Elusive Love

‘D’you know what happens when you hurt people?’ Ammu said. ‘When you hurt people, they begin to love you less.’

Ammu says this comment to her daughter, Rahel, in Chapter 4, “Abhilash Talkies,” after Rahel snaps at Ammu for being nice to the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man, a man selling refreshments in the lobby of a theater, whom Rahel senses is bad. The man has just molested her brother, Estha, while the rest of the family is inside the theater, but only Rahel senses that something happened because of her psychic connection to her brother. When Ammu says these words to Rahel about people loving you less if you behave badly, Rahel’s sense of childhood safety is effectively shattered. For the rest of the novel, she becomes preoccupied with how much of her mother’s love she has at any given time. The sense of having a mother’s love constantly and unconditionally, something foundational to the emotional health of any child, is now on variable ground. Rahel begins to create hierarchical “lists” of love, ordering how much love she has or is given from others in an attempt to gain a sense of control over her life, which is now on insecure emotional grounding.

She arrived on the Bombay-Cochin flight. Hatted, bell-bottomed and Loved from the Beginning.

These are Rahel’s words in Chapter 5, “God’s Own Country,” reflecting on the day Sophie Mol arrives with her mother, Margaret, at the airport in Cochin from England. Sophie Mol is Rahel’s uncle Chacko’s daughter. She is half-Indian, half-English. The whole family is anticipating Sophie Mol’s arrival, whom they have never met. Since she is half-English, they are now officially getting to represent India to her. Chacko’s wife, Margaret, left him just after Sophie Mol was born, and Chacko returned home to India after Margaret left. Rahel, who has just been told by Ammu that people will love her a “little less” for saying harsh things, is now anxious about not having her mother’s love and attention. Rahel observes how much everyone in her family fawns over and adores Sophie Mol, whom they barely know. Rahel, as any seven-year-old would be, is acutely aware of the amount of attention the adults around her are giving to her at any moment. In this moment, however, their focus is on Sophie Mol, a girl they are only just meeting. As she’s too young, Rahel cannot fully understand the family’s fascination with Sophie Mol.

Ammu saw what he saw. . . . History’s fiends returned to claim them. To rewrap them in its old, scarred pelt and drag them back to where they really lived. Where the Love Laws lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.

This quote happens in a crucial moment in Chapter 8, “Welcome Home, Our Sophie Mol,” when Ammu and Velutha first notice each other as sexual beings. For a moment, they catch each other’s eyes, notice each other’s bodies, and a passion is stirred within them. Up until this point, Velutha has been a long-time employee of the family. He’s an “Untouchable,” a member of the lower castes, and for him and Ammu to have a relationship is strictly against the system’s order as Ammu is a “Touchable.” History, in this case, is personified as a devil-like master, who sends out “fiends” to capture, bind, and hold Velutha and Ammu in society’s boundaries where they are not allowed to be together. Their love is something that is profane and unsacred in the Indian caste system’s eyes. Later, while an adult Rahel is watching a Kathakali dance being performed in a temple, the “Love Laws” are invoked again, when a mythical mother forbids her son to kill her other sons, his brothers. The “Love Laws” are a superimposed system of order that binds and warps the true spirit of love, which grows naturally and unpredictably, without any respect for social order.

The Struggle to Maintain Boundaries

Chacko . . . though he was the Man of the House, though he said, ‘My pickles, my jam, my curry powders,’ was so busy trying on different costumes that he blurred the battle lines.

This line occurs in Chapter 4, “Abhilash Talkies,” in a flashback to the time when the rumblings of unrest, provoked by the growing influence of the Communist Party in Kerala, begin to grow at the Kochamma pickle factory. Mammachi feels perturbed, thinking about how there is a famine, and the workers are lucky to have any work at all. Whenever anything happens at the factory, the matter is brought to her, not Chacko, because she fitted properly into the “conventional scheme” of things, and “played her part.” Mammachi lives within the boundaries of her culture. Chacko, on the other hand, plays both sides and is sympathetic to both Communist Party members within and outside his factory, even though, he, too, feels the movement is foolish. Like Rahel and Estha, Chacko has difficulty maintaining boundaries and a stance on anything in his life. In the end, Chacko’s failure to maintain boundaries costs him the factory, which succumbs to pressures from Communist influence.

In that brief moment, Velutha looked up and saw things that he hadn’t seen before. Things that had been out of bounds so far, obscured by history’s blinkers.

In this moment in Chapter 8, “Welcome Home, Our Sophie Mol,” Velutha suddenly becomes aware of Ammu’s beauty. This moment of awareness and attraction is “out of bounds” because he is an “Untouchable,” a person of a lower caste than Ammu, and is forbidden by society to have a relationship with her. Yet the stirrings of love within Velutha force him to see beyond this artificial “boundary” and lead him to see Ammu in a new light. History, once again, is the cause of obfuscation in society and in life, drawing boundaries around who can and cannot love each other. Later, after Mammachi learns of Velutha’s affair with Ammu and spits on him and casts him out of her house, threatening to end his life, Velutha once again has a moment of being “stunned” outside the boundaries of history, and walks home in a trance. He feels unmoored knowing that he, a man who never had a real place in society in the first place, is even more “homeless” within the bounds of history. Velutha begins to name things he sees on his walk home, like “gate,” and “road,” to try to regain a sense of place and standing, not only in the world, but in his own consciousness.

The rest of the recipe was in Estha’s new best handwriting. Angular, spiky. It leaned backwards as though the letters were reluctant to form words, and the words reluctant to be in sentences[.]

This moment occurs in Chapter 10, “The River in the Boat,” when Ammu allows young Estha to copy Mammachi’s prized banana jam recipe into her new recipe book. Estha feels pride knowing he is the one to copy the recipe into the blank book. The gesture is a symbolic one, for it’s a moment when the family’s legacy is recorded as this recipe, this banana jam, and is the one thing that has “made” the family. Estha tries to use his best handwriting, which is angular and sharp. However, even Estha’s handwriting cannot stay within its own boundaries, or even the conventions of writing. The script appears to be reluctant to fall in line, as if it’s resisting being strait-jacketed into words and sentences. This idea carries the theme of the boundary-crossing the twins do throughout the novel, first as psychic twins who operate as “One,” and later, as two individuals who commit incest. Rahel and Estha even share a habit of reading road signs backward. The twins, in their ability to cross boundaries and see beyond them, however, are able to make more accurate observations about the world around them, if only later, as adults.

Pride and Shame

He bought the skyblue Plymouth from an old Englishman in Munnar. He became a familiar sight in Ayemenem, coasting importantly down the narrow road in his wide car, looking outwardly elegant but sweating freely inside his woollen suits. He wouldn’t allow Mammachi or anyone else in the family to use it, or even to sit in it. The Plymouth was Pappachi’s revenge.

In this quote in Chapter 2, “Pappachi’s Moth,” Chacko has just stopped Pappachi from his nightly ritual of beating his wife, Mammachi, with a brass vase. Pappachi, in a fit of rage, takes a chair outside and smashes it instead. Pappachi is not seen much in the novel, but it is clear he has a savage, cruel, and inhumane personality. He terrorizes both his wife and his daughter, Ammu. To regain a sense of standing and pride as the head of the household, Pappachi buys a “skyblue” Plymouth which he doesn’t allow anyone else to ride in. Pappachi’s beating of Mammachi is a source of twisted male pride for him, and the car replaces this pride when Chacko forces him to stop. Chacko, in comparison, is later humiliated by his own wife, Margaret, who casts him out when he reveals himself to be a lazy underachiever. Chacko’s sense of pride doesn’t come from dominating women, but rather from protecting them, as he tries to do years later with his ex-wife and daughter, Sophie Mol, however feeble and late his attempts may be.

He knew that if Ammu found out about what he had done with the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man, she’d love him less as well.

In this quote from Chapter 4, “Abhilash Talkies,” Estha has just been sexually molested in the lobby of the Abhilash Talkies theater. Estha, who was speaking too loudly and singing in the theater, was sent outside to wait in the lobby so he wouldn’t disturb anyone. The Orangedrink Lemondrink Man is a bored, perverted man selling refreshments in the lobby. When he notices that the young, seven-year-old Estha is alone, he offers him a free drink, and then he proceeds to make Estha touch him. After the event, Estha feels ill to his stomach and struggles to process what happened. Estha has a feeling of shame, knowing that something “wrong” just happened, but projects the blame on himself, rather than on the perpetrator. Estha internalizes this shame and believes it makes him less worthy of receiving his mother’s love. Shame, as an inverse of pride, is another form of self-assessment. In this case, Estha, a confused child, cannot properly assess or understand his assault, and he struggles to regain some order in his mind.

And the Air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. The Big Things lurk unsaid inside.

The narrator makes this observation in Chapter 6, “Cochin Kangaroos,” at the airport, as Chacko, Ammu, Baby Kochamma, Mammachi, Rahel, and Estha await the arrival of Sophie Mol and her mother Margaret from London. Sophie Mol is Chacko’s daughter and Margaret is his ex-wife. Chacko has not seen them since Margaret kicked him out and divorced him nine years earlier when Sophie Mol was an infant. Sophie Mol is half-Indian, half-English. At the airport, the family scuffles around, painfully aware that the people arriving are English while they are Indian, meaning they represent India. They worry about how they’re dressed and they are careful with their speech. Here, the narrator notes how, in this instance, the “Small Things,” like the polite niceties and formalities of dressing well, and saying the “right thing,” become prioritized over the “Big Things,” such as fear of being judged or shamed. This scenario inverts the novel’s consistent relegation of the “Small Things” to things of substance, such as love and the little moments Ammu and Velutha share with each other during their secret meetings. In this moment, the “Small Things” are the things people do out of pride or to conceal shame.

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