The God of Small Things Read Online Free PDF Page A

were divorced, Rahel worked for a few months as a waitress in an Indian restaurant in New York. And then for several years as a night clerk in a bullet-proof cabin at a gas station outside Washington, where drunks occasionally vomited into the till, and pimps propositioned her with more lucrative job offers. Twice she saw men being shot through their car windows. And once a man who had been stabbed, ejected from a moving car with a knife in his back.
    Then Baby Kochamma wrote to say that Estha had been re-Returned. Rahel gave up her job at the gas station and left America gladly. To return to Ayemenem. To Estha in the rain.
      In the old house on the hill, Baby Kochamma sat at the dining table rubbing the thick, frothy bitterness out of an elderly cucumber. She was wearing a limp, checked seersucker nightgown with puffed sleeves and yellow turmeric stains. Under the table she swung her tiny, manicured feet, like a small child on a high chair. They were puffy with edema, like little foot-shaped air cushions. In the old days, whenever anybody visited Ayemenem, Baby Kochamma made it a point to call attention to their large feet. She would ask to try on their slippers and say, “Look how big for me they are!” Then she would walk around the house in them, lifting her sari a little so that everybody could marvel at her tiny feet.
    She worked on the cucumber with an air of barely concealed triumph. She was delighted that Estha had not spoken to Rahel. That he had looked at her and walked straight past. Into the rain. As he did with everyone else.
    She was eighty-three. Her eyes spread like butter behind her thick glasses.
    “I told you, didn’t I?” she said to Rahel. “What did you expect? Special treatment? He’s lost his mind, I’m telling you! He doesn’t
recognize
people anymore! What did you think?”
    Rahel said nothing.
    She could feel the rhythm of Estha’s rocking, and the wetness of rain on his skin. She could hear the raucous, scrambled world inside his head.
    Baby Kochamma looked up at Rahel uneasily. Already she regretted haying written to her about Estha’s return. But then, what else could she have done? Had him on her hands for the rest of her life? Why
should
she? He wasn’t her responsibility.
    Or was he?
    The silence sat between grandniece and baby grandaunt like a third person. A stranger. Swollen. Noxious. Baby Kochamma reminded herself to lock her bedroom door at night. She tried to think of something to say.
    “How d’you like my bob?”
    With her cucumber hand she touched her new haircut. She left a riveting bitter blob of cucumber froth behind.
    Rahel could think of nothing to say. She watched Baby Kochamma peel her cucumber. Yellow slivers of cucumber skin flecked her bosom. Her hair, dyed jetblack, was arranged across her scalp like unspooled thread. The dye had stained the skin on her forehead a pale gray, giving her a shadowy second hairline. Rahel noticed that she had started wearing makeup. Lipstick. Kohl. A sly touch of rouge. And because the house was locked and dark, and because she only believed in forty-watt bulbs, her lipstick mouth had shifted slightly off her real mouth.
    She had lost weight on her face and shoulders, which had turned her from being a round person into a conical person. But sitting at the dining table, with her enormous hips concealed, she managed to look almost fragile. The dim, dining-room light had rubbed the wrinkles off her face, leaving it looking—in a strange, sunken way—younger. She was wearing a lot of jewelry. Rahel’s dead grandmother’s jewelry. All of it. Winking rings. Diamond earrings. Gold bangles and a beautifully crafted flat gold chain that she touched from time to time, reassuring herself that it was there and that it was hers. Like a young bride who couldn’t believe her good fortune.
    She’s living ber life backwards
, Rahel thought.
    It was a curiously apt observation. Baby Kochamma
had
lived her life backwards. As a young woman