KERALA

Which?	The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1997)
What?	Lush South Indian state where love and tragedy brew amid the languid backwaters

THE AFTERNOON is heavy, hazy, lazy; the viscid air, damp as an unwrung sponge, awaits the imminent squeeze of the monsoon. For now, it’s curry-hot, the sun beating indiscriminately on red ants and yellow bullfrogs, whooping coucals and long-legged lily-trotters. It glitters on the corpses of silver fish. It nurtures the mango and jackfruit. Then, finally, the sky cracks. The heavens empty onto Kerala. Under this deluge, the paddies, palm trees and plantations flush even greener. And the channels swell to their limits, no longer languid but deceptively angry. The sort of spate that might make bad things – small bad things, big bad things – occur …

Indian author Arundhati Roy trained as an architect, which perhaps shouldn’t come as a surprise. Because her debut novel, The God of Small Things, is like a 2D blueprint conjured into 3D reality. Kerala oozes off its pages. It’s less a book than a deep pool of colour, fragrance, heat, history and politics stirred by love and loss, sentences rippling like backwaters.

The novel, which won the 1997 Booker Prize, takes place largely in the village of Ayemenem, shifting in time between 1969 and 1993 in a series of flashbacks and foreshadowing. It follows boy and girl twins, Estha and Rahel, who live with their mother Ammu and her family – grandmother Mammachi, grand-aunt Baby Kochamma – and whose lives are upturned when their half-English cousin, Sophie Mol, drowns in the nearby river. The waterways that attract so many outsiders to this dream-like patch of the subcontinent – touted by the Keralan tourist board as ‘God’s Own Country’ – become a deadly heart of darkness.

The book is as sensorially delicious as one of Mammachi’s Paradise Pickles & Preserves. It is a mouth-waterer of banana jam, fresh coconut, hot parippu vadas (lentil fritters), cardamom and cinnamon, red fish curry, black tamarind. There are crows feasting on fat mangoes and fireflies flickering in the darkness. There are vibrant saris and tucked-up mundus. There are shanty huts leaning into the heat and colonial, teak-shuttered bungalows with deep verandas where it’s always cool. There is the ‘sicksweet smell of old roses on a breeze’.

But The God of Small Things also draws bigger issues into focus. For around 3,000 years Indian society was shaped by the caste system. Among the world’s oldest forms of social stratification, this class structure divided Hindus into four main groups: at the top, Brahmins (intellectuals), then Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), Vaishyas (traders) and Shudras (labourers). Outside of this were the Dalits or ‘untouchables’, the lowest of the low. Members of different castes lived apart, drank from separate wells, could not marry, often would not touch.

Although the Indian Constitution of 1950 outlawed the caste system and status-based discrimination, the old ways proved hard to shake. This long-standing hierarchy, which extended beyond Hinduism into wider society, persisted; unwritten rules continued to be upheld and individuals remained limited by their rank. Certainly in The God of Small Things, the caste system still determines what Roy calls the Love Laws: ‘the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much’. For Ammu, a higher-class Syrian Christian, to be in a relationship with the handyman Velutha – a Paravan, one of the ‘untouchables’ – is not conscionable at all. When the ‘laws’ are broken, tragedy ensues.

Ayemenem is a fictionalised version of Aymanam, in Kerala’s Kottayam District, where Roy spent time as a child. The village name (meaning ‘five forests’) refers to the woodland that once thrived here, alongside the Meenachil River. Now paddy fields cloak much of the area and frenetic, traffic-jammed Kottayam town has seeped towards the old village, injecting greater bustle.

There are a few old Hindu temples to visit – the Vishnu-dedicated Sree Narasimha Swamy and mural-daubed Pandavam Shasta temples. However, you won’t find an exact replica of the novel’s ‘Ayemenem House’, though the building is not entirely made up. Roy borrowed parts of two family homes to construct her fictional nexus. Puliyampallil House and Shanti House stand on adjacent plots at the end of a path of rubber trees, along from the village school. Puliyampallil is a fine early-20th century home ‘with its steep gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat’, while Shanti dates from the 1960s. The river flows across the fields behind, towards Lake Vembanad.

The ‘History House’, where the book’s most tragic events occur, is not on the other side of the river in the middle of an abandoned rubber estate. The real home of ‘Kari Saipu’ – aka Alfred Baker, one of a family of English missionaries who’d ‘gone native’, spoke Malayalam (Kerala’s official language) and wore mundus – is actually a little way away, in the Kumarakom Bird Sanctuary. The Bakers developed the sanctuary in the mid-19th century, and it’s now a haven for Indian darters, white Ibis, Siberian cranes and other resident and migratory birds. The ‘History House’ bungalow is now part of the Taj Garden Retreat.

In her novel, Roy laments how Kerala has kowtowed to tourist tastes: the heritage buildings that are now hotels, the hours’-long kathakali dances that have been abridged for impatient foreigners. It’s true that kettuvallam houseboats now tote visitors rather than rice and spice along the backwaters. But while boarding one of these restored-for-tourists vessels for a slow cruise has become a cliché, it remains the best way to see Kerala – the best way to spot its wonderful small things.