Living life has varying prices. Especially to those who break the rules. "Perhaps, Ammu, Estha and Rahel were the worst transgressors. But it wasn't just them. It was the others too. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers lovers, and cousins died and had funerals (p 31)." Rahel, Estha and Ammu for transgressing the Love Laws by loving the man they should not love paid a price. As Baby Kochamma says "some things come with their own punishments (p109)." .
"While the other children of their age learned other things, Estha and Rahel learned how History negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws. They heard its sickening thud. They smelled its smell and never forgot it (pp. 53-54)." If only punishments were proper. "They didn't ask to be let off lightly. They only asked for punishments that fitted their crimes. Not ones that came like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. Not ones you spent your whole life in, wandering through its maze of shelves (p 309).".
Estha and Rahel "would grow up grappling with ways of living with what had happened. They would try to tell themselves that in terms of geological time it was an insignificant even. Just a blink of the Earth Woman's eye. That worse things had happened. That worse things kept happening. But they would find no comfort in that thought (p54)." .
When Rahel and Estha watched the Kathakali presentation, it was not performance for them. "They recognized it. They had seen its work before. Another morning. Another stage. Another kind of frenzy. The brutal extravagance of this matched by the savage economy of that. (p 224)." The History House. Where they weren't supposed to be, with a man they weren't supposed to love. History in live performance. .
The God of Small Things also presents the cost of living, politically and socially.
