TEXTO ETNICAS, Apuntes de Idioma Inglés

¡Descarga TEXTO ETNICAS y más Apuntes en PDF de Idioma Inglés solo en Docsity! “The poetic intensity of Roy's prose, her dynamic energy, her capacity to touch the combined strain of high jinks and pathos in childish humour, her presentation of characters through the children's disturbing perspective have a fanction beyond that of holding the reader to the narrative. They create within the framework of Rahel's desolation the magic of prelapsarian Eden, and make the fall from innocence doubly poignant. BHASWATI CHAKRAVORTY, The Telegraph (Calcutta) “A work of unusual range and depth and feeling, all the more remarkable for finding expression ín a first novel. Tt is so well- paced, evocative and denselyplotted that lt sustains the tension and taumess ofa thriller.* SUNIL SETH!E, Outlook “Arundhati Roy has stretched language and imagination to recreate the fun-filled, magical yet anguished world of child- hood with poignant simplicity, directness and wit.* MARIA COUTO, Stontline ARUNDHATT ROY The God of Small Things FOURTH ESTATE + London Q.660756 2837  Paradise Pickles € Preserves May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month, The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trers. Red bananas ripen, Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebotiles hum vacuously in the fiuity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baflled in the sun. The nights are clear but suffused with sloth and sullen expec- tation. But by early June the south-west monscon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with. The countryside turas an immodest green. Boundaries blur as tapioca [ences take root and bloom. Brick walls turn mossgreen. Pepper vines smake up electric pol Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across thx (looded roads. Boats ply in the bazaars. And small fish appear in the puddles that fill he PWD potholes on the highways. It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenern. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, ploughing it up like gun- fire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat. The walls, streaked with moss, had grown soft, and bulged a fte with dampness that seeped up from the ground. The wild, overgrown garden was fall of the whisper and scurry of small lives. ln the undergrowth a rat TEE GOD OF SMALL THINGS these things lying in a collin looking up than standing in the pews, hemmed in by sad hips and hymnbooks. Rahel thought ofthe someone who had taken the trouble to go up there with cans of paint, white for the clouds, blue for the sky, , and brushes, and thinner. She imagined him up there, someone like Velutha, bare bodied and shining, sitting on a plank, swinging from the scaffolding in the high dome of the church, painting silver jets in a blue church sky. She thought of what would happen if the rope snapped. She imagined him dropping like a dark star out of the sky that he had made. Lying broken on the hot church floor, dark blood spilling from his skull like a secret. By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar vith the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a bre Thing Two that Sophie Mol showed Rahel was the bat baby. During the funeral service, Rahel watched a small black bat climb up Baby Kochamma's expensive funeral sari with gently clinging curled claws. When it reached the place berween her sari and her blouse, her roll of sadness, her bare midriff, Baby Kochamma screamed and hit the air with her hymnbook. The singing stopped for a “Whatisi? Whathappened? and for a furrywhirring and a sariflapping. The sad priests dusted out their curly beards with goldringed fingers as though hidden spiders had spun sudden cobwebs in them. The baby bar flew up into the sky and turned ínto a jel plane without a crisscrossed trail, Only Rahel noticed Sophie Mol's secret cartwhcel in her cofáin. The sad singing started again and they sang the same sad verse twice. And oncc more the ycllow church swelled like a throat with voices. PARADISE PICKLES € PRESERVES When they lowered Sophie Mol's coffin into the ground in the Ktde cemetery behind the church, Rahel mew that she still wasr't dead. She heard (on Sophie MoP's behalf), the sofisounds of the red mud and the hardsounds ol the orange laterite that spoiled the shining coffn polish. She heard the dullthudding through the polished cofán wood, through the satin collía dining. The sad priests? voices muffled by mud and wood. We entrust into ¿hy hands, most merciful Father, The soul of this our child departed, And we commit her body to the ground, Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. loside the earth Sophie Mol screamed, and shredded san with her teeth. But you can't hear screams through earth and stone. Sophie Mol died because she couldn't breathe. Her funeral killed her. Dus to dus to dus to dus to dus. On her tombstone it said 4 Sunbeam Lent To Us Too Brifip. Ammu explained later that Too Briefly meant For “loo Short a While, After the funeral Ammu took the twins back to the Kottayam police station, They were familiar with the place. They had spent a good part of the previous day there. Ánticipating the sharp, smoky stink of old urine that permeated the walls and furniture, they clamped their nostrils shut well before the smell began. Ammu asked for the Station House Officer and when she was shown into his office, she told him that there had been a terrible mistake and that she wanted to make a statement. She asked to sec Velutha. Inspector Thomas Mathew's moustaches bustled Like the friendly Air India Maharajab's, but his eyes werc sly and greedy. “Tes a litde too late for all this, don't you think?” he said, He 7 THE GOD OF 83MALL THINGS spoke the coarse Kottayam dialect of Malayalam. He stared at Aromw's breasts as he spoke. He said the police knew all they needed to know and that the Kottayam Police didn't take state- ments from veshyas or their illegiúmate children. Ammu said she'd see about that. Inspector Thomas Mathew came around his desk and approached Aramu with his baton. “lí were you, he said, 'Pd go home quietly.” Then he tapped her breasts with his baton. Gently. Tap, tap. As though he was choosing mangoes from a basket, Pointing out the ones that he wanted packed and delivered. Inspector Thomas Mathew scemed to know whom he could pick on and whom he couldn't. Poticemen have that instinct, Behind him a red and blue board said: P oliteness Obedience Loyalty Intelligence Courtesy Efficiency When they left the police station Armmu was crying, so Estha and Rahel didn't ask hcr what zeskya meant. Or for that matter, illegilimate. lowas the first time they'd seen their mother cry. She waso't sobbing. Her face was set like stone, but the tears welled up in her eyes and ran down her rigid cheeks. lt made the twins sick with fear. Ammws tears made everything that had so far seemed unreal, real, They went back to Ayemenem by bus. The conductor, a narrow man in khaki, slid towards her on the bus rails, He balanced his bony hips against the back ofa seat and clicked his ticker-puncher at Ammu. Where to? the chick was meant to mean. Rahel could smell the sheaf of bus tickets and the sourness of the steel bus-rails on the conductor's hands, “He's dead,” Ammu whispered to him. Pve killed him.* 8 PARADISE PIGKLES $ PRESERVES “Ayemenem,” Estha said quickly, before the conductor lost his temper. He took the money out of Ammuw's pursc. The conductor gave him the tickets. Estha folded them carcfully and put them in his pockeL. Then he put his little arms around his rigid, weeping mother. "Two weeks later, Estha was Returned. Ammu was made to send him back to their father, who had by then resigned his lonely tea estate job in Assam and moved to Calcutta to work for a company that made carbon black. He had remarried, stopped drinking (more or less), and sullered only occasional relapses, Estha and Rahel hado* scen each other since. And now, twenty-three years later, their father had re-Returned Estha. He had sent him back to Ayemenem with a suitcase and a letter, The suitcase was full of smart new clothes. Baby Kochamma showed Rahel the letter. It was written in a slanting, femininc, convent school hand, but the signature underneath was their father's. Or at least the name was. Rahel wouldn't have recognized (he signature. The letter said that ho, iheir father, had retired from his carbon black job and was emigrating to Australia where hc had got a job as Chief of Security at a ceramics factory, and that he couldo't take Estha with him. He wished everybody in Ayemenem the very best and said that he would look in on Estha if he ever came back to India, which, he went on to say, was a bit unlikely. Baby Kochamma told Rahel that she could keep the letter if she wanted to. Rahel put it back into ¡ts envelope. “lhe paper had grown soft, and folded like cloth. She had forgotten just how damp the monsoon air in Aye- menem could be. Swollen cupboards creaked. Locked windows burst open. Books got soft and wavy between their covers. Strange insects appeared like ideas in the evenings and burned 9 THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS themselves on Baby Kochamma' dim 40-watt bulbs. In the daytime their crisp, incinerated corpses littered the fioor and windowsills, and until Kochu Maria swept them away in her plastic dustpan, the air smelled of Something Burning. l: had changed, the June Rain. Heaven opened and the water hamumered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea-coloured puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colourcd minds. The grass looked wetgreen and pleased. Happy earthworras frolicked purple in the slush. Green netdes nodded. 'Prees bent. Further away, in the wind and rain, on the banks of the river, in the sudden thunderdarkness of the day, Estha was walking. He was wearing a crushed-strawberry-pink T-shirt, drenched darker now, and he knew that Rahel had come. Estha had always been a quiet child, so no one could pinpoint with any degree of accuracy exactly when (the year, if not the month or day) he had stopped talking. Stopped talking altogether, that is. The fact is that there wasn't an “exactly when”. It had been a gradual winding down and closing shop. A barely noticcable quietening. As (bough he had simply run out of conversation and had nothing lell to say. Yet Estha's silence was never awkward, Never intrusivc. Never noisy. HL wasn't an accusing, protesting silence as much as a sort of aestivation, a dormancy, the psychological equivalent of what Iungfsh do to get themselves through the dry season, except that in Estha's case the dry season looked as though it would last for ever. Over time he had acquired the ability to blend into the background of wherever he was — into bookshelves, gardens, curtains, doorways, streets — to appear inanimate, almost invis- ble to the untrained eye. It usually took strangers a while to notice him even when they were in the same room with him. 10 PARADISE PIGKLES € PRESERVES Ít took thera even longer to notice that he never spoke. Some never noticed at all. Estha occupied very little space in the world. After Sophie Mol's funeral, when Estha was Returned, their father sent him to a boys' school in Calcuta. He was not an exceptional studeni, but neither was he backward, nor parlicu- larly bad at anything. Án average siudent, or Satisfacior» work were the usual comments that hís teachers wrote in his Annual Pro- gress Reports. Does nol participate in Group Activities was another recurring complaint. Though what exactly they meant by “Group Activities” they never said. Estha finished school with mediocre results, but refused to go to college. Instead, much to the initial embarrassment of his father and stepmother, he began to do he housework, Ás though in his own way he was trying to carn his keep. He did the sweeping, swabbing and ali the laundry. He learned to cook and shop for vegetables. Vendors in the bazaar, silting behind pyramids of viled, shining vegetables, grew to recognize him and would attend to him amidst the clamouring of their olher customers. They gave him rusted film cans in which to put the vegetables he picked. He never bargained. They never cheated him. When the vegctables had been weighed and paid for, they would transfer thern to his red plastic shopping basket (onions at the bottom, brinjal and tomatoes on the top) and always a sprig of coriander and a fistfil of green chillies for free. Estha carried them home in the erowded tram. A quiet bubble floating on a sea of noise. At meal times when he wanted something, he got up and helped himself. Once the quiemess arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. lt reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, foctal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckured tentacles inching along the insides of 1 THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS Mammachi's violin case. 1n the scabs of (he sores on Chacko's shins that he constantly worried. In his slack, womanish legs. It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that t purlomed. Over the years, as the memory of Sophie Mol (the seeker of small wisdoms: Where do old birds go to die? Why dow't dead ones fall like stones from the sky? The harbinger of harsh reality: You're both zohole wogs and Tm a half one. The guru of gore: Fue seen a mon in an accident with his eyeball swinging on the end of a nerve, like a yo-y0) stowly faded, the Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. lt was always there. Like a fruit in season. Every season. As perma- nent as a Government job. lt ushered Rahel through childhood (from school to school) into womanhood. Rahel was first blacklisted in Nazareth Convent at the age of eleven, when she was caught outside her Housemistress's garden gate decorating a knob of fresh cowdung with small flowers. At Assembly the next morning she was made to look up depravity in the Oxford Dictionary and read aloud its meaning, “The quality or condition of being depraved or comupt? Rahel read, with a row of stern-mouthed nuns scated behind her and a sea of sniggering schoolgirl faces in front. “Perverted quality: Moral perver- sion; The innale corruption of human nature due to original sin; Both the elect and the non-elect come into the world in e state of total d. and elienation from God, and can, of themselves do nothing but sin. J. H. Blunt? Six months later she was expelled after repeated complaints from senior girls. She was accused (quite rightly) of hiding behind doors and deliberately colliding with her seniors. When she was questioned by the Principal about her behaviour (cajoled, caned, starved), she eventually admilled that she had done it to find out whether breasts hurt. In that Christian insti- tution, breasts were not acknowledged. They weren't supposed to exist, and if they didn't could they hurt? That was the first of three expulsions. The second for 6 PARADISE PICKLES € PRESERVES smoking. The third for setting fire to her Housemistress's false hair bun which, under duress, Rahel confessed to having stolen. In each of the schools she went to, the teachers noted that she: (a) Was an extremely polite child. (b) Had no friends. lt appeared to be a civil, solitary form of corruption. And for this very reason, they all agreed (savouring their tcacherly disapproval, touching it with their tongues, sucking it like a sweet) — all the more serious. lt was, they whispered to each other, as ¿hoxgh she didn'e faros how to be a girl. They werent far off the mark. Oddly, neglect seemed to have resulted im an accidental release of the spirit, Rahel grew up without a brief. Without anybody to arrange a marriage for her. Without anybody who would pay her a dowry and therefore without an obligatory husband looming on her horizon. So as long as she wasn't noisy about it, she remained free to make her own enquiries: into breasts and how much they hurt. Into false hair buns and how well they burned. Into life and how it ought to be lived. When she finished school, she won admission into a mediocre college of Architecture in Delhi, lt wasn't the outcome of any serious interest in Architecture. Nor even, in fact, of a superficial one. She just happened to take the entrance exam, and hap- pened to get through. The staff were impressed by the size (enormous), rather than the skill, of her charcoal still-life sketches. The careless, reckless lines were mistaken for artistic confidence, though in truth, their creator was no artist. She spent eight years in college without finishing the five-year undergraduate course and taking her degree, The fees were low Y TIE GOD OF SMALL THINGS and it wasn't hard to scratch out a living, staying in the hostel, eating in the subsidized student mess, rarely going to class, working instead as a draughtsman in gloomy architectural firms that exploited cheap student labour to render their presentation drawings and to blame when things went wrong. The other students, particularly the boys, were intimidated by RahcP's way- wardness and almost fierce lack of ambition. They left her alone, She was never invited to their nice homes or noisy parties. Even her professors were a little wary of her - her bizarre, impractical building plans, presented on cheap brown paper, her indiffer- ence to their passionate critiques. She occasionally wrote to Chacko and Mammachi, but never returned to Ayemenem. Not when Mammachi died. Not when Chacko emigrated to Canada. Ít was while she was at the School of Architecture that she met Larry McCaslin who was in Delhi collecting material for hús doctoral thesis on Energy Ejficiensy in Vernacular Architecture. He first noticed Rabel in the School library and then agaín, a few days later, in Khan Market, She wás in jeans and a white U'-shirt. Part of án old patchwork bedspread was buttoned around her neck and trailed behind her like a cape, Her wild hair was tied back to look straight though it wasmt. A tiny diamond gleamed in one nostril. She had absurdly beautiful collarbones and a Nice athletic run. There goes a jazz tune, Larry McCaslin thought to himself, and followed her into a bookshop where neither of them looked at books, Rahel drifted into marriage like a passenger drifts towards an unoccupied chair in an airport lounge. With a Sitting Down sense. She returned with him to Boston. When Larry held his wife in his arms, her cheek against his heart, he was tall enough to see the top of her head, the dark tumble of her hair, When he put his finger near the corner of her mouth he could feel a ny pulse. He loved ils location. And 18 PARADISE PICELES de PRESERVES that faint, uncertain jumping, just under her skin. He would touch it, listening with his eyes, Bike an expectant facher feeling his unborn baby kick inside lts mother's worab. He held her as though she was a gift. Given to him in love. Something still and small. Unbearably precious. But when they made love he was offended by her eyes. They behaved as though they belonged to someone else. Someone watching. Looking out of the window at the sea. At a boat in the river. Or a passer-by in the mist in a hat. He was exasperated because he didn't know what trat look meant, He put it somewhere berween indifference and despair, He didn't know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happencd when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation, Thar Big God howled like a hot wind, and dermanded obeisance, Then Small God (cosy and contained, private and limited) came away cau- torized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequenco, hc became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less 14 mattered. 11 was never imporíant enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening. So Small God laughud a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. He whistled, kicked stones. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune. He climbed into people's eyes and became an exasperating expression. What Larry McCaslin saw in Rahel's cyes was not despair at all, but a sort of enforced optimism. And a hollow where 19 THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS Estha's words had been. He couldn't he expected to understand that. That the emptiness in one twin was only a version of he quietness in the other. That the two things fitted together. Like stacked spoons. Like familiar lovers” bodies. After they were divorced, Rahel worked lor a few months as a waitress in an Indian restaurant in New York. And then for several years as a night clerk in a bullet-proof cabin at a gas station outside Washington, where drunks occasionally vomited into the money tray, and pimps propositioned her with more lucrative job offers. Twice she saw men being shot through their car windows. And once a man who bad been stabhed, ejected from a moving car with a knife in his back. Then Baby Kochamma wrote to say that Estha had been re-Returned. Rahel gave np her job at the gas station and left America gladly. To return to Ayemenem. To Estha in the rain, In the old house on the hill, Baby Kochamma sat at the dining table rubbing the thick, frothy bitterness out of an elderly cucumber. She was wearing a limp, checked, seersucker night- gown with pulled sleeves and yellow tarmeric stains. Under the table she swung her tiny, manicured feel, like a small child on a high chair. They were pully with oedema, like little foot- shaped air cushions. lo the old days whenever anybody visited Ayemenem, Baby Kochamma made it a point to call attention to their large fect. She would ask to try on their slippers and say, “Look how big for me they are” Then she would walk around the house in them, lifting her sari a little so that every- body could marvel at her tiny feet. She worked on the cucumber with an air of barely concealed triumph. She was delighted that Esta had not spoken to Rahel. That he had looked at her and walked straight past. Inlo the rain. As he did with everyone else. She was ejghty-threc, Her eyes spread like butter behind her thick glasses. 20 PARADISE PICKLES $ PRESERVES 11 told you, didn't 1? she said to Rahel, “What did you expect? Special treatment? He's lost his mind, Pin telling yow! He doesn't recegnizo people any more! What did you think?” Rahel said nothing. She could feel the rhythm of Estha's rocking, and the wetness of rain on his skin. She could hcar the raucous, scrambled world inside his head. Baby Kochamma looked up at Rahel uneasily. Already she regretred having written to her about Estha's return. But then, what else could she have done? Had him on her hands for the rest of her life? Why should she? He waswt her responsibility. Or was he? The silence sal between grand-niece and baby grand aunt like a third person. A stranger. Swollen. Noxious. Baby Kochamma reminded hersclf to lock her bedroom door at night. She tricd to think of something to say. “How d'yon like my bob? With her cucumber hand she touched her new haircut. She lefl a riveting bitter blob of cucumber froth behind. Rahel could think of nothing to say. She watched Baby Kochamma peel her cucumber. Yellow slivers of cucumber skin flecked her bosom. Her hair, dyed jetblack, was arranged across her scalp like unspooled thread. The dye had stained the skin of her forehead a pale grey, giving her a shadowy second hairtinc. Rahel noticed that she had started wearing make- up. Lipstick. Kohl. A siy touch of rouge. Ánd because the house was locked and dark, and because she only believed in 3o-watt buibs, her lipstick mouth had shifted slightly off her real mouth. She had lost weight on her face and shoulders, which had tumned her from being a round person into a conical person. But sitting at the dining table with her enormous hips concealed, she managed to look almost fragile. The dim, dining-room light had rubbed the wrinkdes off her face leaving il looking — in a 21