noteface

"No one could pinpoint exactly when Estha had stopped talking... It had been a gradual winding down. A barely noticeable quietening. As though he had simply ran out of conversation and had nothing left to say. Yet Estha's silence was never awkward. Never intrusive. Never noisy... A sort of dormancy, the psychological equivalent of what lungfish do to get themselves through the dry season, except that in Estha's case the dry season looked as though it would last for ever.

Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in it's swampy arms. It rocked him to the rythm of an ancient, foetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory, dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. 

Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilliser on his past. Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away, entombed somewhere deep in the soothing folds of the fact of it. 

-- The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy