MEENA KANDASAMY ON The God Of Small Things

The God Of Small Things came to us in tiny doses. First, we read in the papers that a young Indian woman was bringing home the Booker Prize. I was a 13-year-old teenager in Chennai (Madras) in 1997, and her win was a welcome change from the other achievements that routinely bombarded us – an Indian woman won Miss World, an Indian woman won Miss Universe. For geeky-nerdy girls like me, Arundhati Roy was a welcome validation: we could do other things than take part in beauty contests.

The second time, Arundhati Roy was sued for obscenity for

The God Of Small Things.

The third time, I held a physical copy of this book when it was ordered for our school library. I cajoled the librarian to let me take it home for a night. I went to school the next day never having slept a wink, and I could not stop talking about it to all my girlfriends.

We all took turns reading it, sitting around in a circle on our school desks and reading its loveliest pages aloud. It was a book that made promises, and kept them. A novel that made and unmade language for me. Everything felt like perfection when I first read it; everything about it feels like perfection when I reread it now.

For all of the ornate, lyrical writing, it is an extremely political text and a novel of place – it captures the paradise-like beauty of Kerala like no other. It is a novel of childhood, of abuse – of state power, the abuses of feudalism, the predatory abuse of a child by Orangedrink Lemondrink Man. It is also a novel of immense resistance and great beauty.

Ammu, 31 years old (‘a viable, die-able age’) when the novel opens, is a heroine like no other, and I appreciate her all the more now that I’m a mother of two small children and in my 30s, too. Her story with Velutha (labourer, Untouchable) is the pulsating heart. Roy writes about caste taboos that enforce endogamy. Years afterwards, when I visit an atrocity zone like Dharmapuri where hundreds of villages of Dalit (ex-untouchable) people have been burnt to ashes because of an inter-caste marriage; when I read about the honour-killings of inter-caste couples, I remember the quiet defiance of Roy’s protagonists. The love that wrapped Ammu and Velutha together; a love that is almost always punished with death in my country.

It changed the way I look at love, at rivers, at beauty, at children, at marriages, at men, at women, at death. It changed the way

I look at myself. I urge every one of you to pick it up.