The God of Small Things: Chapter 13 Summary & Analysis

In 1969 Sophie Mol wakes up and thinks about Joe. She and Margaret Kochamma are staying in Chacko’s room, and Sophie looks around at the broken airplanes, thinking that her mother was the only one to escape and fly away. She sees a picture of her mother and Chacko on their wedding day.

The narrator explains Chacko and Margaret Kochamma’s relationship. Margaret was working as a waitress in London when Chacko came to her café one day. He was slim then and looked like a disheveled intellectual. He told Margaret a joke as she served him, and then he started coming back to the café to see her. They began to date, and Margaret felt her “horizons expanding,” and she confused her growing self-acceptance with love for Chacko.

Chacko loved Margaret’s English self-sufficiency. He rarely spoke about his home to her, as it seemed so small and unreal, and even on his visit where he stopped Pappachi from beating Mammachi he was still in a “trance” of love. He and Margaret got married against Margaret’s family’s consent, and Chacko didn’t even tell his family.

They soon had financial troubles and Chacko got very fat, and Margaret’s parents wouldn’t speak to her. Then she met Joe, who was the opposite of Chacko. Chacko finally wrote to Mammachi about his marriage and asked her for money. After Sophie was born, Margaret asked Chacko for a divorce. The brokenhearted Chacko returned to India and started teaching at a college.

When Pappachi died, Chacko moved back to Ayemenem to become a “pickle baron.” He purposefully seemed to cultivate his sloth and bad habits just because he knew Mammachi adored him despite everything. Margaret Kochamma would write him about Joe and Sophie Mol. She still thought of Chacko as an “extraordinary man,” so she didn’t realize how much she had hurt him.

Margaret Kochamma was working as a teacher when Joe died in an accident, and she dealt with her grief by sticking to a strict routine for herself and Sophie Mol. She relented when Chacko invited her to Ayemenem for the holidays, however. The narrator then jumps ahead, saying that Margaret Kochamma never forgave herself for taking Sophie to India. She and Chacko had been buying plane tickets in Cochin, and when they returned to Ayemenem she saw Sophie Mol’s drowned, fish-nibbled body laid out in the drawing room.

The morning of Sophie Mol’s death all three of the children had been missing for breakfast, Ammu was locked in her bedroom, and the river was swollen with a recent rain. Mammachi and Baby Kochamma got news that a fisherman had found Sophie Mol’s body, and then Ammu remembered what she had yelled through the door in her blind rage: she had called the twins “millstones around her neck” and told them to leave her alone.

The previous afternoon Kochu Maria is cleaning a fish when Vellya Paapen shows up outside, drunk and crying in the heavy rain. Kochu Maria gets Mammachi, and Vellya Paapen begins listing all the great things Mammachi’s family had done for his family. Then “the Terror” takes over and he tells Mammachi what he has seen – Velutha and Ammu are lovers, and they take a little boat across the river every night to Kari Saipu’s house. He says others have seen too, and the whole village knows by now.

Mammachi is filled with rage and she screams at Vellya Paapen and shoves him away from her, forgetting his Untouchability. Baby Kochamma hears the commotion and appears, and Kochu Maria tells her the story. Baby Kochamma immediately “blooms,” seeing all this as righteous punishment for Ammu, the twins, and Velutha. Baby Kochamma tells Mammachi they must send Velutha away before the family is ruined.

Baby Kochamma makes a little comment to Mammachi about the smell of Paravans, and at that Mammachi’s rage “unspooled.” She imagines her daughter and an Untouchable together and the shame Ammu has brought on the family forever. She, Baby Kochamma, and Kochu Maria trick Ammu into her bedroom and lock her inside, and then they send for Velutha, planning to get him to leave before Chacko returns from Chochin. But by then Sophie Mol’s body has been found.

The narrator describes the fisherman finding the body of a white child that morning, and realizing that one can never underestimate the Meenachal river. Afterward Baby Kochamma goes to the police station, where she tells Inspector Thomas Mathew that Velutha came to the house and tried to rape Ammu the night before. She says the disappearance of the children and Sophie Mol’s death must be his fault as well. She goes into the details and her imagination takes over, and Mathew believes her story. He is very helpful and only worried when she says Velutha might be a Naxalite.

Inspector Thomas Mathew comforts the “weeping” Baby Kochamma and promises to catch Velutha soon. After she leaves he sends for Comrade Pillai to make sure that Velutha doesn’t have any important political connections. The narrator describes both men as “terrifyingly adult,” the kind of people who control the machine of the world. Pillai says Velutha is on his own, and he doesn’t tell Mathew that Velutha had showed up at his house last night.

When Baby Kochamma returns to the house Chacko and Margaret Kochamma have gotten back from Chochin. Margaret sees Sophie Mol’s body laid out on the chaise lounge and she goes insane with grief. She only vaguely remembers the following days: Chacko’s presence, the funeral, and Ammu’s eviction from the house.

Margaret Kochamma comes to irrationally hate Estha and Rahel for surviving, and in her grief she connects Estha with Sophie Mol’s death – which is unknowingly prescient, considering it was Estha’s idea to run away and he who rowed the boat. In her trauma she finds Estha a few times and slaps him. It is only after she returns to England that she sends a letter apologizing for her behavior, but by then Estha has been sent away to Baba. And Margaret never knew anything at all about what happened to Velutha, “the God of Small Things.”

The narrator then jumps back to two weeks before, as Sophie Mol wakes up and digs through Margaret Kochamma’s bags – Margaret has packed everything, just in case, for her trip to “the Heart of Darkness.” Sophie finds her presents for her cousins and goes out to “negotiate a friendship.” Unfortunately it would be a brief friendship, and the “Loss of Sophie Mol” would live much longer than Sophie Mol herself.