The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy Read Free Book Online

to Ayemenem. Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for.
    Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.
    Still, to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem is only one way of looking at it.
    Equally, it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago. Long before the Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch Ascendency, before Vasco da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin’s conquest of Calicut Before three purple-robed Syrian bishops murdered by the Portuguese were found floating in the sea, with coiled sea serpents riding on their chests and oysters knotted in their tangled beards. It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag.
    That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.
    And how much.
    however, for practical purposes,
in a hopelessly practical world …

CHAPTER 2
PAPPACHI’S MOTH
    … it was a skyblue day in December sixty-nine (the nineteen silent). It was the kind of time in the life of a family when something happens to nudge its hidden morality from its resting place and make it bubble to the surface and float for a while. In clear view. For everyone to see.
    A skyblue Plymouth, with the sun in its tailfins, sped past young rice fields and old rubber trees on its way to Cochin. Further east, in a small country with similar landscape (jungles, rivers, rice fields, Communists), enough bombs were being dropped to cover all of it in six inches of steel. Here however it was peacetime and the family in the Plymouth traveled without fear or foreboding.
    The Plymouth used to belong to Pappachi, Rahel and Estha’s grandfather. Now that he was dead, it belonged to Mammachi, their grandmother, and Rahel and Estha were on their way to Cochin to see
The Sound of Music
for the third rime. They knew all the songs.
    After that they were all going to stay at Hotel Sea Queen with the oldfood smell. Bookings had been made. Early next morning theywould go to Cochin Airport to pick up Chacko’s ex-wife—their English aunt, Margaret Kochamma—and their cousin, Sophie Mol, who were coming from London to spend Christmas at Ayemenem. Earlier that year, Margaret Kochamma’s second husband, Joe, had been killed in a car accident. When Chacko heard about the accident he invited them to Ayemenem. He said that he couldn’t bear to think of them spending a lonely, desolate Christmas in England. In a house full of memories.
    Ammu said that Chacko had never stopped loving Margaret Kochamma. Mammachi disagreed. She liked to believe that he had never loved her in the first place.
    Rahel and Estha had never met Sophie Mol. They’d heard a lot about her though, that last week. From Baby Kochamma, from Kochu Maria, and even Mammachi. None of them had met her either, but they all behaved as though they already knew her. It had been the
What Will Sophie Mol Think?
week.
    That whole week Baby Kochamma eavesdropped relentlessly on the twins’ private conversations, and whenever she caught them speaking in Malayalam, she levied a small fine which was deducted at source. From their pocket money. She made them write lines— “impositions” she called them—
I will always speak in English, I will always speak in English.
A hundred times each. When they were done, she scored them out with her red pen to make sure that old lines were not recycled for new punishments.
    She had made them practice an English car song for the way back. They had to form the words properly,