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An invented language

There is scarcely a sentence in Arundhati Roy that would satisfy the Fowlerian rules of English expression. By the canons of our schoolmasters, half her words are mis-spelt or non-words, and most of her constructions are grammatically suspect. Yet what a wonderfully invented language it is!! And how apposite for a story that ripples with the slow waters of the Meenachal river, and the language draws you in and you can feel the words on your skin, like "slow mud that oozed through toes like toothpaste".

"Roy stretches the English language in all directions," says Rosemary Dinnage in the New York Review of Books. The Booker committee talks of the "extraordinary linguistic inventiveness".

What does this inventiveness involve? No doubt a grist for considerably academic ink-spilliing, I think this inventiveness is largely a play with metaphor, the juxtaposition of unlikely thoughts, as in a church that swells "like a throat with the sound of sad singing" - and you can almost feel the swelling travelling down the nave.

Another type of innovative-ness involve unusual collocations, like "noisy television silence" - you feel what it means, although it is an impossibility.

But the most striking innovations are where she changes the language itself,
which can be of several kinds.  The first is the child's view of language, as
when words are re-bracketed, so we have phrases like "Bar Nowl" or "Dus to
dus to dus to dus..."  The second is neologisms through sandhi, as when a bat
has climbed onto Kochamma, who screams and the "singing stopped for a
"Whatisit?" "Whathappened?" and for a furrywhirring and a sariflapping," the
sounds falling like a bat's frantic wingbeats.  Some of these coinages, like
"greenheat", are used repeatedly in the text.  Other coinages, like "a
schoolteacher-shaped-hole in the universe" or "a posse of Touchable
Policemen" become refrains carrying the story.

My favourite novel

Unstintingly, this is my top novel of all time. Without it there would be a
Arundhati-Roy shaped hole in my universe!  For my list of the top 10 Indian
novels in English, see Shadow Lines.

Be it the evocation of greenheat in kerala, the malayalam-tinged inventive
language, or the child's point of view of an adult world, the book
excels on all counts.  Add to that a  brilliant plot unfolding in slow dregs,
and you have a world-winner.  The theme of the upper-class woman and a lower
class man sees itself played out in Yukio Mishima's Thirst
for Love as well.  (See review and excerpts).

In the following I have culled an idiosyncratic set of extracts
the more creative of which have been roughly categorized into these three
classes:

UC - unusual collocation
CM - colourful metaphor
IL - invented / inventive language

Enjoy!

Excerpts

hopeful yellow bullfrogs cruised the scrummy pond for mates (2)

black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, DUSTGREEN trees [IL/Neologism]

Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air.  Then they stun
themselves against clear windowpanes and die, FATLY BAFFLED in the
sun. [UC]

The countryside turns an immodest green. [UC]

And small fish appear in the puddles that fill the PWD potholes on the
highways.

It was raining.  Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth,
ploughing it up like gunfire.  The old house on the hill wore its
steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat.  [CM]

The wild overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small
lives. [UC]

life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was For Ever
[p.2]

Orangedrink Lemondrink man [IL]

Thirty-one.  A viable-diable age. [IL]

With the queer compassion of the poor for the comparatively
well-off... [3]

[They were nearly born on a bus, Estha and Rahel.]
According to Estha, if they'd been born on the bus, they'd have got
free bus rides for the rest of their lives.  It wasn't clear where
he'd got this information from, but for years the twins harboured a
faint resentment against their parents for having diddled them out of
a lifetime of free bus rides.

They also believed that if they were killed on a zebra crossing, the
Government would pay for their funerals.  They had the definite
impression that that was what zebra crossings were meant for.  Free
funerals. [p.4]

Dark blood spilling from his skull like a secret [6]

the yellow church swelled like a throat with the sound of sad singing
[CM]

Mammachi was almost blind and always wore dark glasses... her tears
trickled down from behind them and trembled on her jaw like raindrops
on the edge of a roof.  [CM] [p.6]

She showed Rahel Two Things.  Thing one was ... Thing two [was a bat
climbing along Baby Kochamma's sari] When it reached the place between
her sari and her blouse, her roll of sadness [CM], her bare midriff,
Baby Kochamma screamed and hit the air with her hymnbook.  The singing
stopped for a "Whatisit?" "Whathappened?" and for a furrywhirring and
a sariflapping. [IL/N]

The sad priests dusted out their curly beards with goldringed fingers as
though hidden spiders had spun sudden cobwebs in them. [IL]

Once more the church swelled like a throat with voices.[CM] 6

Rahel knew that [Sophie Mol] wasn't dead.  She heard the SOFTSOUNDS of
the red mud and the HARDSOUNDS of the orange laterite that spoiled the
shining coffin polish. She heard the DULLTHUDDING through the polished
coffin wood, through the satin coffin lining... [IL/Neologism] 7

Sophie Mol died because she couldn't breathe. ...
Dus to dus to dus to dus... [IL] [7]

"If I were you," [said the inspector], "I'd go home quietly."  Then he
tapped her breasts with his baton.  Gently.  _Tap, tap.  As though he
was choosing mangoes from a basket. ... Inspector Thomas Mathew seemed
to know whom he could pick on and whom he couldn't.  Policemen have
that instinct. [8]

Strange insects appeared like ideas in the evening.  [CM]

Happy earthworms frolicked purple in the slush. Green nettles
nodded. [10]

Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha.  It reached
out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms.  It rocked him to
the rhythm of an ancient, foetal heartbeat.  It sent its suckered
tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls
and dells of his memory, dislodging old sentences, whisking them off
the tip of his tongue.  [CM][12]

It had been quiet in Estha's head until Rahel came.  But with her she
had brought the sound of passing trains, and the light and shade that
falls on you if you have a window seat.  The world, locked out for
years, suddenly flooded in, and now Estha couldn't hear himself for
the noise.  Trains.  Traffic.  Music.  The Stock Market.  [15]

The loss of Sophie Mol stepped softly around the Ayemenem House like a
quiet thing in socks.  [CM]

[the teachers savoured] their teacherly disapproval, touching it with
their tongues, sucking it like a sweet [CM] [17]

Rahel drifted into marriage like a passenger drifts towards an
unoccupied chair in an airport lounge.  [18]

He held her as though she was a gift.  Given to him in love.
Something still and small.  Unbearably precious.

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 a window at the sea.

He was exasperated because he didn't know what that look meant.  He
didn't know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came
from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy.  And that
personal despair could never be desperate enough.
[  That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside
  shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane,
  unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind
  and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy and contained, private and
  limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured
  by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly
  indifferent. Nothing mattered much.]
Nothing mattered much.  And the less it mattered, the less it mattered.  It
was never important enough.  Because Worse Things had happened.  Worse Things
kept happening.

So Small God [of personal despair] laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped
away cheerfully.  Like a rich boy in shorts.  He whistled, kicked
stones.  The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness
of his misfortune.  He climbed onto people's eyes and became an
exasperating expression. [19] [CM]

rubbing the frothy bitterness out of an elderly cucumber. [20] [CM]

Then he would reopen his umbrella and walk away in chocolate robes and
comfortable sandals, like a high-stepping camel with an appointment to
keep. [CM][24]

[In the neglected garden] Only the vines kept growing, like toe-nails
on a corpse. [CM][27]

noisy television silence [UC][28]

"Shut [the window] when you are finished with it," Baby Kochamma said,
and closed her face like a cupboard.  [CM][29]

[From the portrait] Reverend Ipe smiled his confident-ancestor smile
[CM][30]

Rahel saw that her eyes were redly dead. [IL]

Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a
teabag. [33][CM]

It really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws
that lay down who should be loved, and how.

And how much. [33]

Hotel Sea Queen with the oldfood smell.  [35] [IL]

She subscribed wholeheartedly to the commonly held view that a married
daughter had no position in her parents' home.  As for a divorced
daughter... And as for a divorced daughter from a love
marriage... As for a divorced daughter from a intercommunity love
marriage - Baby Kochamma chose to remain quiveringly silent on the
subject. [46]

Ruchi lokathinde Rajavu sounded a lot less ludicrous than _Emperors of
the Realm of Taste_. [46]

[IDEA: Translation of collocations from L1 to L2 as an interesting
	exercise on cultural disparity]

When the twins were asked what cuff-links were for - "To link cuffs
together," Ammu told them - they were thrilled by this morsel of logic
in what had so far seemed an illogical language.  Cuff+Link =
Cuff-link.  Cuff-links gave them an inordinate (if exaggerated)
satisfaction, and a real affection for the English language.
This, to them, rivaled the precision and logic of mathematics.
Cuff-links gave them an inordinate (if exaggerated) satisfaction, and
a real affection for the English language.  [51]

[IDEA: Precision and logic of mathematics - see Chesterton on "trap
	for logicians" ]

Ammu said that Pappachi was an incurable British-CCP, which was short
for chhi-chhi poach and in Hindi meant shit-wiper. Chacko said that
the correct word for people like Pappachi was Anglophile. He made
Rahel and Estha look up Anglophile in the Reader's Digest Great
Encyclopaedic Dictionary. It said: Person well disposed to the
English.

Then Estha and Rahel had to look up dispose.

It said:
(1) Place suitably in particular order.
(2) Bring mind into certain state.
(3) _Do what one will with, get off one's hands, stow away, demolish,
    finish, settle, consume (food), kill, sell_.

Chacko said that in Pappachi's case it meant (2) _Bring mind into
certain state_. Which, Chacko said, meant that Pappachi's mind had
been brought into a state which made him like the English.

Chacko told the twins that though he hated to admit it, they were all
Anglophiles.  They were a family of Anglophiles.  Pointed in the
wrong direction, trapped outside their own history, and unable to
retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away.  He
explained to them that history was like an old house at night.  With
all the lamps lit.  And ancestors whispering inside.

"To understand history," Chacko said, "we have to go inside and listen
to what they're saying.  And look at the books and the pictures on the
wall.  And smell the smells.... [51-2]

... But we can't go in because we've been locked out.  And when we
look in through the windows, all we see are shadows.  And when we try
and listen, all we hear is a whispering.  And we cannot understand
the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by a war.  A war
that we have won and lost.  The very worst sort of war.  A war that
captures dreams and re-dreams them.  A war that has made us adore our
conquerors and despise ourselves." [53] [ANGLOPHILIA AS WAR]

"We're Prisoners of War," Chacko said. "Our dreams have been
doctored. We belong nowhere. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may
never be allowed ashore...
Our sorrows will never be sad enough.  Our joys never happy enough.
Our dreams never big enough.  Our lives never important enough.  To
matter. [53]

Years later, when Rahel returned to the river, it greeted her with a ghastly
skull's smile, with holes where teeth had been, and a limp
hand raised from a hospital bed.

...he told them about the Earth Woman. He made them imagine that the earth --
four thousand six hundred million years old -- was a forty-six-year-old
woman...It had taken the whole of the Earth Woman's life for the earth to
become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The
Earth Woman was eleven years old, Chacko said, when the first single-celled
organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish,
appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty-five -- just eight
months ago -- when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

`The whole of human civilization as we know it,' Chacko told the twins,
`began only two hours ago in the Earth Woman's life.' (53-54)

While other children of their age learned other things, Estha and
Rahel learned how history negotiates its terms and collects its dues
from those who break its laws. They heard its sickening thud. They
smelled its smell and never forgot it.

History's smell.

Like old roses on a breeze.

It would lurk for ever in ordinary things. In coat-hangers. Tomatoes. In the
tar on the roads. In certain colours. In the plates at a restaurant. In the
absence of words. And the emptiness in eyes.

They would grow up grappling with ways of living with what happened. They
would try to tell themselves that in terms of geological time it was an
insignificant event. Just a blink of the Earth Woman's eye. That Worse Things
had happened. That Worse Things kept happening. But they would find no
comfort in the thought. (55)

[Mammachi favours son Chacko, "made of prime ministerial material"; Ammu
opposes his greatness, a,b,c,d.]

Chacko said:
(a)You don't go to Oxford. You read at Oxford.
And
(b)After reading at Oxford you come down_. 56  [clique LANGUAGE/ argot / acrolect]

Month after month, Chacko's carefully constructed planes crashed in the
slushgreen paddy fields into which Estha and Rahel would spurt, like trained
retrievers, to salvage the remains. 56  [CM]

[the twins are precocious readers] ...
At night Ammu read to them from Kipling's Jungle Book.

Now Chil the Kite brings home the night
That Mang the Bat sets free -- 59

[when the missionary] Miss Mitten, gave Estha and Rahel a baby book -- The
Adventures of Susie Squirrel -- as a present when she visited
Ayemenem, they were deeply offended. First they read it forwards. Miss
Mitten, who belonged to a sect of Born-Again Christians, said that she
was a Little Disappointed in them when they read it aloud to her,
backwards.

"ehT sertanrvdA fo eisuS lerriuqS.
enO gnirps gninrom eisuS lerriuqS ekow pu." [59-60]
[BACKWARDS READING occurs in many places in the book]

They showed Miss Mitten how it was possible to read both Malayalam and
Madam I'm Adam backwards as well as forwards. She wasn't amused
and it turned out that she didn't even know what Malayalam
was. They told her it was the language everyone spoke in Kerala. She
said she had been under the impression that it was called
Keralese. Estha, who had by then taken an active dislike to Miss
Mitten, told her that as far as he was concerned it was a Highly
Stupid Impression. 60

Silence hung in the air like secret loss. 91

The sculpted hollows on either side of his taut, beautiful buns. Tight
plums. Men's bums never grow up. (93)

`D'you know what happens when you hurt people?' Ammu said. `When you hurt
people, they begin to love you less. That's what careless words do. They make
people love you a little less.'  A cold moth with unusually dense dorsal
tufts landed lightly on Rahel's heart. Where its icy legs touched her, she
got goose bumps. Six goose bumps on her careless heart. A little less her
Ammu loved her. (112)

Both things had happened.

It [the river] had shrunk.  And she had grown. ...

Once it had had the power to evoke fear.  To change lives.  But now
its teeth were drawn, its spirit spent.  It was just a slow, sludging
green ribbon lawn that ferried garbage to the sea.  Bright plastic
blew across its viscous, weedy surface like subtropical
flying-flowers. [124]

Splay-footed, cautious (124)

Fetid garbage

Squelchy, sucking mud of the exposed river bed

The History House (where map-breath'd ancestors with tough toe-nails once
whispered) (125)

...smelliness, like other people's poverty, was merely a matter of
getting used to. (126)

the uninitiated

labeled with edifying placards

While fathers played sublimated sexual games with their nubile teenaged
daughters (127)

...there are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot -- that
sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways staring eyes
(129)

His nipples peeped at Rahel over the top of the boundary wall like a sad
St. Bernard's eyes. 129 [CM]

mock dismay

The slow ceiling fan sliced the thick, frightened air into an unending spiral
that spun slowly to the floor like the peeled skin of an endless potato (132) [CM]

A stainless-steel tray of boiled needles (133)

...her baby thought he was the Pope. He smiled and waved and smiled and
waved. With his penis in a bottle. (139)

children's whole-hearted commitment to life (165)

She was beautiful. Old, unusual, regal.

Blind Motor Widow with a violin. (166)[UC]

She played _lentement - a movement from the suite 1 in D/G of
Handel's Water Music.  Behind her slanted eyeglasses, her useless eyes
were closed, but she could see the music as it left her violin and
lifted into the afternoon like smoke. 167

Kochu Maria was wary of other people's versions of the outside world. More
often than not, she took them to be a deliberate affront to her lack of
education and (earlier) gullibility. (170)

The man standing in the shade of the rubber trees with coins of sunshine
dancing on his body 176

An embarrassed schoolteacher-shaped Hole in the Universe. 179 [IL]

Littleangels were beach-coloured and wore bellbottoms.
Littledemons were mudbrown in Airport Fairy frocks with forehead bumps that
might turn into horns. 179

~~

"D'you know who this is?" Mrs. Pillai asked Latha.

Latha shook her head.

"Chacko saar. Our factory Modalali."

Latha stared at him with a composure and a lack of curiosity unusual in a thirteen-year-old.

"He studied in London Oxford," Mrs. Pillai said. "Will you do your recitation
for him?" -

Latha complied without hesitation. She planted her feet slightly apart.

"Respected Chairman" -- she bowed to Chacko -- "mydearjudges and" -- she
looked around at the imaginary audience crowded into the small, hot room --
"beloved friends." She paused theatrically.

"Today I would like to recite to you a poem by Sir Walter Scott entitled
`Lochinvar.'" She clasped her hands behind her back. A film fell over her
eyes. Her gaze was fixed unseeingly just above Chacko's head. She swayed
slightly as she spoke. At first Chacko thought it was a Malayalam translation
of "Lochinvar." The words ran into each other. Like in Malayalam, the last
syllable of one word attached itself to the first syllable of the next. It
was rendered at remarkable speed:

"O, young Loch in varbas scum oat of the vest
Through wall the vide Border his teed was the be:
sTand savissgood broadsod he weapon sadnun,
He rod all unarmed, and he rod al lalone..

The poem was interspersed with grunts from the old lady on the bed, which no
one except Chacko seemed to notice.

Whe swam the Eske river where fird there was none;
Buitair he alighted at Netherby Gate,-
The bride had cansended, the galla ntcame late."

~~

[summer heat: the book opens with it,
"nights suffused with sloth and sullen expectation",
and it is described
in unmatched prose at many points in the narrative]

Outside, the Air was Alert and Bright and Hot. ... [IL; orthographic] 201

She could hear the blue cross-stitch afternoon.

The slow ceiling fan.  The sun behind the curtains.

The yellow wasp wasping against the windowpane in a dangerous dzzzz. [IL]

A disbelieving lizard's wink.

High-stepping chickens in the yard.

The sound of the sun crinkling the washing.  [CM]
Crisping white bedsheets. Stiffening starched saris.

Red ants on yellow stones.

A hot cow feeling hot. Amhoo.  In the distance.

~~

[Note: "greenheat" appears several times - "Blue army in the greenheat" is
almost a refrain.]

Tumbling barefoot through the greenheat, followed by a yellow wasp. 202

And on one side of the driveway, beside the old well, in the shade of the
kodam puli tree, a silent blue-aproned army gathered in the greenheat to
watch. 172

Nobody said Hello to Rahel. Not even the Blue Army in the greenheat. 173

While the Welcome Home, Our Sophie Mol Play was being performed in the front
verandah and Kochu Maria distributed cake to a Blue Army in the greenheat,
Ambassador E. Pelvis/S. Pimpernel (with a puff) of the beige and pointy
shoes, pushed open the gauze doors to the dank and pickle-smelling premises
of Paradise Pickles. He walked among the giant cement pickle vats to find a
place to Think in. ...
Ousa, the Bar Nowl, who lived on a blackened beam near the skylight (and
contributed occasionally to the flavor of certain Paradise products), watched
him walk. 193

And Ousa the Bar Nowl watched the pickle-smelling silence that lay between
the twins like a bruise. 198

In the factory the silence swooped down once more and tightened around the
twins. But this time it was a different kind of silence. An old river
silence. The silence of Fisher People and waxy mermaids. 200

[Kochu Maria] Thickwrinkied like a sudden rhinoceros in a frilly
apron. 201 [CM/IL]

Tumbling barefoot through the greenheat, followed by a yellow wasp. 202

Jeweled dragonflies hovered like shrill children's voices 202 [CM]

slow mud that oozed through toes like toothpaste.203 [CM]

a posse of Touchable Policemen 303 / 304 / 127 / 190 / 309

Unlike the custom of rampaging religious mobs or conquering armies running
riot, that morning in the Heart of Darkness the posse of Touchable Policemen
acted with economy, not frenzy. ...  They didn't hack off his genitals and
stuff them in his mouth. 309

Estha read aloud from the board on the wall.
"ssenetiloP," he said. "ssenetiloP, ecneidebO."
"ytlayoL, ecnegilletnI," Rahel said.
"ysetruoC."
"ycneiciffE." 313

[READER'S DIGEST]

Two reference books mentioned are both from RD -
the Reader's Digest Great Encyclopaedic Dictionary, the authorative
reference in which the
twins look up "Anglophile", and the "The Reader's Digest World Atlas",
the heaviest book with which Ammu defends herself against her
alcoholic husband.

Velutha

[Velutha is a Paravan, an untouchable.  Professionally a carpenter, he is
clearly a man of many interests. ]

[A large number of Paravans converted to Chrisitianity.  ] As added incentive
they were given a little food and money. They were known as the Rice
Christians.  As a special favor they were even given their own separate
Pariah Bishop.
After Independence they found they were not entitled to any government
benefits like job reservations or bank loans at low interest rates, because
officially, on paper, they were Christians, and therefore casteless.

[Mammachi noted] little Velutha's remarkable facility with his hands. Velutha
was eleven then, about three years younger than Ammu. He was like a little
magician. He could make intricate toys-tiny windmills, rattles, minute jewel
boxes out of dried palm reeds; he could carve perfect boats out of tapioca
stems and figurines on cashew nuts. He would bring them for Ammu, holding
them out on his palm (as he had been taught) so she wouldn't have to touch
him to take them. Though he was younger than she was, he called her
Ammukutty - Little Ammu. Mammachi persuaded Vellya Paapen to send him to the
Untouchables' School that her father-in-law Punnyan Kunju had founded....

Velutha had a way with machines. Mammachi (with impenetrable Touchable logic)
often said that if only he hadn't been a Paravan, he might have become an
engineer. He mended radios, clocks, water pumps. He looked after the plumbing
and all the electrical gadgets in the house.

Velutha knew more about the machines in the factory than anyone else.

...

Velutha, Vellya Paapen and Kuttappen lived in a little laterite hut,
downriver from the Ayemenem house. A three-minute run through the coconut
trees for Esthappen and Rahel. They had only just arrived in Ayemenem with
Ammu and were too young to remember Velutha when he left. But in the months
since he had returned, they had grown to be the best of friends. They were
forbidden from visiting his house, but they did. They would sit with him for
hours, on their haunchesôhunched punctuation marks in a pool of wood
shavingsôand wonder how he always seemed to know what smooth shapes waited
inside the wood for him. They loved the way wood, in Velutha's hands,
seemed to soften and become as pliable as Plasticine. He was teaching them to
use a planer. His house (on a good day) smelled of fresh wood shavings and
the sun. Of red fish curry cooked with black tamarind. The best fish curry,
according to Estha, in the whole world.

It was Velutha who made Rahel her luckiest-ever fishing rod and taught her
and Estha to fish.

Ayemenem today

In 2012, I went on a three week cycling tour in Kerala, which included a
day at Kumarakom.  I was on my way from Kochi to Periyar (this was a three
week tour, starting in Trivandrum and going up to Calicut, with a ghat
segment from Periyar to Munnar).



The Taj Vivanta in Kumarakom has the Baker House as its
office and reception area.

Arundhati's Ayemenem

	by Partha S Banerjee, 2004
	[High up on my list of places to visit.]

As we cruised in the backwaters around Ayemenem, the lush imagery of
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy's Booker-winning novel, kept
coming back to mind.

Ayemenem. Immodestly green, with grey-green backwaters and Kari
Saipu's old colonial bungalow. Where Estha and Rahel, the "two-egg
twins", wandered through the magic and mystery of childhood. Where
Mammachi ran her pickles factory and the twins loved - by day - the
man their mother loved by night. Clandestinely.

Arundhati Roy's Ayemenem. Of The God of Small Things. In God's
Own Country.

Ayemenem village adjoins Kumarakom, one of Kerala's top tourist
attractions on the Vembanad Lake, and home for over a century to the
Bakers, a British family that until 1962 lived and worked in the
marshy, forested lakeside. The locals called Baker `Kari Saipu';
in The God of Small Things, Kari Saipu's house, abandoned now but
haunted by his ghost, is "History House" to the twins Estha and Rahel,
where police, as the story nears its tragic climax, pummel Velutha to
near death.

The story goes back to 1818 when 25-year-old Henry Baker, a recently
ordained priest from Essex in eastern England, joins a mission in
Tanjore (Thanjavur). Within a year, after marrying Amelia Dorothea, he
moves to Kottayam in Kerala to run a new mission. They live here for
the rest of their lives, devoting themselves primarily to education
(their pioneering efforts contributing in no small measure to Kerala's
subsequent high literacy level). George Baker, the third of their 11
children, takes over the mission after his parents' death but he is
more than just an evangelist; visiting the mangrove swamps on the
Vembanad lake shores not far from the mission outpost of Olasha, six
miles from Kottayam, he often contemplates clearing the area for a
coconut plantation.

But it wasn't until he was 50, after his second marriage
in 1878 (he had lost his first wife 17 years earlier), that he set
about realising his dream. Clearing the forests and planting took
years of hard work even as the impressive two-storied bungalow, with
its encircling verandah and high Kerala-style tiled roof, came up on
the Comorote (as they then called Kumarakom) lakeside. Four
generations of the Bakers lived in the splendid isolation of that
bungalow, becoming part of the region's folklore, speaking Malyalam,
even wearing the mundu.

We looked in at the Taj Garden Retreat on the last day of our stay to
see Baker House (lovingly restored by the hotel chain) and breakfast
in its verandah. Earlier in the morning we had gone for a hike in the
Kumarakom Bird Sanctuary on the eastern shores of the Vembanad
Lake. It was drizzling and overcast but we did manage, with help from
our guide, to spot a whole host of birds: egrets, Siberian storks,
black snakebirds with S-shaped necks, herons and colourful
kingfishers.




We had of course spotted some of those species, though not in such
great numbers, the day before in the backwaters and in the lake. The
Vembanad Lake is some five miles wide at Kumarakom and scores of
strange birds perch on weeds near its shores. Fringed by swaying palms
and dense mangroves, this sprawling lagoon has an awe-inspiring
beauty. Its vastness amazes you, especially if your hotel is not on
its shores and your first view of it is from a boat as it approaches
the lake from a narrow river. The largest lagoon in India, it
stretches as far north as Cochin, 70 km away, where it opens into the
Arabian Sea. Sunsets on the lake are dramatic, the sinking orange disk
setting aflame the shimmering waters; our hotel boat took us deep into
the waters in the evening and we watched in wonder as the spectacle
unfolded.

On the eastern bank of the lake, not far from the Bird Sanctuary, is a
stretch of rainforest called the R-Block that is well below sea level
and has dykes protecting it. We sailed to its shores next morning and
stopped by a hut for sweet coconut water and fried karimeen
fish. There was a gentle breeze, not enough to sway the palms. Weeds
floated on the grey-green waters, birds drifted with the weeds and in
the distance someone paddled a dugout canoe. We ate our karimeen in
silence, savouring the serenity.

That afternoon we asked for a motorboat to visit Ayemenem. The cruise
took us through paddy-fields, past bamboo forests and coconut groves
and clumps of bright red hibiscus, across little hamlets. Presently we
were on the Meenachal river, Meenachal with "the sky and trees in
it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it." In Ayemenem,
everybody knows Arundhati Roy's name; an autorickshaw takes us to
Ayemenem House, "grand old house. . . but aloof-looking" where, like
Estha and Rahel, she spent part of her childhood. Nobody lives here
now, said the unfriendly caretaker. We moved on to visit the village's
famous temple. Next afternoon, on the drive back to Cochin, we took in
the more famous Vaikom temple, with its unusual pyramidal dome, and
the grand 16th century Kottayam churches of Valiapally and Cheriapally
(a blend of Portuguese and Malabar architecture). The Gods here, we
thought, were not of Small Things.

Access Kumarakom is 16 km west of Kottayam, where most trains to
	Thiruvananthapuram and Kanyakumari (like the
	Thiruvananthapuram Mail from Chennai and the KanyaKumari
	Expresses from Mumbai and Bangalore) reach by
	mid-morning. Taxis from the station to Kumarakom cost around
	Rs 250. The nearest airport is Kochi, 90 km away.

Accommodation On the Vembanad lakeside are several plush resorts: the
        Taj Garden Retreat, Coconut Lagoon, the expensive Kumarakom
        Lake Resort and Waterscapes among them. But if it's in the
        backwaters that you want to stay, the Golden Waters resort
        (0481-2525826; alex@blr.vsnl.net.in), could be your best
        bet. Most of these resorts offer two-night three-day stays for
        between Rs 10-14,000 per couple; cheaper lodgings with rooms
        for around Rs 1000 or less are available at several "home
        stay" establishments in the area.

Characters [wikipedia]

    * Ammu - Rahel and Estha's mother, sister of Chacko, daughter of Pappachi
      and Mammachi.
    * Baba - Rahel and Estha's father, tried to prostitute Ammu and beat her,
      later re-married, of a lower caste than Ammu
    * Baby Kochamma (Navomi Ipe) - Pappachi's sister -- aunt to Chacko and
      Ammu, and grand-aunt to Sophie Mol, Estha, and Rahel.
    * Chacko - Brother to Ammu, son of Pappachi and Mammachi, father to
      Sophie Mol and divorced from Margaret Kochamma
    * Comrade Pillai - Leader of the local communist party.
    * Estha (Esthappen Yako) - Rahel's twin brother, son of Ammu and Baba
    * Father Mulligan- Baby Kochamma's love interest. A Roman Catholic
    * Joe - Second husband of Margaret.
    * Kari Saipu - English paedophile who lived in the History House before
      Estha and Rahel arrived in Ayemenem; Vellya Pappen pins his ghost to a
      tree with his sickle, and there the ghost remains asking for a cigar
    * Kochu Maria - Housekeeper to Mammachi, Chacko, and Baby Kochamma.
    * Larry McCaslin - ex-husband of Rahel, travels to India to teach and
      falls in love with Rahel, bringing her back to the USA with him
    * Mammachi (Shoshamma Ipe) - Blind. Wife of Pappachi, mother of Chacko
      and Ammu, grandmother of Estha, Rahel, and Sophie Mol. Also founder of
      the family pickle factory.
    * Margaret Kochamma - Chacko's ex-wife, mother of Sophie Mol.
    * Murlidharan - A homeless, insane person who crouches naked on the
      welcome sign for Cochin. He carries the keys to his last residence
      around his waist expectantly
    * Orangedrink Lemondrink Man - Paedophile from Estha's past
    * Pappachi (Shri Benaan John Ipe) - Father to Chacko and Ammu,
      grandfather to Estha, Rahel, and Sophie Mol. He was an imperial
      entomologist.
    * Rahel - Estha's twin sister, daughter of Ammu and Baba, divorced from
      Larry McCaslin.
    * Sophie Mol - The twins' cousin, daughter of their uncle Chacko and
      Margaret Kochamma.
    * Inspector Thomas Mathew - The police inspector who interviews Baby
      Kochamma on the night Velutha dies. He is somewhat ambivalent about his
      men's practices of beating Untouchables nearly to death without having
      a substantiated reason
    * Urumban - Velutha's imaginary twin brother.
    * Kuttappen - Velutha's paralyzed brother.
    * Velutha - The title character, local carpenter, an untouchable (lower
      social caste) by birth.
    * Vellya Paapen- Velutha's father, a Paravan

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