Why I outgrew my love for "God of Small Things"

Arundhati Roy is an Indian writer whose The God of Small Things (GOST) won the Booker Prize, Britain's pre-eminent literary prize, in 1997. Here is info on Roy and the book.

I was clearing my old books bag today and came across the screenplay of "In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones", a short film made by Roy and her husband (screenplay written by Roy) which won a National Award in the 1980s. I had come across the screenplay after a long time so I decided to go through parts of it again. And as I turned the pages, a familiar feeling of another world, nice, innocent, gently sad, hovered over me. A world so richly brought to life in GOST in which tragedy visits the best people and death takes away the brightest, the most radical, the avant garde.

But today, I found out as I read In Which Annie... again, that also happens to be my problem with both Annie and GOST. Annie is set in an architecture school in Delhi where two sets of people are clearly distinguishable-- the bourgeois, middle class types exemplified by Lakes (played by Divya Seth) who worry about women's modesty et al. And the other, the bohemians, populated by the likes of Radha (Roy herself) who dope, booze and generally have fun all over.

Back when I was in engg college and first read Annie, this chic damn-with-world crowd held special attraction. These people, including Radha's boyfriend Arjun, seemed the perfect embodiments of all the love, craziness and that word again, gentle sadness, looking down on me. When at the end of the book Radha dies by drowning and Arhun reverts to the back of beyond to become a commercial farmer, it was the end of the otherwordly glamour that had touched these lives in their youth. It was all too much.

Too much what? Too much dramatisation. Too much artiness. Too much running away from life. Yes, Annie and GOST both suffer from a lack of messy dirty living. Characters in these books, Ammu and Velutha in GOST for instance, suffer grand tragedies, elaborate hurts and harrowing emotional pain. And they always die heroes. Always!

But is that what I want? No. Not for Roy's characters the messy everyday task of raising children, running to office and living life one day to the next and locating joys therein. Not for them the reconciling of a terrible past with the need--no necessity-- to negotiate life day by day. (Plot spoiler ahead!!) Far better to return to a cocoon in Kerala and fuck your sibling.

Frankly, I just got tired of the easy endings. Ammu gets killed, so does Radha. Why kill your characters after a blaze of rich storytelling? Because you don't know how to bring them back to ordinary life? Well, tough luck. For, that is literature. The real, the ordinary, the messy (Lakes in Annie marries a mosquito repellent manufacturer, and I am certain Roy's choice of the husband's profession had some relation to her dim view of bourgeois life).