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 7-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 7-10 Summary
Chapter 7 returns to the present. Rahel searches through the cluttered library of her grandfather, who lived a long and unhappy life, a frustrated amateur entomologist who believed he had never gotten credit for a species of moth he was sure he first identified. Rahel searches for notebooks she and her brother kept as children, which they called Wisdom Notebooks. She finds Estha’s notebook, where he cryptically erased his name and wrote in “Un-known.” His entries are morbid, compelled by dark thoughts. As she flips through the notebook, Rahel remembers the last time she saw her mother, Ammu, four years after Sophie’s death. Weakened from lung cancer, Ammu, with a “rattle in her chest that sounded like a faraway man shouting” (151), had lost her beauty, her passion, her fire. She died a few weeks later, alone, struggling to make it to a job interview in a “strange bed in a strange room in a strange town” (154). Because she was divorced, we are told without explanation, Ammu could not be buried in sacred ground. Rahel recalls watching, with her uncle Chacko, her mother’s body being fed into the furnace of a crematorium. Rahel looks up from her thoughts in time to see Estha disappear out the door, off for another walk. She remembers how, in the aftermath of Sophie’s death, the introspective and suddenly moribund Estha was fond of saying, “Things can change in a day” (156).
In Chapter 8, the narrative returns to the family officially welcoming Sophie and her mother to the Ayemenem home. Central to the welcome is Rahel’s nearly blind grandmother playing, despite the happy occasion, a sad and mournful tune, “languid and liquid” (159), on her polished violin. The selection reflects her deep dislike of Sophie’s mother, whom she blames for the collapse of her son’s marriage. She regards her former daughter-in-law as “just another whore” (161). In fact, even young Rahel notices that her family is putting on an elaborate show, pretending to be happy and welcoming, ignoring the larger and darker issues that hang about the visit: “[O]nce again, only the Small Things were said. The Big Things lurked unsaid inside” (165).
Uneasy over the hypocrisy of the scene, Rahel rudely leaves the welcome party and seeks the company of the Black factory handyman Velutha, the one adult who never condescends to her, always treating her and her brother with respect and good humor. A disapproving Ammu, who follows Rahel outside, cannot help but notice the young man, sweaty and stripped to the waist, “contoured and hard” (167), as he picks up Rahel playfully. For his part, Velutha, distracted by the mother’s lingering stare, notices really for the first time that “Rahel’s mother was a woman” (168). Impulsively, Rahel and Velutha even dance in a moment of uncomplicated joy. Ammu calls Rahel inside and cautions her about becoming “over-familiar” with Velutha, although she does not explain the dynamics of the caste system and how Velutha is deemed one of the untouchables. A furious Rahel runs outside and, sulking, squashes ants with a stone until it is “coated with crushed red carcasses and a few feebly waving legs” (177), ignoring all the while her cousin, who comes out to play.
Chapter 9 is a slender interlude in which Rahel recalls the week leading up to Sophie Mol’s drowning. She recalls how the assertive and confident, borderline rude, Sophie callously revealed to Chacko, her biological father, how much she missed her “real” father. Sophie makes clear, despite feeling homesick and alone in this strange world, she is not interested in establishing close ties with her Indian family. The only breakthrough comes when Rahel and Estha introduce Sophie to Velutha, with his engaging and friendly demeanor. He chats with them amiably about the weather, the river, his carpentry tools, and the animals and birds all around them, and he even lets them paint his fingernails a bright red. Now, 20 years later, Rahel grieves the death of Velutha and her part in it: “He left behind a Hole in the Universe through which darkness poured like liquid tar” (182). It was true what her brother, given to melancholy after that Christmas, so often said: “Things can change in a day” (183).
In Chapter 10, the narrative returns to the day Sophie and her mother arrive. Estha, still plagued by the memories of the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man and the molestation at the movie theater, goes off by himself, wandering about the grounds of his family’s pickle factory. Although only seven, he understands now two things about life: “Anything can happen to Anyone” and “It’s best to be prepared” (186). When Rahel, who departs the family gathering uncertain over how to react to Sophie, joins him, he tells her that he has decided to run away, to cross the “sticky scarlet” Meenachal River and take refuge for a while in the History House. Using a rickety vallom, a tiny wooden boat, they find abandoned along the river, the twins practice crossing the river. The boat flounders and slowly sinks. They drag it back to shore and enlist the help of a reluctant Velutha to plug the leaks and make the tiny craft navigable. Velutha agrees to help but cautions them that the river can be dangerous, saying, “she is really a wild thing” (201). Although the children have no way of knowing it, Velutha has begun an illicit affair with their mother. For his part, he finds it exciting and titillating holding a conversation with “Her children,” the children of his secret lover.
Chapters 7-10 Analysis
These middle chapters introduce three ideas: 1) the darker implications of Estha’s apparently happy-go-lucky childhood mantra that everything can change in a day; 2) the impact of the family’s willingness to ignore big things, the complicated things that are responsible for corroding the family’s integrity; and 3) the import of Velutha, who here emerges as the novel’s doomed moral center.
The gift of childhood, at least until Estha and Rahel climb into the family’s Plymouth, is the privilege of living in pure expectation. Before the molestation in the theater lobby that effectively ends his childhood and dooms his adulthood, Estha, like any child, engages every day with wonder and anticipation, certain that at any moment the world will yield unexpected surprises. He lives in expectation of the unexpected—the happy, unexamined logic of a child’s wonder. In these chapters, the narrator begins to use Estha’s mantra as an increasingly threatening warning. Given how easily and casually the dominos fall that lead Estha to the lobby, in the aftermath he has learned that, given the reality of change, a person is helpless, perpetually vulnerable. He loses confidence in himself; as Rahel pages through Estha’s notebook, she sees that he erased his name and replaced it with the single word “Un-known.” Rahel sees that if that trip to the airport is taken out of Estha’s life narrative, her brother becomes someone entirely different from the socially awkward isolate who, now in his thirties, takes meandering walks that go nowhere, symbolic of the emotional drift of his life. She understands now the dark side of expectation, the grim reality of every person’s puniness in a malevolent universe of misfortune, bad luck, accidents, and raw chance. As she describes her life now at its midpoint, expectation is a curse; her horizon is lined with a “team of trolls” (148).
These chapters juxtapose Big Things—the narrator capitalizes the phrase—and Small Things. This juxtaposition here emerges as the sole avenue to even a tempered optimism. The world, revealed by the family’s gross hypocrisies over the arrival of the outsiders Margaret and Sophie and by its heartless treatment of Ammu after her affair has been exposed, is driven by Big Things, abstract concepts that are never fully articulated or even recognized. They simply are, stubbornly, there. Discrimination, bias, hate, history, laws, custom, tradition—even though these big ideas drive the plot, determine character reaction, and even foreshadow the tragedies of this family, they are never acknowledged, discussed, or questioned. If the small things are the quiet and unstated delights of the senses, the moments of incandescent surprise that delight, the unexpected collisions of shapes and colors and textures, easy to miss and seldom enjoyed, these Big Things are a heavy presence. Thus, the narrator shares the ghastly cremation scene in which a teenage Rahel watches, without emotion, without tears, her mother’s dead body fed into the funeral home’s ovens. The big ideas that condemned Ammu first for her fleeing an abusive marriage and then for her powerful and irresistible yearning for the strapping Velutha—hate, history, bigotry, racism—are never mentioned; the narrator spends more time explaining how the tied plastic bag of ashes was to be claimed at the crematorium offices.
In these chapters, however, it is Velutha who emerges as a counterargument to the Ipe family's benighted acceptance of tradition, its willingness to be bound and defined by the past. Velutha emerges here as a potent alternative. He is energized by the present. His muscular frame suggests his sheer presence. He does not comport himself like an untouchable, defined by his society as a lesser personage, beneath notice and respect and designed for menial labor. He does not cower; he lives, joyously, proudly, and completely.
As Ammu, herself mired in a midlife crisis of lost expectations, watches him play with the twins, he emerges as the novel’s principle of the here and now, engaged in the urgent embrace of the moment: “He had a lovely laugh that he really meant” (169). He plays, smiles, sings, and dances. He refuses to be limited by a racist culture. As such, surrounded by the miasmic and toxic environment of the Ipe family, he is a tonic, positive force. He is a builder, not like the dilettante Chacko and his flimsy model planes. Velutha, with his calloused hands, keeps the family’s factory and ramshackle homestead operating. He is a master carpenter, an outsider, a threat, his position as well as the occupation aligning him as a kind of Christ figure, his heart full of compassion and gentleness. In this section, the narrator reveals that Velutha has sacrificed much of his own life, without bitterness, animosity, or complaint, to care for his older brother, disabled years earlier by an accident in the factory. These chapters, then, lay the narrative foundation for the tragedy of Velutha’s fast-approaching horrific execution, like Christ’s, at the hands of a blinded amoral state.
