The God of Small Things

Finally I got to read Arundathi Roy's first and sole novel. It was her recent statements on the unfortunate Kashmir issue that stirred my interest to grab the book finally from flipkart.com. It was quite surprising for me to find the novel to be happening completely in a small village in kerala, on the shore of meenachal.
I was completely in awe of the way she tell the story of Estha and Rahel, where there was no chronological order, and more importantly there was no nail-biting events to make the plot engrossing. The beauty of the novel lies in two aspects. First one is the language. As the book cover proclaims "A book of passion and ambition discovers it's own language, and this book does exactly that". The thinking is sometimes as that of seven year old twins, and sometimes as that of a thirty one year old woman(Rahel). Secondly, the novel is a reflection of the socioeconomic and political state of early sixties of the malayalam heartland. It gives a vague painting of an important political arena of a state, where the first democratically elected communist government came to power when the rest of country was ruled by Nehru's congress. One can get the picture of a society which were driven by feudal power were landlords abuse the untouchables. The untouchable(God of small things) in Arundathi Roy's story finds solace in the communist party. But the untouchability was a stink that wouldn't go off so easily. When the untouchable thought that he can love anyone irrespective of the colour of the skin he was mistaken. When the comrade paravan landed in trouble he goes to the local party leader. The hypocrite comrade didn't help him stating the party can not deal with the personal issues. This is the instability of the community as envisioned by Mrs.Roy.The interesting part of the novel is the relation between velutha and Ammu which formed the backbone of the story. It was not the kind of classic romance that we encounter usually in literature. This strange relation perhaps underlines the unpredictability of human nature.
There are certain other incidents that are heart-felt descriptions in the language of the twins. This novel is a great effort and a concoction of several nuggets.