The God of Small Things Chapters 5 & 6 Summary & Analysis

Chapters 5 & 6

Summary: Chapter 5, God’s Own Country

In the present, the novel turns to the river, which has turned sluggish, polluted, and putrid after years of colonization. At one point, the river had the power “to evoke fear” with its current, but now it has become a “swollen drain” after years of people dumping garbage into it, and bathing and defecating in its waters. A five-star hotel chain was built on the river and christened itself “God’s Own Country.” The hotel does its best to block the view of the putrid river—putting boundaries up and installing a pool—but can do nothing about the smell, which wafts over the fences. At the hotel are held traditional Kathakali dances, ancient dances that tell a story that last six hours long, but the dances in the hotel are performed in a truncated version to appeal to tourists’ short attention spans.

Rahel runs into Comrade K. N. M. Pillai, who feigns small talk, vaguely recalling that her family was involved in a sex scandal and had a tragic death years before. Comrade K. N. M. Pillai shows her pictures of his son, Lenin, named after Vladimir Lenin, the famous Marxist leader. This conversation provokes a flashback for Rahel, to when she and Lenin were toddlers waiting at the doctor’s office together to have objects they got stuck in their noses removed. Afraid of the doctor, who Rahel now knows sexually assaulted his patients, Rahel tried to blow the object out of her nose to avoid seeing him and succeeded, while Lenin let the doctor remove his object for him. Comrade Pillai also shows Rahel a picture of herself, Lenin, and Sophie Mol as children. The picture shows Sophie Mol in a goofy pose, with her eyelids turned out, wearing a yellow rind across her teeth and her tongue sticking out from under it with a thimble dangling from the tip. Rahel recalls how, just before the picture was taken, Sophie Mol suggested that they were all actually “bastard” children. The picture was taken the day before Sophie Mol died.

Summary: Chapter 6, Cochin Kangaroos

Back in the past, the narrative continues at the Cochin Airport, where the family is waiting for Margaret Kochamma’s and Sophie Mol’s arrival. Rahel is still preoccupied with her mother’s statement that she loves her a “little less.” The family wears their best clothing to the airport, hoping to impress Sophie Mol and her mother Margaret, who is white and British. They hold welcome signs and Ammu reminds the twins that they are now official Ambassadors of India for Sophie Mol. The narrator describes how the air was “full of Thoughts and Things to Say” as Sophie Mol and her mother approach the family. Chacko awkwardly greets them, and refers to Margaret as his wife, but Margaret corrects him, saying she’s his ex-wife. Rahel notices how Sophie Mol is taller than her and has blue eyes and light skin. Baby Kochamma, in an effort to seem cultured, makes a reference to the Shakespearean play The Tempest, saying Sophie Mol looks like the character Ariel. Sophie Mol doesn’t understand the reference as she doesn’t know the play and is only nine years old. Rahel hides in the curtain, overwhelmed, and Ammu yells at her for dirtying her dress. On the car ride back, Rahel and Estha sing songs in English to impress Sophie Mol. The narrator notes how the car drove into a “cabbage-green butterfly” or, perhaps, “it drove into them.”

Analysis: Chapters 5 & 6

The five-star hotel on the riverbank proclaims itself “God’s Own Country,” a satirical reference as Roy shows the hotel is nothing of the sort as it is simply a perverted version of paradise. “God’s own country” is actually the riverbank, where Velutha lives. The hotel does everything in its power to snuff out the signs of India and its rich complexity, by blocking and choking out the river and truncating the Kathakali dances from six hours to less than an hour to suit tourists’ tastes. The hotel is a symbol of British imperialism and modernity’s encroachment on the traditions of India. As Roy writes, “History and Literature . . . Kurtz and Karl Marx [joined] palms” in India, blending the problems with British influence and Marxism as they both try to overlay their ideologies onto India’s traditions.

The results become horrific and bizarre, continuing on Roy’s themes of the natural and the unnatural. The Kathakali dances performed at the hotel are perverted versions of their original forms, and no longer have the power to reflect the true soul of the dancers, which are purely motivated to perform humanity’s stories. The river is polluted as well, strangled by the hotels’ presence and full of the markings of modernization like garbage and plastic bags. The river no longer follows the course of its “true” nature and is reduced to a trickle. Both the river and the dancers are mutated versions of their former selves, and stripped of their ability to do any real good for anyone.

Comrade K. N. M. Pillai is also a strangely mutated version of society’s mixings. He is a Communist, pledging allegiance to ideas that originated outside his country. He is also someone who values India, as shown when he congratulates Rahel for paying respect to her country’s traditions. This interaction takes place later in the novel when he runs into her at the temple, where she’s watching Kathakali dances performed in their full form. Comrade K. N. M. Pillai later becomes ineffectual as well when he refuses to let Velutha take refuge in his Communist Party. The Communist Party, based on the premise of protecting the “worker,” shuts one of its loyal members out at his time of need, and tragically, leaves him vulnerable to the attack of the police later.

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