Ahmenem Home Analysis

The house is also noted for the absence of any bond between the house and its members. Sophie Mol experiences the stifling atmosphere of the house and considers herself “A captured spy in enemy territory” (TGST 238) and longs to escape from such a suffocating situation. Margaret Kochamma, Sophie Mol’s mother and Chacko’s ex-wife, also has a similar experience. She comes to Ayemenem “to heal her wounded world” (TGST 263) after the death of her husband Joe. Instead, she loses her child and experiences “the fear and gloom that hung over the Ayemenem House” (TGST 263).

The men in the Ayemenem family pride in their ancestry. They are the privileged descendants of Rev. E. John Iype, a priest of the Mar Thoma Church and well-known in the Christian community for being “blessed personally by the patriarch of Antioch, the sovereign head of the Syrian Catholic Church - an episode which had become part of Ayemenem’s folklore” (TGST 22). But as events progress what one finds is the gradual decline of religious and moral values on the one side and the rise of patriarchal and

As Ammu, her daughter puts it, she cried not because she loved him, but she had got used to him. According to Ammu, “human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things they could get used to” (TGST 5)). Asha Choubey in her article, “A House Without Space: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things as a Mirror of Patriarchy” writes, “habit is tradition, habit is the long entrenched patriarchal values, which tend to polarize the masculine and the feminine values, where masculine is the centre and feminine is the periphery. It is this habit that stops Mammachi from feeling happy at the good riddance that Pappachi’s death should mean” (111). Mammachi’s life shows how even in an educated Indian household deeply ingrained patriarchal beliefs and practices still persist and make a woman’s life