50 pages • 1 hour read
Arundhati RoyThe God of Small Things
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 11-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 11-14 Summary
Chapter 11 returns to the days leading up to Sophie’s drowning. The twins watch anxiously as Ammu naps fitfully. She is in the throes of an erotic dream about swimming in a turbulent dark sea with a one-armed Black man, “ridges of muscle in his stomach” that “rose under his skin like divisions on a slab of chocolate” (205). In the dream, the yearning lovers can never quite connect. The twins gently stir her awake. Noticing the twins are covered in a light coat of sawdust and knowing they have been with Velutha, she scolds them to be careful; he is an untouchable, and any association with him can only lead to trouble. She heads off to the bathroom, where she studies the pale lines of her stretch marks and her “withered breasts” that hang like “weighted socks.” She is overwhelmed with sadness. She locks herself in her bedroom and weeps for her lost life, never knowing entirely “which way her road might turn and what lay beyond the bend” (213). That bedroom is, Rahel in the narrative present realizes, the same room where now she, Rahel, watches her troubled twin, naked, in the shower.
Chapter 12, set in the narrative present, takes place in a refurbished temple near the family home. Rahel goes alone to take in a show, called a kathakali, in which local performers use traditional music and elaborate dance to tell highly charged melodramatic stories intended to teach moral lessons. The performances were at one time a powerful expression of Indian culture. Rahel watches the show with increasing displeasure. She recalls the power and passion of the kathakali presentations before the shows were cheapened and simplified to appeal to Western tourists. The story she watches unfold, about a poor man, once a prince, whose own brother kills him, causes her to reflect on her own family’s dissolution. She notices Estha slip into a back row during the show. The two stay for the entire performance—“Quietness and Emptiness, frozen two-egg fossils […] Trapped in the bog of a story that was and wasn’t theirs” (224). Although they sit far apart, Rahel feels a deep emotional tie with her brother. They leave in silence together.
Chapter 13 returns to the day of Sophie’s death. As the girl wakes up and regards the framed photos of her biological father next to her bed, the narrator provides the backstory of Chacko and Margaret’s relationship. Chacko, studying at Oxford at the time, met Margaret when she worked as a waitress. Chacko immediately fell under the spell of Margaret’s energy, her whip-smart humor, her carefree passion in bed, and her flippant and daring style. They married after a whirlwind courtship only to quickly find they had little in common and the magic gone. Before Margaret delivered their daughter, she had already fallen in love with Joe, a biologist: “Joe was everything Chacko wasn’t” (235). Chacko’s careless and slovenly ways, as well as his alarming weight gain, left her cold. She took Sophie and left him. They divorced, and, heartbroken, Chacko returned to India and taught for a few desultory years in a community college before returning home. In the aftermath of Joe’s death, Margaret accepted Chacko’s ill-fated invitation to spend the Christmas holidays in India: “She was haunted by that decision for as long as she lived” (238). The chapter closes with a quick cut to Margaret, inconsolable, looking down at the bloated seaweed-covered body of her dead daughter fished from the river.
On the morning of Sophie’s death, Chacko and Margaret have gone to the airport in Cochin to secure return flight tickets. A furious Ammu has been locked in her bedroom, where she screams invectives against her family and her own children. Without them, she cries out, “I would have been free!” (240). The narrative then moves back to the previous night, when Velutha’s very drunk father interrupts the family dinner. Nearly incoherent, he discloses that he has seen with his own eyes that his son is involved with Ammu. Distraught over the shame of his son’s actions, he offers to kill his own son with his bare hands. The disclosure rocks the family. Baby Kochamma, still nursing a grudge against Velutha for his perceived insult against her during the street parade and long regarding the divorced Ammu as a disgrace to the family, sees the distraught father’s revelation “as God’s Way of punishing Ammu for her sins and simultaneously avenging her [Baby Kochamma’s] humiliation” (243). This leads to Ammu being locked in her bedroom. The family then sends for Velutha. In a tense showdown with the proud Black man, Ammu’s mother slaps him, terminates his employment with the pickle factory, and warns him to leave the family alone.
Interspliced with this drama is a scene in which a local fisherman recovers Sophie’s body from the Meenachal and returns the body to the family home. Meanwhile, a resolute Baby Kochamma heads to the police station to report Velutha as a “sex-crazed” rapist. It is the only way she knows to “contain the scandal” (245). She spins an entirely fabricated story about Velutha attacking Ammu, describing the Paravan’s “sneering fury” and how proud he was for defiling Ammu. The police head out to track their suspect. It is only then the family discovers the missing children. When Margaret and Chacko return late in the afternoon to be told about the death of their daughter, a grieving Margaret immediately suspects Estha was responsible for the children’s afternoon escapade. She never suspects Velutha; she does not even know who he is. The chapter’s close returns to Sophie waking up the morning of her death. The doomed girl grabs a cache of Christmas presents she brought for her cousins and heads out to find them.
Chapter 14 begins with Chacko, before going to the airport with Margaret, leaving the house early—observed by Sophie—and heading to the family factory to discuss with Pillai, the factory foreman, his ambitious plans to expand the company’s product line to include synthetic cooking vinegar and perhaps even new labels. When Chacko casually mentions that Rahel thought she saw Velutha at the parade, Pillai darkly warns Chacko that Velutha “is going to cause trouble for you” and urges him to fire him (263). Chacko refuses. Velutha, he says, is invaluable. The chapter then cuts to a devastated Chacko in the days after Sophie’s death. He abandons his ambitious plans for the chutney business, the factory flounders, and two years later, after Chacko exiles himself to Canada to escape the memories of Sophie’s death, the business folds.
The chapter closes with Velutha, reeling from the angry confrontation with Ammu’s enraged mother, in flight, unnerved by the family’s wrath. He heads to Pillai’s house in the hopes of finding sympathy and a refuge, but Pillai offers none. Velutha is on his own.
Chapters 11-14 Analysis
In these chapters, the Big Things take over. If a novel traditionally is compelled by the energy of action, Roy’s novel in these chapters concedes the curve of plot to the desperate strategies of reaction. Helplessness emerges here as the defining kinetics of the plot.
In these chapters, which preface the closing chapters and their harrowing account of the arrest and brutal beating of the innocent Velutha, the novel centers on the irony of action and the futility of planning. In these increasingly dark chapters, the narrator highlights how helpless the characters, indeed India itself, appear before the apparently irresistible urgencies of events. History itself emerges as a kind of character, a forbidding antagonist moving the characters like chess pieces one by one to tragedy. The section is summarized by the closing image in Chapter 14 of Velutha, on the run, stumbling through the night, desperate now that the affair with Ammu has been exposed and his own father and friends have turned on him for nothing more sinister than daring to make love with an Indian woman. He heads to the treacherous Meenachal River. He has already warned the children not to mess with the wild river. Nevertheless, desperate for sanctuary, he heads to the river, where, in a flashforward, the narrator cautions that the helpless Velutha will be “swimming against the current, in the dark and rain, well in time for his blind date with history” (267).
The chapters begin with the poignant juxtaposition of Ammu dreaming of the one-armed Black lover she cannot possess, and then after she awakes, her heartbreaking inspection of her body in the bedroom mirror. She traces with shaking fingers the stark evidence of time, the withered breasts, the lax musculature, the white webbing of her stretch marks. The erotic dream itself is cased in “could have,” as in Ammu “could have touched his body lightly with her fingers, and could have felt his smooth, hard skin turn to gooseflesh” (205). Even in a dream, where fulfillment and fantasy should drive the action, Ammu both can and cannot have what she craves. That the foiled lovemaking in the churning, “spume-vomit green” sea in her dream is witnessed from the shore by vaguely sinister people wearing sunglasses sitting in lines of folding chairs foreshadows the tragic ending of the affair with Velutha (206).
After the twins rouse her, still damp from the dream, she inspects her body in the bedroom mirror and sees what history has done to her. She is only in her twenties, but looking in the mirror, she feels, “The specter of her future appeared in it to mock her” (211). Her cup, she decides ruefully, is already “full of dust” (212). The narrator underscores this growing sense of helplessness by closing the scene with a flashforward: This bedroom is the room where Ammu, her affair exposed and her family reeling in shock, will be locked and where she will so loudly bewail the curse of her family, precipitating the twins’ decision to run away to the river.
The theatrical performance where the adult Rahel and Estha happen to meet, at what once was one of the region’s most ornate and revered temples, parallels the family’s helpless spiral into tragedy with the larger cultural decline of modern India. The novel maintains that twin perspective. Certainly, the novel explores the psychological particularities of the Ipe family and its own signature brand of twisting pride and power, sex and violence, but the novel is as well a critique of post-colonial India—that is, the India that has emerged after more than a century of domination by British occupation. India, left to its own evolution, has moved uncertainly, torn between the impulse to return to its distinct cultural roots on the one hand and kowtowing to Westerners and the money doing so brings.
That helplessness in the face of history, the catastrophe of an entire nation’s vulnerability to forces apparently beyond control, is defined by the performance that night. Once a proud display of the kathakali, the rich Indian pageantry enhanced by elaborate dance, music, and storytelling, the performance that Rahel watches disappoints her because she remembers what such theatrical spectacles once meant, how they would go on for an entire night. Now the Great Stories and the delicate interplay of Indian music on native instruments are repackaged as quick service shows for easily bored tourists. The narrator compares India itself to an ancient and long-respected storyteller now helpless, lost: “In despair, he turns to tourism. He enters the market. He hawks the only thing he owns. The stories his body can tell. He becomes a Regional Flavor” (219). The story that unfolds that night suggests this cultural suicide—it tells of a helpless prince betrayed and destroyed by his own family.
As these chapters move toward the grim recovery of Sophie Mol’s blanched body, everything and everyone in them appears as helpless and as vulnerable as young Sophie unwittingly riding the rickety vallom into a floating log. The closing image of this section suggests as much. Velutha, standing in the cold rain under the spare light of a single streetlamp, his life suddenly in ruins, his mind a blank, his feet seeming to guide him to the river, the narrator compares him to a dog on a leash, a helpless, beaten animal being walked: “History walking the dog” (272).
