He climbed into people’s eyes and became an exasperating expression. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune. So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. Rahel has come back see her dizygotic twin Estha. 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. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. The narrator introduces Ayemenem, a small town in Kerala, India, and describes the humid jungle and the monsoons that come in June. Then Small God (cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. He didn’t know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. He put it somewhere between indifference and despair. He was exasperated because he didn't know what that look meant. They behaved as though they belonged to someone else. “But when they made love he was offended by her eyes.
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