The God of Small Things

Before going into the theatre “to see The Sound of Music for the third time” (35), Estha “[completes] his first adult assignment” (93). He goes to the bathroom on his own, while Ammu, Baby and Rahel accompany each other to the ladies room. This little detail about going to use the restroom foreshadows another instance where Estha will be forced from being a child into manhood.

Ammu tells Estha to “shut UP!!” (96) because he was singing along to the words of the movies. Instead of shutting up, he leaves the theatre on his own account, because “he couldn’t help” (96) but sing along to the words he knew. After completing his first adult assignment, his childlikeness comes out in having to sing the lyrics in “a nun’s voice” (96). He did not know that this act of immaturity, in acting his own age, he would be shoved into yet another adult assignment, something that he kept as a small thing, but ended up as a Big Thing inside him.

The Orangedrink Lemondrink Man scolded Estha for “[disturbing]” (97) him with his song. As soon as he is done scolding him, his “yellow piano key” (97) teeth offered him a free drink. As Estha came, the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man already knew what he had in store for Estha. The Man asked him questions, and Estha, being a man and a child, had to answer. Where did he live? What did his family do? The Man “handed Estha his penis” (98) and made Estha masturbate him while he drank his lemon drink, and he had to, because the Man “knew where to find [him]” (104). After the Man was done with Estha, he sent him back into the theatre.

Estha knew from this time that he would be love a little less if anyone knew what he had done with the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man. So he told no one. But in his head, a conversation was taking place between himself and Baron von Trapp, the father in The Sound of Music. Would von Trapp love him even though he was not white? Even though he “[blew] spit bubbles…[shivered] his legs… held a strangers’ soo-soos?” (101). Was he still acceptable to obtain a Baba’s love? He knew that it was “out of the question. [He could not] love them”