Ruminating on what my twenty-year relationship with The God of Small Things has taught me.
Photograph by Sahil Mane
Ah, The God of Small Things. This iconic book and I, well, we have history.
It was 1997, and I was The Most Unpopular Girl in the country’s best girls’ boarding school. Arundhati Roy’s stepdaughter was a couple of years my senior and in my house. She was one of the few people who was kind to me, and I liked her then as much as I do now.
One afternoon, I walked into the dorm to find this girl and her best friend watching TV, outside the prescribed time. I guess they’d been given special permission to watch the news, because she turned to me and said, “My mom just won the Booker!”
“That’s great!” I replied, smiling, feeling many layers of awkward. The main reason being: I did not know what the Booker even was!
Over the next few days I found out, of course, what a big deal it was. I was now dying to read the book and, a few years later, at 17, when I was finally allowed to read this very adult novel, I finally did. Or, more accurately, I tried to. I didn’t understand it, laboured through each page, thought it was slow and boring, and didn’t finish it. Simply put, I hated it.
It was an impression I retained throughout my bachelor’s and master’s in English, getting into frequent battles with an array of professors about why it was overrated and undeserving of the accolades. Not only was it not great, it was positively awful, I insisted. I refused to revisit it, and nothing could change my mind.
Then, at 27, I read it again. I can’t remember why I chose to give it another shot. Was it by chance—a book I happened to encounter in a moment of boredom? Or was it by choice—to see if I thought differently about it? Whatever the reason might have been, I absolutely loved it. The words, the structure, the story—everything. Since then, my admiration for Roy has only increased manifold, as she has put her magic pen to political ethics with which I am completely aligned.
But, beyond the book, this fact—that my opinions had changed, diametrically and dramatically, in 10 years—held life-altering lessons for me, and are ones that I retain to this day. I learnt that you change. That you evolve. That you see things from the prism of your experiences and through your own palette. That first impressions need not be lasting. That you shouldn’t be too quick to judge. And that you should never say never.
As a reader, I have grown to love a book I hated, and also hate books I once loved. [I can no longer tolerate the neoliberal pop philosopher Ayn Rand and her anthems for angsty teens or the racist Enid Blyton; and I wouldn’t be caught dead with a Sidney Sheldon, Bridget Jones’ Diary or a Mills & Boon (ewww, basic).] If this is the case, what will I feel about my own writing over time? What would I feel about my own thoughts and actions? One must examine, re-examine, and do that again and again. Think about who you think you are, what you think you believe, what you think you want to be.
Outgrowing my own writing is a very real point of anxiety on the recent release of my first book. So, although I have wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember (the earliest my mother remembers me saying it was when I was six!), I am glad I wrote my first book in my mid-thirties. It’s for the same reasons that I recommend marrying later in life—you know yourself, your voice, your ideologies better. Besides, if book writing (and long-distance running) is as Haruki Murakami says it is—a combination of talent, focus and endurance, where the latter two can be “acquired and sharpened through training” and can even stand in for a lack of talent—then a book at 37 has given me time to practice and train. I hope many readers feel about my book as early reviewers have. My fingers (toes and everything) are crossed.
A few days ago, when we lost the Internet (for 36 whole hours!) and I had to cancel all my meetings, I chose to reread The God of Small Things, a decade since I last read it, two decades since I first tried to. Some things, beliefs, goals, relationships, etc., withstand scrutiny and re-examination, others don’t. I raced through the book in a few hours and I loved it more than ever before.
An edited version of this article appeared on Keeping Zen on 11.08.20.