was once full of lives and strength but now is no more than a “swollen
drain.” A saltwater barrage was built to block the river and water the rice. Now
farmers could have “two harvests a year instead of one” (118). Thus, the river is
shrunk, sacrificed for more rice. The shrunk river now only has “a thin ribbon of thick
water that lapped wearily at the mud banks on either side, sequined with the
occasional silver slant of a dead fish” (118) even in monsoon season.
Rama Nair indicates the polluted river presents decaying society where human
values are eroded (252). Human excrements and polluted factory effluent obstruct the
river and color the water. In the hot summer, the smell of filth “hovers over
Ayemenem like a hat” (119).
Children hung their bottoms over the edge and defecated directly onto the
squelchy, sucking mud of the exposed riverbed. The smaller ones left their
dribbling mustard streaks to find their own way down. [. . .] Upstream,
clean mothers washed clothes and pots in unadulterated factory effluents.
People bathed. Severed torsos soaping themselves, arranged like dark busts
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on a thin, rocking, ribbon lawn. (119)
The river is shrunk and blocked, and the water is foul, “thick and toxic” (119). Dead
fish floats on the river, and dying small lives suffer in the water. Human beings for
their own benefits have sacrificed the life of the river, just like what they did to
Velutha. Only in twenty-tree years, the river lost its life. People who live near the river
seem to have no feeling about the change. Across the river, the History House has
turned into a luxury five-star hotel where “a tall wall to screen off the slum,” but
“there wasn’t much they could do about the smell” of the thick and toxic river (120).
As thought the river was born in this way, no one tries to save the river’s life. Ulrich
Beck criticizes:
The destruction of environment is not just the loss of something, but the
lack of memory of the loss that buries it a second time for good. [. . .] The
natural environment thus becomes a world of signs and symptoms, a
mirror, an image for sensibilities and events that remain closed to the eye
by itself (whatever that might be), but not to the knowing eye, which has
learned, as Goethe put it, “to read in the book of nature.” (14)
Those clever hotel managers continue to promote the History House as “God’s Own
Country” despite of the fact that the hotel is surrounding by a smelly river and the
slum (120). They knew that “smelliness, like other people’s poverty, was merely a
matter of getting used to” (120). Thus, the smelly river ironically becomes one part of
“God’s Own Country.”
As Beck criticizes people are blind to their everyday life (13), from the shrunk
river, one could find that people not only lack of their feelings and the memory of the
river but also what had happen. In their blurred memory, all they remember is a “whiff
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of scandal” which involves “sex and death” as the man who Comrade Pillai introduces
to Rahel as thought it is just a small thing (123). A small thing had happened and
faded away, but is it just a small thing? This is the question that Roy asks. Is it “a
small price to pay” as Baby Koachmma said? (318) “Two lives. Two children’s
childhoods. And a history lesson for future offenders” (318). Since then, the twins
have suffered in their traumatic memories. They were forced to be separated because
there was Satan in their eyes. “Together they were trouble.” However, no one notice
that these two-egg twins have joint identities, one untied soul: “Esthappen and Rahel
thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us” (4).
No one knows the magic of the twins, how the twins share memories. Rahel
could have the Estha’s memories that “she has no right to have” (5). When she was
just a child, she shared the memory of The Orangedrink Lemondrink Man and she
remembered the taste of Estha’s sandwiches on the train when he was sent away alone
(5). However, no one knows how important for the twins to be together. Even the
twins themselves do not know that being together is so important to them untile they
were separated and both in their heart have the other’s hollow. “That the emptiness in
one twins was only a version of the quietness in the other” (21). In Rahel’s heart, there
is a Estha-shaped hole, and there is a Rahel-shaped hole in Estha’s heart. These holes
are waiting for them to fill up. Roy points out how important they have to be together,
for they are like “two things” that have to be “fitted together” as “stacked spoons” and
“familiar lovers’ bodies.” (21). They had once lost each other, and now both return to
Ayemenem.
Rahel is gladly to return to Estha. Taking her empty heart, this time she would
retrieve Estha’s lost voice and fill her own emptiness. “It was raining when Rahel
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came back to Ayemenem” (4). It was Rahel who brings the rain in the long dry season
of Estha’s heart to wake him up from the deep estivation. The rain following Rahel’s
return brings the greenness and small lives. “The walls, streaked with moss, had
grown soft, and bulged a little with dampness that seeped up from the ground” (4). “It
hadn’t change, the June Rain. Heaven opened and the water hammered down,
reviving the reluctant old well, green mossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still,
tea-colored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored minds” (11). Every
dying creature now nourishes and recovers in the rain that Rahel brings. However, it is
not so easy for the twins to recover, for their wound has been buried in the History
House for twenty-tree years. Their time has stuck at the moment when they witness
the live performance of history. “Something lay buried in the ground. Under grass.
Under twenty-tree years of June rain. A small forgotten thing. Nothing that the world
would miss. A child’s plastic wristwatch with the time painted on it. Ten to two, it
said” (121).
The time has stopped, and their world was frozen despite the changes of the
outside world, the environment. The twins are stuck in their inner world where every
thing remains the same as twenty-tree years ago as the sicksweet smell of old roses
always remain. Estha could not have any feelings. He could not feel the rain, the dog
walking next to time, the smelly river, or the filthy Ayemenem House. As Roy writes,
“Estha occupied very little space in the world” (12). He only lives in his small clean
room, in his silent world until Rahel comes. Rahel, his sister possess another half of
their soul brings the rain and the noises into his world. Rahel who could hear the
whisper of the Ayemenem House, see the ghastly smile of the river, and feel how
ironic the History House turns into a five-star hotel in the cooperation of Marxism,
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Capitalism and Tourism (120).
It is Rahel, his annoying twins sister loose their cramped hearts. She reads what
they had written in the “wisdom exercise notebooks” when they were young. Rahel
said, “Imagine. It’s still here. I stole it. After you were Returned” (149). The noises of
the train which returns Estha to his father pierce the quietness of Estha’s world.
“Something altered in the air. And Rahel knew that Estha had come. She didn’t turn
her head, but a glow spread inside her. He’s come. She thought. He’s here. With me”
(222). In the Kathakali dance of the temple, Estha joins Rahel in the story that
Kathakali Men performed. Their traumatic memories once were like brooding June
but now are less damp. The twins join together in the ancient story and share their
memories. Once more the two split hearts integrate and interlace their memories. The
twins went home together. “He and She. We and Us.” They lay together in the dark
and hold “each other close, long after it was over” (331). “Quietness and Emptiness
fitted together like stacked spoons,” and “once again they broke the Love Laws” (311).
“What they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief” (311). The twins
replenish each other’s emptiness and share each other’s affliction. Their frozen world
begins to dissolve. The monsoon once perished with Velutha. Now it returns with the
untied soul, conciliating the two broken hearts. As driving away the traumatic
memories, soon the monsoon would flood the river and wash away its filth. Their
world would be renewed, and thus tomorrow might come. As Miller unravels the
temporal topographies in Tennyson’s poem “Tears, Idle Tears” that represents death in
New Starts: Performative Topographies in Literature and Criticism, one could also
conclude that the topographies in The God of Small Things interlace the outer
landscape with the characters’ inner landscape. The landscape is the mirror of
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memories reflecting in the stream of time.

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Chapter Two
Subaltern Identities in Small Things
“The cheerful man without footprints—did he count?” (208) When Ammu wakes
up from her dream, her son Estha asks her whether the happiness counts if she felt
happy in her dream. It is Ammu’s and also Roy’s question whether the cheerful man
without footprints counts if he could only appear in the dream, without any footprints
in the big history. In Subaltern Studies, Gayatari Spivak in her famous essay “Can the
subaltern speak?” writes, “in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no
history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow” (28).
She claims that the ‘true’ subaltern group whose identity is its difference, and that no
one could construct a category to speak for the subaltern without problematic voice
while occupying other positions of voices. The subaltern in India, as Roy portrays, has
no voices to speak for one’s self and leaves no footprints in the history since history is
written by the elite in the official voice. Velutha, is an Untouchable 1 in the old
traditional world and a Marxist in the new era as well, identified as the cheerful man,
the god of small things, and the god of loss in Ammu’s dream as “the one-armed man
blew out his lamp and walked across the jagged beach, away into the shadows only he
could see” (208). He is caught in-between the order of the old world and the politics
of the new world and eventually falls into the shadow, a “Hole” he left behind “in the
1
In the caste system of India, there are Untouchable group and Touchable group. French sociologist
Louis Dumont explains the caste system of India: Indian society is organized by a “hierarchy of the
four varnas, ‘colours’ or estates” led by the “Brahmans or priests, below them the Kshatriyas or
warriors, then the vaishyas, in modern usage mainly merchants, and finally the Shudras, the servants or
have-nots. [. . .] There is in actual fact a fifth category, the Untouchables, who are left outside the
classification” (45).
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Universe through which darkness poured like liquid tar” (182). This chapter illustrates
the dilemma Velutha faces as an Untouchable Parvan and a Marxist carpenter. It
further elaborates his ironic sacrifice which only leaves small traces on small things
for the twins. Through the dilemma and oppression of Velutha who belongs to
subaltern group, this chapter represents the social relation between place and people.
People develop their sense of place from society. Place represents the social relation
between people and place in a society which could be displayed by its social structure,
especially the structure of class. Ayemenem is the classic examples representing the
social structure of class. Under the social structure of Ayemenem, the life of subaltern
group expresses the sense of place and the unique meaning of place for those who live
here.
From Massey’s definition of place, she points out places as social process having
their interrelation with society. Place does not have a single identity. There are full of
internal conflicts between social groups. Therefore, place is identified by its
interrelation with society, not political history (Massey 155-56). Massey’s idea of
social relations is more open and considers other elements such as race or gender as
the situation Velutha faces in Ayemenem due to his subaltern identity.
Antonio Gramsci claims that the history of the subaltern class was just as
complex as the history of the dominant classes although the history is often written by
the latter classes (52). Ranajit Guha also specifies that the historiography of Indian
nationalism has long been dominated by colonialist elitism and bourgeoisie-nationalist
elitism. Such historiography called “politics of the people” is actually under the
supremacy of elitism (Guha 4). Therefore, “to retrace the ‘lost footprints’ of History”
(Sheena Patchay 149), Gramsci suggests that one needs to retrace those fragments.
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Gramsci indicates that the history of the subaltern is fragmented and episodic (54).
Since the subaltern is subject to the ruling class, they have few accesses to represent
their own, and only permanent victory by breaking the class boundaries let the
subaltern group have their own voice. However, ironically, in The God of Small
Things, Velutha, under the circumstance of breaking the class boundaries, his
sacrifices are manipulated by the intentioned politician, Comrade K.N. M. Comrade
Pillai. Velutha does leave small traces in the official history and certainly that is not
his own voice but a politician who belongs to higher class voices for Velutha.
Velutha’s own voice, however, vanishes as the god of loss and leaves no footprints.
Therefore, how do we retrace the history if there is no trace? The only way that Roy
in the novel seems to suggest is to retrace the small things, those fragments that
Velutha leaves for the twins.
Sheena Patchay, in “Pickled Histories, Bottled Stories: Recuperative Narratives
in The God of Small Things,” also proposes to search from the small things. She
indicates that in the narration interweaving “official and unofficial version of the
past,” Roy allows the reader to “revisit the personal histories of Ammu, Velutha,
Estha, Rahel and Baby Kochamma” (149). Patchay points out that The God of Small
Things combines “personal histories” with “public and political silencing and
‘containment’” (158). Patchay further explains how “the Untouchables lend both their
labour and lives to the Touchables and provides the evidence of Untouchables’
“geographical dislocation” (156). She focuses on the “geographical differences
between their locations, the plight of the Paravans and their mortgaged bodies”
(Patchay 156). Illustrating Paravans’ lives of “pain, anguish and sometimes, joy,” Roy
dignifies Paravans and therefore allows readers to express Velutha’s feelings about his
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affair with Ammu and the betrayal of the Communist Party (Patchay 156).
The Untouchables
Trapped in the law of the old world, Velutha becomes the scapegoat for “future
offenders” (318). Under the caste system of India, Velutha belongs to the
Untouchables, the inferior class. As Comrade Pillai said, for other people, Velutha is
just a Paravan, a conditioning he has from birth even though he is also a card-holder
member in the Communist Party. From Roy’s illustration of Velutha’s father, readers
could easily understand the strict circumstance of Untouchables. Velutha’s father,
Vellya Paapen is an old world Untouchable. “He had seen the Crawling Backwards
Days and his gratitude to Mammachi and her family for that they had done for him
was as wide and deep as a river in spate” (73). Mammachi also describes to the twins
what the crawling backwards days is like. In Mammachi’s childhood, Paravans have
to crawl backwards with to crawl backwards with a broom to sweep away their
footprints so that Brahmins or Syrian Christians, people of higher class in the caste
system would not pollute theimsevles by accidentally stepping into a Paravan’s
footprint. In Mammachi’s time, Paravans are not allowed to walk on public area,
cover their upper bodies, or carry umbrellas. They cover their mouths by hands to
prevent their polluted breath defiling those whom they talk to. No one would allow
Paravans to enter their houses or to touch anything that Touchalbes touched (71).
Velutha’s brother, Kuttappen, in Vellya Paapen’s view, is a good, Paravan, for he
could not read nor write. Unlike Velutha, Kuttappen is a good Paravan because buried
in mind, he still follows the restriction of the old world. He knows his own
insignificance and such awareness even drives him crazy. When he lays paralyzed on
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his bed, thatch and dirt drop from the ceiling blending with his own sweat. Sometimes
ants and other insects fall on him. On those days when Kuttappen feels uncomfortable,
the orange wall bends over him like evil doctors checking on him, slowly and
carefully to make Kuttappen scream. Sometimes, the wall withdraws itself and makes
the room extremely large, terrorizing Kuttappen with his own insignificance, which
also makes him want to cry out. Insanity haunts him like an eager waiter at an
expensive restaurant. Kuttappen envies madmen who could walk, and he believes that
it is an equal deal to transfer his sanity for walking legs (197-98).
Patchay explains that the condition of Kuttapen is “[t]he geographies of pain
which allude in the first instance to the physical dislocation of characters” that also
cause emotional and psychological trauma (157). Kuttapen suffers in “[t]he silent,
claustrophobic space of the hut, and his inability to move hen him in” and the terror of
his own insignificance (Patchay 157). Moreover, Kuttapen’s paralysis also indicates
the situation of modern Paravan, foretelling Velutha’s doom. Modern Paravans who
want to break the boundary of the caste system are enmeshed in the power of
intentioned politicians and the ideology that is deep rooted for centuries. Just like
Velutha who believes in his professional skills as an excellent carpenter thinks he may
gain the power from the Communist Party to support himself and reverse the unjust
class system, but still he fails, and his failure is cunningly used by Comrade Pillai
who repackages Velutha’s death and uses it to announce the victory of Marxists—the
collapse of a bourgeoisie family’s pickle factory: “Paradise Pickles slumped softly to
the floor without so much as a murmur or even the pretense of resistance” (266).
Velutha, trapped in the order of the old world as the spirit that stocks in Kuttapen’s
paralyzed body, could only cry out and eventually vanish without footprints.
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Velutha may think that he gains the power from the communist party since he is a
card-holder member which makes him an official member. However, for others who
do not belong to the inferior class as Untouchables, in their eyes, they only treat
Velutha as the inferior class. In the novel, Roy’s description of some grotesque small
men allows readers to see the real situation that most subaltern groups have. M. M.
Bakhtin analyzes the functions of the rogue, clown and fool in the novel. “The rogue,
clown and fool create around themselves their own special little world, their own
chronotope” (Bakhtin 159). He points out three functions. First, “these figures”, “with
the mask of the public spectacle” are “connected with that highly specific, extremely
important area of the square where the common people congregate” (Bakhtin 159).
Second, these figures may not have “a direct, but rather a metaphorical, significance”
(Bakhtin 159).
Their very appearance, everything they do and say, cannot be understood
in a direct and unmediated way but must be grasped metaphorically.
Sometimes their significance can be reversed—but one cannot take them
literally, be cause they are not what they seem. (Bakthin 159)
Third, the existence of the rogue, clown and fool reflect people’s mode of beings. The
rogue, clown and fool are “life’s makers” (Bakthin 159). “Their being coincides with
their role, and outside this role they simply do not exist” (Bakthin 159).
Bakthin explains that the privilege of these three figures is “the right to be
‘other,’’’ so they can “exploit any position they choose, but only as a mask” (159).
Therefore, “the masks of the clown and the fool (transformed in various ways) come
to the aid of the novelist” (Bakthin 161). These figures allow novelist to reflect
“private life and make it public” (Bakthin 161). Thus, the “indirect,” “metaphorical,”
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and the “allegorical nature” of the rogue, clown and fool allows the novelist to
represent things he cannot to write directly in the plot (Bakthin 161).
In The God of Small Things, the first fool “Murlidharan, the level-crossing
lunatic” appears on the way of the twins and their family to pick up Sophie Mol.
Murlidharan whose “balls and penis dangle down, pointing towards the sign” of
Cochin where Sophie Mol would arrive at the airport naked sits on the level-crossing
of the railway (61). Murlidharan is naked except he wears “the tall plastic bag that
somebody had fitted onto his head like a transparent chef’s cap, through which the
view of the landscape continued—dimmed, chef-shaped, but uninterrupted,” but he
cannot even move his ridiculous plastic cap away, for he has no arms which “had been
blown off in Singapore in ’42” (60-61). After the war, he became a “Grade I Freedom
Fighter” and had the privilege of “a free first-class railway pass for life” (61).
However, he lost his privilege to live on trains or in stations and thus he lost his mind.
“Murlidharan had no home, no doors to lock, but he had his old keys tied carefully
around his waist. In a shining bunch. His mind was full of cupboards, cluttered with
secret pleasure” (61).
All day long, Murlidharan stays on the railway and counts his keys. “He watched
the trains come and go. He counted his keys. He watched governments rise and fall.
He counted his keys” (61).
He was never sure which cupboard he might have to open, or when. He sat
on the burning milestone with his matted hair and eyes like windows, and
was glad to be able to look away sometimes. To have his keys to count and
countercheck. Numbers would do. Numbness would be fine. (61)
Murlidharan witnesses the changes of politics silently and only counts those keys of
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invisible cupboards, for counting is the only property he possesses. He could only
count on numbers, the small things that he can add up. Velutha, too, has no cupboards.
Inside the small hut where his brother Kuttappen suffers, “[t]here were no keys or
cupboards to lock” (198). Unlike those “Foreign Returnees” who are labors and work
aboard happily bring money back “[w]ith keys to count, and cupboards to lock” (134),
Cupboards obviously are the symbol of properties.
Chacko, the twins’ uncle also owns his own cupboard where he stuck all his
broken wooden airplanes, a broken dream to fly high but always fails down into
remnants. Thought Comrade Pillai is quite poor, he has the cupboard insider his small
house. Here, the cupboard in not just the material symbol of property but also the
symbol of the intention where human beings store their thought: “Whatever Comrade
Pillai stored in his curtained cupboard, it wasn’t broken balsa airplanes,” but the
politician’s ambitious plans (260). Even Murlidharan, the lunatic on the railway has
invisible cupboards to store his “secret pleasure,” Roy does not mention if Velutha has
such intention. Perhaps it is a way that Roy points out how naïve Velutha is in the
world of aggressive politicians. Another crazy man that Roy depicts is on the platform
of the train station when Estha is “returned” to his father.
A man sitting on a red weighing machine unstrapped his artificial leg (knee
downwards) with a black boot and nice white sock painted on it. The
hollow, knobbled calf was pink, like proper calves should be. (When you
re-create the image of man, why repeat God’s mistakes?) Inside it he
stored his ticket. His towel. His stainless-steel tumbler. His smells. His
secrets. His love. His hope. His madness. His infinite joy. His real foot was
bare. He bought some tea for his tumbler. (285)

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This man carries his mobile cupboard where he stored all the things he needs and his
madness. It is really bizarre to see a man of one artificial leg with painted boot and
sock and the other leg bare. Roy literally shows the readers how grotesque the real
world is when she depicts this “Stationworld,” as “Society circus” where “Hollow,”
“Homeless,” “Hungry” 2 people perform their lives (285). A madness man stores his
property in his artificial leg or “[a]n old lady vomited [a] lumpy pool [a]nd went on
with her life (285).
The Touchables
By introducing these grotesque people, Roy not only represents the real life in
India but also implies the difficult situation that Velutha faces. Since for other people
who do not belong to the Untouchable, there is no distinction between Velutha and
these ridiculous small people who live as inferior class. However, those who contemn
Velutha due to his birth do no live in a better environment than Velutha or process
exception skill as Velutha. Kocha Maria thought only a low cook of the twins family
(since her pay is really low, only “seventy-five rupees a month”) is proud of herself as
a Touchable Syrian Christian, an “upper-caste Christian,” not “a Pelaya, or a Pulaya,
or a Paravan” (162). Therefore, though her “thick and gold” “kunukku earings” are
too heavy to distend her earlobes into “weighted loops that swung around her neck,
her earrings sitting in them like gleeful children in a merry-go-(not all the
way)-round,” and because of the heaviness, the earrings has split open her right
2
Roy writes, these “Hollow,” “Homeless,” “Hungry” people “still touched by last year’s famine” (285)
since in 1967, Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad’s party was re-elected and separated into two parties:
the Communist Party of India (CPI) and Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM), and China turned
to support CPIM. Kerala (the state of Ayemenem) was “in the aftermath of famine and a failed
monsoon” (65).
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earlobe and “was sewn together again by Dr. Verghese Verghese,” she still insists to
wear these big rings that could categorize her as a upper class (162). To stitch split
earlobes back are “better option by far” (162). Velutha also belongs to a Christian
family but in a rather intricate and problematic situation. When the British came to
Ayemenem, some Paravans including Velutha’s grandfather, Kelan convert to
Anglican Church to escape the miseries that Untouchables suffer under the caste
system. While they become Christians, they are given a little food and money, so they
are also known as “Rice-Christians.” Soon these Paravan realize that convert only
make their original status even worse. They are forced to have separate churches with
separate priests (71).
It seems that even western religion could not change Untouchables’ social status
or provide them a better life. At the end, this western power still changes nothing
except pushes these converted Untouchables into a more painful hell as Roy confirms,
“from the frying pan into the fire” (71). Worse of all, they become “caste-less.”
Literally they belong nowhere since they are forced to leave no footprints in history:
After Independence they found they were not entitled to any government
benefits like job reservations or bank loans at low interest rates, because
officially, on paper, they were Christians, and therefore casteless. It was a
little like having to sweep away your footprints without a broom. Or worse,
not being allowed to leave footprints at all. (71)
The only difference between Kocha Maria and Velutha that Roy shows is that they
convert to different denominations. However, in Kocha Maria’s case, she converted to
the right denomination while Velutha’s family is played by the destiny that marks
Untouchables miseries and even falls into a worse condition.

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Comrade Pillai is also not better than Velutha, but since he is not one of the
Untouchables and is a poor Marxist, powerful in his political career. In fact, the
poverty is the most powerful weapon that Comrade Pillai possesses. There are
“Comrade Pillai’s SSLC, BA, and MA certicates” on the wall of his house, but it
seems that even education does not help Comrade Pillai out of poverty (260). In Roy’s
description, Comrade Pillai’s house is so small, and it seems that “the blue walls” of
his house “crowde[s]” Chacko since “Chacko was too big for the room” and he feels
uneasy in it (260). Moreover, Comrade Pillai lets Chacko realize their power structure
under the Marxist system. When Chacko enters Comrade Pillai’s house, he undergoes
a process of dissolution. Chacko is like a general forced to disarm. Comrade Pillai
strict circumstance, “his small, hot house, his grunting mother, his obvious proximity
to the toiling masses,” makes him powerful in the Marxist revolutionary times that
Oxford scholars have no way to fight back. Comrade Pillai’s poverty is the gun that
points Chacko’s head (260-61).
In fact, behind Chacko’s back, in the evening after the workers of Paradise and
Pickles factory come off their work, Comrade Pillai would take them to his printing
press and urge them to raise the revolution in his encouraging voice. He lectures:
People of the World [. . .] be courageous, dare to fight, defy difficulties and
advance wave upon wave. Then the whole world will belong to the People.
Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed. You must demand what is
rightfully yours. Yearly bonus. Provident fund. Accident insurance. (114)
Comrade Pillai never opposes Chacko in the public, but when he refers to Chacko in
his speeches, he is deliberate to dehumanize Chacko and introduces him as “an
abstract functionary in some larger scheme” (115). When Comrade Pillai mentions the
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owner of Paradise and Pickles factory, he would not refer to Chacko’s name but slyly
called Chacko “the Management” to dehumanize him.
Though Chacko knows in this era how powerful Marxism is, unfortunate he does
not realize that he is in the territory that needs to be subverted. He is worried about
Velutha’s political tendency since Velutha was in the Marxist march, but he does not
know that he is walking into the trap that Comrade Pillai sets for him. To answer
Chacko’s question, Comrade Pillai confirms Velutha’s identity as an official Marxist
member. It is apparent that Velutha’s political power should be as strong as Pillai, but
Roy points out here that the power between a poor Marxist and a Paravan Marxist is
certain different. This is why Pillai warns Chacko that “from local standpoint, these
caste issues are very deep-rooted,” and other workers of Paradise and Pickles factory
are not happy to work with Velutha due to his Paravan identily, so he suggests Chacko
to dismiss Velutha (263). Comrade Pillai tells Chacko that Velutha would cause
trouble for him and therefore Chacko should send Velutha away. However, it is only
one part of Comrade Pillai’s plan. He tries to become the Communist Party’s
candidate “for the Kottayam by-elections to the Legislative Assembly” since the
formal candidate is expelled from the Party as suspected Naxalites (114). Comrade
Pillai thus thinks that forming a “new labor union” of Paradise and Pickles workers
would be a good opportunity to send himself to the Legislative Assembly (114). For
him, the only obstacle is Velutha since Velutha is “the only card-holding member of
the Party. Comrade Pillai knows how “all the other Touchable workers in the factory
resented Veltuha for ancient reasons of their own,” and he just “stepped carefully
around this wrinkle, waiting for a suitable opportunity to iron it out” (115). Velutha’s
Untouchable identity is something that in Pillai’s mind, one day at the right moment,
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he could use it to gain the benefits for himself.
Pillai is right: even thought the basic ideal of Marxism is to subvert the classes,
still it is quite difficult for most people to subvert the law that is already “deep-rooted”
in their mind. The caste system has internalized in most Touchables and they have
practiced it for centuries. Even though Velutha is a “card-holder” Marxist member and
an excellent carpenter, these do not seem to regenerate his Untouchable social status.
There are many evidences that Roy provides. Mammachi, as I have mentioned, grows
up in those “Crawling Backwards Days” of Paravan. She needs Velutha to fix things
for her to change “[t]he washer in the foot-valve” of the tank or even to build the
fancy “sliding-folding door” (72) for the back verandah of the Ayemenem House. Still
she would not allow Velutha or Vellya Paapen to go inside the Ayemenem House.
When Vellya Paapen goes to tell Mammachi the affair between Velutha and her
daughter Ammu, Mammachi is furious and said, “how dare you come here in this
condition?” since Vellya Pappen is drunk and offers his fake eye to return to
Mammachi. Vellya Pappen asserts how much Mammachi’s family has done for his
family “[g]eneration for generation” (241). Pappachi’s father, Reverend E. John Ipe
gives Vellya Pappen’s father, Kelan, a piece of land and allows his family to live on it.
Vellya Pappen is grateful for the generosity of Mammachi who pays for his fake eye
and offers the education and a job for Velutha (242). Vellya Pappen then cries in fear
and confesses to Mammachi how his son and her daughter “made the unthinkable
thinkable and the impossible really happen” (242).
Mamamchi could not bear the truth that her daughter sleeps with an Untoubles.
Mammachi thinks how Ammu naked “coupl[es] in the mud with a man who was
nothing but a filthy coolie” (244). Mammachi imagines the details vividly how a
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Paravan’s hand touches her daughter’s breast and how his mouth covers on hers
breathing with the particular Paravan smell. “Like animals, Mammachi thought and
nearly vomited. Like a dog with a bitch on heat” (244). Mammachi is so furious, she
even pushes Vellya Paapen into the rain, which makes him startled since one of the
taboo of Untouchables is not to be touched. The handy young man that Mamamchi
used to count now is worse than a dog only because he is an Untouchable.
Baby Kochamma has the same contempt for Velutha though in a more gloating
way. She says sarcastically, “How could she stand the smell? Haven’t you noticed?
They have a particular smell, these Paravans” (243). Then she offers the plan to
Mammachi. First, they lock Ammu in her room and ask Velutha to come. Baby
Kochamma and Mammachi plan to dismiss Velutha before Chacko returns. Then
Sophie Mol’s body is found and Baby Kochamma goes to the police office and tells
Inspector Thomas Mathew the story she makes on how an Untouchable rapes her
niece and kidnaps three children, but there is at least one part of her story is true,
which is her resent of Untouchables. Baby Kochamma complains how ungrateful
Velutha’s family is since her family has done so much. She tells Inspector Thomas
Mathew how her family offers education for Velutha and sends him to study in the
“Untouchables’ school started by her father, Punnyan Kunju” who is well-known in
Kerala (247). Because of her family, Velutha has the opportunity to be trained as a
carpenter and even the house he lives is donated by her family. She could not believe
how Velutha can be so ungrateful after everything her family has done for Velutha:
“He owed everything to her family” (247). Inspector Thomas Mathew, as a Touchable,
totally agrees with Baby Kochamma and even criticizes her: “You people, first you
spoil these people, carry them about on your head like trophies, then when they
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misbehave you come running to us for help” (247).
Inspector Thomas Mathew despisess Untouchables, but he is also a man with
cautions. When he hears Baby Kochamma mentions seeing Velutha “in the march of
the way to Cochin and the rumors that he was or had been a Naxalite,” he now not
only concerns the caste problem but also the political issue (247). Therefore, after
Baby Kochamma leaves, he finds Comrade Pillai to figure out if Veltuha has “any
political support” or whether he is on his own (248). Comrade Pillai knows now his
chance is coming. He does not tell Inspector Thomas Mathew that Velutha is an
official member of Communist party and just assures Inspector that Velutha does not
“have the patronage or the protection of the Communist Party” (248). Two cruel
adults know how the world is working.
They were not friends, Comrade Pillai and Inspector Thomas Mathew, and
they didn’t trust each other. But they understood each other perfectly. They
were both men whom childhood had abandoned without a trace. Men
without curiosity. Without doubt. Both in their own way truly, terrifyingly
adult. They looked out at the world and never wondered how it worked,
because they knew. They worked it. They were mechanics who serviced
different parts of the same machine. (248)
They are the manipulators and they know how to control things to happen. Two men
with different thought now have an agreement. One is relief that Velutha has no
political support and since he is an Untouchable, it would be no problem to arrest him
for his misbehavior. The other one is pleased that his plan begins to work and is eager
to see its outcome. Their movement could all be found in one foundation that is the
caste hatred. Because Velutha is an Untouchable, they know how to work it out.
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Therefore, Inspector Thomas Mathew now has no more misgivings and sends his man
to arrest Velutha, all the abuses that the policemen add on him.
The abuse of Velutha the twins witness is just the act that the police exorcises the
ancient fear that their class would be subverted: “A clinical demonstration in
controlled conditions (this was not war after all, or genocide) of human nature’s
pursuit of ascendancy. Structure. Order. Complete monopoly,” which represents
“Human history, masquerading as God’s Purpose, reveling herself to an under-age
audience” (292-93). If the police hurts Velutha more than they suppose to, it is only
because of the profound connection between themselves and him interweaved by the
internalized social rule of the caste system. The policemen are extremely reasonable
and have clear thoughts. They knew that they follow the old law, the law of the caste,
and all they do does not violate this rule.
Unlike the custom of rampaging religious mobs or conquering armies
running riot, that morning in the Heart of Darkness the posse of Touchable
Policemen acted with economy, not frenzy. Efficiency, not anarchy.
Responsibility, not hysteria. They didn’t tear out his hair or burn him alive.
[. . .] They were merely inoculating a community against an outbreak.
(293)
They just calmly guide the lost lamp to his proper direction and place the slanting
order to its original position. They exercise their rights to punish a misbehaved
Untouchable and form a teaching lesson for others.
A Subaltern Marxist
Mammachi, Baby Kochamma, Comrade Pillai, Inspector Thomas Mathew, and

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his policemen all follow the order of the old world, and they all belong to the advance
side since they are Touchable. However, the internalized law is strong even the one
who is forced to be inferior is still grateful for his oppressor as Velutha’s father, Vellya
Pappen. However, this internalized law does not seem to apply for Velutha. In fact,
Roy portraits Velutha as a retuned hero who experiences the heroic initiation in three
phases: separation, transformation, and return. It is Mammachi who “first notices little
Veluha’s remarkable facility with his hand” (71). He is just eleven years old and he is
like “little magician.” He could “make intricate toys—tiny windmills, rattles, minute
jewel boxes out of dried palm reed” and he could “carve perfect boats out of tapioca
stems and figurines on cashew nuts” (71). Therefore, Mammachi persuades Vellya
Pappen to send Velutha to the Untouchables’ school. When Velutha is fourteen, he
learns his carpenter skills from Johann Klein, a German carpenter. Therefore, Velutha
finishes his high school and becomes a professional carpenter.
Besides his carpentry skill, Velutha is also talented in machinery. “Mammachi
(with impenetrable Touchable logic) often said that if only he hadn’t been a Paravan,
he might have become an engineer” (72). Velutha is good at mending radios, clocks,
water pumps and he also “look[s] after the plumbing and all the electrical gadgets in
the house” (72). He builds the fancy sliding-folding door for Mammachi and helps
Chacko to assemble the “bottle-sealing machine” and to maintain “the new caning
machine and the automatic pineapple slicer” (72).Velutha even builds “the aluminum
sheet-lined, easy-to-clean cutting surfaces, and the ground-level furnaces for boiling
fruit. It is Velutha who makes Paradise and Pickles factory function well. Velutha is
certainly proud of his skills and his talent though Roy does not exactly tell her readers.
Devon Campbell-Hall manifests how Velutha attains his confidence from his skills:
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Velutha’s “anarchic nature stems from the varying levels of social independence they
acquire from their finely-tuned manual skills” (45). Moreover, Velutha thus acquire
the fluidity to move his identity:
Velutha’s careful adherence of caste restrictions (until his inter-caste affair)
leads him to unexpected Naxalite rebellion. Their identities are in flux, in a
constant state of redefinition. Benefiting from the fluidity of such a hybrid
space, the dangerous artisan is able to move independently, free from many
of the collective responsibilities of established societies, including those of
his traditional community. (Campbell-Hall 45)
However, Vellya Paapen fears for Velutha’s confidence. He senses Velutha’s ambition
and he senses that Velutha is approaching to the danger that he could not tell. “Vellya
Paapen feared for his younger son. He couldn’t say what it was that frightened him. It
was nothing that he had said. Or done. It was not what he said, but they way he said it.
Not what he did, but the way he did it” (73).
Deep in mind, Vellya Paapen senses something wrong with Velutha’s attitude.
Every time he tries to “caution” Velutha, but “since he couldn’t put his finger on what
it was that bothered him, Velutha misunderstood his muddled concern” (73). Velutha
thinks Vellya Paapen is just jealous of “his brief training and his natural skills” (73).
No one knows why Velutha disappears. “For four years, nobody knew where he was,”
and there are rumors that he becomes a Naxalite or has been to prison (73). After he
returns to Ayemenem, he never talks about “where he had been, or what he had done”
(74). His missing years are like a mystery. Roy shows Velutha’s separation and return
but does not detail his transformation. However, certainly something is changed. He
returns as an official member of Communist Party.

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Before Velutha leaves, he has already mastered his carpenter’s skills. After his
returns, he has won himself as a “card-holder” Marxist. For Velutha, he proves that
knowledge is power. He is certainly the best model of Marxist. An inferior
Untouchable is an excellent carpenter and an official member of Commuist Party. I
agree with Campbell-Hall’s point. He analyzes how Velutha gains his strength.
Velutha has the power and the abilities to move the traditional boundaries: “The
mobility that occupying such a theoretical in-between position makes possible enables
the dangerous artisans to undermine the established communities from which they
came” (Campbell-Hall 46).
Velutha joins the march and waves his Communist red flag. In the march, the
workers demand the reasonable payment and abolish Untouchables’ caste name.
“They demanded not to be addresses as Achoo Parayan, or Kelan Paravan, or Kuttan
Pulayan, but just as Achoo, or Kelan or Kuttan” (67). It seems that the age for Velutha
is coming. The Marxism seems to offer these subaltern groups a way to subvert the
classes. However, Roy points out the truth that Marxism is actually an illusion for the
subaltern. “Marxism was a simple substitute for Christianity. Replace god with Marx,
Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the Church with the Party,
and the form and purpose of the journey remained similar” (64). The people who have
already had power would not let go it easily, and it is not so easy for the people in the
bottom of the class to subvert their class or change their condition. In Kerala, Roy
indicates, “the Syrian Christins were, by and large, the wealthy, estate-owning
(pickle-factory-running), feudal lords, for whom communism represented a fate worse
than death” (64).
It seems clearly that the revolution of Marxists in Kerala is not so simple to

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overthrow the higher class. It is more complicated and it is all about money. Thus, the
revolution of Marxists in Kerala becomes a fight between the poor Touchables against
the rich Touchables, not poor Untouchables against Touchables. It is too sad that
Velutha does not realize it, and his special identity is used as a scapegoat to overturn
the power structure between the poor and the rich. Devon Campbell-Hall also asserts:
Velutha does join a Marxist march, but the fact that in The God of Small
Things he acts largely autonomously has prompted Aijaz Ahmad to
condemn Roy for her denigration of collective action and failure to offer
any solution to poverty. (47)
Campbell-Hall criticizes that Roy does not offer a solution to poverty. However, the
truth is that what Roy concerns is not about poverty but the subaltern. Roy not only
clarifies the illusion of Marxists’ revolutions for the subaltern but also represents the
power relations in the novel, “the laws that form and structure desire privilege
particular identities and desires while excluding or disenfranchising other
possibilities” (Thormann 300). Janet Thormann indicates that by dramatizing “the
unequal effects of the laws of international culture, imposed in a master discourse
entering the local environment through the entertainment industry, consumerism, and
international migration and travel,” Roy represents “the laws of caste that traditionally
govern social relations in India in complicity with class inequality in the global
economy; and the regulation of women that founds patriarchal power” (300).
What Velutha does not realize is that power is knowledge, and he is just the
scapegoat that is used by Comrade Pillai to fulfill his ambition and is sacrificed as a
lesson for future offenders. Comrade Pillai uses Velutha’s death to trigger
“Communist Party siege of Paradise Pickles & Preserves”, and he claims that “the
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Management had implicated the Parvan in a false police case because he was an
active member of the Communist Party” (286). In his “high-pitched speeches about
Rights of Untouchables (‘Caste is Class, comrades’),” Comrade Pillai never reveals
the whole story (266). He never tells that Velutha goes to his house for help before he
is arrested or how he assures Inspector Thomas Mathew that Velutha has no political
support. Velutha thus becomes a Martyr, a victim that dies in the hand of capitalists,
the wealthy Touchables in Marxists’ belief. However, the truth is Velutha is the victim
of the sophisticated conspiracy by ambitious politician and those Touchables who are
afraid of the reverse of caste system.
Velutha’s body is dumped in the “the pauper’s pit,” unknown and never recorded
in the official memories (304). What he leaves is the “Loss” for the twins and Ammu.
For the twins, they are the collaborator to help send the man they love to death. For
Ammu, she knows her love cross the social boundaries kills her lover. “They had
loved a man to death” (307). The man is the God of Small Things in Ammu’s dream.
The man is the God of Loss that is easily forgotten by others. His death points out the
cruelty of the History on how the dominant history must lie to “produce in order to
be,” to “lie the possibility of other” (Needham 373). Therefore, when one wants to
retrace the invisible footprints of the subaltern, one needs to pursue the small things.
These fragments are scattered with a-chronological time as Madhu Benoit indicates:
“Fragmentation of chronological time highlights the importance of achronological
time, allowing Roy to deconstruct, as it were, the cultural codes she is attacking” (9).
José David Saldivar also claims:
Subaltern identity and experience depends upon a minor (or small)
historiography. We cannot claim a political identification, Roy suggests,

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until we have reconstituted our small collective identities and reexamine
who counts in our cultures and societies. (362)
Thus, to retrace the subaltern history, we need to be careful to the messages that these
small things try to reveal. We need to listen carefully for their murmurs and remap the
fragments. The subaltern history reveals the particularities of social relations in
Ayemenem, and the small things that are remained will stay where Rahel and Estha
live, a space that exists only when the small things connect with the place,
Ayemenem.
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Chapter Three
Small Things in Life Space
The smell of Velutha’s blood as a ghost haunts Rahel and Estha from 1969 to
1992. From the day they learned the history lesson, Rahel and Estha are involuntarily
attacked by the traumatic memory they could not forget, and they have to live with.
The blood of Velutha smells like old roses, sicksweet, and smell is the master of
memory for her and Estha. Rahel thus says, “Smells, like music, hold memories” (94).
Every time when they recall Velutha, they evoke the sensory experience. It seems that
the smell itself creates a special space that only Rahel and Estha live in it. Apparently,
this special space that Rahel and Estha live in and experience is quiet different from
other characters in Ayemenem. In fact, in the novel, all the characters have their own
life space. What they conceive, perceive, and live in is different from one another.
Though they all live in the same place, people identify themselves in different ways
and have different life experiences. To understand Ayemenem, one should consider its
histories, social relations, and spatiality. As the thesis has already discussed
Ayemenem’s histories and social relations, this chapter will elaborate the spatiality of
Ayemenem. Since people have different life experiences, their life spaces are also
varied. This chapter would elucidate how the life space is formed by using Rahel and
Estha as examples.
The Significance of Sensory Experiences
In Roy’s depiction, smell, one of the five senses of human beings, connects what
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people think and memorize. When Mammachi first met Chacko’s English wife,
Margaret, she “caught a whiff of inexpensive perfume soured at the edges by airline
sweat” (165). Mammachi thought the perfume that Margaret wore was inexpensive
because Mammachi had a bottle of Dior perfume. Therefore, she may believe that if
the perfume does not smell like Dior, it would not be a high class perfume. Mohit
Kumar Ray also agrees that because of the feminine jealousy of this patriarchal
society, Mammachi resents Margaret even though she never meets Margaret before
(57). N.P. Singh even points out that since Mammachi follows the norms of patriarchy,
she envies Margaret for her courage to love and cross the boundaries of race and class
(69). Therefore, Mammachi would try her best to distain Margaret no matter Margaret
wears expensive perfume or not. Mammachi loves and worships her son so much that
she detests the woman her son married since Chacko is the one who saves her from
her husband’s beaten.
Mammachi would have despised Margaret Kochamma even if she had
been heir to the throne of England. It wasn’t just her working-class 3
background Mammachi resented. She hated Margaret Kochamma for
being Chacko’s wife. She hated her for leaving him. But would have hated
her even more had she stayed. (160)
Therefore, during Margaret’s visit, Mammachi slips the money into Margaret’s
pockets of the clothes in the laundry bin everyday. In Mammachi’s mind, “a fee
clarified things. Disjuncted sex from love. Needs from Feelings,” so Mammachi is
3
In Mammachi’s mind, Margaret Kochamma was just a “Shopkeeper’s daughter.” Margaret’s parents
lived in London. Her father owned a bakery, and her mother was a milliner’s assistant. Mammachi
looks down the working class because in her world if “she was invited to a wedding in Kottayam, she
would spend the whole time whispering to whoever she went with, ‘The bride’s grandfather was my
father’s carpenter. Kunjukutty Eapen? His great-grandmother’s sister was just a midwife in Trivandrum.
My husband’s family used to own this whole bill’” (160).
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pleased to regard Margaret “was just another whore” that Chacko has sex with for his
“Man’s Needs” though Margaret never finds the money (161). The perfume that
Mammachi senses from Margaret is inexpensive because Mammachi projects her
contempt on Margaret. The smell of inexpensive perfume is not only what Mammchi
senses but also she thinks to sense.
When smell connects to Chacko, it is about food and his daughter Sophie Mol. In
order to pick up Sophie Mol at the airport, Chacko and his family stay a hotel nearby.
When Ammu, Rahel, Estha, and Baby Kochamma return from the movie theater,
Chacko was caught feasting: “Roast chicken, chips, sweet corn and chicken soup, two
parathas and vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce. Sauce in sauceboat” (108). He
loves to eat and he eats well. “Chacko often said that his ambition was to die of
overeating. Mammachi said it was a sure sign of suppresses unhappiness. Chacko said
it was no such things. He said it was Sheer Greed” (108). Like Chacko says, eating is
a way to show his greed. He is like a spoiled fat prince. After his father’s death, he
becomes the master of house, so everything belongs to him: the Ayemenem House and
the pickle factory. He plays the comrade game with the female workers of his factory
and has sex with them. Food feeds Chacko’s desire, and he even catches the smell of
food so tightly. After he finishes the dishes he orders in the hotel and asks the bearer
to take away the plates and bones, he even tries to “catch the dinner smells” to
memories the satisfaction of food. Smell thus holds a special position in Chacko’s
heart (110).
Chacko also memorizes his daughter by the smell. When he and Margaret got
divorce, Sophie Mol was a just a baby. Before he had to leave Sophie Mol, he tried to
memories her. “To learn her. Imprint her on his memory” (111). Chacko was amazed
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at “how someone so small and undefined, so vague in her resemblances, could so
completely command the attention, the love, the sanity, of a grown man” (112).
Chacko found how much he loves his child, so “[w]hen he left, he felt that something
had been torn out of him. Something big” (112). Chacko still remembers the day when
he tried to imprint Sophie Mol on his memory. “She smelled of milk and urine” (112).
Therefore, when he sees nine-year-old Sophie Mol, he laughs and says that the last
time he hugged Sophie Mol, he got a wet shirt for his paints, and at the same time he
gives her a big hug and kisses her “bluegrayblue eyes, her Entomologist’s nose, her
hatted redbrown hair” as though they has never separated from each other (140).
Smell for Chacko apparently is a way of memory to memorize his baby daughter or
remember the satisfaction of food.
Smell for Ammu, Rahel and Estha’s mother, is also crucial. The smell represents
her despair, desire, and death. In the afternoon of Sophie Mol’s arrival, after Ammu
discovers her passion and desire for Velutha, she has a dream about the God of Small
Things. After she wakes up by her children, she tries to weep for herself, the God of
Small Things, and her children, for she senses that her future becomes sour and
unbearable. Ammu does not want to know what her future is like. She is desperate and
she thinks she knows her future is really bad, and “what Ammu knew (or thought she
knew) smelled of the vapid, vinegary fumes that rose from the cememnt vats of
Paradise Pickles. Fumes that wrinkled youth and pickled futures” (214). Jean-Pierre
Durix points out that Roy expresses how her society treats women as “the weaker
sex” (8). Singh also indicates that Ammu knows her real status at home—she has no
position in her parents’ house (65). As a divorced womam, Ammu knows there is no
bright future waiting for her, but she does not know her future would become worse
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than she imagines. The sour smell incessantly reminds her despair, the truth that no
hope, no expectation, and nothing would exist in her future. Her future is empty. She
weeps for her bare future, but she does not know her future would turn into an abyss.
Her children, the man they love, and she would fall in it after Ammu smelled
Velutha’s skin, the smell of the river, 4 the smell of the God of Small Things in her
dream 5 , and the smell of her desire. What Ammu does not know is that later on her
desire would turn into despair. After others finds out the affair between her and
Velutha, after Velutha’s death, after her world and her children’s world collapse, she
becomes the walking dead, a fat women, “swollen with cortisone”, suffered in asthma
(153). She loosens the phlegm and explains to Rahel: “You must always check it [. . .]
When it’s white, it means it isn’t ripe. When it’s yellow and has a rotten smell, it’s ripe
and ready to be coughed out. Phlegm is like fruit. Ripe or raw. You have to be able to
tell” (153). The rotten smell of phlegm foretells Ammu’s near death. The future once
smells sour, and now it turns into the rotten smell. Before the death brings her away,
both her body and mind have begun to corrupt. Smell represents Ammu’s thinking and
condition, the sour smell of her future, the river smell of her desire, and the rotten
smell of her death.
Smell, one of the five senses of human beings, is a way how people conceive the
world. It is the most intimate, immediate, and subjective sense. In the novel,
Mammachi, Chacko, and Ammu all sense different smells and these smells all have
special and specific meanings for them. When they sense the smells, readers could
also imagine what these characters sense, the perfume, the food, or the rotten phlegm.
Reading the smells, readers also experience different aura, different spaces that only
4
“She smelled the river on him” (317).
5
In Ammu’s dream, she smells the salty sea from the skin of the God of Small Things (206).
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these characters experience. These are the life spaces where Mammachi, Chacko, and
Ammu live. Henri Lefebvre thus foregrounds the importance of the body in the space
study. He points out that sensory experience of the body is certainly a crucial element
that constructs space:
The whole of (social) space proceeds from the body, even though it so
metamorphoses the body that it may forget it altogether—even thought it
may separate itself so radically from the body as to kill it. The genesis of a
far-away order can be accounted for only on the basis of the order that is
nearest to us—namely, the order of the body. (Lefebvre 405)
Therefore, Lefebvre urges the importance of the body. He concludes his The
Production of Space: “Theoretical thought, carrying reflection on the subject and the
object beyond the old concepts, has re-embraced the body along with space, in space
and as the generator (or producer) of space” (Lefebvre 407). Yi-Fu Tuan also indicates
the significance of personal experience. He points out that the sense of place is
constructed by human experience. Thus, exploring life space of The God of the Small
Things, it is important to review the body itself and analyze its senses.
Life Space
The life space explored here is the space that is practiced and lived, and the space
is not simply being material or mental. This idea of life space comes from Edward
Soja’s “Thirdspace.” Soja uses the idea of Lefebvre’s “trialectics of spatiality” and
explains the three spaces (51). The Firstspace that Soja elucidates is perceived space.
The Secondspace is conceived space. Soja’s Thirdspace breaks the binary oppositions
of spatiality: perceived space versus conceived space. He proposes that Thirdspace is

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comprised of perceived space, conceived space, and lived space. Therefore, the
concepts of Soja’s Thirdspace and Lefebvre’s lived space are adopted to remap the
small things that Roy depicts in the novel and try to figure out how life space is
formed through these small things, such as smell, goosebumps, and sunglasses. The
term of life space is used instead of Lefebvre’s lived space or Soja’s Thirdspace for
the reason explained in the introductory chapter since the meaning of life space is
literally more specific: Life space focus on lived experiences. Therefore, to
reconstruct the life spaces of the characters in the novel, their life experience and their
sensory experience need to be examined. Smell as an example analyzed above is a
clue of the life spaces of the characters. Lefebvre emphasizes the importance of senses
since to study life space, it is crucial to return to the body. Smell thus becomes one of
the elements that construct life space. Still the construction of life space is
complicated. To figure out how life space is formed, the small things of the novel are
remapped for Rahel and Estha.
The first chapter of the thesis has already discussed that Rahel and Estha share a
joint identity. Even though they have been forced apart, they need each other to share
their affliction. Their time is stuck at the moment when they witnessed the tragedy of
Velutha. Before Velutha’s death, the twins share their life space until they have been
separated. Therefore, this chapter examines the small things that construct the twins’
life space and classify the small things into three categories. The first one is the
sensory experience, including smell, taste, sunglass, and goosebumps. The second one
is the relics of the history, including stains, footprints, and toys. The third one is the
roots of place, including monsoon and moth.

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Smell
Smell is the essential that imprints Velutha in the twins’ life space. Before
Velutha’s death, the twins memorize him with the smell of “fresh wood shavings and
the sun” which not only represents Velutha’s career but also his personality (75).
Velutha is an excellent carpenter and the wood in his hand can transform in everything
that the twins want. The twins are amazed at Velutha’s talent of carpentry, and they
love Velutha who is like the sun, warm and comfortable. This is what the twins sense
in Velutha’s house, the smell of wood, the sun, and the red fish curry cooked by
Velutha. On the day when Velutha is beaten by the police, the twins memories the
“sicksweet” smell “like old roses on a breeze” of Velutha’s blood and the smell of
Velutha’s handcuff, “[c]old with the sourmetal smell [l]ike steel bus rails and the bus
conductor’s hands from holding them” (294). Later, in the inquiry room where Estha
confirms the false charge of Velutha, “[t]he smell of shit made him[Estha] retch”
(303). The swollen Velutha sits in front of Estha. “Blood spilled form his skull like a
secret” and on the ground there is “the rim of a pool of urine spreading from
him[Velutha]” (303). In the inquiry room, Eshta memorizes the smells of shit, urine
and blood that represents dying Velutha. Therefore, twenty-tree years later, when
Estha takes care his dying dog that cannot control its urination, he is amazed that his
dog “so fragile, so unbearably tender had survived, had been allowed to exist, was a
miracle” (14), but Velutha dies in his prime time under the violence of the society.
Eshta thus “steep[s] in the smell of old roses, blooded on memories of a broken man”
(14).
In Chapter One and Two of The God of Small Things, the smells about Velutha
appear continually in Rahel and Estha’s life space in 1992, and in other chapters, the
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smells about Velutha show in 1969. Obviously, Estha’s traumatic memory demands
and occupies his life space. In his head, he has terrible pictures:
Rain, Rushing, inky water. And a smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a
breeze. But worst of all, he carried inside him the memory of a young man
with an old man’s mouth. The memory of a swollen face and a smashed,
upside-down smile. Of a spreading pool of clear liquid with a bare bulb
reflected in it. Of a bloodshot eye that had opened, wandered and then
fixed its gaze on him. Estha. And what has Estha done? He had looked into
that beloved face and said: Yes. (32)
Rahel is also haunted by the traumatic memory that she shares with Estha. Years later,
on the train of New York, Rahel tries to comfort herself by the odd behavior of her
co-passenger from the terrible memory that inhabits in her life space, the memory of
“A sourmetal smell, like steel bus rails, and the smell of the bus conductor’s hands
from hold them. A young man with an old man’s mouth” (70). Catherine
Pesso-Miquel points out New York as a “deranged womb” for Rahel (28). The
memory of two broken women, one from East, Rahel’s mother Ammu who teaches
Rahel to smell the phlegm, and the other from the west, the woman on the train who
counts her lumps of tissue now appears in Rahel’s mind (Pesso-Miquel 29). Rahel
herself however is traumatized by the tragedy of Velutha’s death. Comforting by the
madness of Ammu and the woman on the train, Rahel gains the strength to resist the
traumatic memory of the history smell left by Velutha. The “history’s smell [l]ike old
roses on a breeze” will “lurk forever in ordinary things” in “coat hangers”,
“tomatoes,” “the tar on roads,” “certain colors,” “the plates at a restaurant,” Estha’s
“absence of words,” and Rahel’s “emptiness” of eyes (54). The smells about the
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tragedy of Velutha compose and occupy Rahel and Estha’s life space. The traumatic
memory haunts them in ordinary things of their life, which also shapes what they are,
numb Estha and empty Rahel.
Before Velutha’s death, the twins learn the world from smell. Rahel learns the
filth of money and public toilet, for Ammu tells her that “Public Pots were Dirty. Like
Money was. You never knew who’d touched it. Lepers. Butchers. Car Mechanics”
(91). Rahel confirms Ammu’s teaching when she notices the “[m]eat-smelling blood
money” that the butcher gives to the cook, Kocha Maria, and twenty-tree years later,
after Rahel returns to Ayemenem, she recalls the money smell of the gas station where
she worked in Washington (179). Besides the money smell, there are the smells that
Rahel cherishes, and the smells she hates. For instance, Rahel treasures smell as
memories since she tries to memorize the smell of the theatre, the smell of “breathing
people and hairoil,” and “old carptets” (94). The smell of the theatre is a “magical,
Sound of Music smell” (94). It is the happiest time in Rahel and Estha’s life. Though
their families argue quite often, the fight between Ammu and Chacko, the fight
between Estha and Rahel, or the sarcasm of Baby Kochamma, still there is
harmonious. Rahel cherishes the moment of harmony when Ammu, Baby Kochamma,
and she go to the toilet of the theater together: “Rahel liked all this. Holding the
handbag. Everyone pissing in front of everyone. Like friends. She knew nothing then,
of how precious a feeling this was. Like friends. They would never be together like
this again. Ammu, Baby Kochamma and she” (91-92). Rahel prizes the smell of
theatre and has “bottled it up for posterity” (94).
There is also a smell that Rahel hates. It is the smell that Estha does not learn
together, for he has been sent away. It is the smell of Ammu’s rotten phlegm which
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makes Rahel “nearly retch” (153). At that time, Rahel hates Ammu for her
incompetence because Ammu is unable to reunite their small family, Ammu, Rahel,
and Estha. She hates Ammu for her sickness that foreshadows the death. Rahel hates
the rotten smell because it involves Ammu’s despair and death. Later, in the
crematorium where Ammu’s body is cremated, it is the same rotten smell “rundown
air of a railway station, except that it [the crematorium] was deserted” (155). The
same rotten smell of railway that sends Estha away, and the same rotten smell of
crematorium that announces Ammu’s death. Ammu’s death and despair is rotten and
decayed, but the smell of it would not fade away in Rahel’s mind. It commands a
place in Rahel’s life space, stays there, and waits for an adequate moment to interrupt
her thought. Therefore, years later, on the train in New York, Rahel suddenly recalls
Ammu’s expression when she wants Rahel to shut up in the march: “That hard marble
look in Ammu’s eyes. The glisten of perspiration on her upper lip. And the chill of
that sudden, hurt silence. What had it all meant?” (69). Why is Ammu so angry to stop
Rahel calling Velutha? The complicated relationship that Rahel did not know as a
child now reveals in Rahel’s adult mind to wonder whether it connects to Velutha’s
destiny. “Memory was that woman on the train” who wrapped her phlegm into several
packages “in neat rows on the empty seat” (69). Her odd behavior, for Rahel, is how
memory represents in Rahel’s mind.
Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged
with the most unlikely ones—a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of
smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother’s marble eyes. Quite sane in the way
she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered. (69-70)
Memory is the insane woman that often dries Rahel crazy to force her to face the
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darkness, the most traumatic memory that often appears in the ordinary things of her
life and keeps reminding her: a smell, a look, or a feeling. At the same time, she
resists the memory and tries to forget it. Those unremembered things, however,
continue bothering her in her life space in varied forms, in different small things.
Taste
Taste, another sense, tightly connects Rahel and Estha since Rahel still
remembers the taste of Estha’s tomato sandwiches when he was sent away on the train
(5). Taste, in fact, is a crucial sense for this small family: Ammu, Estha, and Rahel.
Taste also associates with their pickle factory. On the billboard of the car, Plymouth, it
is painted the labels of the pickle factory: “Paradise Pickles & Preserves” with
“Emperors of the Realm of Taste” (45-46). These two slogans are Comrade Pillai’s
idea. Ironically, Pillai is the one who closes the pickle factory down, and the taste of
pickles as “Emperors of the Realm of Taste” is always a little bit too salty since
Mammachi increases the proportion of preservative and salt in order to prevent oil
leaking from the bottles of pickles (159). “It was imperceptible, but they did still leak,
and on long journeys, their labels became oily and transparent” (159). The leaking oil
is like the secrets that Mammachi’s family tries to seal but still fails. The rumors 6 blur
the truth and still destroy the reputation that Mammchi tries to protect.
The salt that Rahel taste on her own skin foreshadows Ammu’s affair. In the
airport when they welcome Sophie’s arrival, Rahel licks the scratch made by Estha’s
hand. “When she licked it, it tasted of salt” (135). Ammu never notices this small
6
As I have discussed in Chapter One, the false version about Velutha is known by the public and
reported by the local newspaper: Ammu is raped by Velutha, but the truth is that there is no raping.
However, the public only remembers the scandal of this family about sex and death.
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incident of her daughter, and later she will taste the salt of Velutha:
Ammu, naked now, crouch over Velutha, her mouth on his. He drew her
hair around them like a tent. Like her children did when they wanted to
exclude the outside world. She slid further down, introducing herself to the
rest of him. His neck. His nipples. His chocolate stomach. She sipped the
last of the river from the hollow of his navel. She pressed the heat of his
erection against her eyelids. She tasted him, salty, in her mouth. (318).
It is the same saltness that Ammu dreams in her afternoon nap. On the beach, the skin
of The God of Small Things, the cheerful one arm man is “salty” and so is hers (206).
Her desire turns into a fact. The happiness of the dream that Ammu and Estha are not
sure if it counts now appears in the reality. Ammu fulfills her desire but suffers the
latter outcome, a dead lover and a broken family. Ammu also does not notice that
Estha also tastes the same saltness before her. Estha tastes “the hot, salt breeze on his
mouth” on the taxi driving past the sea after he is sexual abused by the Orangedrink
Lemondrink Man (107). Estha is afraid if Ammu knows what the Orangedrink
Lemondrink Man did to him. Ammu would love him less as Ammu warms Rahel’s
improper behavior. Since Estha knows what the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man did is
wrong, he fears that Ammu will punish him and even love him “[v]ery much less”
(108). The salty taste here combines with Rahel’s taste of her own skin, Ammu’s
desire, and Estha’s oppression. They all sense the saltness of skin though in Estha’s
case, he senses imaginary skin. Saltness is a common taste. It could exist in the food
(pickles as an example), in the air, or on someone’s skin. The saltness thus connects
their memories in the life spaces of Rahel, Estha, and Ammu. Whenever they have
salty taste or they recall the taste, the same fear, the same joy or regret, or the same
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feeling will reappear.
Red Vision
Rahel’s sunglasses are one of the small things that only exist in her childhood.
Whenever she wears them on, her vision becomes red. The change of vision seems to
consist with Rahel’s mood and the action of changing into red vision gives her the
power to show her expression and feelings. The red sunglasses and the toy watch are
the two means that Rahel could manipulate as she holds the power to control her
world. One is her sight, and the other is time. Ammu, however, dislikes Rahel’s
sunglasses. She thinks that the red plastic glasses are bad for Rahel’s eyes and advise
her not to wear them too often (37). In fact, Rahel’s red sunglasses is also a way how
Ammu vents her anger, so she commands Rahel to take off her sunglasses, for
instance when Rahel recognizes Velutha in the march or when Ammu is irritated by
Rahel’s “spit bubbles” (81). Ammu hates Rahel to make “spit bubbles” because her
ex-husband Baba “used to blow spit bubbles,” and she believes that “only clerks
behaved like that, not aristocrats” (80). Therefore, when Ammu is angry at Rahel’s
behavior, Estha points out the reason why Ammu is so angry: Rahel’s spit bubbles
“brings back Memories” (81).
Rahel’s sunglasses represent a freedom that Ammu is jealous of, for Rahel can
change the color of her world whenever she wants. The red color of her sunglasses
first connects to the symbol of anger when Rahel sees Velutha holding a red flag “with
angry veins in his neck” in the Marxist march through her red sunglasses (68).
Everything is red:
Steelshrill police whistles pierced holes in the Noise Umbrella. Through

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the jagged umbrella holes Rahel could see pieces of red sky. And in the red
sky, hot red kites wheeled, looking for rats. In their hooded yellow eyes
there was a road and redflages marching. And a white shirt over a black
back with birthmark. (76)
It is Velutha she sees, marching with a red flag in his hand and a monsoon birthmark
on his back. Rahel is happy to see him, and she calls his name out loud, passionately
and enthusiastically, having veins in her neck, too (68). Red, a passionate and angry
color, is undoubtedly suitable for Marxist labors, for they ask for the right that they
believe they have but not allow owning. They are angry and unsatisfied for the reality
and they demand change. Rahel’s red sunglasses represent all the elements that
Marxists ask for, passion, anger, and freedom, a freedom to change the color of their
world, too.
Rahel enjoys and manifests the power that she could change the color of her
world. She would take off the sunglasses in order to “get a better look the dead frog
squashed on the road,” and she would put on her red glasses when her world burns
with rage (78). Rahel wears on the sunglasses and look at the red world of the play
(the welcoming) for Sophie Mol. “Every thing was Angry colored. Sophie Mol,
standing between Margaret Kochamma and Chacko, looked as thought she ought to
be slapped” (176). Rahel kills the ants in her red world and relieves her fury and
jealous for Sophie Mol.
Catherine Lanone also suggests that Rahel’s red glasses expresses the way she
sees the world and reflects emotional tensions around her, but also within her. When
Ammu is angry, Rahel’s world becomes red, too, or her world becomes
“angry-coloured as a jealous Rahel crushes church-going ants, a homophonic

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substitutue for Margaret and Baby Kochamma” (Lanone 135). In fact, Rahel’s anger
is also Estha’s though in the novel Rahel is the one who has the glasses. Since Rahel
and Estha shares their life space when they are children, Rahel senses the fear and
anger in Estha after the sexual abuse of the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man, so she
wears her red glasses and appears in the factory where Estha is making the banana
jam:
A gauze door creaked, and an Airport Fairy with hornbumps and
yellow-rimmed red plastic sunglasses looked in with the sun behind her.
The factory was angry-colored. The salted limes were red. The tender
mangoes were red. The label cupboard was red. The dusty sunbeam (that
Ousa never used) was red. (188).
However, after the tragedy of Velutha, Rahel losses the ability to change the color of
her world. Literally, Rahel’s red sunglasses are left on the river bank where Velutha is
beaten by the police, and her sunglasses is even played and sneered by the policemen:
“The glasses one of them wore. The others laughed, so he kept them on for awhile”
(295). Rahel’s passion and freedom is taken away by the policemen, and only the
emptiness is left in her heart.
Goosebumps
Goosebumps is another sensory experience that often appears in the novel and
connects Rahel, Estha, moth, Ammu, Velutha (The God of Gossebumps). When
someone is chilled or has strong emotions such as fear or anger, there are goosebumps
on his skin, the reflex of horripilation, piloerection, or pilomotor. Goosebumps for
Rahel and Estha often connect to the moth and Ammu. The flying moth that lives in
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their heart represents Ammu’s rage, for Ammu inherits the bad temper directly from
Pappachi who is furious and regretful that the moth is not named after him. Therefore,
when Ammu is angry at Rahel or Estha, the imaginary moth will fly around and leave
goosesbumps on them. “A cold moth with unusually dense dorsal tufts landed lightly
on Rahel’s heart. “Where its[the moth’s] icy legs toughed her, she got goosebumps.
Six goosebumps on her careless heart,” for Ammu will love her a little less. Ammu
says, “When you hurt people, they begin to love you less (107). That is what careless
words do. They make people love you a little less” (107).
It is the same feeling for Eshta. When Estha does not greet to Sophie Mol
properly, Ammu’s irritation is stopped by Chacko and says to Estha, “All right. Later”
with her angry eyes on Estha (139). “And Later became a horrible, menacing
goose-bumpy word. Lay. Ter. Like a deep-sounding bell in a mossy well. Shivery, and
furred. Like moth’s feet” (139). Ammu’s anger is like the horror movie for both Rahel
and Estha, for they know that later Ammu will punish them by loving them less, and
“later” like a long waiting time tortures them to the painful death.
Goosebumps for Rahel and Estha represent their fear to loss their mother’s love,
while goosebumps on Velutha represents another fear for love, the love that is
forbidden by the social rule. In the afternoon nap, Ammu dreams the one armed
cheerful man:
She could have touched his body lightly with her fingers, and felt his
smooth skin turn to gooseflesh. She could have let her fingers stray to the
base of his flat stomach. Carelessly, over those burnished chocolate ridges.
And left patterned trails of bumpy gooseflesh on his body, like flat chalk
on a blackboard, like a swathe of breeze in a paddyfield, like jet streaks in

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a blue church-sky. (205).
Ammu knows in her dream that the love between Velutha and her may result
damaging consequence because their love is built on fear, a fear that they know the
public will not admit them to love each other but they love anyway and a fear that
they know they will loss each other if they love but they still fall in love anyway.
Therefore, in Ammu’s dream, Velutha is “the God of Goosebumps and Sudden
Smiles” (207), and the goosebumps in the dream come true in the reality, on Velutha’s
skin when the handcuffs touches his skin (294). The goosesbumps that carry Velutha’s
anger and fear and Ammu’s love thus transmit to Rahel and Estha forever, for their
love has loved the man they love to death. In the chilling moment, the flying moth
will shiver its leg and reminds the twins with the goosebumps, fear, pain and regret.
Stains, Footprints, and Toys
The second category of small things that forms the life space of Rahel and Estha
are stains, footprints, and toys. They are the relics of history and ghosts in the past.
For Rahel and Estha, there are many stains on the road:
Squashed Miss Mitten-shaped on the road. Squashed frog-shaped stains in
the Universe. Squashed crows that had tried to eat the squasahed
frog—shaped stains in the Universe. Squashed dogs that are the squashed
crow-shaped stains in the Universe. Feathers. Mangoes. Spit. All the way
to Cochin. (79)
Rahel takes off her sunglass in order to look the squashed frog on the road more
clearly. Because the frog is so dead and flat, it looks like a frog stain on the road, a
frog-shaped stain. This makes Rahel wonder if Miss Mitten also leaves a Miss
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Mitten-shaped on the road when she is killed by the backward milk truck. In Rahel
and Estha’s observation, there are so many stains in the world even the tiny frog has
its own stain, but Velutha dies without any trace. There is no record for him in the
history. Ammu foresees Velutha as The God of Small Things who leaves “no
footprints in sand, no ripples in water, no image in mirrors” (206) since he is
Untouchble who in the old days had to sweep his own footprints backwards to prevent
Touchables anciently stepping on and being polluted (71).
Velutha is just a small thing for the history, a small stone in the trend of history
leaving no ripples. He is just one of many victims that are played and manifested by
the history to teach people the lesson what will happen for offenders against the social
order, the strict boundary between Touchable and Untouchable. Therefore, under the
great power of history, Velutha is no doubtfully condemned by Mammachi and Baby
Kochamma for his love affair with Ammu, betrayed by Comrade Pillai since “Party
was not constituted to support workders’ indiscipline in their private life” (271).
Velutha crosses the river, leaves “no ripples in the water” and “[n]o footprints on the
shore,” meets his final ends where the police will find and beat him to near death. All
these events will make the future Estha wonder how fragile his old dog is allowed to
live, while Velutha is not admit to survive and leave no trace. There is no stain for
Velutha leaving in the history, only the dark hole of emptiness and numbness in the
twins’ heart.
The loss of Velutha and his invisible footprints haunts with the ghosts of toys.
“The terrible ghosts of impossible-to-forget toys clustered on the blades of the ceiling
fan” in Estha’s room where “[s]lience hung in the air like secret loss” (87). There are
ghosts of toys, “[a] catapult,” “[a] quantas koala (from Miss Mitten) with lossened
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button eyes,” “[a]n inflatable goose (that had been burst with a policeman’s cigareet),”
and “[t]wo ballpoint pens with silent streetscapes and red London buses that floated
up and down in them” who witness the tragedy of Velutha together with Rahel and
Estha. Now the ghosts of toys haunts Rahel and Estha and becomes a part of their life
(87). Together the missing footprints of Velutha, the stains of the world, and the
ghosts of toys forms the life space of Rahel and Estha. They would suddenly show up
in ordinary things, in any stains, in the silence, or in a breeze.
Monsoon and Moth
The third category of small things has monsoon and moth which all relate to the
place, Ayemenem. Monsoon is the typical weather of India and people who live here
depend on the water that monsoon brings. Without the rain, people will suffer in
famine as Roy describes, “Kerala was reeling in the aftermath of famine and a failed
monsoon” in 1967 and “[p]eople were dying” (65-66). The famine just bursts out in
Ayemenem two years before Marxists march and Sophie Mol’s visit. At the same time,
Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad’s party was re-elected and separated into two
parties: the Communist Party of India (CPI) and Communist Party of India (Marxist)
(CPIM), and China turned to support CPIM. Kerala (the state of Ayemenem) was “in
the aftermath of famine and a failed monsoon” (65), and “The Naxalite movement
spread across the country and struck terror in every bourgeois heart” (66). There were
many Communist marches and political movement during these years. Therefore, in
1969, the anger of people raises very high. They demands a change, and the violence
of Naxalite movement make people live in fear, especially those who own properties.
Therefore, the birthnmark on Velutha’s back is important, for Roy describes it as a

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monsoon leaf that makes monsoon come on time, but those who live in Ayemenem do
not realize the signification of Velutha’s existence. Only Rahel and Estha know it, so
they carry the memories and small things about Velutha in their life space. It is the
same rain once on Velutha when he crosses the river and the same rain on grown
Estha walking by the river bank.
Moreover, the moth that often bothers Rahel and Estha is a special species that
only exists in India. The flying moth that combines Pappachi’s regret, Ammu’s rage,
and Rahel and Estha’s fear is the distinctive particularity of the place, Ayemenem. In
this place, many small things have the particular meanings connects Rahel and Estha.
These meanings represent themselves in ordinary things that they live with. These
small things thus construct a unique life space for Rahel and Estha. It is a life space of
Ayemenem, carried by Rahel and Estha when Estha is sent away and returned to his
father, when Rahel marries Larry and lives in New York, or when they both return to
Ayemenem in the room with Eshta’s silence, in the rain that Rahel brings, or in the
Kathakali dance they both watch.

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Conclusion
People experience the world through place which has complicated interrelation
with those who live there. In The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy represents the
particularities of India by telling the story of Ayemenem. From the tragedy of the
Untouchable, Velutha, the fall of an Anglophile family is represented, and fragments
of small things that haunt the twins Rahel and Estha wait to be reexamined. Roy
ingeniously expresses her concerns for nowadays India with the issues of
postcolonialism, subalternity, and gender. By representing the small things, Roy
retells the history, social relation, and spatiality with the place, Ayemenem. From
examining the fragments of small things, the thesis discovers that these small things
are interwoven with the twins and Velutha in the place, Ayemenem. To know the place,
one needs to study the social relation and its interrelation with people, and it demands
an understanding of the place. Therefore, the thesis tries to unveil the story behind the
place. By remapping the small things, the thesis uncovers the relationship between
people and place with their life space.
Chapter One represents that the sense of place is formed by personal history and
personal experience. In Topographies, J. Hillis Miller proposes that place has its own
history, and one can even retell the story of the place from its name. The name of
place projects its landscape and history. Indeed from the changes of landscape, the
place conveys its own history. From the past and the present of three main locations of
Ayemenem, Roy represents the story how Rahel and Estha are traumatized by the
memories of Velutha’s death. At the beginning of story, Ayemenem is merely a setting,

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a pure stage where all the events happen. To tell the story of The God of Small Things
starting with Sophie Mol’s visit is only one way of examining the story. The story that
Roy narrates could be retold in various way. The story or the history of Ayemenem
actually begins thousands of years ago, long before the influence of Marists, British,
and Syrian Chritianity. The story of Ayemenem, in Roy’s depiction, starts when the
social rule is formed. In other words, the history of Ayemenem begins with its social
relation, the interrelation between Ayemenem and those who live there.
The story of Rahel and Estha demonstrates their interrelation with Ayemenem. In
1969, the Ayemenem House is the grand old house like an old man watching coldly
what happened inside the house. The Ayemenem House, represented as the grand
history, is the primary stage where all the characters have their performance. It
witnesses the oppression of patriarchy how Pappachi beats his wife and daughter and
how Ammu is treated as a divorced woman. It is also in this place where the show of
welcoming Sophie Mol plays, which elaborates how this Anglophile family cherishes
Indian-white hybrid Sophie Mol while neglecting the twins, Rahel and Estha, the
half-Hindu hybrids. Though the twins are not treasured as they should be, in their
childhood they still have some pleasure, when they examine small lives such as ants
or frogs, hang out with Velutha, or play in the Meenachal River behind the Ayemenem
House.
Rahel and Estha’s sense of Ayemenem is stuck and formed at the day of
Velutha’s tragedy. When they are just innocent and vulnerable children, they become
persecutors that kill Velutha. On the day of Velutha’s final doom, the twins know there
are other persecutors, but there is only one victim. The love of the twins for their
mother kills Velutha who they also love because they confirm Velutha’s false charge
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in order to protect their mother. Velutha thus dies in confusion of his beloved
children’s accusation. From then on, the twins are haunted by the small things that
could be traced by Velutha, a history lesson they learn from Ayemenem. The
fragments of small things are spread in Ayemenem, including the Ayemenem House,
the History House, and the Meenachal River.
In 1992, the Ayemenem House becomes an old filthy house in spite of its grand
appearance in 1996. The relics of the History House turns into a five-star hotel where
the memories of Velutha’s tragedy and the watch that symbolizes the stuck time
buried under the hotel and its food smell in 1992. The Meenachal River is once a wild
river that could take away Sophiel Mol’s life in 1996. Now the river is only a small
stream because the dam is built and blocks the water of the river 1992. The
appearance of the landscape in Ayemenem alters dramatically. However, Rahel and
Estha still sense Ayemenem the same as twenty-tree years ago. They could not feel the
changes, for they are stuck in their memories of the past. Until they fulfill each other’s
emptiness, their time resumes and moves on, and their sense of place begins to change.
Therefore, Roy indicates that the sense of Ayemenem for Rahel and Estha are formed
by their personal history (their traumatic memory of Velutha’s tragedy) and by their
personal experience. Only when Rahel and Estha perceive Ayemenem in a different
way, their sense of Ayemenem alters.
Chapter Two demonstrates the social relation between place and people from
Velutha’s dilemma due to his subaltern identity in Ayemenem. While exploring the
meaning of the small things, the thesis finds that the small things that spread all over
in Rahel and Estha’s life space are the clue to discover the invisible footprints of the
subaltern. Under the social structure of Ayemenem, Velutha faces the dilemma as an
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Untouchable Paravan and a Marxist carpenter. On one hand, Velutha belongs to the
subaltern group as inferior Untouchable because of the caste system in India. On the
other hand, being a Marxist, Velutha believes that he could gain the power from the
Communist Party to reverse the strict circumstance of Untouchables. However, in The
God of Small Things, those who do not belong to the subaltern group tend to identify
Velutha with these grotesque small men, including the fool Murlidharan, who is the
level-crossing lunatic, and the crazy man, who stores his smell inside his artificial leg
on the platform of the train station.
Those who contemn Velutha due to his subaltern identity, in fact, do no have
better condition than Velutha, including Comrade Pillai and Kocha Maria. Kocha
Maria is only a poor cook of the twins’ family, but she is proud of herself as a
upper-caste Syrian Christian, while Velutha’s family belongs to Rice-Christian set for
Untouchables. Untouchables who convert to Christianity from Hinduism thus trap in
unexpected miseries. They become casteless because legally they no longer belong to
subaltern. They are not allowed to claim the benefits that the government offers for
the subaltern. At the same time, they are treated as a lower class of Christians. The life
condition of Comrade Pillai is no better than Velutha. However, Comrade Pillai is not
an Untouchable. Therefore, his identity as a poor Marxist makes him powerful in his
political career. Even though Velutha is a card-holder Marxist member and an
excellent carpenter, these do not regenerate his Untouchable social status.
Mammachi, Baby Kochamma, Comrade Pillai, Inspector Thomas Mathew, and
his policemen all follow the old social rules of Ayemenem since they all belong to the
advance side as Touchables. Velutha, returning as a Marxist hero, believes his
professional skill and his Marxist’s power could help to reverse the social structure of
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Ayemenem. However, the revolution of Marxists in Ayemenem are not interested in
overthrowing the caste but rather overturning the class between the poor and the rich.
Thus, it is a fight between the poor Touchables against the rich Touchables, not poor
Untouchables against Touchables. However, Velutha does not realize the reality of
politics. His subaltern identity is used by ambitious Comrade Pillai to overturn the
power structure between the poor and the rich, while Velutha’s body is dumped
unknown in the slum, and his tragedy is never recorded in the official history and
public memories. What he leaves is the loss for the twins and Ammu. The loss is
embodied in the small things which traumatize the twins and confine them in the
space of the past. Velutha’s tragedy represents the social relation in Ayemenem.
People connect Ayemenem with the social structure—the caste system, while different
social groups fight with one another in Ayemenem such as the conflicts between the
poor and the rich, Marxists versus the rich, Untouchables versus Touchables, Syrian
Christians versus Rice-Christians.
Chapter Three examines the small things of Ayemenem. Each small thing has its
own significance. People, who live in Ayemenem experience the small things, produce
their own life spaces. For instance, smell for Mammachi, Chacko, and Ammu has
diverse meanings. The smell of Margaret’s inexpensive perfume provokes
Mammachi’s jealous love for Chacko. The food smell represents Chacko’s greedy,
and the smell of urines reminds Chacko of his love for Sophie Mol when she is only a
baby. The smell of Velutha’s skin, the river smell, and the smell of salt all confine
Ammu in the space of her desire for love, while the smell of rotten phlegm foretells
her death. The smells they sense create the spaces that only belong to them. Sensory
experiences that they sense in Ayemenem thus are important and form the spaces they
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live.
In spite of the meanings of the smell for other characters, small things left by
Velutha in Ayemenem, especially the sensory experiences such as smell, taste, and
goosebumps, confine the twins in the space of the past. They sense Ayemenem as the
same when Velutha dies in 1969 even though they grow to be adults and the
appearance of Ayemenem changes so much. These small things the twins sense form a
unique life space they live in, and this space is full of the small things that lead to the
twins’ traumatic memories for Velutha with Ayemenem. Therefore, twenty three years
later, Rahel and Estha still sense the smell of Velutha’s blood no matter where they
are.
Fragments of small things that scatter in The God of Small Things form the life
space of Rahel and Estha, which are produced by the particularities of the place,
Ayemenem, from its history and social relation with those who live in it. People have
different life experiences from their interrelation with place, and place forms different
life spaces for those who live there. From Rahel and Estha, the thesis observes how
Ayemenem forms Rahel and Estha’s life space by the small things, and their life space
also shape their sense of the place. Place thus is represented by its social relation with
people, for place is identified by personal experience and life space of those who live
there.
By exploring the interrelation between people and place, the thesis reveals how
place produces meanings. Place becomes meaningful only if place connects with
those who live there when people conceive and perceive their life experience from
place and produce their life space.

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Remapping the Small Things: Place and Life Space in

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

By: Sun Siao Jing

Advisor: Dr. Min-hsiou Rachel Hung

I would like to express my gratitude to several people who help me so much in

I am also very grateful for my committee members, Professor Hsin-ya Huang

Kaohsiung Normal University.

and useful suggestions.

During my school life, I am most thankful to Professor Yu-san Yu whose

kindness supports me to complete my thesis. Finally, I would like to thank my best

accompanies me through my entire student life.

which is formed by small things that people perceive and conceive.

constructed by people’s life experience and life space.

God of Small Things.

According to Lucy Lippard, place is “temporal and spatial, personal and

apparently without any reference to writing or other means of representation” (3). In

landscape in front of people’s eyes.

reveals its own history.

Cresswell’s theory to explore the particularity of Ayemenem, but rather by researching

Cresswell’s social constructionist approach by using the distinctiveness and

constructionist approach. This approach still concerns the distinctiveness and

formed under “capitalism, patriarchy, heterosexism, post-colonialism and a host of

group under the social structure of Ayemenem.

In studying place by constructionist approach, Doreen Massey tries to explore

challenge to David Harvey’s idea of time-space compression. According to Harvey,

is under time-space compression due to the “political economy of place construction

under capitalism” (Cresswell 57). In short, following Harvey’s explanation, Cresswell

anxiety and need to be resisted (Cresswell 71). Therefore, at the beginning of

Massey’s paper, she questions the assumptions of time-space compression and

points out:“Power-geometry of time-space compression, different social groups and

They could be businessmen who distribute movies, control news, organize

we think about ‘locality?’” (151).

She analyzes Kilburn in the north-west of London as an example. Though Kilburn

imagine place as “moments in networks of social relations and understandings” (154).

conflicts between social groups in Ayemenem. Third, the uniqueness of place is

(Massey 155-56). As a result, Massey defines place as processes constructed by social

relations could be demonstrated from the structure of class. Therefore, by illustrating

experiences with the idea of space and place.

Cresswell’s third level of place study is a phenomenological approach. The

belonging, while space is for abstract discussions of special science. He elaborates

perceive in their home town, Ayemenem.

people “experience the world—through and in place” (Cresswell 50). Therefore,

form their sense of the place, Ayemenem.

a phenomenological approach relate to each other since the place people

live—favorite rooms, neighbors, and nations—could be analyzed as the product of

Lefebvre also emphasizes the significance of experience. He remarks that sensory

social space and their interconnections” (Lefebvre 405). Therefore, personal

Based on Lefebvre’s space theory, Soja has developed the “trialectics of

term, is “a material and materialized ‘physical’ spatiality that is directly

comprehended in empirically measurable configurations,” such as “sites and

concrete and mappable geographies” (74-75). Firstspace accents objectivity and

materiality. Firstspace is the traditional domain of human geography to explore “the

production of Firstspace either in “individual and collective psychologies” or in “the

social processes and practices presumed to be underlying and structuring the

production of material spatialities.” Marxist geographers explain the uneven

the study of Firstspace tends to focus on “presumably non-spatial variables, behaviors,

and social activity such as historical development, class consciousness, cultural

preferences, and rational economic choice” (Soja 77).

In contrast to the materiality of Firstspace, Secondspace is a conceived space

(espace conçu) that is “primarily produced through discursively devised

representations of space, through the spatial workings of mind” (Soja 79).