Ammu the tragic heroine of The God Of Small Things

Ammu, the most neglected and humiliated person in The God of Small Things, is undoubtedly a tragic and lonely figure. A victim of hostile circumstances all through her life, Ammu was mercilessly oppressed when she tried to emerge as an individual with freedom. 

Ammu was born in a patriarchal family and witnessed how her father, the ill-tempered retired Imperial Entomologist Pappachi beat her mother Mammachi every night with a brass flower vase. Later on, she became the victim of her asst. Manager husband’s routine drunken violence: Slowly life began to become unbearable to her. One day her husband (Baba) made an indecent proposal to her to satisfy the sexual appetite of his office boss, Mr. Hollick, and then she had no option but to return unwelcomed with her two children to her parent’s home in Ayemenem, deserting her husband. Thus her husband's drunkenness was instrumental in making her more desperate than she ever was. 

Within the first few months of her return ta Ayemenem, Ammu found around her people who were hog te and hypocritical. Their showy sympathy irritated her and reckless rage of suicide grew in her. This eventually led her to love by night Velotha, the untouchable man her children loved by day Agam, Baby Kochamma was never at peace with her. She like others held the view that a married daughter had no position in her parents’ home and as for a divorced daughter, she had no position at all. 

There is enough evidence m the novels that Ammu was slowly moving towards a forbidden path. She never got love from any of the members of her family and naturally, she had been a little unkind to her own children. Chacko her brother and Baby Kochammma, her aunt made use of every opportunity to sideline her creating an impression that she was an outsider in Ayemenem House But Ammu was more and more determined to shed her ‘motherhood’ and ‘divorcee hood’ only to establish a relation with Velutha, the untouchable 

Ammu now a young woman of only twenty-seven emerges as a much-wronged character. She had seen the daily violence of her father on Mammachi, a drunken husband who wanted to trade his job by handing her over to his boss, a self-centered brother, Chacko, and the mean and vindictive Baby Kochamma. She had only her children to love and protect but she would shoo them away in one of her dark moods. This fed Estha and Rahel to leave the house with Sophie Mol on that fateful night when Sophie Mol died. Nothing that she did seemed to be night She broke all the norms and rules of a rigidly patriarchal society by mating with an untouchable outcaste like Velutha. 

To sum up, a victim of hostile circumstances and virtual social outcaste, alienated from family, home, and society, Ammu has almost the characteristics of a Shakespearean tragic heroine The manner of her death and cremation rouses our pity and fear She was made to sun possible ways and finally she became a mere receipt number with a tren to shed da drop of tear for her death.