Comparing Water In God Of Small Things And Michael Ondaatje's The

Water commonly represents purity or the washing away of one’s sins, but in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient the meaning varies. Both authors use water, or the absence of, as a means to assert notions of identity and human connections during the occurrence of traumas. The movement and presence of water equates to the transgression of social boundaries and recovery from traumatic experiences displayed by the characters in these novels.

The resurfacing of loss memories is present in both novels. Water is associated with the remembering of things lost like trash that rolls up on the beach. “The language of trauma is disjointed, interruptive, and repetitive, whereas a healing narrative is linear

Almásy spends most of his life trying to find water in the desert. “He knew every water hole and had helped map the Sand Sea. He knew all about the desert” (Ondaatje, 163). Ondaatje uses the desert to create water, therefore making absence equivalent to water. “A man in the desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something that feeds him more than water” (Ondaatje, 155). Water doesn’t satisfy his thirst, it is absence. This equates to the identity. Absence supplies something to the body that water can’t, it shows that in times of struggle a person can really develop themselves. Ondaatje associates a lot of water imagery with Katherine and uses it as a motif to frame her relationship with Almásy. It “symbolizes the essence of Almásy’s love for Katherine” and gives the sense that their relationships would do more harm than good (Stenberg, 256). “Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and mouth” (Ondaatje,

There are restrictions on who can be loved by whom and how. Love laws constrain relationships in The God of Small Things. “They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousin counsins, jam jam, and jelly jelly” (Roy, 31). Roy’s story surrounds a family that challenges these love laws. The relationship between Ammu and Velutha, an untouchable, leads to a series of tragedies that causes everyone to suffer and incest relationship between Rahel and Estha exhibit different notions of