05. Returning and loss of space, time and culture
In my definition of migration I have stated that a migrant does not intend to return to the place he has left. If he does return, however, it means that something went wrong or is not working any longer at the place he migrated to. Relating to The God of Small Things this happens several times. Chacko and Ammu return after they get divorced and Rahel returns because she is not happy with her life in America and wants to meet her brother again.
Why do the characters want to return to the place they once wanted to leave? When they went away, they were looking for a new and better home. But the new home turned out to be worse than the home they have left, so they remember their past and think that they can go back and return to their old life. What they forget is that meanwhile their home including the people there might have changed, and that they themselves might have changed, too.
Heraclitus’ famous sentence panta rhei, everything flows, comes to mind. You can not step into the same river twice, because the second time the river has changed and so have you. While a going back in space can easily be accomplished simply by turning around and moving back to the origin, a clock can not be turned back and time can not be undone.
This is a common postcolonial concept: “[M]ultitudinous as movement in space is, it is visibly surpassed by one of a different kind: movement in time. This journey no one can avoid: we are all ‘migrants’ from our past.” (Santaollalla 1994, 164). They are migrants, who – in The God of Small Things – hope to return to their old life just to find out that the things that have happened can not be made undone.
Salman Rushdie connects the idea to the idea of home:
“The past is a foreign country,” goes the famous opening sentence of L.P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, “they do things differently there.” But the photograph [of my childhood house] tells me to invert this idea; it reminds me that it’s my present that is foreign, and that the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time. (Rushdie 1991, 9)