Thirty-one. Not old. Not young. But a viable die-able age.
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Estha occupied very little space in the world.
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Estha would walk past, not rude, not polite. Just quiet
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He dismissed the whole business as the Inevitable Consequence of Necessary Politics.
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They provided the care (food, clothes, fees), but withdrew the concern.
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In that Christian institution, breasts were not acknowledged. They weren’t supposed to exist (and if they didn’t could they hurt?).
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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 passerby in the mist in a hat.
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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.
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Baby Kochamma loved the Ayemenem house and cherished the furniture that she had inherited by outliving everybody else.
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She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture. She kept her doors and windows locked, unless she was using them.
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desperate and dispossessed people. She
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desperate and dispossessed people. She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.
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They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam, and jelly jelly.
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His arms had goosebumps where the handcuffs touched his skin. Cold handcuffs with a sourmetal smell.
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a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes.
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choosing between her husband’s name and her father’s name didn’t give a woman much of a choice.
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In the way that the unfortunate sometimes dislike the co-unfortunate,
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She subscribed wholeheartedly to the commonly held view that a married daughter had no position in her parents’ home. As for a divorced daughter-according to Baby Kochamma, she had no position anywhere at all. And as for a divorced daughter from a love marriage, well, words could not describe Baby Kochamma’s outrage. As for a divorced daughter from a intercommunity love marriage—Baby Kochamma chose to remain quiveringly silent on the subject. The twins were too young to understand all this, so Baby Kochamma grudged them their moments of high happiness when a dragonfly they’d caught lifted a small stone off their palms with its legs, or when they had permission to bathe the pigs, or they found an egg hot from a hen.
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She subscribed wholeheartedly to the commonly held view that a married daughter had no position in her parents’ home. As for a divorced daughter-according to Baby Kochamma, she had no position anywhere at all. And as for a divorced daughter from a love marriage, well, words could not describe Baby Kochamma’s outrage. As for a divorced daughter from a intercommunity love marriage—Baby Kochamma chose to remain quiveringly silent on the subject.
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She had managed to persuade herself over the years that her unconsummated love for Father Mulligan had been entirely due to her restraint and her determination to do the right thing.
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as though he was making an effort to be civil to the photographer while plotting to murder his wife.
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(d)All Indian mothers are obsessed with their sons and are therefore poor judges of their abilities.
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They were made to write “In future we will not read backwards. In future we will not read backwards”. A hundred times. Forwards. A few months later Miss Mitten was killed by a milk van in Hobart, across the road from a cricket oval. To the twins there was hidden justice in the fact
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nataS ni rieht seye. They were made to write “In future we will not read backwards. In future we will not read backwards”. A hundred times. Forwards. A few months later Miss Mitten was killed by a milk van in Hobart, across the road from a cricket oval. To the twins there was hidden justice in the fact
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nataS ni rieht seye. They were made to write “In future we will not read backwards. In future we will not read backwards”. A hundred times. Forwards. A few months later Miss Mitten was killed by a milk van in Hobart, across the road from a cricket oval. To the twins there was hidden justice in the fact that the milk van had been reversing.
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“is it at all possible for you to prevent your washed-up cynicism from completely coloring everything?”
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He was called Velutha—which means White in Malayalam—because he was so black.
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He stared straight ahead with his mortgaged eye. He wept with his own one.
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He stared straight ahead with his mortgaged eye. He wept with his own one. One cheek glistened with tears. The other stayed dry.
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Ammu had told them the story of Julius Caesar and how he was stabbed by Brutus, his best friend, in the Senate. And how he fell to the floor with knives in his back and said, “Et tu, Brute? —then fall, Caesar.”
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“You can’t dictate what she does with her own spit!”
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In an unconscious gesture of television-enforced democracy, mistress and servant both scrabbled unseeingly in the same bowl of nuts.
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In her mind she kept an organized, careful account of Things She’d Done For People, and Things People Hadn’t Done For Her.
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live in Ayemenem. My grandmother owns Paradise Pickles & Preserves. She’s the Sleeping Partner.” “Is she, now?” the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man said. “And who does she sleep with?”
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“I live in Ayemenem. My grandmother owns Paradise Pickles & Preserves. She’s the Sleeping Partner.” “Is she, now?” the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man said. “And who does she sleep with?”
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Estha went behind the Refreshments Counter for his Free Cold Drink. He saw the three high stools arranged in a row for the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man to sleep on. The wood shiny from his sitting. “Now if you’ll kindly hold this for me,” the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man said, handing Estha his penis through his soft white muslin dhoti, “I’ll get you your drink. Orange? Lemon?” Estha held it because he had to. “Orange? Lemon?” the Man said. “Lemonorange?” “Lemon, please,” Estha said politely. He got a cold bottle and a straw. So he held a bottle in one hand and a penis in the other. Hard, hot, veiny. Not a moonbeam. The Orangedrink Lemondrink Man’s hand closed over Estha’s. His thumbnail was long like a woman’s. He moved Estha’s hand up and down. First slowly. Then fastly. The lemondrink was cold and sweet. The penis hot and hard. The piano keys were watching. “So your grandmother runs a factory?” the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man said. “What kind of factory?” “Many products,” Estha said, not looking, with the straw in his mouth. “Squashes, pickles, jams, curry powders. Pineapple slices.” “Good,” the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man said, “Excellent” His hand closed tighter over Estha’s. Tight and sweaty. And faster still. Fast foster flies: – Never let it rest Until the fast is faster; And the faster’s fest.
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She asked him for a divorce. Those last few tortured nights before he left her, Chacko would slip out of bed with a torch and look at his sleeping child. To learn her. Imprint her on his memory. To ensure that when he thought of her, the child that he invoked would be accurate.
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Now he had a house and a Bajaj scooter. A wife and an issue.
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He didn’t have a How do YOU do? in him.
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She felt somehow humiliated by this public revolt in her area of jurisdiction. She had wanted a smooth performance. A prize for her children in the Indo-British Behavior Competition.
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They walked past the Class III Airport Workers’ Union token one-day hunger strike. And past the people watching the Class III Airport Workers’ Union token one-day hunger strike. And past the people watching the people watching the people. A small tin sign on a big banyan tree said For VD. Sex Complaints contact Dr. OK Joy.
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An engineer from the Ettumanoor municipality was supervising the disposal of the carcass. They had to be careful because the decision would serve as precedent for all future Government Pachyderm Carcass Disposals. Not a matter to be treated lightly. There was a fire engine and some confused firemen.
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An engineer from the Ettumanoor municipality was supervising the disposal of the carcass. They had to be careful because the decision would serve as precedent for all future Government Pachyderm Carcass Disposals. Not a matter to be treated lightly.
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She was thirty-one. Not old, not young, but a viable, die-able age.
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Neither Mammachi nor Baby Kochamma saw any contradiction between Chacko’s Marxist mind and feudal libido.
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A pair of actors trapped in a recondite play with no hint of plot or narrative. Stumbling through their parts, nursing someone else’s sorrow. Grieving someone else’s grief.
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He walked on water. Perhaps. But could He have swum on land?
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“If you’re happy in a dream, Ammu, does that count?” Estha asked. “Does what count?” “The happiness—does it count?”
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Ammu undressed and put a red toothbrush under a breast to see if it would stay. It didn’t Where she touched herself her flesh was taut and smooth. Under her hands her nipples wrinkled and hardened like dark nuts, pulling at the soft skin on her breasts. The thin line of down from her belly button led over the gentle curve of the base of her belly, to her dark triangle. Like an arrow directing a lost traveler. An inexperienced lover She undid her hair and turned around to see how long it had grown. It fell, in waves and curls and disobedient frizzy wisps—soft on the inside, coarser on the outside—to “The God of Small Things” By Arundhati Roy 107 just below where her small, strong waist began its curve out towards her hips. The bathroom was hot. Small beads of sweat studded her skin like diamonds. Then they broke and trickled down. Sweat ran down the recessed line of her spine. She looked a little critically at her round, heavy behind. Not big in itself. Not big per se (as Chacko-of-Oxford would no doubt have put it). Big only because the rest of her was so slender. It belonged on another, more voluptuous body.
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if in a dream you’ve eaten fish, it means you’ve eaten fish).
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The hidden fish of shame in a sea of glory.
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He still had about him the aura of rage that even murder cannot quell.
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found herself looking forward to the Rumpled
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Despite her marital troubles, she had that air of secret elation; that affection for her own body that pregnant women often have.
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Mammachi’s rage at the old one-eyed Paravan standing in the rain, drunk, dribbling and covered in mud was re-directed into a cold contempt for her daughter and what she had done. She thought of her naked, coupling in the mud with a man who was nothing but a filthy coolie. She imagined it in vivid detail: a Paravan’s coarse black hand on her daughter’s breast. His mouth on hers. His black hips jerking between her parted legs. The sound of their breathing. His particular Paravan smell. Like animals, Mammachi thought and nearly vomited. Like a dog with a bitch on beat. Her tolerance of “Men’s Needs,” as far as her son was concerned, became the fuel for her unmanageable fury at her daughter. She had defiled generations of breeding (The Little Blessed One, blessed personally by the Patriarch of Antioch, an Imperial Entomologist, a Rhodes Scholar from Oxford) and brought the family to its knees. For generations to come, forever now, people would point at them at weddings and funerals. At baptisms and birthday parties.
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Inspector Thomas Mathew, receding behind his bustling Air India mustache, understood perfectly. He had a Touchable wife, two Touchable daughters—whole Touchable generations waiting in their Touchable wombs…
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They were both men whom childhood had abandoned without a trace. Men without curiosity. Without doubt. Both in their own way truly, terrifyingly adult. They looked out at the world and never wondered how it worked, because they knew. They worked it. They were mechanics who serviced different parts of the same machine.
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Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.
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quoted Chairman Mao. In Malayalam. His expression curiously like his niece’s. “Revolution is not a dinner party. Revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence in which one class overthrows another.”
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what he really needed was the process of war more than the outcome of victory.
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War could have been the stallion that he rode, part of, if not all, the way to the Legislative Assembly, whereas victory left him no better off than when he started out.
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It was not entirely his fault that he lived in a society where a man’s death could be more profitable than his life had ever been.
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it didn’t stop the feeling that somebody had lifted off his head and vomited into his body.
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it didn’t stop the feeling that somebody had lifted off his head and vomited into his body. Lumpy vomit dribbling down his insides. Over his heart. His lungs. The slow thick drip into the pit of his stomach. All his organs awash in vomit. There was nothing that rain could do about that.
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And there it was again. Another religion turned against itself. Another edifice constructed by the human mind, decimated by human nature.
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She died on the backseat, with her legs in the air. Like a joke.
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(When you re-create the image of man, why repeat God’s mistakes?)
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His skull was fractured in three places. His nose and both his cheekbones were smashed, leaving his face pulpy, undefined. The blow to his mouth had split open his upper lip and broken six teeth, three of which were embedded in his lower lip, hideously inverting his beautiful smile. Four of his ribs were splintered, one had pierced his left lung, which was what made him bleed from his mouth. The blood on his breath bright red. Fresh. Frothy. His lower intestine was ruptured and hemorrhaged, the blood collected in his abdominal cavity. His spine was damaged in two places, the concussion had paralyzed his right arm and resulted in a loss of control over his bladder and rectum. Both his kneecaps were shattered. Still they brought out the handcuffs. Cold.
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Nobody saw them. Bats, of course, are blind.
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There were people trapped in the glass paperweight on the policeman’s desk.
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She went to him and laid the length of her body against his. He just stood there. He didn’t touch her. He was shivering. Partly with cold. Partly terror. Partly aching desire. Despite his fear his body was prepared to take the bait. It wanted her. Urgently. His wetness wet her. She put her arms around him.
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Ammu smiled to herself in the dark, thinking how much she loved his arms—the shape and strength of them, how safe she felt resting in them when actually it was the most dangerous place she could be.
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Each time they parted, they extracted only one small promise from each other:
omorrow?
Tomorrow.
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She touched him lightly with her fingers and left a trail of goosebumps on his skin.
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They knew that there was nowhere for them to go. They had nothing. No future. So they stuck to the small things.
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