The God of Small Things

Been reading Arundhati Roy's book "The God of Small Things". It's taking me a while, baby steps, a mere 10 pages a day it seems :) but it's such a nice read. Roy's prose reads like poetry, and she renders quietness, the still silence of the inner life, in words whose spaces contain so much life. Only someone who has gone through the stillness of solitude can effectively write about it, I think.

Will quote a passage from the book which encouraged me to actually search through Metro Manila malls to buy it. Finally found it, the last copy in the entire store, wrinkled, seemingly having been passed on from hand to hand, eye to eye. And now my hands and my eyes have it. Hehe. Life is good sometimes. :)

The passage ...

Estha had always been a quiet child, so no one could pinpoint with any degree of accuracy exactly when (the year, if not the month or day) he had stopped talking. Stopped talking altogether, that is. The fact is that there wasn't an "exactly when." It had been a gradual winding down and closing shop. A barely noticeable quietening. As though he had simply run out of conversation and had nothing left to say. Yet Estha's silence was never awkward. Never intrusive. Never noisy. It wasn't an accusing, protesting silence as much as a sort of estivation, a dormancy, the psychological equivalent of what lungfish do to get themselves through the dry season, except that in Estha's case the dry season looked as though it would last forever.

Over time he had acquired the ability to blend into the background of wherever he was -- into bookshelves, gardens, curtains, doorways, streets -- to appear inanimate, almost invisible to the untrained eye. It usually took strangers a while to notice him even when they were in the same room with him. It took them even longer to notice that he never spoke. Some never noticed at all.

Estha occupied very little space in the world.

...

Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory; dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past. Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away, entombed somewhere deep in the soothing folds of the fact of it.