Ammu

Occasionally, when Ammu listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside her. A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out of the world like a witch, to a better, happier place. On days like this there was something restless and untamed about her. As though she had temporarily set aside the morality of motherhood and divorcee-hood. Even her walk changed from a safe-mother walk to another wilder sort of walk. She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank with her little plastic transistor shaped like a tangerine. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims.
What was it that gave Ammu this Unsafe Edge? This air of unpredictability? It was what she had battling inside her .An unmixable mix. The infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber. It was this that grew inside her, and eventually led her to love by night the man her children loved by day. To use by night the boat that her children used by day. The boat that Estha sat on and Rahel found.
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Sometimes she was the most beautiful woman that Estha and Rahel had ever seen. And sometimes she wasn’t.


Arundhati Roy, God of small things.