The God of Small Things

Chapter 7 returns to the present. Rahel searches through the cluttered library of her grandfather, who lived a long and unhappy life, a frustrated amateur entomologist who believed he had never gotten credit for a species of moth he was sure he first identified. Rahel searches for notebooks she and her brother kept as children, which they called Wisdom Notebooks. She finds Estha’s notebook, where he cryptically erased his name and wrote in “Un-known.” His entries are morbid, compelled by dark thoughts. As she flips through the notebook, Rahel remembers the last time she saw her mother, Ammu, four years after Sophie’s death. Weakened from lung cancer, Ammu, with a “rattle in her chest that sounded like a faraway man shouting” (151), had lost her beauty, her passion, her fire. She died a few weeks later, alone, struggling to make it to a job interview in a “strange bed in a strange room in a strange town” (154). Because she was divorced, we are told without explanation, Ammu could not be buried in sacred ground. Rahel recalls watching, with her uncle Chacko, her mother’s body being fed into the furnace of a crematorium. Rahel looks up from her thoughts in time to see Estha disappear out the door, off for another walk.