THE GOD OF - 'The God Of Small Things'

The first thing i learnt from Arundhati Roy's only novel - 'The God Of Small Things' is that one should never name the title of a creative writing before creating it. I realized later, that there is great fun in doing such an act as it throws up a thousand and one more ideas into the write up. And that is not the only thing that I liked about the novel. The God Of Small Things is semi-autobiography at its best. Arundhati converts all that she has seen of her home town of aymenem and all that her childhood has been through into a seemingly simple but unarguably spellbinding collection of words in what remains her only published novel till date. ( Which sometimes is surprising because I don't believe that Man ever went to moon for he never went there twice. But the question of authenticity is quenched by the autobiographical nature of this splendid book).

The God Of Small Things is essentially the story of a pair of fraternal boy-girl twins and their lives which are altered permanently thanks to a dreadful combination of love,extra-marital love,marriage, divorce, caste,religion (the usual villains), and infinitely many more factors. But as a quote in the opening page of the book goes "No story shall hereafter be written or read as one single story" , the book doesn't really deal with just the story of the twins. Interacting with their lives is the beautiful yet disturbed state of Kerala,the bitter truth behind communist politics,the history and religion of the syrian Christians, the life of a young kid blessed by the blessed one, the heart-break of a young girl in love with a church bishop, the story of a self made man who is tied down by retirement, the agony of a divorced mother who loses her only child when she makes a trip to her ex husband's place, the purposeless life of a woman and her servant maid who watch TV 24x7, the death of a dalit who made a mistake of loving a once-married woman belonging to an upper caste,the disgusting episode of a canteen owner making a young boy hold his penis to help him masturbate and a lot more.A lot lot more

In this narrative which goes back and forth and then flashes forward only to race further back, every mini-tale which ends up constituting this mega-tale is a heart wrenching experience. Every line is tragic and the language is fresh, even ten years after the book was written. She uses repeated phrases, which individually have no big effect but on repeated reading set in the nostalgia ball rolling. A lot of importance is paid to poems which the protagonists sang as kids, objects that they loved, tales that they heard and repeated, handwriting lessons, and every other cute thing that childhood is all about - the major irony being, this almost picture perfect childhood is later ripped off into an irreparable mode.

There are some major highlights where Arundhati hits the peak of brilliant writing. She travels the fine line between over-indulgence and magnificent descriptive writing. For instance the chapter towards the fag end of the novel where she describes the doped kathakalli dancers who want to apologise to god for having sold their art to the foreign tourists and so, come up with a breathtaking show at the temple.

Overall a stunning novel which unlike other uni-sense-drivers, makes every sense of yours get up and imagine-Not only do you imagine the picture she paints, but you also end up tasting her food, smelling her scent,hearing her cries, feeling her touch and more than all that losing your heart to her tale.

I know I am ten years late reading this novel, now in 2008, but the fact that i loved it suggests that this novel has not only withstood the cruel test of time but has ended up triumphing over it.