Free The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.”
    “
Marry
our conquerors, is more like it,” Ammu said dryly, referring to Margaret Kochamma. Chacko ignored her. He made the twins look up
Despise.
It said:
To look down upon; to view with contempt; to scorn or disdain.
    Chacko said that in the context of the war he was talking about—the War of Dreams—
Despise
meant all those things.
    “We’re Prisoners of War,” Chacko said. “Our dreams have been doctored. We belong nowhere. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter.”
    Then, to give Estha and Rahel a sense of Historical Perspective (though Perspective was something which, in the weeks to follow, Chacko himself would sorely lack), he told them about the Earth Woman. He made them imagine that the earth—four thousand six hundred million years old—was a forty-six-year-old woman—as old, say, as Aleyamma Teacher, who gave them Malayalam lessons. It had taken the whole of the Earth Woman’s life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The Earth Woman was eleven years old, Chacko said, when the first single-celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty-five—just eight months ago—when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
    “The whole of human civilization as we know it,” Chacko told the twins, “began only
two hours
ago in the Earth Woman’s life. As long as it takes us to drive from Ayemenem to Cochin.”
    It was an awe-inspiring and humbling thought, Chacko said (
Humbling
was a nice word, Rahel thought.
Humbling along without a care in the world
), that the whole of contemporary history, the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge—was no more than a blink of the Earth Woman’s eye.
    “And we, my dears, everything we are and ever will be are just a twinkle in her eye,” Chacko said grandly, lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling.
    When he was in this sort of mood, Chacko used his Reading Aloud voice. His room had a church-feeling. He didn’t care whether anyone was listening to him or not. And if they were, he didn’t care whether or not they had understood what he was saying. Ammu called them his Oxford Moods.
    Later, in the light of all that happened,
twinkle
seemed completely the wrong word to describe the expression in the Earth Woman’s eye.
Twinkle
was a word with crinkled, happy edges.
      Though the Earth Woman made a lasting impression on the twins, it was the History House—so much closer at hand—that really fascinated them. They thought about it often. The house on the other side of the river.
    Looming in the Heart of Darkness.
    A house they couldn’t enter, full of whispers they couldn’t understand.
    They didn’t know then that soon they
would
go in. That they would cross the river and be where they weren’t supposed to be, with a man they weren’t supposed to love. That they would watch with dinner-plate eyes as history revealed itself to them in the back verandah.
    While other children of their age learned other things, Estha andRahel learned how history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws. They heard its sickening thud. They smelled its smell and never forgot it.
    History’s smell.
    Like old roses on a breeze.
    It would lurk forever in ordinary things. In coat hangers. Tomatoes. In the tar on roads. In certain colors. In the plates at a restaurant In the absence of words. And the emptiness in eyes.
    They would grow up grappling with ways of living with what happened. They would try to tell themselves that in terms of geological time it was