The God of Small Things: Title
Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is the story of Estha and Rahel, the small two-egg twins who bear witness to other small, insignificant things of life that change their small world. It is a story of
innocence lost, of love unfulfilled, a story whose sheer smallness accounts for its extraordinary power. In a sense, it is a story of development: the intermittent narrative eavesdroppings on the childhood of the twins tell us something of the big changes that the small things of life inevitably bring about. The incident at Abhilash Talkies, the smell of wood and fish curry in Velutha’s hut, the long-wished-for journey to the History House, or Inspector Thomas Mathew’s tapping Ammu’s breasts are the small things in the backdrop of Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad’s second coming or India’s war with Pakistan. Because these are the grand things. But the small things are what memories are made of, and memories bring desires. Thus, recollected in tranquillity as the narrative is, it is full of digressions on apparently unimportant (but capitalized) incidents and things that seem to have a formative influence on the future of Estha and Rahel. Surrounded by things that appear small and insignificant, Estha comes to occupy “a very little space in the world” while Rahel’s eyes are marked by a look which is neither indifference nor despair but a form of emptiness that laughs and makes fun of its own inanity. The god who
presides over this world of small things is Small God. He is also the God of Loss, of memory and desire, the one-armed man of Ammu’s dreams. The god’s having only one arm is significant: the handicap points to the god’s powerlessness and relative unimportance in the scheme of things; like Velutha, he is an untouchable, allowed no place in the pantheon of the God of Big Things. If Big God is social, national or universal, Small God is private, and the loss he presides over is a private loss, acknowledged only by those who suffer it intimately. But he is a playful god, playful because unperturbed by his own inconsequence. Indeed, for all its apparent seriousness, The God of Small Things tells a funny story of a pair of dizygotic twins who seem to show less interest in what affects the outside world than in the small closed world within themselves, a world where a cousin dies of suffocation in her coffin, where words become meaningful when read backwards, and above all where thirty-one is “a viable die-able age.” The God of Small Things is a celebration of life with all its “sicksweet” flavor (with sickness predominating) and a poetic story of the laughing god who presides over this life.