“As fire is shrouded in smoke, a mirror by dust and a child by the womb, so is the universe enveloped in desire.”

–Lord Krishna, The Bhagavad-Gita

"Blessed are you who weep and are oppressed by those without hope, for you will be released from every bondage.”

–Thomas the Apostle, The Book of Thomas

Innocence is the currency of childhood: we spend and squander it from cradle to grave. We fritter a bit away on early romances, we splurge on nationalism and politics, but mostly we waste it by entrusting it to those with innocence-debts of their own. And yet, perhaps the greatest portion of this capital is stolen away, leaving only “an exasperating expression” in our eyes (Roy 20). The God of Small Things is the God of small people—of children, the poor, the disabled…—but we all must learn, as do Rahel and Estha in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, the contrived lines created by Big people and their Big God that must not be blurred that leads them to their desire to return to a small, childlike, uncomplicated oneness to truly ascend from a world of division and to remigrate to the original home of the womb.

The fraternal twins, small and (ironically) contained within a liminal existence in late-1960s India, are defined in the negative space between the modernity of postcolonialism and the ancient specters of a culture gone, but not forgotten. These apparitions haunt Roy’s novel in various forms: the “History House” of a long-dead pedophile from across the river from the Ipe estate (51-54), the often-mentioned history of the twin’s ancestral Syrian Christians (33), and especially in the demise of the twin’s half-British cousin, Sophie Mol (6). This past/present binary is crossed even by the construction of the non-linear storyline created by Ms. Roy, in which the reader is leaped forward and backward in time from chapter-to-chapter. Of course, this structure creates a splendid mystery to solve: what was the time, the place, and the circumstances to which the twins owe the totality of their loss? Can any of us ever truly distill the essence of the moments to which we ascribe the theft of our innocence?

In The God of Small Things, the contrived boundaries created by society are criticized in scathing detail. There are, of course, two arbitrary Ayemenems: the one inhabited by the Paravans, the Untouchables, and the one of the Touchables. However, this is not the end of Roy’s exploration of the capricious border construction present in society—universal society, as opposed merely to the example of the microcosm of India—as she furthers her investigation by questioning other artificial separations and the lack of rationalization for their construction: Roy takes aim at the separation of the sexes in public restrooms when the family visits the Abhilash Talkies (90-93,) the rules of dress and cosmetics when the twins paint Velutha’s nails a deep red (181) and the separation of people from their culture (colonization of the mind) with the introduction of a hotel built across from the Paradise Pickle Factory and the Ipe house—a boundary which becomes physical, as the two halves of the land are divided by a muddy, polluted river (119). It is the river, this indistinct but physical boundary that will envelop the twin’s little cousin, Sophie Mol (Roy 277). It is the tangible barrier of the river that claims the representation of hybridity—Sophie Mol being both British and Indian, but indistinct (at least genetically) of one from the other—that envelopes and quashes the soul of the child with both cultures, and neither. 

Roy expands the post-modern argument of colonization of the mind to imply that we all have had our minds colonized and inorganically altered by governments, religions, and even families. It is through the lens of childhood that Roy extrapolates the morphology of these social borders. As Claudia Durst Johnson wrote of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel with vastly parallel themes to The God of Small Things, “[t]he novel is a study of how Jem and Scout begin to perceive the complexity of social codes and how the configuration of relationships dictated by or set off by those codes fails or nurtures the inhabitants of (their) small worlds” (19). The same can be said about an immense swath of the roles filled by Estha and Rahel. Estha, for instance, must learn how to “properly” respond to the greeting of his British aunt, Margaret Kochamma (Roy 138). Rahel must learn the difference between “CLEAN” and “DIRTY,” what is touchable and what is untouchable (Roy 142). Both must learn these lessons of social order, or they will “Jolly Well” learn to “Behave;” a method of teaching to which Estha, although cognizant of the implications, is unfamiliar with the particulars. A telling scene follows as Estha inquires of Rahel where people are sent to “Jolly Well Behave,” and Rahel answers, “‘[t]o the government,’ … because she knew” (Roy 143).

Even in Margaret Kochamma, Sophie’s British mother, the colonization, the stiff and stifling construction of social order is readily apparent: “[b]eing with Chacko made Margaret Kochamma feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his” (Roy 233). The illustration is of a post-modern, postcolonial search for an “undiscovered country” within one’s self, a utopian society free from the manufactured mental confines of one’s own country. The truth of this search, from Roy’s vantage, is that the post-modern explorer simply exchanges familiar restrictions for unfamiliar limitations. Roy emphasizes the human urge to colonize, to expand, but with this expansion, we pollute new countries and new minds with the litter of rubble that is transformed into the walls of tomorrow.

Roy’s depiction of despoiled innocence is further investigated through Biblical allusion. The name of the pickle factory started by Mammachi, Paradise Pickles, is a flimsily veiled allusion to the Biblical Garden of Eden (30). Then, Estha and Rahel, children cast out from Paradise, share the referential roles of Adam and Eve with Ammu and Velutha. The need to return to Paradise, to innocence, explains the ostensible, incestuous scene between Estha and Rahel in which they attempt to return to the womb, to the place “before Life began” (Roy 310). Velutha’s role as Adam is highlighted in Roy’s clever literary utilization of the rib reference: "[s]he awoke to the sound of his heart knocking against his chest. As though it was searching for a way out. For that movable rib” (Roy 319). This is, no doubt, the rib that pierces his lung after the vicious beating by policemen sent to arrest him on counterfeit charges (Roy 294). However, Velutha’s Biblical casting is not limited to Adam, but extended to Isaac, as Velutha’s father assumes the role of Abraham upon learning of Velutha’s imagined transgressions and vows to murder his son to fulfill the desires of the Big God (Roy 243). The final position for Velutha, the carpenter-by-trade and fisherman-by-hobby, is that of Christ Himself (or perhaps Christ’s twin brother,) being alluded to as the mysterious man in Ammu’s dreams (Roy 205-208). 

It should be no great surprise that The God of Small Things is rife with reference to the Syrian Christians—some of these allusions are simple and plainly stated, while others are complex and obscure. The simple mentions of this rare form of Christianity are inferences to the deeper undercurrent of Christian symbolism. According to Paul Burns in his Favourite Patron Saints, St. Thomas the Apostle is the mythic founder—substantiated by local folklore and the apocryphal The Gospel of Thomas—of the Syrian Christian religion so prevalent throughout The God of Small Things (25). The King James Version of the Bible, John 11:16, calls Thomas “Didymus.” Didymus in Greek means ‘twin’ or ‘double.’ The twin-soul metaphor matches in both the Bible and The God of Small Things with Estha and Rahel being referred to as the “two-egg twins.” The Gnostics—a group of Christians that would include the Christians of St.Thomas, or Syrian Christians, if their oral history is to be believed—believe this an implication that Thomas was the twin brother of Jesus: