Sophie Mol Quotes

It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined. Over the years, as the memory of Sophie Mol ... slowly faded, the Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. It was always there. Like a fruit in season. Every season. As permanent as a government job.

One beach-colored. One brown. One Loved. One Loved a Little Less.

Quella prima notte, il giorno dell'arrivo di Sophie Mol, Velutha guardò la sua amante che si rivestiva. Quando fu pronta, Ammu si accovacciò di fronte a lui. Lo toccò leggermente con le dita e lasciò una traccia di pelledoca sulla pelle. Come un gesso morbido sulla lavagna. Come la brezza in una risaia. Come le scie dei jet in un cielo celeste da chiesa. Lui le prese il viso tra le mani e lo attirò verso il suo. Chiuse gli occhi e le annusò la pelle. Ammu rise. Sì, Margaret, pensò. Lo facciamo anche fra noi. Baciò gli occhi chiusi di Velutha e si alzò. Velutha, con la schiena appoggiata al mangostano, la guardò andar via. Aveva una rosa secca tra i capelli. Si girò per dirlo un'altra volta: "Naaley". Domani.

Still, to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem is only one way of looking at it. Equally, it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago. Long before Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch Ascendency, before Vasco da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin's conquest of Calicut. Before three purple-robed Syrian Bishops murdered by the Portugese were found floating in the sea, with coiled sea serpents riding on their chests and oysters knotted in their tangled beards. It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag. That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.

He walked past the village school that his great-grandfather built for Untouchable children. Past Sophie Mol’s yellow church. Past the Ayemenem Youth Kung Fu Club. Past the Tender Buds Nursery School (for Touchables), past the ration shop that sold rice, sugar and bananas that hung in yellow bunches from the roof. Cheap soft-porn magazines about fictitious South Indian sex-fiends were clipped with clothes pegs to ropes that hung from the ceiling. They spun lazily in the warm breeze, tempting honest ration-buyers with glimpses of ripe, naked women lying in pools of fake blood.

It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined. Over the years, as the memory of Sophie Mol slowly faded, the Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive.

their English aunt, Margaret Kochamma—and their cousin, Sophie Mol, who were coming from London to spend Christmas at Ayemenem.

It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined. Over the years, as the memory of Sophie Mol (the seeker of small wisdoms: Where do old birds go to die? Why don’t dead ones fall like stones from the sky?

Sophie Mol eventually found what she had been looking for. Presents for her cousins. Triangular towers of Toblerone chocolate (soft and slanting in the heat). Socks with separate multicolored toes. And two ballpoint pens—the top halves filled with water in which a cut-out collage of a London streetscape was suspended. Buckingham Palace and Big Ben. Shops and people. A red doubledecker bus propelled by an air bubble floated up and down the silent street. There was something sinister about the absence of noise on the busy ballpoint street. Sophie Mol put the presents into her go-go bag and went forth into the world. To drive a hard bargain. To negotiate a friendship. A friendship that, unfortunately, would be left dangling. Incomplete. Flailing in the air with no foothold. A friendship that never circled around into a story which is why, far more quickly than ever should have happened, Sophie Mol became a Memory, while The Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. Like a fruit in season. Every season.