The God of Small Things Chapters 1 - 3
In 1993, Rahel Ipe left America and headed to her mother’s hometown, Ayemenem, a small coastal town in the Indian state of Kerala. The purpose of the journey is to reunite with her twin, Estha, who was separated from her 25 years ago. Rahel thinks back on the days that had changed the fate of her life and caused her to part ways with her fraternal twin. She remembers the day of Sophie Mol’s funeral, and how she had to stand aside from her mourning family along with Estha, and their mother, Ammu. Sophie Mol was Rahel’s first cousin through her mother’s brother, Chacko. Rahel remembers going to the police station with Ammu and Estha after the funeral, as Ammu wished to clarify something to the police. The policeman refused to hear her out and tapped her breasts with his stick before dismissing her outright. Ammu cried on the way back home. Estha was sent to live with their father a couple of weeks after the funeral. He adopted a quiet demeanor after the move and developed a quietness around himself that made people think he wasn’t there. He performed well in school, yet he refused to go to university. He stayed home and took care of the errands around the house until his father retired from his position in 1993. He wrote the family a letter, explaining that he couldn’t take Estha with him to Australia and that he was sending him back to his mother’s home.
Rahel learned of Estha’s return through her aunt, Baby Kochamma. The narrator reveals that Baby Kochamma was the younger daughter of a famous Reverend, as well as the younger sister of Rahel and Estha’s grandfather. She had fallen in love with an Irish priest who visited her father and converted to Catholicism in hopes of being closer to him. Eventually, she grew tired of living the life of a nun and wrote to her family for rescue. Her father brought her back home and sent her abroad for an education in Ornamental gardening. She used that education to craft a beautiful garden for her home, but she never married anyone. She continued to believe that she had loved purely, and harbored deep resentment for Ammu, the divorced daughter who had married a Hindu man. Rahel had faced her share of hurdles after the death of their cousin. Ammu left the house without a word, and Rahel was raised by the remaining family in the house. She couldn’t apply herself at school and often changed schools because of her troublemaking. She moved to Delhi to study architecture and spent several years working as a poorly paid architect’s assistant. She never completed her course and encountered an American doctoral student in Delhi. He fell in love with her, and Rahel married him indifferently. She moved to America with him, but their marriage soon fell apart. She divorced him rather indifferently and was working a cashier’s job when she heard from Baby Kochamma about Estha’s return.
Estha looks back on her life and decides that everything began to change with the arrival of Sophie Mol. In 1969, Estha and Rahel packed into their grandfather’s powdery blue Plymouth with Chacko, Ammu, and Baby Kochamma. They were headed to Cochin to pick up Chacko’s ex-wife and his daughter, Sophie. They had accepted Chacko’s invitation to spend Christmas with his family as they were dealing with the recent demise of Margaret’s husband, Joe. Chacko had met Margaret when he had been reading at Oxford, and they had gotten married quickly. However, Margaret had asked him for a divorce only a week after Sophie’s birth, as she confessed that she had been seeing someone else. Chacko returned to his family and finally put an end to the nightly beatings that his father administered to his mother. Chacko then took over the family pickle business that his mother had started. In the process of expanding the business with large bank loans, Chacko was slowly Bute surely leading the family to financial ruin. The twins were fascinated by the stacks of books that were always in his room, and extremely jealous about the arrival of his daughter. Chacko was an intellectual Marxist, and he took a particular interest in educating the young women, who worked in the factory, about Marxism.
Ammu, Chacko’s younger sister, had been denied higher education by her abusive father, who believed that women did not require a high level of education to be married. She escaped his home by marrying the first man who proposed to her, although he had been charming during their initial encounters. The marriage soured quite quickly for Ammu as she realized that her husband was a compulsive alcoholic. She decided to finally leave him when he asked her to sleep with his white employer so that he could retain his job. She bore the contempt of her family who felt that she had brought disgrace upon their family. On their way to the airport, the car encounters a large red mass of communists that halt its progress. The narrator briefly explains how the state of Kerala became the first place in the world where a communist government was formed democratically. The car is swarmed on all sides by the protesters, and Rahel happens to see an individual who appears to be Velutha, a worker of the untouchable class, whose family has served their family for several years. She happily calls out to him, but Ammu angrily shuts her up. Chacko questions whether Rahel had truly seen Velutha amongst the communists and Rahel backtracks on account of her mother’s reaction. Some of the protesters open the door and make Baby Kochamma wave their flag. They leave her feeling humiliated, and the car drives off towards the theatre where they will be watching The Sound of Music for a third time.
She finds their old home to be in a dilapidated condition, and the fault lies with her the only inhabiting family member, Baby Kochamma. Rahel and Estha’s spinster great aunt spends her days decked in the family’s gold jewelry, watching satellite TV with her old and ill-tempered maid. Estha does not react to Rahel’s reappearance, and this seems to delight Baby Kochamma. Rahel follows Estha to his room, the only clean place in the house, and watches him undress without caring about her presence.
Analysis
The God Of Small Things upends traditional storytelling structure. The novel begins at the height of a traditional story’s climax, the funeral of Sophie Mol, and quickly jumps between incidents of the future, present, and past. These flashbacks and flash-forwards can be extremely disconcerting, but eventually, achieve a rhythm that mirrors how we process reality. The author focuses on the small occurrences and habits of the characters involved. Throughout the novel, readers experience a certain dread for the characters since they are aware of the tragedy that awaits them in the future. The structure of the novel is non-linear yet it allows the reader to understand the true extent of the tragedy in the lives of the twins through its unique structure.
The story of Baby Kochamma’s love affair sets the tone for the rest of the love stories in the novel that are doomed to a tragic end. Although the use of traditional literary structure is limited, Velutha, who functions as the moral center of the novel is foreshadowed in the first chapter as Ammu realizes that she has led a “he” to his destruction.
