The God of Small Things

Chapter 11 returns to the days leading up to Sophie’s drowning. The twins watch anxiously as Ammu naps fitfully. She is in the throes of an erotic dream about swimming in a turbulent dark sea with a one-armed Black man, “ridges of muscle in his stomach” that “rose under his skin like divisions on a slab of chocolate” (205). In the dream, the yearning lovers can never quite connect. The twins gently stir her awake. Noticing the twins are covered in a light coat of sawdust and knowing they have been with Velutha, she scolds them to be careful; he is an untouchable, and any association with him can only lead to trouble. She heads off to the bathroom, where she studies the pale lines of her stretch marks and her “withered breasts” that hang like “weighted socks.” She is overwhelmed with sadness. She locks herself in her bedroom and weeps for her lost life, never knowing entirely “which way her road might turn and what lay beyond the bend” (213). That bedroom is, Rahel in the narrative present realizes, the same room where now she, Rahel, watches her troubled twin, naked, in the shower.