Spent Christmas to finish the book. I picked it up after watching the interview of Arundhati Roy with Amy Goodman. They discussed about the recent situation of Kashmir and the Muslim Ban implemented in India with a lot of compassion but no solutions. Arundhati pointed out that Kashmir is itself cultural diverse and excluding people with different life styles just to secure a regime’s political power is a despicable move of the Hindu party, well Modi. The youtube comments are again hostile and it seems that indians bothered to leave a comments all condemned her to be a traitor. I wonder if there are other opinions. Kashmir is not covered a lots by press, as there are other demonstrations and chaos in the world. This kind of fit in with her book narrative: the god of small things dancing in between the war of big gods, too small to have any impacts and no one cares. Sometimes I think the world just let indians die of whatever causes and no one actually could give a damn.
Back to the book. I think the whole story had a very suppressed setting that I was holding my breath all the time trying not to startle the characters of whatever their activities. Sitting in a car with shut windows, gluing in front of the TV and littering their seats with peanut coats, intense gazing or waiting, playing and writing english sentences. There was a inner rhythm, a delicate one that I was afraid to break if I read too fast or skip a word. Yet the rhythm represses the emotions in many episode of events.
Roy never directly write about loss, but described it subtlety through the subsided yet important details of what the people in the book doing. The misfortune and plight of the people was silently played out in front of us or recounted by the images of the aftermath; we could only witness and lament in silence. Like Amun’s (the twin’s mother) death, it was mainly conveyed by her dead body, how bruised the lifeless piece of flesh was and how hard to find a place to carry our the cremation due to prejudice against love across classes.
I was moved by the way she talked about how people live in the shadow of trauma, the meekness to live with the loss. It was again the situation that personal turmoil become minuscule when the turmoil and crash in the nation, between class, against opposite sex become the main focus.
The story ended by the twins Rahel and Estha reunited and allow themselves to bring up the long suppressed hurt with each other’s recognition; a lot of people see you suffer but a few understand the pain, the pain was mourned among Rahel and Estha who experienced it differently but felt it with the same intensity.
This ties in with the world today, a lot of people are suffering in many different ways but everyone are too busy to hear other’s pain. We are trapped in our own prison by closing our heart and pose as the most damaged victim among all tragedies of earth. Maybe we can do better by leaving some room to hear other stories?