The God of Small Things

Before going into the theatre "to see The Sound of Music for the third time" (35), Estha "[completes] his first adult assignment" (93). He goes to the bathroom on his own, while Ammu, Baby and Rahel accompany each other to the ladies room. This little detail about going to use the restroom foreshadows another instance where Estha will be forced from being a child into manhood.

Ammu tells Estha to "shut UP!!" (96) because he was singing along to the words of the movies. Instead of shutting up, he leaves the theatre on his own account, because "he couldn't help" (96) but sing along to the words he knew. After completing his first adult assignment, his childlikeness comes out in having to sing the lyrics in "a nun's voice" (96). He did not know that this act of immaturity, in acting his own age, he would be shoved into yet another adult assignment, something that he kept as a small thing, but ended up as a Big Thing inside him.

The Orangedrink Lemondrink Man scolded Estha for "[disturbing]" (97) him with his song. As soon as he is done scolding him, his "yellow piano key" (97) teeth offered him a free drink. As Estha came, the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man already knew what he had in store for Estha. The Man asked him questions, and Estha, being a man and a child, had to answer. Where did he live? What did his family do? The Man "handed Estha his penis" (98) and made Estha masturbate him while he drank his lemon drink, and he had to, because the Man "knew where to find [him]" (104). After the Man was done with Estha, he sent him back into the theatre.

Estha knew from this time that he would be love a little less if anyone knew what he had done with the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man. So he told no one. But in his head, a conversation was taking place between himself and Baron von Trapp, the father in The Sound of Music. Would von Trapp love him even though he was not white? Even though he "[blew] spit bubbles...[shivered] his legs... held a strangers' soo-soos?" (101). Was he still acceptable to obtain a Baba's love? He knew that it was "out of the question. [He could not] love them" (102). No father could ever love him.

They leave the theatre because Estha the child, Estha the man, is sick. When they exit the theatre, the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man smiles at Rahel and offers her candy. She goes toward him, and is suddenly petrified, and "[shrinks] from him" (106). And she knows. She knows what he did to Estha. The lesson of Manhood he taught him. Rahel "[spins] around to look at Estha" (106). She knows that would be loved a little less if Ammu or anyone knew.

The next thing you know, Rahel is saying something to Ammu that "makes [Ammu] love [her] a little less" (107). Ammu "couldn't be expected to understand that... emptiness in one twin was only a version of the quietness in the other" (20,21). She did not get the hint that something happened to Estha in the theatre by Rahel's behavior.

Journal Entry: February 18-20

The back verandah of the History House (where a posse of touchable policemen converged, where an inflatable goose was burst) had been enclosed and converted into the airy hotel kitchen. Nothing worse than kebabs and caramel custard happened there now. The Terror was past. Overcome by the smell of food. Silenced by the humming of cooks. The cheerful chop-chop-chopping of ginger and garlic. The disemboweling of lesser mammals--pigs, goats. The dicing of meat. The scalding of fish. Something lay buried in the ground. Under grass. Under twenty-three years of June rain. A small forgotten thing. Nothing that the world would miss. A child's plastic wristwatch with the time painted on it. Ten to two, it said. (121)

This passage is taken from a time when Rahel was in her "viable, die-able age" (154), back from America and reminiscing over the past. This passage holds some foreshadowing, both for what the book holds for us, which has already happened but not yet disclosed to the reader, and for what the future holds for the characters in the book, that the reader has not gotten to yet. It makes ties to the brutal murder of Velutha, the ways of the caste system, the title and main theme of this work, the madness of Ammu, and the loss of Estha.

Rahel is looking at the hotel that now takes the place of the History House. A place