This is an excerpt from The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, her first and only work in fiction. Roy creates a new language of expression, the kind that norms of writing usually don't afford us. She wouldn't care she's writing in English; if there is a thought in Malayalam, she will express it as such. Anyway, this and much more makes it my favourite book of all time. This excerpt is about a character called Estha which is particularly close to my heart. Hope you can appreciate despite the absence of all context.
"Estha had always been a quiet child, so no one could pinpoint with any degree of accuracy exactly when (the year, if not the month or day) he had stopped talking. Stopped talking altogether, that is. The fact is that there wasn’t an “exactly when.” It had been a gradual winding down and closing shop. A barely noticeable quietening. As though he had simply run out of conversation and had nothing left to say. Yet Estha’s silence was never awkward. Never intrusive. Never noisy. It wasn’t an accusing, protesting silence as much as a sort of aestivation, a 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 forever.
Over time he had acquired the ability to blend into the background of wherever he was—into bookshelves, gardens, curtains, doorways, streets—to appear inanimate, almost invisible to the untrained eye. It usually took strangers a while to notice him even when they were in the same room with him. It took them even longer to notice that he never spoke. Some never noticed at all.
Estha occupied very little space in the world."
