Childhood: Bravery as a Pontetial Transgressor

state apparatuses.

A. Childhood: Bravery as a Pontetial Transgressor

Ammu Ipe is the second child and only daughter of Soshama Ipe and Shri Benaan John Ipe. In the novel Soshama Ipe is commonly referred as Mammachi, while Shri Benaan John Ipe is referred as Pappachi. Mammachi and Pappachi are honorable terms used to refer to grandparents. The terms are used because this novel is narrated from the point of view of the twins, Rahel and Estha. Ammu has an older brother, Chacko, who is four years older than Ammu. With Chacko, Ammu often argue and even quarrel. But in rare occasions, they share sibling friendly affections p. 30. Ammu is born November 17, 1948 p. 75. Her childhood is spent in Delhi, as her father works as an Imperial Entomologist. As a child, Ammu has to live with an abusive father. She experiences beatings and witness her mother being beaten by her father. Meanwhile she also experiences the heavy jealousy her friends direct to her for having such a perfect father. This father-daughter relationship is one of many things that shape her perspective towards men, class, religion and the world in general. The quotation below shows how her worldview is formed through the horrid happenings she has gone through in her childhood. As a child, she had learned very quickly to disregard the Father Bear Mother Bear stories she was given to read. In her version, Father Bear beat Mother Bear with brass vases. Mother Bear suffered those beatings with mute resignation… But alone with his wife and children he turned into a monstrous, suspicious bully, with a streak of vicious cunning. They were beaten, humiliated and then made to suffer the envy of friends and relations for having such a wonderful husband and father p. 86. Her most traumatic experience with her bully father was narrated in chapter 8. This event affirms a “...lofty sense of injustice and the mulish, reckless streak that develops in Someone Small who was been bullied all their lives by Someone Big p. 87. The discourse of the Big trouncing the Small is the issue that is continuously repeated throughout the novel. He flogged her with his ivory-handled riding crop the one that he had held across his lap in his studio photograph. Ammu didn’t cry. When he finished beating her he made her bring him Mammachi’s pinking shears from her sewing cupboard. While Ammu watched, the Imperial Entomologist shred her new gumboots with her mother’s pinking shears p. 86. In the quotation, it is emphasized Pappachi’s cold surliness shown to his female immidiate family members. In the page Arundhati composes the tense horror shown by Pappachi’s quiet gesture as follows The strips of black rubber fell to the floor. The scissors made snicking scissor-sounds....When the last strip of rubber had rippled to the floor, her father looked at her with cold, flat eyes, and rocked and rocked and rocked p. 86. Pappachi’s unstable personality is hypothetically caused by inbreeding. The Ipe family, like other Syrian Christians, maintain their privilege and honors by marrying only people of the same kind. It means in the ancestry line there is a high possibility of marriage among close relatives. Ammu worried about madness. Mammachi said it ran in their family. That it came on people suddenly and caught them unawares. There was Pathil Ammai, who at the age of sixty-five began to take her clothes off and run naked along the river, singing to the fish. There was Thampi Chachen, who searched his shit every morning with a knitting-needle for a gold tooth he had swallowed years ago. And Dr. Muthachen, who had to be removed from his own wedding in a sack. ... Chacko said that the high incidence of insanity among Syrian Christians was the price they paid for Inbreeding. Mammachi said it wasn’t p. 107. The quotation above shows that there are tendency of unstable emotion that is inherited through kinship in the family. As a child, Ammu sees these beastly lunacy tendencies shown by her father that gives her traumatic views on patriarchal values. However, her fear to her father somehow builds her resistance towards the values in which her father stands for. Ammu’s choices somehow deviate from what are regarded common by her family and society. As a child she also shows a strong personality, referring to her brave decision to enter the house and rescue her beloved gumboots, and how she manages to endure her father’s beating without crying, and also how she courageously watches those gumboots shredded by her father using the pinking scissors that she herself brings to him. It is easily said that Ammu’s bravery that she shows during her childhood is also a form of unstable emotion that she inherits biologically from her kin. In her early age, Ammu has shown the pontetials for a transgressor.

B. Adolescence: Marriage as a Transgression