50 pages • 1 hour read
Arundhati RoyThe God of Small Things
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 3-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 3-6 Summary
In Chapter 3, set in the narrative present, we are told how the family home in Ayemenem has deteriorated over the years. The last of the family still there, Baby Kochamma, in her eighties, spends her days in front of the new television, seldom bothering to tidy up the place, indifferent to the piled dishes and the scurrying cockroaches, relying on a most unreliable maid, a dwarf named Kochu Maria. Estha, coming in from a long walk in a steady rain, heads to his room, which he has reorganized and cleaned up. He prepares for a shower. Rahel arrives from the airport eager to reunite with her brother. As Rahel watches from his bedroom door, Estha, knowing his sister is watching, strips without shame. Rahel is impressed by her brother’s lithe and muscled frame, looking on his body as if he were “a naked stranger met in a chance encounter” (89). It is an awkward moment, Estha and Rahel “[a] sister a brother. A woman a man” (89).
In Chapter 4, the narrative returns to 1969 and the family trip to the airport in Cochin. After being waylaid by the parade, they stop at the Abhilash Talkies, a movie theater showing The Sound of Music. After they visit the theater’s bathroom in an elaborate ritual, they settle into their seats to watch the movie. Quickly, Estha becomes a problem—he loves to sing along at the top of his voice to the movie’s songs. The family quietly tells him to go sit in the back of the theater. Estha, on his own there, wanders into the ornate theater lobby. He sees a man “with gummy eyes” working the snack counter (97). He dubs him the “Orangedrink Lemondrink Man” (97). The man invites the boy to come behind the counter by offering him a free cold drink. There, after some chit-chat, the man casually places his erect penis, “hot, hard, veiny” (98), into the hands of the shocked and terrified boy. He hisses to Estha to rub the thing until, to the boy’s surprise, his hand suddenly feels “wet and hot and sticky” (99). Estha returns to his family. He tells his mother he feels nauseous. He says nothing about the vendor. The family decides to leave the movie. Only Rahel, suddenly “full of sadness” (109), senses something is terribly wrong with her brother. At the hotel, as the family settles down for the night, Chacko thinks about his daughter and their reunion the next day, uncertain over how he will feel after so long a separation. Rahel and Estha sleep together, their arms and legs entwined, both dreaming of the Meenachal River back home.
Chapter 5, set in the present, offers a panoramic perspective of Ayemenem centering on the Meenachal River that runs through it and the impact of the burgeoning tourist industry. Rahel, on a walk, notes that the river, promoted to tourists as the picturesque life-stream of “God’s Own Country” (120), is in fact a sort of community bathroom, a turgid, fetid river where everyone bathes. The river is little more than “a swollen drain” (118), a brownish river clogged with feces from the villagers and their animals. In the hopes of attracting tourists, local officials have also reskinned a few of the town’s rundown homesteads left over from the long era of British colonialism into what they dub “historic” sites, most notably a rambling structure known now as the History House, a largely empty edifice with a labyrinth of furnished rooms that has become, for the local children, a kind of haunted house from which they are strictly forbidden. On her way back home, Rahel runs into K. N. M. Pillai, once the manager of the family’s now defunct pickle business as well as the proud head of the communist underground in Ayemenem. The old man shares with Rahel a box of vintage photographs, among them a goofy shot taken that Christmas holiday of Sophie, Rahel, and Estha innocently clowning for the camera. Sophie, the narrator intrudes, would be dead within days.
Chapter 6 returns to 1969. The family heads to the airport. They are each dressed in their best and carry flowers and even painted signs to welcome Margaret and Sophie. When the plane arrives, the family, particularly Rahel, is stunned by Sophie’s very British beauty—her blonde hair, her strikingly fair skin, her pale blue eyes: “Hatted, bell-bottomed, and Loved from the beginning” (129). Rahel is immediately overwhelmed by her cousin, uncertain how to respond. In the long car ride back to Ayemenem, Rahel hides awkwardly behind the curtains that drape the car windows against the tropical sun. She struggles to figure out how even to talk to the cousin, a stranger she now has a duty to like.
Chapters 3-6 Analysis
Given that the dimensions of the Ipe family tragedy suggest the family’s inability or unwillingness to engage the past in any healthy way, these four chapters explore strategies of handling time and the effects of the past, strategies that, given the evident troubled psychologies of the family members, clearly do not work. If the novel ultimately moves toward a hesitant note of guarded and decidedly tempered optimism in the closing chapter, these chapters begin the spiral downward into a claustrophobic pessimism. In examining the traumatic impact of molestation on Estha, the influence of tourists and the ill-advised efforts to attract Westerners to the swampy wastes of coastal southwest India, and the evident filth and neglect of the Ipe house itself, the chapters offer only dead-end strategies for handling time: simple denial, stubborn silence, or clumsy repackaging. These are elaborate strategies for surrender.
Thus, this section is in large part defined by the old country saying that Baby Kochamma, wallowing in front of her television, is fond of recycling: “Big Man the Lantern. Small Man the Tallow-stick” (85). The proverb suggests the rationale for her and her family’s surrender to the loss of their dreams. Important people, she reasons, people of wealth and influence, get the lanterns—that is, broad and open vistas and sure and steady steps. Small people, those without such influence, those like her family, must make do with the feebler light of candles, struggling without illumination, scared and uncertain one small step after the next. The saying is, the narrator suggests, just another way to embrace hopelessness.
To suggest the decline of the Ipe family, the narrator focuses here on the degradation and physical deterioration of the house using the perspective of the twins and their arrival in Ayemenem after 20 years: “Filth had laid siege to the Ayemenem House like a medieval army advancing on an enemy castle. It clotted every crevice and clung to the windowpanes” (84). The rooms are dusty, the garden gone to shambles, the roof tilting. In returning home after more than two decades, the twins take in the neglect their family home has suffered. Efforts to maintain even a reasonable level of basic cleanliness have collapsed. Baby Kochamma, whom we learn only later is principally responsible for the tragedy of that Christmas holiday and, thus, for the family’s dissolution, seems in this section harmless, more a victim of time and of being abandoned by her family, to be pitied more than blamed. She is morbidly overweight and indifferent to her surroundings, seeing the family maid as more of an inconvenience and a distraction while the two of them down fistfuls of peanuts and watch long hours of outdated episodes of the Phil Donahue Show. The choice of program is ironic given the show’s emphasis on encouraging psychological health and therapeutic new beginnings. Indeed, given the backstory of her unrequited love for a priest, she comes across here as someone who would benefit from being a guest on the talk show. Only the unfolding layers of memories will reveal the context for the old woman’s surrender and the petty, spiteful, vindictive nature of the apparently innocuous woman herself. The condition of the house, then, suggests the emotional and psychological ruin of the family itself.
If neglect is one dead-end strategy for surrendering to the past and to time itself, embodied by Baby Kochamma, the lost figure of Estha represents another, equally ineffective strategy: silence. These chapters juxtapose Estha in his early thirties, broken and emotionally distant, with Estha at 7, loquacious, cheeky, and confident. The horrific experience of being lured behind the candy counter and then made to assist the vendor in masturbating and the boy’s confusion and fear shatter his innocence and his naïve bravura. The kid who walks into the movie theater is not the kid who walks out of the theater, nauseous, queasy, paranoid, and haunted. The Estha introduced in the narrative present still, 20 years later, suffers from trauma. Grappling with what happened, unable to understand its implications, Estha opts for a stubborn and prolonged silence.
Much as he shares with no one the encounter with the snack vendor, Estha maintains a protective wall about himself. He is, as the narrator argues, a victim of the past, of history’s “thickening thud”: “It would lurk forever in ordinary things. In coat hangers. Tomatoes. In the tar on roads. In certain colors. In the plates at a restaurant. In the absence of words. And the emptiness in eyes” (54). Estha’s select mutism represents his surrender to a past he cannot negotiate, fathom, or relinquish. His reunion with his sister marks the beginnings of what might be his redemption. The encounters even here foreshadow the closing scene when the twins, against social taboos and Indian law, make love.
Finally, in these chapters, the narrator details the backstory of the town of Ayemenem itself with an especial focus on its own struggle with its history. The town, uncertain over what to do with the edifices that testify to India’s long and humiliating colonization by the British, is determined to redefine itself, in essence to paint over the past, reskin it as something better than what it was and is. That strategy is at once painful and pointless. When Rahel visits the temple where once the performers in traditional Indian theater would put on elaborate all-night rituals that invoked story, dance, and music, she cannot help but see how watered down and simplified the performances are now in an attempt to cater to the limited cultural awareness of Western tourists. The narrator quotes the elaborate obfuscations of government tourist bureaus too eager to distort the realities of the state of Kerala, its fetid river system, its nonexistent infrastructure, its stark poverty, and its street upon street of empty homes in ruin. This is God’s Own Country, a boast that is at best an exaggeration, at worst a deliberate lie. It offers, like Estha’s mutism and Baby Kochamma’s benign neglect of her home, yet another unworkable dead-end strategy for handling the reality of history and the weight of the time.
