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Chapters 11 & 12

Summary: Chapter 11, The God of Small Things

The narrative remains in the past, on the day of Sophie Mol’s arrival. Ammu has a dream about a one-armed man that she wants to make love to. In the dream, there are others that prevent this from happening, though, and she and the man swim together in a stormy sea, never touching. The twins think she’s having a nightmare, so they wake her up. Ammu tells them they are wrong, that she was having a pleasant dream. Ammu senses that the twins have been to Velutha’s hut and reprimands them. They climb around her and cuddle, tracing the stretch marks on her belly from when she was pregnant. Ammu becomes irritated and shoos the twins away. She goes to the bathroom and looks at herself in the mirror, noticing all the signs of aging and distress over her face and stomach. She weeps, thinking about herself, her twins, and the “God of Small Things.” The narrative switches to the moment when Chacko, crazed by grief over Sophie Mol’s recent death, breaks down the door to Ammu’s room and kicks Ammu and the children out of the house. The narrator points out that Ammu’s room is the same room in which, years later, Rahel will watch Estha bathe and wash his clothes, a “silver raindrop on his ear.”  

Summary: Chapter 12, Kochu Thomban 

In the present, the narrative joins Rahel at a temple, where she sees a ritual elephant named Kochu Thomban who travels around collecting coconuts from villagers. Kochu Thomban is older now, just like Rahel. She notices how his skin sags more than she recalled. Rahel leaves a coconut for Kochu and goes inside to watch as a troupe of Kathakali dancers acts out a scene about a man who grows up in poverty and is killed by his own brother. The story is violent and touches on similar issues that run through her own family, such as motherly love and duty, and she is absorbed in the performance, which has not been truncated like the dances at the hotel by the river. While Rahel watches, the narrator comments on how the traditional dance of Kathakali has now become a cheapened version of itself, where the dancer now “hawks the only thing he owns,” the love of story, for tourists’ entertainment. These dancers, or Kathakali Men, are now the “Regional Flavor” of India, men in make-up who go home every night to beat their wives. 

Rahel senses Estha has arrived at the temple, and their thoughts begin to mingle in and out of the story, as if they are in a trance. The sound of Kochu Thomban cracking open the coconut Rahel brought for him awakens the twins from their trance. Just then Comrade K. N. M. Pillai enters the temple. The reader learns that he is the person who introduced the twins to Kathakali. Comrade K. N. M. Pillai congratulates Rahel and Estha on being still interested in their culture. The twins don’t reply, and walk home quietly. 

Analysis: Chapters 11 & 12

Ammu’s dream of the one-armed man whom she wants to make love to foreshadows her relationship with Velutha. In the dream, forces conspire to prevent the pair from being together. They ride a treacherous sea that tosses them back and forth, and they are prevented from touching, just like in real life. Ammu and Velutha can’t literally “touch” or be together because she is a member of the “Touchable” class and he is an “Untouchable.” The one-armed man is “incomplete,” just like their love, since this love cannot be experienced or actualized fully in life. 

As children, Rahel and Estha mistake Ammu’s dream for a nightmare and try to wake her up, but Ammu corrects them saying it was a “good” dream. This moment shows how once again fantasy and reality are mixed up, for the dream is actually a nightmare, as it shows the reality of Ammu and Velutha’s situation, that they can’t be together even though their love is real. Ammu feels it is a good dream, because it’s the only place where she can experience the enormity of the emotions she has for Velutha. As she and he ride a treacherous sea, a symbol for the intensity of the emotions they share, Ammu is brought closer to her feelings and dream or fantasy of being with Velutha.

Ammu’s dream also links back to Murlidharan, a naked lunatic Estha saw on the drive to pick up Sophie Mol from the airport as a child. The Murlidharan had no arms and wore a plastic bag on his head that someone else put there. The man also wore the keys to his former home around his waist and held a sign that read “Cochin,” where the family was headed. The Murlidharan’s presence in Chapter 2 foreshadows the later Velutha, fully “armless” and unable to do anything after Mammachi kicks him out of her family and out of a job, as well as when Comrade K. N. M. Pillai denies Velutha protection from the Communist Party. Velutha becomes truly “homeless,” just like the Murlidharan seen earlier. The plastic bag on Murlidharan’s head is an almost comical and satirical gesture of how modernity places a “dunce’s” cap on the heads of Indians and reduces them to lunatics. 

Once again, the theme of role-playing and the mixing of fiction and reality are combined when Rahel visits the temple. Here, the Kathakali dances can be performed in their “true” form, lasting a full six hours. The dancers act out a family play of motherly love, violence, and duty, and Rahel is swept up into the performance as it reflects the themes of her own life. It is here, in the temple, that the play can achieve its true role of purging the emotions and be truly effective, unlike how it is performed at the hotels on the river, where each dance is truncated and completely ineffective. As Rahel watches the scenes enacted, she can “see” the story of her life unfold, and for the first time, stand outside of it. In a poignant gesture, Estha, her twin, joins her quietly in the temple, likely sensing the moment. Roy makes a statement here that it’s not psychotherapy or other Western methods that will work to free Rahel and Estha from their false roles in childhood, but their freeing will come only from inside their own culture, through the cultural traditions and places where they lived as children.

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