The God of Small Things Chapters 3 & 4 Summary & Analysis

Chapters 3 & 4

Summary: Chapter 3, Big Man the Laltain, Small Man the Mombatti

The narrative shifts to the present, where Baby Kochamma and the cook Kochu Maria are in the house in Ayemenem. The house is covered in insects, grime, and dirt from years of neglect. Baby Kochamma and Kochu Maria have a routine where they sit side by side in chairs watching television together. Rahel watches them as they watch an episode of Phil Donahue, a long-running American sensationalist talk show. A busker on television reminds Rahel of an old Bihari laborer who used to carry their luggage at the train station. The man used to say “Big Man the Laltain sahib, Small Man the Mombatti,” meaning “Big Man the Lantern, Small Man the Tallow-Stick,” a reference to there being two types of dreams people have—big and small. Estha walks in, drenched from the rain. Rahel follows him silently to his room, where she watches him undress. She’s fascinated by his body and remembers how they used to look at each other’s bodies without shame when they were children, but how now they’re “old.” Rahel wipes a raindrop from his ear, but whether he notices or not is unclear because he remains silent. Estha has remained silent for most of his life after an event that happened as a child. He continues to wash his clothes, unacknowledging Rahel’s presence.

Summary: Chapter 4, Abhilash Talkies

Before going to the hotel to wait for Sophie Mol’s arrival, the family goes to the cinema Abhilash Talkies in Cochin. The family goes to the restroom—Baby Kochamma, Ammu, and Rahel to the women’s restroom, and Estha to the men’s restroom. Baby Kochamma and Ammu help Rahel urinate by hovering her over the pot. They all share a laugh as she urinates, a memory that Rahel treasures as a family bonding moment. Estha, alone in the men’s restroom, gets two cans to stand on so he can be tall like the other men as he urinates. Inside the theater, Estha cannot control himself—he sings joyfully as the movie is about to begin. An embarrassed Ammu banishes him to the lobby to wait for them.

Inside the lobby is a man selling drinks, the “Orangedrink Lemondrink Man.” The man notices Estha is alone and beckons him to come over for a free drink. The man proceeds to make Estha fondle him, while he asks Estha questions about his family. The man laughs thinking about Estha as a privileged boy as he sexually assaults him. The event, especially the man’s laughter, profoundly confuses Estha, and makes him feel ill. The family reconvenes in the lobby, and Rahel senses immediately something is wrong with the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man because of her psychic connection with Estha. Ammu, not realizing what has happened, praises the man’s politeness. Rahel snaps at her mother saying, “Why don’t you marry him then,” confusing herself at her own response. Ammu snaps back, telling Rahel, “When you hurt people, they begin to love you less.” This comment hurls Rahel into despair, causing her to feel anxious for the rest of the novel about how much of her mother’s love she has at any moment in time. Estha leaves the theater haunted knowing that the man now knows where they live and could come at any time to assault him again.

The family goes to the hotel for the night. Chacko wonders what his daughter Sophie Mol looks like now. The last time he saw her she was an infant. Before he and his wife Margaret Kochamma divorced, he would go to Sophie Mol’s bedroom at night to study her features to memorize them, but to also confirm she was actually his child. Estha vomits in the bathroom in the adjoining room. Chacko goes to the twins’ room, where he and Rahel talk. Rahel asks him whether it was in fact Velutha whom they saw marching with the Communists on their way to Cochin. This makes Chacko wonder how he’s going to handle the growing situation with Comrade K. N. M. Pillai, the Communist leader who wants to rally the workers at Paradise Pickles. The family business is financially struggling as it is. Rahel, as an adult, reflects on the irony of how Velutha was the only card-carrying Communist in the factory, but Comrade K. N. M. Pillai avoided aligning with him because Velutha was an Untouchable, or a person of the lower caste. At night, the twins slept holding each other and dreaming of “their river” near their house.

Analysis: Chapters 3 & 4

Nature has overcome the Ayemenem house after years of Baby Kochamma’s neglect. Dead insects lie in empty vases, cockroaches scurry across the floor, and years of grime collect on plugs and lightbulbs. The two residents of the home—Baby Kochamma and Kochu Maria—are now lazy, defunct members of society. They’re enraptured by the “unnatural”—the holographic figures shown by the television screen and the distorted versions of their lives reflected on the television screen. It is here that a major theme of the novel—the dichotomy of small things and big things—begins to emerge. Rahel’s recollection of the old Bihari’s saying, “Big Man the Laltain, Small Man the Mombatti,” which roughly translates to “Big Man the Lantern, Small Man the Tallow-Stick” reminds her that it is the “small things” that really have the most control in life. The “big” light comes from the lantern, but it is the tallow stick that provides the light. Similarly, in the novel, “Big Things” get attention, like marriages, jobs, and social order, but it’s the “Small Things,” like little expressions of love, that provide the impulses to act.

In Chapter 4, two main plot events emerge: Estha’s molestation and Sophie Mol’s arrival. By this point it is clear that the story will be told in a nonlinear order. The story straddles between two years—1969, when Sophie Mol visits, and 1993, when the twins are thirty-one and reunited after decades apart. Readers constantly shift from being introduced to a character in the present, then learning more about them in the past. This shifting reflects the disorderly and illogical lives of the Kochamma family, and is also a commentary on life itself, which is not always logical and does not always follow an orderly fashion.

Another key theme emerges here as well—that of love. Estha is “cast out” of the theater for being too loud and boisterous, for essentially acting naturally, like a seven-year-old boy does. It’s when he’s cast out of his family’s protection that he becomes vulnerable to a bored sexual predator. Through this tragic assault, Estha is also “cast out” of his own childhood innocence and into a world of worry and fear. Noting that the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man has made it a point to say he knows where the child lives, Estha constantly worries he’ll come to assault him at any time. Estha no longer feels safe. Rahel, sensing the assault because of her connection to her twin, is also a victim of the assault by proxy. Her sense that something is wrong causes her to act out and provoke her mother, who in turn makes the mistake of telling Rahel that she will love her a little less for speaking harshly. The twins now embark together on a life without safety and a mother’s unconditional love—two essential moorings to ground a child’s life. These events happen because of the family’s denial of what is natural, for transgressing social boundaries the family wants to keep.

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