What if ammu has disappeared after she said the magic words how would the story have changed in the middle
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The title of Arundhati Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things, as well as the place in which the story unfolds, Kerala, call to the informed reader’s mind a profound sense of the divine and conjure up Kathakali, a highly stylized dance drama performed by an all male company whose characters are dressed with colourful and intricate costumes and display codified and elaborate make-up. In fact, Kathakali combines dance, the nritya, which includes not only dance steps within its framework but also hand gestures (mudra*) and face and eye movements (bhasu), as well as the nritta or rhythmic pure dance, and the natya or drama.
Native to Kerala and originating in the seventeenth century (1657), it is based on the representation of classical stories from the great Indian epics: the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and the Purana, a collection of ancient traditional stories most popular amongst Hindus and Indians at large. Needless to say, the heroes and their deeds are well-known to spectators who can watch the same story a hundred times with the utmost interest. Moreover, on the historical front, temples were the places of origin where the dancer or nata, or the priests danced in praise of the Lord, enacting various mythological stories, legends and tales staging well-known epic heroes familiar to the Malayali audience. No wonder then that, in this dramatic art, the director being non-existent, the actor-dancer should play a variety of roles easily identifiable to the local spectator—Hindu mythology being replete with tales about gods and goddesses—and should even freely improvise.
Thus, after the example of the actor-dancer, Arundhati Roy seems to delight in disrupting and manipulating chronology, using at will prolepses, analepses and paralepses, associated to numerous echoes, repetitions and digressions. These devices, added to the apparent lack of linearity, confer a circular, or rather spiralling progression upon the novel whose writing becomes repetitive and ritual after the spectacular and operatic performance of Kathakali, since percussion, vocals, mime and dance are intertwined, reviving and weaving myths, legends and tales. At the same time, the circular structure and the evocation of legendary subjects contribute to set a-historicity, timelessness in an enclosed space favouring transgression, abolishing any chronological landmarks in the twins’ mythical quest to revert to primal indistinction and, in this respect, the focus on Kathakali may reveal the author’s attachment to ritual practices, myths and legends and, underneath the surface, drama.