Gifts and Exchanges in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things

16 Pages·2012·0.24 MB·English

北台灣學報 第34期 2011年6月 ISSN-1819-0278
Gifts and Exchanges in Arundhati Roy’s The

God of Small Things

I-YUN CHEN

Technology and Science Institute of Northern Taiwan.

Applied Foreign Languages Department.

Abstract
The idea of “exchange” requires measurement, quantification, and assessment in value;
however, the logic of “gift” seems to ground itself on a different system based on the act of
generosity. Yet Marcel Mause’s theories on gift exchanges and some others’ make it clear
that gift giving invites a recipient to receive the gift and creates the debt that asks for a
counter-gift. Gifting thus gestures not an act of pure generosity but a kind of exchange
paradigm based on domination and self-interest. I propose to regard giving and taking of
gifts as a microcosm of human relations in Roy’s The God of Small Things. At issue is the
way how exchanges of gifts can be examined as exchanges of culture and how exchange
relations in transnational contexts perpetuate unfair sex, class and race distinctions.

Key words: gift exchange, power relation, ethnicity

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Gifts and Exchangesin Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
阿蘭達蒂·洛伊《微物之神》中的禮物交換
阿阿阿阿蘭蘭蘭蘭達達達達蒂蒂蒂蒂····洛洛洛洛伊伊伊伊《《《《微微微微物物物物之之之之神神神神》》》》中中中中的的的的禮禮禮禮物物物物交交交交換換換換

陳陳陳陳藝藝藝藝雲雲雲雲

北北北北台台台台灣灣灣灣科科科科學學學學技技技技術術術術學學學學院院院院應應應應用用用用外外外外語語語語系系系系

摘摘摘摘要要要要

「交換」的概念側重於價值上的算計、估量與評定，而「禮物」則是種慷慨贈與
的行為。然而，法國學者馬歇·牟斯(Marcel Mauss)與其他學者的論著揭示，贈禮對收禮
者而言，涉及回禮的酬謝義務。禮物遂從「單向」的餽贈進入「交換」的範疇。因此，
贈禮並非慷慨之表現；送/收禮物其實蘊含著某種私利較勁與權力宰制的交換關係。本
文剖析阿蘭達蒂·洛伊《微物之神》小說中，送/收禮物的交換行為如何形塑角色間之
權勢地位，說明作者如何藉「禮尚往來」的交易觀點，探討禮物作為一種消弭國界/差
異的可能性、進一步批判性別、階級、與族裔間錯綜的權力關係。

關關關關鍵鍵鍵鍵詞詞詞詞：：：：禮禮禮禮物物物物交交交交換換換換、、、、權權權權力力力力關關關關係係係係、、、、族族族族裔裔裔裔

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The world of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is that of a pervasive porosity.
In her novel, Roy describes a transnational, diasporic phenomenon in the current era when
contacts and transactions between nations constitute the central fabric of contemporary life.
Indeed, The God of Small Things is replete with practices of border-crossings, that is,
departures from and returns to and across India that situate the characters in and beyond
India in their engagement with the world.1 In busy transnational traffic, objects assuming
the form of a “gift” travel with subjects on the move. The gift can seem nothing less than a
“small” thing but the habit of giving and receiving gifts resonates through human lives
because the gift is more than a material object. A rethinking of gift exchanges in a
transnational landscape is certainly of tremendous significance in Today’s any
de-territorializing encounter. The study of the gift on a supra-national basis is primarily
about the study of transcultural exchanges: circulations of subjects and objects that operate
worldwide mobilize and materialize the sending and receiving of culture.2 The logic of the
gift, on special occasions, enters into the structure of global economy and establishes a
relationship between nations across the world.
Writing an introduction to the book Arguing with Anthropology: An Introduction to
Critical Theories of the Gift in 2003 in Manchester, on the eve of the World Trade
Organization meetings in Cancun, Mexico, Karen Sykes recalls his experience of reading the
Guardian newspaper supplement on “Trade:” “Many of the articles discuss the benefits and
difficulties in forgiving the debt of the developing to the developed world, of regulating
obligations rather than freeing international trade, of making (for example) pharmaceuticals
and other medicines freely available at no cost in poorest nations, and of creating a fair trade
organization” (2, the author’s italics). In my paper, I thus propose to regard giving and
taking of gifts, both literal and metaphorical, as a microcosm of human relations, a “small”
thing that reflects a wider trajectory of historical, political, economic and social concerns in
Roy’s particular text. At issue is the way how exchanges of gifts can be examined as
exchanges of culture and how exchange relations in transnational contexts perpetuate unfair
caste, sex, and race distinctions. In her advocating for acts of transgression that demand a
de-classification of sameness and otherness so as to transcend “Love laws,” the author
articulates a kind of global ethics. It is the kind of ethics that eludes a utilitarian economic
reasoning, privileges equal, reciprocal national relations, and aims for a better understanding
of cultural particularities and differences.

1 For example, there are crossings made by Pappachi and Mammachi (Austria), Chacko (England and Canada),
Rahel (America) and her father (Australia). Foreigners from different countries also visit India for various
reasons: Kari Saipu , Mr. Hollick , Margaret, and Sophie from England, Fr. Mulligan from Ireland, and Rahel’s
husband Larry from America.
2 The term “culture” can take on many meanings in different disciplines and studies. Here my definition of
the term comes close to that of the anthropologist Edward B. Tylor who wrote in 1871: “Culture or
Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art,
morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” This
quotation is cited by Stephen Creenblatt in Critical Terms for Literary Study (Chicago and London: U of
Chicago P, 1995) on Page 225.

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阿蘭達蒂·洛伊《微物之神》中的禮物交換

Giving, Taking, and the Debt
On his way away from home and to the airport, the “Little Man” Estha receives his
“Free Cold Drink” given by the Orangedrink Lemondrink man at the cinema after Estha
dignifies himself by completing “his first adult assignment” in “HIS” (93; 98). That
Orangedrink Lemondrink man is a “Clean” uncle who has “an air hostess’s heart trapped in a
bear’s body”; however, the gift from the “generous Air Hostess” gestures not an act of pure
generosity but a kind of exchange paradigm based on domination and self-interest: Eshta’s
sweet drink is transformed into a “bitter” bottle of “fizzed, lemon-flavored fear” in exchange
for the satisfaction of the hairy man’s sexual appetite (104; 106; 113). “So he held a bottle
in one hand and a penis in the other. Hard, hot, veiny. Not a moonbeam” and thus,
Estha’s hand remains to be a token of transgression and impurity, the soiled hand, the
alienated “Other hand” which carefully carries the weight of the encounter in his life, like an
invisible orange (98). This encounter, in which Estha’s Other hand touches the Other’s (a
stranger’s) strange gift (the penis), serves as a prelude to the twins’s later encounter with the
foreign Other at the airport, their uncle Chacko’s ex-wife Margaret and their daughter Sophie
Mol. The scene in “The Refreshments Counter” doesn’t only set a stage for an “exchange;”
it also ironically questions the nature of gift giving/taking, offering a critique of the notion of
hospitality. These questions include: Is a truly free gift possible? What obligations do
gifts carry? What do gifts reveal about the person who gives or takes and the conditions of
giving and taking? How are the tropes of otherness or the Other intrinsic to the discussion
of the gift? Are gift exchanges economic activities or alternatives to economic behavior?
To add one more question to the endless list, what is the relationship between gifts and
commodities?
Gifts differ from commodities in a sense that the idea of the gift is based on values of
sharing and creation of bonds. In its disregard of private profits and utilitarian egoism, the
gift as a form of exchange grounds itself on a logic contrary to that of capitalist exchanges of
commodities. Genevieve Vaughan renders clear the difference in “Mothering,
Co-muni-cation, and the Gifts of Language,” saying that “[t]he exchange of commodities
requires measurement, quantification, and assessment in money. Exchange is ego-oriented.
The need that is satisfied by exchange is the exchanger’s own need. Therefore it does not
attribute value to the other, but only to the self” (99; 100). The logic of the gift Vaughan
argues for echoes back to the basic tenet, posited by Marcel Mauss in his influential study
The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies.3 In explaining how men
and women become exchangers of objects, Mauss turns to ceremonies of the indigenous

3 Mauss’s work serves as the primary source of the gift theory that has invited rich and complex discussions
from critics like Levi-Strauss to Pierre Bourdieu, Marshall Sahlins, Annette Weiner, Marilyn Strathern, Jacques
Derrida, Maurice Godelier, George Gilder, George Soros, and Georges Bataille, to name a few of them (Marcus
40). As shown in the following argument, this paper develops itself only from a portion of Mauss’s theory of
the gift, that is, his definition of the gift as a means of reciprocity by which the social order is secured and his
discussion of the obligations involved in gift exchanges.
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peoples of the Northwest coast of North America and among others, practices of some
Polynesian and Melanesian peoples for an answer. Mauss concludes that in indigenous
philosophies we find “the joy of giving in public, the delight in generous artistic expenditure,
the pleasure of hospitality in the public or private feast” (67). The gift is the manifestation
of reciprocity that confirms the bond of dependence and reliance among individuals and
groups. In the gift system, people do not give for the sake of one’s own but for that of
“[s]ocial insurance, solicitude in mutuality or co-operations” to create the so-called “Friendly
Societies” (Mauss 67). The argument pivots on the goodwill of the self to contribute to the
well-being of the other and the entire social order: the theory of the gift for Mauss is a theory
of human solidarity. A gift is thus outside economic and egoistic reasoning, unlike
commercial exchanges defined by giving in order to receive more. The purpose of a gift is
to look after the needs of others and giving, considered in this vein, should free the recipient
from the structure of repaying.
Yet, hidden behind Mauss’s theory of humanistic generosity lies the paradox: for Mauss,
giving invites a recipient to receive the gift and creates the debt that asks for a counter-gift.
Jean Baudrillard writes, “Disinterestedness [gratuite] is a giving which asks nothing in
return” (103). 4 But it seems that Mauss’s gift is never “free” since it “asks back”
something and the debt caused by the gift results in an inequality of status between the two.
“What is giving for Mauss?” asks Maurice Godelier and the critic immediately supplies a
reply: “It is an act that creates a double relationship between donor and recipient” (22).
Godelier develops his argument from Mauss who sees the logic of the gift entailing a chain
of obligations of giving, receiving, and repaying in activities of gift exchanges. Mauss
claims generosity is an obligation for “the rich” who possess “excessive wealth and
happiness,” and to refuse to give as well as to receive can amount to “the equivalent of a
declaration war; it is a refusal of friendship and intercourse” (15; 11). To complete the
chain, the recipient who accepts the gift places himself/herself in the debt of the one who has
given it: “The sanction for the obligation to repay is enslavement for debt” (41).5 Simply
put, a sense of spiritual bond is created since the giver shares what he/she has with the
recipient but at the same time, a relationship of superiority is established as well since the
recipient owes the giver something back no matter what form it is. Godelier contends that
“[g]iving produces two things at once, then. It both reduces the distance and creates
distance between the two parties. It creates dissymmetry, a hierarchy between giver and
receiver” (22). Though dissymmetry may possibly characterize any exchange, Godelier’s

4 Writing in the line of a tradition that criticizes Mauss’s notion of gifts, Baudrillard seems to suggest that
Mauss’s gift is not a real “gift” simply because the act of giving, in Mauss’s theory, requires a counter-gift in
return. Adriaan Peperzak in his article “Giving” even stresses the “impossibility” of giving: “Not only is
giving destroyed by gratitude, it is already annulled by the self-satisfaction or anticipated self-satisfaction of the
giver” (162). I choose to stay with Mauss’s way of using the term “gift” but remain attentive to the frequent
occurrence of hypocritical giving as it turns to be insincere hospitality in disguise and the pursuit of maximum
profits. In so saying, I intend to examine in Roy’s novel the unequal conditions created by the debt of gift
giving and taking especially when it involves nations of different power relations.
5 Mauss’s explanation under the titles of “The Obligation to Give,” “The Obligation to Receive,” and “The
Obligation to Repay,” runs through The Gift from Page 37 to Page 41. As Mauss admits, his analysis of these
obligations in gift-exchanges comes from his observations of the Kwakiutl, Haida and Tsimshian (41).
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rereading of Mauss reminds us that gift exchanges across the globe necessarily take on
different modes and yield different meanings, depending on whether they are performed
between people of similar or different caste, class, sex, and particularly, race. Exchanges
between people of radically different status (which brings us back to the Refreshments
Counter scene in Roy’s novel) often establish the relation of the giver and the receiver as
hierarchical and unfulfilled.

Gifting and Power relations
During Christmas holidays in India, the arrival of a white woman and a half-Hindu girl
from England accounts for the main event of Roy’s The God of Small Things. Hierarchical
social structures and hegemonic cultural codes are articulated in this very small frame of
transnational circumstances, a small encounter that defines India as a place regulated by
“Love laws.” Classifications in Kerala distinguish between adults and children, men and
women, married and divorced women, Naxalites and others, Christian Syrians and Hindus,
Touchability and Untouchability, but the national classification between Westerners and
Indians remains the most salient one. Abiding to the rule of classifications, “Love laws”
stand for principles of difference and exclusion, and the first categories (the Touchables,
males, the First World) deserve more love and they are to be loved more according to the
laws. The tension between the English world and the Indian world is fueled by the arrival
of Margaret and Sophie. In the transnational encounter of the local Self with the foreign
Other or vice versa, differential power relations based on caste, sex, and race find their
contested terrain, and status becomes a precondition for exchanges in the characters’
everyday life. Discussions of the gift acquire special meaning when exchanges take the
form of “culture” and work according to a hierarchal principle that obeys a certain form of
power politics.
“’One for you [Margaret] and one for you [Sophie],’” says Chacko with his roses and in
return, Margaret brings him from England the Rolleiflex camera “as a Christmas present”
(136; 128).6 In contrast to roses that connote love, warmth, emotional attachment and
Chacko’s anticipation for a change in relationship, the camera as one of Western inventions
is a cold machine that symbolizes science, progress, and a technological change in the
history of modernization.7 The advent of photography in 1839 emerged as the triumph of
the West addressing to the world, linking “the advance of science” with the “march of
[Western] civilization” as Robert Hunt, a scientist and photographer stated (qtd. in Marien
62). Indeed, the camera enters into the family life of the Indian world “freezing” Indians in
the eye of the machine: Estha and Rahel’s memory of their father is “the only photograph” of

6 In “Translator’s Note” of Mauss’s The Gift, Ian Cunnison points out the fact that Mauss employed the words
don and present “indifferently” and in the translated text, “similarly ‘gift’ and ‘present’ are used for the most
part interchangeably” by the translator Ian himself (xi).
7 For a brief description of photographic history, please refer to Mary Warner Marien’s article, “Photography
and the Modern in Nineteenth Century Thought” in Photography and Its Critics: A Cultural History,
1839-1900, pp. 47-83.
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him, Chacko keeps a “silver-framed black-and-white wedding picture” of his English wife,
the “young” Pappachi is forever young being taken by a photographer in Vienna and it
becomes a legacy for the Ipe family, and in front of Rahel, Mr. Pillai proudly flips through a
bunch of pictures of his son, “a pictorial guide to Lenin’s Life-in-a-Minute” (81; 228; 49;
128). The camera shows up in India as a symbol of “First World panache” when only
Sophie from the West prepares for herself “a face” for the Rolleiflex camera while the Indian
kids Estha, Rahel and Lenin appear in the photograph “like frightened animals that had been
caught in the headlights of a car” (128). Under eyes of the First World, Ammu rejects the
idea of acting awkwardly and backwardly “like some damn godforsaken tribe that’s just been
discovered” although she pokes fun at Margaret joking that smelling hands is the Indian way
of “making babies” (171). Yet now framed in this old black-and-white picture, the Indian
kids are actually stunned by the light of the West, just like animals. In the gift exchange,
the camera is a precious gift from the West for Indians, a gift that makes life more advanced
and civilized in a certain sense; however, the camera as a gift also proves the West superior
as an able giver and creditor, a sort of “First World panache,” flattening the Other with cold
knowledge of the machine.
In their first encounter in England, Chacko brings no roses for Margaret but a
mysterious Indian breakfast ritual at the café, together with a joke about birthday presents.
The latter attracts less interest from the English girl than the former. With a slight Oriental
touch, the Western food is fantastically prepared to display a charm of exoticism, perhaps
partly due to the weird way her Indian lover performs it. Chacko is “the untidy, beatified
porcupine” from the animal world associated with everything cheerful, energetic, and
abundant unlike the “tiny, ordered” universe that confines Margaret within (229; 232).
Margaret falls so much under the spell of the Indian Other as he demonstrates in front of her
a particular plate of food, introducing her “vast, extravagant spaces of his”: the unusual
manner how toast can be jammed, coffee can be sugared, fried egg can be cut, strawberries
can be sliced and, all in all, how the breakfast can be curiously served (233; 230). The
encounter is an exchange on both sides since Chacko is equally fascinated with a sense of
foreignness conjured up by Margaret: her “self-sufficiency” seems to be a quality average in
the Western culture but “remarkable to Chacko” (233). Nevertheless, the encounter ends up
as a “joke” just as Chacko’s joke of “the Man with Twin Sons” implies: the Optimist Pete
overturns his father’s gift of love, “an expensive watch, a carpentry set and a bicycle,” into
trash while the Optimist Stuart mistakes his father’s gift of trash, that is, a pile of “horse
dung,” for gem (230-31). It is the blindness to the truth and misrecognition of the situation
that fail the gifts. This applies to the case of Chacko and Margaret, too. Margaret fails to
understand that her love for Chacko is “actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself”
and Chacko doesn’t realize what Margaret desires most is something such as “a job” and “a
clean home” from her husband (233; 235). Hence “’She traded me in for a better man’” is
the statement Chacko uses to comment on their divorce (236). It is certainly not valid to
draw any judgment on the East and the West here, which is not Roy’s point I think, but the
unfulfilled encounter years later when Sophie is nine does foreground the West as an
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ever-present hegemonic power in the exchange relation.
The West, in its noble project of civilizing the globe, gives too much and takes too
much in return from India, turning the history of colonial efforts into one form of coercive
power.8 For characters like Chacko, the colonial past still weighs on the present and his
marriage with Margaret (“’Marry our conquerors, is more like it’”) is a metaphorical
exchange of the national Self for the sake of a white gift, a trophy in hand (“Chacko’s proud,
tennis-trophy simile’) like his Oxford oar (52; 312).9 Colonization commands all forms of
power to its own purpose to civilize the world but in a way it also purloins the history and
culture of the colonized country which adopts the colonizer’s values and attitudes and forgets
its own. Just like what Chacko confesses in explaining to the twins their Anglophile family
background, they are “Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and
unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away” (51). The
underlying idea is that in the obligations to give and to take, the receiver belongs to the
indebted, inferior rank (being able to give nothing back) and the state of inferiority in
encountering with the West is deftly linked to the subaltern role of the Untouchables in India:
Roy makes it clear that Paravans too are expected “to crawl backwards with a broom,
sweeping away their footprints” (71). Ammu protects against the notion of treating “the
white child and her mother as though they were the only source of light” (312). However
in a sophisticated manner, the First World indeed outshines India, replacing the Indian Other
with its English culture, English behavior, English education, English language, or literally
speaking, the English Self. The political power of the West proliferates itself in other new
forms, for example, in the form of economic expedition. Tea is the target of Western
capital and the target of Chacko’s English manager, Mr. Hollick, is not only money but those
“tea-pickers” on the tea estate. What he has “bequeathed on” the Indians are “a number of
ragged, lightskinned children on the estate:” he is the noble English giver who takes by
means of giving (41).
Decades after her encounter with the First World as a kid, the adult Rahel reencounters
the First World, in which Western capital still leads global economy and in the capitalist
structure “the dark woman” matters little (310). The young Indian wraps herself up in a
way much like a gift: “Part of an old patchwork bedspread was buttoned around her neck and
trailed behind her like a cape. Her wild hair was tied back to look straight, though it
wasn’t” (19). Larry from America interprets her as a mobile piece of African music, “There
goes a jazz tune,” and he regards her as a present from India for him: “He held her as though
she was a gift. Given to him in love. Something still and small. Unbearably precious”
(19; 20). Rahel offers herself as gift in the hope of getting away from India: she “drifted

8 Here I’m indebted to Karen Sykes for the notion of colonial power as a gift and a curse as well. Please see
Chapter 2 “The Awkward Legacy of the Noble Savage” in his Arguing with Anthropology, pp. 19-37.
9 Jean-Pierre Durix in “’The ‘Post-Coloniality’ of The God of Small Things” in Reading Arundhati Roy’s The
God of Small Things writes, “he [Chacko] has attempted to ‘whiten’ himself by marrying an English woman,
Margaret, thus hoping to espouse British culture in the flesh” (13). Many critics hold the similar view on the
marriage. My reading of the marriage doesn’t focus on Chacko’s personal choice; instead, through an analysis
of exchanges, I attempt to explicate the nature of giving and taking in the colonizer/the colonized relation.
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into marriage like a passenger drifts toward unoccupied chair in an airport lounge. With a
Sitting Down sense” (19). The American takes this delicate gift of love and repays Rahel
with his parental care “like an expectant father feeling his unborn baby kick inside its
mother’s womb” (20). Unfortunately, the transnational exchange proves futile since Larry,
much like Chacko and Margaret, cannot become a true giver of care or a lucky receiver of
love when he fails to cross over the cultural barrier for a better understanding of the both:
“He didn’t know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of
despair competed for primacy” (20). Thus the forsaken gift, Rahel, drifts aimlessly in
America, now “the symbolical location of ‘foreignness’ of the ‘First World’” to replace
England in the global system (Pesso-Miquel 24). The condition of Rahel is that of the
Third World woman in diaspora and she is doubly effaced in terms of gender and race in the
First World.10 New York is neither a generous giver nor receiver for her: it represents no
parental kindness but only a “deranged womb” of chaotic madness (70). In Washington,
she suffers from racism and debased sex when a white drunk at night addresses her in foul
language, “Hey, you! Black bitch! Suck my dick!” (179). The subaltern Rahel is also the
diasporic foreigner economically dispossessed like those Indians mentioned by Roy: they are
“nurses, masons, wire-benders and bank clerks who work hard and unhappily in faraway
places,” and Rahel is an Indian restaurant waitress and a gas station night clerk in America,
the same inferior rank (14). Western capital, embodied by the rise of America as the global
hegemonic power, tends to aim at accumulation of profits at the cost of the Third World,
cheap labor, for example—a kind of “’new imperialism’” David Harvey calls our attention to
(182). Anyway, Rahel is not a gift anymore. A white man once asserts her value as
something “precious” but he devalues her later on, making her a returned gift deprived of
worth and drifting in the First World. In fact, Rahel is more or less a thing both abroad and
at home. The very encounter set in 1969 during Christmas holidays has made everything
clear with the appearance of Sophie.
Sophie is the real gift for the Ipe family while Rahel and her twin brother Estha are only
the “library books” to be “borrowed and returned” or “billiard balls” at one’s careless
disposal (149; 80). The superior status awarded to the English ex-wife and the half-English
child determines the First World and the Third World exchange relations, but the issue of the
racial status also overlaps gender and class issues that are related to “Love laws” again.
Love laws are laws in favor of male domination in the domestic world of India and blood
lineage. Man is the head of the family and no doubt Chacko is the man of the house who
can claim everything his own legally: “My house. My pineapple. My pickle” (214). Mr.
Pillai serves as another example of this unfair, gendered relation: he hands his wife a dirty
ball of his shirt wet with sweat “as though it was a gift. A bouquet of flowers,” dishonoring
the wife by a false present (258). Ammu as a daughter and a divorced woman even finds
herself an eyesore and a source of shame to the family, and her twin children are even more
despised because they are “Half-Hindu Hybrids whom no self-respecting Syrian Christian

10 In so saying, I’m referring to James Clifford’s article “Diaspora” on Page .313 and Gayatri Spivak’s remarks
in her “Can the Subaltern Speak” on Page 287.
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would every marry”—in a word, they are socially outcasts who defile the family’s blood
lineage (44). The three depend on Chacko for a living: he says they are “millstones around
his neck” (82). But the girl Sophie from the First World with a higher racial status and a
“Pappachi’s nose” is a different story, a big contrast to the girl Rahel (170). English
whiteness belongs to beauty, a superior culture, and it represents a profitable mode of
capitalist production. It yields profits as Kochu Maria observes the “beach-colored” Sophie,
commenting “’When she grows up, she’ll be our Kochamma, and she’ll raise our salaries,
and give us nylon saris for Onam” (177; 175). Definitely unlike the “mudbrown” demon
Rahel, the nine-year-old Sophie is the legitimate daughter of the family factory, she will
make the Ipe family continue and prosper, and she will promote the Indian family to a more
superior status by her whiteness. So, the half-English girl puts the Indians deeply in debt
with a promise for future prosperity, upon which everyone desperately relies. Yet the future
creditor takes before she can give. Sophie takes away Mammachi’s silver thimble by force.
Roy describes, “She had hijacked it the day she arrived, and vowed to spend her holidays
drinking only from a thimble” (128). Near the end of her short stay in India, the hijacker
does try to give: “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” (253).

Gifts That Transcend Differences
Sophie’s giving assumes the form of a “bargain”—she trades presents for her cousins
for friendship in India. On the very day of her arrival, Sophie learns to “clamp her nostrils
shut” to avoid the approaching stench of unprocessed rubber on the way back home, one day
she wakes up in Chacko’s room finding herself trapped, a “captured spy in enemy territory”
and starts to plot “her spectacular escape,” and even in the funeral ceremony, Rahel imagines
Sophie struggling in the sealed coffin for a way out and then killed by being unable to
breathe (146; 227; 9). During the first few days in India, Sophie, described as such by Roy,
regards herself as a totally alienated and lonely Other. Sophie doesn’t appear to be a
generous giver at first, either. She is more about inhuman, at least according to her short
stay. She laughs at the twin hybrids, pointing out straightforward the harsh reality that
“You’re both whole wogs and I’m a half one,” and she also mocks the wounded man with a
dangling eye she once saw in an accident, a bleeding man with “his eyeball swinging on the
end of a nerve, like a yo-yo” (17). Sophie is the one who suggests Rahel save one ant but
kill the rest in order to “leave one alive so that it can be lonely” (177). On the first day of
their encounter, Rahel tells Sophie a list of her beloved persons upon her request, a name list
“torn forever between love and duty” and unnecessarily revealing her true feelings (144).
No matter how, Sophie is one of the names and Rahel takes her in simply due to a family
bond of love and duty, nothing to do with self-interest or economic reasoning: “Because
we’re firstcousins. So I have to [love you].” Sophie rejects the idea by saying she doesn’t
know Rahel yet and ends the conversation with the words, “Any anyway, I don’t love you”
(144). One week later, “Being Lonely” reveals Sophie “to be human” and the kind twins
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