Corner Stones in God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

"Only that once again they broke the love laws. That lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much." 
- God Of Small Things







                  

The Booker Prize(1997) winning, debut novel by Arundhati Roy is constituted with gloomy, rebellious, haunting and heart touching strains, written in her eerie and indiffrently significant humorous style. With the recurring flashes of Semi-Autobiographical notions, the novel picks up Communism, Caste System, Male dominance, and The keralite Syrian Christian culture as its edges.
Having the major plot set in the Ayemenam district of Kerala, weather reports of which are so beautifully descripted that it would put any Romantic's Poet to shame. Beneath the ever drizzling clouds of Ayemenam, Roy touches the forbidden themes of relations between classes, tensions in cultural diffrences, social discrimination, supressed love and to an affective extent, patriarchy. Also a inter-caste sexual expression, an incestual love making, and bodily apetite for physical relations culminates in the intricate web of recurring scenes through the character of Ammu-Velutha (a paravan) , Rahel-Estha and Chacko and her female employees respectively.
Accounting for the evidences of social discrimination; relative inferiority complex between touchables and untouchables, Christians and Hindus, whites and blacks( as in the case of Chacko and his wife, Margareta) also find their instances in the novel. Sophie Mol tells the twins that they all are "wog", while she is a "half wog". 

The book contains the story of two "fraternal" and "dizygotic twins", Rahel and Esthappen and of their rebellious mother, Ammu, who ends up to her fate in a "viable, die-able age".  Little Estha with his "beige and pointy shoes", "elvis puff", his theories of "Anything can happen to anyone" and 'does happiness counts in a dream' echo through the course of the book. His 18 minutes younger twin sister, Rahel with "her hair sitting on her head like a fountain" in her "love in Tokyo" band, is an intelligent child, through whose eyes, major part of indirect narration takes place. The narrative style revolving around the life course of twins, unfolds itself in a non linear and a non chronological manner. The third person narration is often accompanied by flashbacks and lengthy side tracks. 

Sophie Mol's (daughter of Chacko) dies and unexpected sequential death, which also happens to be the central and most crucial incident of the novel. Following which, the lives of everyone related changes drastically. The book is violent in tearing you down with grief. It is reality in its most naked form. Roy spreads out human emotion on the floor for your scrutiny. She dissects human emotions for the readers and let them conclude from whichever part they lay their eyes upon the unexpected.

"It is an inextricable mix of experience and imagination." Roy concludes about her novel.