Novel: The God of Small Things

Overview
Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things is a richly textured, non-linear family saga set in the Indian state of Kerala. The narrative orbits around fraternal twins Rahel and Estha, their mother Ammu, and the tangled legacy of loss, desire, and social prejudice that alters the course of their lives.
The novel juxtaposes intimate domestic moments with broader social forces, showing how caste, colonial aftermaths, and rigid "Love Laws" govern who may be loved and how. Memory and language shape the story as much as events, so past and present fold into one another in a lyrical, often startling prose.

Plot
The plot pivots on a single, devastating summer in the twins' childhood when a beloved foreign cousin's visit, a forbidden affair between Ammu and Velutha, an Untouchable, and the collapse of family secrets culminate in tragedy. A child's death and a violent accusation shatter the household, triggering investigations, betrayals, and irreversible punishments.
Years later, the survivors live marked lives: Ammu faces ostracism and decline, Velutha is cruelly destroyed by the state and community, and the twins grow into fractured adults separated by silence and memory. The narrative returns repeatedly to key moments, assembling a mosaic of cause, consequence, and the acts that cannot be undone.

Characters and Setting
The Ayemenem house and the surrounding Kerala landscape are characters in their own right, harboring histories of colonialism, leftist politics, and shifting economic fortunes. Ammu is at once a tender mother and a woman constrained by poverty and patriarchal expectations. Velutha, a skilled and humane Paravan carpenter, embodies dignity under social degradation and becomes the impossible love that exposes the community's cruelties.
Rahel and Estha's twin bond is the emotional center: their shared childhood language, games, and trauma inform the adults they become. Secondary figures, Chacko, Baby Kochamma, Mammachi, represent fractured ambitions and the petty loyalties that sustain the family's decline.

Themes
Central themes include the brutality of caste discrimination, the lingering shadows of colonialism, and the way private grief is entangled with public power. The "Love Laws", the unspoken rules dictating who may love whom and how, frame the novel's moral geometry, revealing how social codes can criminalize tenderness.
Memory, storytelling, and the elasticity of time are also crucial. Trauma fractures narrative continuity, and childhood perception resists tidy adult explanations, so the novel insists that small, seemingly trivial moments can dictate destinies as surely as grand historical forces.

Style and Legacy
Roy's prose is polyphonic, lush, and experimental, blending sentence fragments, neologisms, recurring motifs, and rhythmic repetitions to echo the workings of memory. The non-linear structure invites rereading, as images and phrases gain resonance when seen from different temporal vantage points.
The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize and established Roy as a major literary voice, admired for its emotional intensity and formal daring. Its haunting portrait of love, injustice, and the costs of silence continues to provoke discussion about narrative form, social responsibility, and the small things that break and bind human lives.