Today I joined a book club at the public library. Something I have always wanted to do and I enjoyed it immensely. Far more than any other literary event I have participated in recently. A group of people who want to listen to what you have to say about a book you read, people who love to read anything and everything on varied topics and love to talk about them. None of the people around the table treated me like I was unique weird specimen or a person with a tendency for sesquipedalian loquaciousness (you see what I just did right there :-D please google it), which by the way I am not. They just wanted to talk about what they read that's all, very simple and straight forward. The reason I finally took that step forward was because of my curiosity about the first assigned book for the club this year, Arundhati Roy's first masterpiece - The God of small things.
I have always wondered how non-Indians and non-Malayalees could make out the essence of the words in the book and how they perceived a story that was set in one of the most tumultuous of times in Kerala. An era where the growth of the Congress party in India, political ramifications of the Emergency, the rise of Communism and remnants of British influence all came to a boiling point and that too set in a dysfunctional Syrian Catholic family. The people around the table came from a lot of different countries and backgrounds and they viewed the book in a very interesting way. Most of them struggled much like I did with the chronological jumps in the story. More than the story what stood out for them was the way women were treated in the family even with very highly educated people in it. They were also surprised by the importance communism had in the story which is not a subject dealt with commonly in English books written by Indian authors. Due to the flowery and descriptive language of Roy's writing, some expected the mysticism of Salman Rushdie's characters to pop out in some places but instead found a strong dose of realism in the end.
Only one question remains at the end, Is there a hero or heroine or villain in the story? Who would you attribute with those labels? Does any one of these broken characters deserve to be burdened with the weight of being at the eye of the tornado that swept through their lives? I wonder what it would mean to be the little bugs which crawls around everywhere between the characters, between the lines in this book that no one notices but is there as the silent spectator to everyone's actions when the story unfolded.
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