The God of Written Things-

“The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t."

I was introduced to story-writing with the advice that secrets and suspense make a great story. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy breaks all of those barriers to present a story, a poignant story, that hooks you to it so tightly that you are left with a whirlpool of emotions and a sad sigh at the end.

The story begins with the somber reunion of a pair of 'two-egg twins’, Rahel and Estha, and takes its course with a back-and-forth narrative that shuttles between their past and present and mourns their losses so beautifully. It is a simple story of complicated people whose lives are riddled with casteist, sexist biases in a politically turmoiled state. And as promised by the above quote, Roy foreshadows the root of all the tragedy from the very beginning.

It all started with the death of Sophie Mol, their cousin, and from there, everything went downhill. However, Roy muses, " It could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago… in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how, And how much."

The story highlights the practice of these ludicrous Love Laws throughout and the part it plays in stripping each of the victims of their birthright. From how miserly Rahel and Estha are loved because they are children of a man their grandparents did not approve of, how biasedly loved the passionate, wild-streaked, and divorced Ammu is in contrast to her brother, the Man of the House, Chacko, (who's illicit affairs, Mammachi still bitterly justifies), how fondly Sophie Mol is loved because she is fair-skinned, to how expensive the price of loving an untouchable is.

She also foreshadows a forbidden relationship in such a way that one knows exactly who she is talking of, yet the reader is left to find for themselves how it happens and how the Small Things leave ripples of horrific Big Things.

Roy uses rich and colourful language and literature to vividly describe the town of Ayemenem, its people, and the complex emotions that the twins are forced to experience with a childlike curiosity in the past and melancholic retrospection in the present. The book hence journeys through the story in a very cinematic narrative but the stories fall perfectly into place without confusion, as though reflecting the memories and the life of man, not in the least linear.

Her similes, metaphors, and analogies paint even the simplest of moments with the brightest colours that make each chapter packed with sensuous and surreal experiences and rich imagery. Additionally, she imbues so much love and care in sketching out each character with such detail that one so deeply feels their emotions, even of the less-liked characters of the play.

The book unravels the tightly wound swathes of reason and constructs of society, leaving exposed the raw and remorseless evil that lies beneath, satirizing it with subtlety and objectivity making it a literature of the highest order.