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pressed together, smiles frozen on their faces, arms pinned to their
sides, chests swiveled to face the photographer. As though
standing sideways was a sin.
Only Sophie Mol, with First World panache, had prepared
for herself, for her biological father‟s photo, a face. She had turned
her eyelids inside out so that her eyes looked like pink-veined flesh
petals (gray in a black-and-white photograph). She wore a set of
protruding false teeth cut from the yellow rind of a sweetlime. Her
tongue pushed through the trap of teeth and had Mammachi‟s
silver thimble fitted on the end of it. (She had hijacked it the day
she arrived, and vowed to spend her holidays drinking only from a
thimble.) She held out a lit candle in each hand. One leg of her
denim bell-bottoms was rolled up to expose a white, bony knee on
which a face had been drawn. Minutes before that picture was
taken, she had finished explaining patiently to Estha and Rahel
(arguing away any evidence to the contrary, photographs,
memories) how there was a pretty good chance that they were
bastards, and what bastard really meant. This had entailed an
involved, though somewhat inaccurate description of sex. “See
what they do is…”
That was only days before she died.
Sophie Mol.
Thimble-drinker.
Coffin-cartwheeler.
She arrived on the Bombay-Cochin flight. Hatted,
bellbottomed and Loved from the Beginning.
Chapter 6.
Cochin Kangaroos
Cochin Airport, Rahel‟s new knickers were polka-dotted and
still crisp. The rehearsals had been rehearsed. It was the Day of the
Play. The culmination of the What Will Sophie Mol Think? week.
In the morning at the Hotel Sea Queen, Ammu–who had