Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

Moths

Moths are a symbol of fear in the novel. For Pappachi, the moth is a symbol of his fear of irrelevance. Pappachi, an accomplished entomologist, discovers a new species of moth when it lands in his drink one day. When he brings it to be officially classified, he is denied, and told that the species he has discovered is a variant of a more common species. Years later, it is discovered that Pappachi was right, but he never receives credit, and the species is not named after him. Pappachi is denied his pride and a sense of relevance and importance in the world for his lifetime’s work. For Rahel, the moth symbolizes her fear of not being loved. When Ammu tells her as a child that Rahel’s actions could cause people to love Rahel less, a cold moth with “unusually dense dorsal tufts” lands gently on her heart. The symbolic and metaphorical moth continues to lift its leg on and off Rahel’s heart every time she feels close and far away from love.

The River

The river near the Ayemenem house appears many times in the novel to remind the reader of the power of nature and the significance of “Small Things” which occur in its waters and on its banks. At one time, the river “had the power to evoke fear” and to “change lives,” but by the time Rahel is an adult, it has become a “slow, sludging green ribbon” with the encroachment of British imperialism and modern society. The river is choked with garbage, sweat, and human fecal matter. The river swells and constricts, constantly changing and giving up the characters’ secrets, as when Sophie Mol’s drowned body resurfaces, and Velutha and the twins are discovered on its shores. The river is where Ammu and Velutha conduct their affair and where Sophie Mol drowns, two “Small Things,” that become bigger things because they are shrouded in confusion and secrecy and contorted to serve other characters’ “Bigger” needs. 

History House

Chacko tells the twins that if they want to learn about their family, they need to go to the History House, a hut on the banks of the river where Velutha, his father, and his brother live. The History House is a symbol for truth in many ways, as it is where the twins decide to go to escape their mother and establish a reality outside the mutable one with their mother, and where Velutha, the “God of Small Things,” lives in a pure state and accepts the children as they are. The History House is also where Velutha is discovered after Baby Kochamma testifies against him. At the History House, the twins learn a more horrifying and harsher truth—the reality of human brutality—as they become witnesses by hearing the beating of Velutha by the policemen sent after them. This truth is so overwhelming that the twins develop a fiction between themselves: Velutha wasn’t the one who was attacked, but an imaginary brother of his. For all its revelation of truth, however, the house is still called “History,” which, as Roy suggests in many ways throughout the novel, is constrictive by nature by only allowing certain stories to be accepted as fact.