The God of Small Things by Suzanna Arundhati Roy

1377 Words3 Pages

Paul was dead. His murderer? Older boys, the Principle, each and every teacher, doctor, mentor, friend and acquaintance he ever had; the buttons of his overcoat, the carnation, every church, pastor, priest, book and neighbor he ever came across; his father, other peoples’ fathers, the train schedule, the chill of November, and the sidewalk outside Carnegie Hall. Some of these things may seem inconsequential and unrelated; after all, they’re just things. They’re small things. They couldn’t have any importance, right? Wrong. Paul didn’t kill himself. Long-lost jaded dreams didn’t cause Baby Kochamma to try to live her life backwards. Technology didn’t appear at any one point in history, and it will never be truly the only force at blame for any of our darkest human interactions. The ruling force of the universe, it seems, is the force of the cumulative effect of the small things, the things that exist and happen all the time, but which are usually overlooked in favor of abstract concepts.

Your life might be completely different right now had, let’s say, 3623 days ago, you had eggs for breakfast instead of cereal. If the wind happened to be blowing in a different direction on the day of your marriage, two of the place markers on one of the tables outside could have blown away, and re-set on the opposite tables they were intended, resulting in your great aunt sitting 15 feet farther away from the food-buffet table than was originally intended. This could subsequently affect who she stands in front of and behind in line, who she starts a conversation with, what said conversation entails, and what she remembers about the event that later informs her life in the same subliminally subconscious way every cumulative exp...

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...verlooked by most of society. In accepting what we could again call The God of Small Things, we allow ourselves to be free from the constraints of attachment to the façade of the ‘big things’ like wealth and success.

Ahrundati Roy said, “The god of small things... whether it’s the way the children see things of whether it’s the insect life in the book, or the fish or the stars-- there is a not accepting of what we think of as adult boundaries.” In embracing the ‘small things’, we enable ourselves to be more like children, to be in the moment, and not to judge based on external ideas but instead just be, like Buddha under the Bodhi tree. The ultimate human activity isn’t trying to put forth a purpose for the species (or think that’s even possible), but instead just existing on a moment-to-moment basis, taking in the ‘insect life’ and the fish, and the stars.

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