Arundhati Roy's Earth Woman

The best part I enjoyed while reading Arundhati Roy's novel, The God of Small Things, is her description of the earth's life and our relationship with it. Roy describes the earth as a woman, Earth Woman, who has gone through various phases in her life to have become what she is today. Describing our relationship with the Earth Woman, Roy writes that human civilization is as insignificant as a blink of an eye in the Earth Woman's life. 

Although this description makes us wonder what a lilliputian role we have played in the Earth Woman's life, I feel there is also a positive angle to it. It may also be possible that all the maturity and stability attained by the Earth Woman is simply to enable human civilization to grow and flourish. 

Anyhow, enjoy reading the following paragraphs and start thinking!   

 “We belong nowhere”, Chako said. “We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter.”

Then, to give the twins Estha and Rahel a sense of Historical Perspective, he told them about the Earth Woman. He made them imagine that the earth – 4600 million years old – was a 46-year-old woman. It had taken the whole of the Earth Woman’s life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The Earth Woman was 11 years old, Chacko said, when the first single-celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was 40. She was over 45 – just 8 months ago – when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

“The whole of human civilization as we know it”, Chacko told the twins, “began only 2 hours ago in the Earth Woman’s life.”

It was an awe-inspiring and humbling thought, Chacko said, that the whole of contemporary history, the World War, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge – was no more than a blink of the Earth Woman’s eye.

“And we, my dears, everything we are and ever will be are just a twinkle in her eye…”

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