ABSTRACT
Arundhati Roy chose to tell the tragic story of the disintegration of a family through the perspective of children. The expression of childhood here is an excavation into memory as it lives in the adult. The extraordinary sensuousness of childhood offers a highly poetic narrative. The book is teeming with images,
sounds, tastes, and tactile impressions that suggest our earliest memories and ways of perceiving the world. At the same time, they bring us close to a world so different from our own. With the fleshiness of Arundhati Roy's metaphors, we are plunged into May in Ayemenem, "a hot, brooding month ... [when] the river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees.... Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun." We are thrust "into early June [when] [t]he countryside turns an immodest green. Boundaties blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom" (God ofSnzall Things, 3). The "sharp, glittering sunshine ... [the] wild creepers that spill across the flooded road ... [the] small fish [that] appear in the puddles that fill the potholes on the highways" (God of SInal! Things, 3) frame the story the adult Rahel tells in retrospect, as she returns to "[t]he wild, overgrown garden" of her childhood home-a place "full of the whisper and SCUITY of small lives" (God of Snzall Things, 4)-to retrieve Estha, her twin brother, from whom she has been separated for twenty-three years. As Estha stopped speaking long ago, sometime after their divorced mother "returned" him to his father, Rahel is keeper of his words, his childhood memories and dreams, which are also her own-even those, as Roy says, "she has no right to have" (God ofSnzall Things, 5).
