Chapters 1 & 2

Summary: Chapter 1, Paradise Pickles & Preserves 

Rahel, a thirty-one-year-old Indian woman, returns home to India after living in the United States. Rahel is returning home after learning that her twin brother, Estha, is also returning to their family home in Ayemenem in Kerala, the southern province of India. Rahel and Estha are fraternal twins who share a subconscious bond. Their minds often sync up and they pick up on each other’s experiences, memories, and even dreams. They are described as essentially one person. The twins were born in Assam at a tea estate where their father, Baba, worked, but later moved to their grandparents’ home in Ayemenem as children when their mother, Ammu, divorced their father. A few years later, Baba had demanded Ammu send Estha back to live with him, separating the twins for a long period of time. 

The narrative shifts, as it will do several times throughout the novel, back to when Rahel and Estha are at the funeral of their cousin, Sophie Mol. The twins were seven years old at the time, and Sophie Mol was nine. Sophie Mol, who recently came to Ayemenem with her mother Margaret Kochamma, has drowned. Sophie Mol is the daughter of Chacko, Rahel and Estha’s uncle and son of Mammachi, their maternal grandmother. During the funeral, Rahel’s attention drifts to the ceiling of the cathedral, which has a scene of the sky painted on it. She imagines the painter falling to the floor of the church and cracking his head open, spilling blood from his skull “like a secret.” She also imagines a baby bat crawling up her great-aunt Baby Kochamma’s sari biting her leg, and Sophie Mol still alive in her coffin and screaming as she is lowered into the ground. After the funeral, Ammu takes the twins to the police station to report that “there’s been a mistake” about something, but it is not clear what. The police officer molests Ammu, and on the train ride back, Ammu is out of her mind, muttering, “He’s dead . . . I’ve killed him” over and over. 

Baby Kochamma is now the only one living in the family home. It is revealed that when she was younger, Baby Kochamma fell in love with an Irish monk, Father Mulligan, and joined a convent to win his affection. When that failed, she went to the University of Rochester in New York to study ornamental gardening. For a while she kept a garden at the house, but now she is lazy and spends her days watching television with the house servant, Kochu Maria. Baby Kochamma doesn’t like that the twins have returned home because she is worried they’ll take the home from her. The home belongs to Rahel and Estha’s grandparents, Mammachi and Pappachi.

As an adult, Rahel looks at her grandmother’s pickle factory, Paradise Pickles & Preserves, and she reflects on how the banana jam made at the factory was banned for being unclassifiable as either jam or jelly and how her family has made similar transgressions of classifications with their own lives. She feels the heaviness and mystery shrouding the home, which she traces back to Sophie Mol’s death. 

Summary: Chapter 2, Pappachi’s Moth

The narrative returns to 1969, when Rahel and Estha are children and Ammu is twenty-seven-years-old. Their grandmother, Mammachi, is driving the family to Cochin for a vacation to pick up Sophie Mol, Chacko’s daughter, who is arriving from England with his ex-wife, Margaret Kochamma.

The story reveals several of the characters’ histories. Ammu got married to Babu, the twins’ father, when she was only eighteen years old after meeting him just days before at a friend’s wedding ceremony in Calcutta. They have a luxurious wedding and for a time, Ammu, believing she has elevated her life, feels happy. Ammu and Babu move to Assam, where Babu works on a tea estate. Babu turns out to be a drunk, and after some time, he is in danger of losing his job. His boss, Mr. Hollick, threatens to fire Babu but offers him a deal: If Babu sends Ammu over to his bungalow at night to sleep with him, Babu can keep his job. Babu tries to force Ammu to comply, but she beats him and leaves with the twins to return home to Ayemenem. She then becomes the town eccentric, emotionally erratic and volatile.

Mammachi and Pappachi’s story is also revealed. Mammachi, a hard-working woman who is blind, is the person behind the family pickle business. Pappachi is an Imperial Entomologist at the Pusa Institute in Delhi. He beats Mammachi at night with a brass vase, but that stops when their son Chacko comes home and forbids him to continue abusing Mammachi. Pappachi buys a blue Plymouth and refuses to let anyone drive the car in a bid to regain his position in the family. One day, Pappachi discovers a new species of moth after the insect lands in his drink, but the Institute refuses to acknowledge it as a new species, claiming it is a variant of another, more common species. Years later, it turns out Pappachi was right, but he isn’t given any credit for the discovery of the new species. Pappachi dies a bitter old man of a heart attack a few years later.

Chacko, Ammu’s brother, is a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, but he is lazy and cannot maintain his job as a lecturer at a college so he returns home to run the family pickle business. He tells the twins that they need to go to the “History House,” a shack on the edge of the river, to learn more about their family, and that earth is an ancient woman far more important than they’ll ever be.  

The story moves back to 1969 with the family in the car. The family passes a naked, armless man, Murlidharan, whose keys to his old home are tied around his waist. They also come upon a crowd of marching Communists. Rahel notices a man known to the family, Velutha, among them. Velutha is an “Untouchable,” a Paravan, or member of a lower caste, and a worker at the family’s pickle factory. Mammachi hires him to do tasks around the house because he is a skilled craftsman, like his father, Vellya Paapen. Rahel rolls down the window to call to Velutha, but Ammu snaps at her, saying it’s not him. The Communist marchers stop the car at one point and force Baby Kochamma to wave the Communist flag. She’s embarrassed and ashamed, and directs her anger at Velutha. Chacko, in a moment of frustration, cries out that Ammu, Estha, and Rahel are all a burden to him. 

Analysis: Chapters 1 & 2 

In the opening chapters of the novel, readers are immediately drawn into the world of the unnatural and bizarre. The twins share an uncanny, psychic bond, and are considered “one” person; Mammachi’s banana jam recipe is too “wild” to be sanctioned by the government for violating the boundaries of “jelly” and “jam”; and Rahel’s vision in the cathedral of the painter falling to the floor and her cousin alive in her coffin blends fantasy and reality. As Rahel looks out over her family’s now-defunct pickle factory, she reflects on the way her family has a habit of transgressing boundaries. 

The language and diction in these opening chapters reflect the unnatural world of the novel. Roy “jams” words together to form new, strange compound words like “greenmossing” and “thunderdarkness” that straddle meanings. She capitalizes odd words like “Group activities” and “Re-returned.” What’s even more noticeable is the sensuality that lurks behind the words. As the novel opens, Roy describes the hot May months of Ayemenem as “hot, brooding,” and the jackfruits “bursting.” Nature seems always ready to pounce through the language, as it does later in the characters’ lives. Here, Roy sets up the theme of the dichotomy between the natural and social world, establishing that the Kochamma family is right in the middle.

The countryside turns an “immodest green,” and the trappings of modern life—fences, electric poles, brick walls—are overturned by encroaching vegetation. Roy writes, “Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom,” and “pepper vines snake up electric poles.” Something about the natural world is stronger than the socially-constructed one, always threatening to take the latter over. Even something about the twins feels threatening to Baby Kochamma, who fears their return home will supplant her. As readers later learn, Rahel and Estha’s tie to the natural world, and to truth, will threaten Baby Kochamma’s sense of security, which comes from an allegiance to family honor, tradition, and the Indian caste system. 

Even Baby Kochamma, as revealed in Chapter 1, has made her own transgression in leaving her culture to become a nun to win Father Mulligan’s love. Her own sacrifice of order in pursuit of love fails, and she settles on a degree in ornamental gardening, another way to “corral” and “order” the unruliness and unpredictability of nature. She fails here, too, and succumbs to an even greater distraction, the lure of the Western world and television and its cheap form of distraction. 

Readers are not totally divorced from the real world, however, as even Rahel’s vision in the cathedral is described in a mundane, realistic fashion—nothing seems out of the ordinary other than Rahel’s macabre overlay of Sophie Mol being alive in her coffin screaming and doing cartwheels, and the painter of the cathedral falling to the floor cracking his head open, spilling blood “like a secret.” Rahel’s vision is of fantastical non-reality is simply superimposed over the real events of the funeral.