The God of Small Things Read Online Free PDF

she had renounced the material world, and now, as an old one, she seemed to embrace it. She hugged it and it hugged her back.
    When she was eighteen, Baby Kochamma fell in love with a handsome young Irish monk, Father Mulligan, who was in Kerala for a year on deputation from his seminary in Madras. He was studying Hindu scriptures, in order to be able to denounce them intelligently.
    Every Thursday morning Father Mulligan came to Ayemenem to visit Baby Kochamma’s father, Reverend E. John Ipe, who was a priest of the Mar Thoma church. Reverend Ipe was well known in the Christian community as the man who had been blessed personally by the Patriarch of Antioch, the sovereign head of the Syrian Christian Church—an episode that had become a part of Ayemenem’s folklore.
    In 1876, when Baby Kochamma’s father was seven years old, his father had taken him to see the Patriarch, who was visiting the Syrian Christians of Kerala. They found themselves right in front of a group of people whom the Patriarch was addressing in the westernmost verandah of the Kalleny house, in Cochin. Seizing his opportunity, his father whispered in his young son’s ear and propelled the little fellow forward. The future Reverend, skidding on his heels, rigid with fear, applied his terrified lips to the ring on the Patriarch’s middle finger, leaving it wet with spit. The Patriarch wiped his ring on his sleeve, and blessed the little boy. Long after he grew up and became a priest, Reverend Ipe continued to be known as
Punnyan Kunju
—Little Blessed One—and people came down the river in boats all the way from Alleppey and Ernakulam, with children to be blessed by him.
    Though there was a considerable age difference between Father Mulligan and Reverend Ipe, and though they belonged to different denominations of the Church (whose only common sentiment was their mutual disaffection), both men enjoyed each other’s company, and more often than not, Father Mulligan would be invited to stayfor lunch. Of the two men, only one recognized the sexual excitement that rose like a tide in the slender girl who hovered around the table long after lunch had been cleared away.
    At first Baby Kochamma tried to seduce Father Mulligan with weekly exhibitions of staged charity. Every Thursday morning, just when Father Mulligan was due to arrive, Baby Kochamma force-bathed a poor village child at the well with hard red soap that hurt its protruding ribs.
    “Morning, Father!” Baby Kochamma would call out when she saw him, with a smile on her lips that completely belied the viselike grip that she had on the thin child’s soapslippery arm.
    “Morning to you, Baby!” Father Mulligan would say, stopping and folding his umbrella.
    “There’s something I wanted to ask you, Father,” Baby Kochamma would say. “In First Corinthians, chapter ten, verse twenty-three, it says ‘All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient,’ Father, how can
all
things be lawful unto Him? I mean I can understand if
some
things are lawful unto Him, but—”
    Father Mulligan was more than merely flattered by the emotion he aroused in the attractive young girl who stood before him with a trembling, kissable mouth and blazing, coal-black eyes. For he was young too, and perhaps not wholly unaware that the solemn explanations with which he dispelled her bogus biblical doubts were completely at odds with the thrilling promise he held out in his effulgent emerald eyes.
    Every Thursday, undaunted by the merciless midday sun, they would stand there by the well. The young girl and the intrepid Jesuit, both quaking with unchristian passion. Using the Bible as a ruse to be with each other.
    Invariably, in the middle of their conversation, the unfortunate soapy child that was being force-bathed would manage to slip away, and Father Mulligan would snap back to his senses and say, “Oops! We’d better catch him before a cold does.”
    Then he would reopen his umbrella and walk away