The God of Small Things: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

The narrator introduces Ayemenem, a small town in Kerala, India, and describes the humid jungle and the monsoons that come in June. In 1993 Rahel Ipe is returning to her childhood home in Ayemenem, where her great-aunt Navomi Ipe (whom everyone calls Baby Kochamma) still lives. Rahel has come back see her “dizygotic” twin Estha, who she hasn’t seen in twenty-three years. As children Rahel and Estha didn’t look alike, but they always thought of themselves as a single person in separate bodies, and they share certain memories and dreams that only one twin experienced.

After their long separation, however, the twins are now distinct individuals and strangers from each other. The narrator describes their birth. The twins’ parents, Baba and Ammu, were driving to the hospital when their car broke down, so they had to take a bus. Estha and Rahel were almost born in the bus, and later they wished they had been, as they got the idea that it would mean free bus passes for life.

The story then jumps to 1969 (when the twins are seven years old), to the funeral for Sophie Mol, Estha and Rahel’s cousin and the daughter of their uncle Chacko, Ammu’s sister. Sophie was visiting from England when she died. At the funeral Ammu, Estha, and Rahel are made to stand apart from the rest of the mourners. Rahel imagines that Sophie Mol is still alive in her coffin, showing Rahel the ceiling of the church. Rahel imagines a man falling from the ceiling and dying, and she thinks of other “breaking men” and a smell like “old roses.” Rahel then watches a bat climb up Baby Kochamma’s sari, and she sees Sophie Mol cartwheel in her coffin while everyone is distracted.

After the funeral Ammu and the twins go to the police station, and Ammu asks to see someone named Velutha. Thomas Mathew, the police inspector, calls Ammu a veshya (prostitute) and threatens her if she doesn’t go home quietly. Ammu leaves and starts to cry, and Estha helps her onto a bus and hugs her.

Two weeks after that, Estha was “Returned” – sent to live with his father (the twins parents are divorced) in Calcutta. Soon afterward he began to grow quieter and quieter until he stopped speaking altogether. The quietness helped him erase the words describing his painful memories, and he began to take long walks around the neighborhood. Twenty-three years later, Baba has “re-returned” Estha to Ayemenem, and now Estha walks around the old familiar places of the village. Since Rahel has returned, however, the quietness in Estha’s head has been broken by the sounds of memories.

The story then follows Rahel after her separation from Estha. She lived with her uncle Chacko and grandmother Mammachi in Ayemenem during the summers, where the “Loss of Sophie Mol” still remained long after the memory of Sophie Mol herself faded. Meanwhile Rahel drifted from school to school, get expelled for different strange reasons like stealing a teacher’s wig and purposefully crashing into other students. Basically she was exercising her curiosity about the world, as no one was around to raise her or teach her about life.

Rahel eventually went to an architecture college in Delhi, where she stayed for eight years without ever graduating. There she met Larry McCaslin, an American student, and she married him and moved to Boston. Eventually he grew weary of her constant detachment and depression, as she watched horrible things happening in India and always felt an emptiness where Estha used to be. They were divorced, and then Rahel heard that Estha had come back to Ayemenem, so she returned as well.

Baby Kochamma, who is now eighty-three, is pleased that Estha doesn’t speak to Rahel when they interact now, and she gets no special treatment from him. Baby Kochamma doesn’t like the twins, and she wishes they would leave soon, as they make her uncomfortable. In her old age she has started wearing all of Mammachi’s jewelry at once and putting on lots of makeup.

When she was eighteen, Baby Kochamma fell in love with an Irish monk named Father Mulligan. Father Mulligan would visit Baby Kochamma’s father, who was a reverend in the Syrian Christian community (and famous for once having been blessed by the Patriarch of Antioch), and Baby Kochamma would make up questions about the Bible as an excuse to talk to him. Then she started performing charitable actions to impress him, but nothing ever came of it.

Eventually Father Mulligan left Kerala and Baby Kochamma followed him to Madras, defying her father and becoming a Roman Catholic. She joined a convent, but soon realized she would hardly ever see Father Mulligan, so she sent for her father to fetch her. Her father knew she was unlikely to find a husband now, so he sent her to school to study Ornamental Gardening. Baby Kochamma never stopped loving Father Mulligan from afar, but she stayed in Ayemenem, grew very fat, and spent all her time gardening.

Almost fifty years later Baby Kochamma discovered television, and since then her garden has been abandoned. She and Kochu Maria, the house cook, watch American TV shows all day and enter all the contests they see. Baby Kochamma has also grown very paranoid, and she keeps her doors, windows, and even her refrigerator locked.

Baby Kochamma questions Rahel suspiciously, but Rahel ignores her. Rahel looks out at the old pickle factory, Paradise Pickles & Preserves, which sits between the house and the river. Mammachi used to run it and make a variety of preserved products, including banana jam, which was officially illegal as it could not be categorized as either jam or jelly. Rahel thinks about how this difficulty with classification is the source of many of her family’s troubles, as they all broke some kind of social rule.

The story jumps back to 1969, after Sophie Mol’s death, when Baby Kochamma acted self-righteously pious even though much of the trouble was her fault. Ammu consulted a “Twin Expert” about separating her children, and the expert said that it would be okay to send Estha away. So Estha took the train to Madras and then to Calcutta, still haunted by the face of a beat-up young man and the smell of old roses.

The narrator steps back, musing that “things can change in a day,” and that little, seemingly ordinary things can add up to life-changing events. The story potentially began with Sophie Mol’s arrival in India, but the narrator says that it also could have begun centuries before, when the Hindu caste system was laid down, including the “Love Laws.”