significance of the sexual encounters between Rahel and Estha, and Ammu and Velutha in GOD OF SMALL THINGS

The God of Small Things builds an incredible amount of anticipation and expectation for the definitive moment of the story. With all of its foreshadowing, its emphasis on tracing one's steps, and its insistent suggestion that everything, from politics to erotic desire, is intimately connected, Roy's novel places a great deal of emphasis on the central event of the twins' childhood that caused the momentous changes in the Kochamma family. The reader comes to expect, because of the narrator's many references to "the Loss of Sophie Mol," that everything will boil down to one key moment, and that this moment will involve Sophie Mol's death.

It eventually becomes clear, however, that Sophie Mol's actual drowning is an accident, an understated tragedy in which she simply vanishes in the river. Like all of the characters' lives and the events of the plot, Sophie Mol's death is intimately tied to many other elements, including Estha's sexual abuse, Sophie Mol's relationship to the twins, and the host of factors that led to the tragedy. But the actual loss of Sophie Mol does not reveal much about the deep historical forces at work in Ayemenem, and it does not explain what truly causes or defines the Kochamma family's experience.

Instead, Roy's trajectory of foreshadowing and anticipation leads to the two forbidden, taboo erotic relationships of the novel€between Ammu and Velutha, and Estha and Rahel. These are the episodes at the core of the unraveling plot and the crux of the book's meaning. All of the tension, desire, and desperation beneath the surface of the narrative converges into these expressions of love, which are examples of perhaps the greatest, most unthinkable taboos of all. This essay will discuss why the two forbidden sexual episodes in the final two chapters of The God of Small Things are so crucial to the history of the Kochamma family and the emblematic of the meaning of the novel.

Before discussing the significance of these episodes, however, it will help to establish how and why they are so closely connected. It is immediately clear that they have much in common as doomed, forbidden love trysts, and it is no coincidence that they are revealed and described next to each other, at the end of the narrative. However, there are other, less obvious connections. During Estha and Rahel's erotic encounter, for example, there are repeated references to Ammu such as calling Rahel's mouth "Their beautiful mother's mouth" and there is the statement that the twins are at the "viable die-able age" of thirty, Ammu's age between her affair with Velutha and her death. Equally important is the phrase, "They were strangers who had met in a chance encounter," because it is more applicable to Velutha and Ammu than to the twins. Also key at this point, late in chapter 20, is the narrator's statement about Rahel and Estha that "once again they broke the Love Laws," which uses the term that had previously been applied to Ammu and Velutha and implies that the twins' situation is a reoccurrence of the affair of 1969.

By closely connecting Rahel and Estha's sexual relationship to Ammu and Velutha's, Roy suggests that present-day events converge with the events surrounding Sophie Mol's death, and that each strain of the plot has the same thematic resolution. The two instances of breaking of the Love Laws form a key to understanding the rest of the book; they are both the result and the cause of the novel's action. This is why the narrator writes that the story "really began in the days when the Love Laws were made," back through the colonial and pre-colonial history of Kerala. The Love Laws represent the strict confines on human behavior€the caste systems, social pressures, and political restrictions that horrify people beyond expression when they are broken. The central action of the novel is about breaking them, and the tragedy that results from breaking them.

For one thing, therefore, the forbidden love affairs at the end of the novel are crucial because they reveal the disgust and horror with the lovers that is at the root of the violence and tragedy directed against them. Present-day Western readers probably do not consider inter-caste romance repulsive, but they are quite likely to be shocked and offended by incest. Incest is as taboo in twenty-first-century Western society as an inter-caste sexual affair would have been in the 1960s, and probably still is, in Kerala. The reader's reaction to such violations of the Love Laws allows him/her to understand how and why such drastic social and political consequences could have resulted from the transgressions at the end of The God of Small Things. Roy allows the reader an insight into the emotional basis behind the careful, planned brutality of those dedicated to Kerala's social code, such as the Touchable Policemen who believe that in beating Velutha to death they are enforcing the Love Laws and "inoculating a community against an outbreak."

However, the love affairs also allow the reader to identify with the transgressor, and they inspire a sympathetic reaction for four people who are abused, tortured, and betrayed by their society's most fundamental rules. The reasons for Ammu's turn to Velutha are sharply drawn and inspire a great deal of sympathy when she studies her body, the body of an "inexperienced lover," in the mirror and peers "down the road to Age and Death through its parted strands." Ammu's love affair is, in a sense, the cause of the novel's tragedy because it shatters her family, condemns Velutha to a brutal death, traumatizes Rahel and Estha for the rest of their lives, and results in her own decay and death. It is also, however, the result of an entire lifetime of abuse, confinement, and imprisonment in a stinting social code. This code not only fails to protect Ammu against her father beating her with a brass vase, her father imprisoning her in the house even when she is an adult, and her husband beating her; it actually leads to these consequences. When she recognizes that Kerala's social code is in the process of forcing her down Baby Kochamma's path of bitter, joyless confinement to the house until death, she acts in perfectly understandable desperation and attempts to find some brief joy with Velutha.

Similarly, Rahel's affair with Estha can be interpreted as the result of a social code, both in Kerala and in the United States, that has traumatized her and deprived her of her childhood. The "Quietness and Emptiness" that characterize Estha and Rahel stems from Velutha's death and their parents' difficulties in raising them, but also stems from a society that is cruel, harassing, and violent towards a single mother and her children. From Baby Kochamma to Chacko to the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man, people are prejudiced towards Ammu and her children, and take advantage of them. Rahel and Estha's incestuous contact is their attempt to find comfort in each other, although, unlike Ammu and Velutha, they are not even able to reach a joyful release from their problems, and "what they shared that night was not happiness but hideous grief."

In addition to what they reveal about the cultural and political content of Roy's novel, the two affairs communicate a great deal about the novel's psychological subtext. In the course of the book, both Ammu and Rahel experience identity crises whose primary goals are, in a sense, discovering who and what they are in relation to their culture and family. Rahel travels back to Ayemenem to see her brother, but her journey is perhaps better described as a quest, through her memories, to discover herself and the roots of her history. The third-person narrator of The God of Small Things is omniscient, and not strictly confined to any particular perspective, but the narrative voice is grounded in Rahel's memories. Events and remembrances weave into the story as they might appear in Rahel's mind, and the novel is structured around her search to understand herself and her past.

Rahel's incestuous contact with Estha is so crucial and definitive in this identity search because, as the narrator stresses insistently, her brother is herself. In opening passages of the novel, the narrator relates that, during their childhood, "Esthappen and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us. As though they were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities." The twins' love-making is a metaphor for their search for this fractured and traumatized joint identity in their adulthood, and it is a real, physical and emotional expression of their grief and longing.

Ammu's affair with Velutha is also, in a sense, a search for herself; this is clear from the lengthy passages in which the narrator describes the desperation in Ammu's strictly confined life and her need to live and experience joy. When Ammu studies herself in the mirror and tests whether a toothbrush will stay on her breast, she reveals that she understands herself through her body and her sexual identity, and she seeks out Velutha in order to discover the beautiful part of herself.

The forbidden love affairs that come at the end of Roy's novel, therefore, work together to provide a single metaphor for the key struggles and meanings of the novel. The twins' incestuous contact and Ammu's affair with Velutha are metaphors for, and physical enactments of, the psychological identity struggles of the novel's protagonists. These struggles extend, by implication and because they are so closely connected to the political subtext of the novel, to the wider political and psychological identity struggles of all those afflicted by the oppressive social code of southern Indian culture.