Free The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy Page B

or Sosha’s Banana Jam. Sosha was Mammachi’s first name. Soshamma.
    It was Chacko who christened the factory Paradise Pickles & Preserves and had labels designed and printed at Comrade K. N. M. Pillai’s press. At first he had wanted to call it Zeus Pickles & Preserves, but that idea was vetoed because everybody said that Zeus was too obscure and had no local relevance, whereas Paradise did. (Comrade Pillai’s suggestion—Parashuram Pickles—was vetoed for the opposite reason: too
much
local relevance.)
    It was Chacko’s idea to have a billboard painted and installed on the Plymouth’s roof rack.
      Now, on the way to Cochin, it rattled and made fallingoff noises.
    Near Vaikom they had to stop and buy some rope to secure it more firmly. That delayed them by another twenty minutes. Rahel began to worry about being late for
The Sound of Music.
    Then, as they approached the outskirts of Cochin, the red and white arm of the railway level-crossing gate went down. Rahelknew that this had happened because she had been hoping that it wouldn’t.
    She hadn’t learned to control her Hopes yet Estha said that was a Bad Sign.
    So now they were going to miss the beginning of the picture. When Julie Andrews starts off as a speck on the hill and gets bigger and bigger till she bursts onto the screen with her voice like cold water and her breath like peppermint.
    The red sign on the red and white arm said STOP in white.
    “POTS ,” Rahel said.
    A yellow hoarding said BE INDIAN, BUY INDIAN in red.
    “NAIDNI YUB, NAIDNI EB ,” Estha said.
    The twins were precocious with their reading. They had raced through
Old Dog Tom, Janet and John
and their
Ronald Ridout Workbooks.
At night Ammu read to them from Kipling’s
Jungle Book.
    Now Chil the Kite brings home the night
That Mang the Bat sets free
—
    The down on their arms would stand on end, golden in the light of the bedside lamp. As she read, Ammu could make her voice gravelly, like Shere Khan’s. Or whining, like Tabaqui’s.
    “Ye choose and ye do not choose! What talk is this of choosing? By the bull that I killed, am I to stand nosing into your dog’s den for my fair dues? It is I, Shere Khan, who speak.!”
    “And it is I, Raksha, who answer,”
the twins would shout in high voices. Not together, but almost.
“The man’s cub is mine, Lungri—mine to me! He shall not be killed. He shall live to run with the pack and to hunt with the pack; and in the end, look you, hunter of little naked cubs—frog-eater—fish-killer—he shall hunt thee!”
    Baby Kochamma, who had been put in charge of their formal education, had read them an abridged version of
The Tempest
by Charles and Mary Lamb.
“Where the bee sucks, there suck I,”
Estha and Rahel would go about saying,
“In a cowslip’s bell I lie.”
    So when Baby Kochamma’s Australian missionary friend, Miss Mitten, gave Estha and Rahel a baby book—
The Adventures of SusieSquirrel
—as a present when she visited Ayemenem, they were deeply offended. First they read it forwards. Miss Mitten, who belonged to a sect of Born-Again Christians, said that she was a Little Disappointed in them when they read it aloud to her, backwards.
    “ehT serutnevdA fo eisuS lerriuqS.
enO gnirps gninrom eisuS lerriuqS ekow pu.”
    They showed Miss Mitten how it was possible to read both
Malayalam
and
Madam I’m Adam
backwards as well as forwards. She wasn’t amused and it turned out that she didn’t even know what Malayalam was. They told her it was the language everyone spoke in Kerala. She said she had been under the impression that it was called Keralese. Estha, who had by then taken an active dislike to Miss Mitten, told her that as far as he was concerned it was a Highly Stupid Impression.
    Miss Mitten complained to Baby Kochamma about Estha’s rudeness, and about their reading backwards. She told Baby Kochamma that she had seen Satan in their eyes.
nataS ni rieht seye.
    They were made to write—
In future we will not read