Sea of Poppies

“Yet, despite the careworn commonplaceness of her appearance, there was one respect in which [Deeti] stood out from the ordinary: she had light grey eyes, a feature that was unusual in that part of the country. Such was the colour—or perhaps colourlessness—of her eyes that they made her seem at once blind and all-seeing.” 

Deeti’s eyes are mentioned at several points, and it is foreshadowed that there is something special about Deeti that will be realized at one point, though what that might be never quite comes to be known in this volume of the trilogy. Deeti’s eyes are unusually colored in a way that make them seem reminiscent of the figure of the blind prophet or an oracle, and the novel opens with a vision of hers; she is not literally blind, but it could be said that she exhibits a metaphorical blindness—to caste, religion, and so on. 

“As for Deeti, the more she ministered the drug, the more she came to respect its potency: how frail a creature was a human being, to be tamed by such tiny doses of this substance!” 

In an interesting way, this sets up a central tension of the novel; namely, between humanity and the power of temptation. Deeti has spent her life around the poppy seed and is aware of its medicinal qualities, as well as its destructive qualities, but to see it in action is a different story and is intriguing to her.

“Generations of landed leisure had allowed [the Halder family] to develop their own terminology for this aspect of the elements [the shade and mood of the wind]: in their vocabulary, a strong, steady breeze was ‘neel,’ blue; a violent nor’easter was purple, and a listless puff was yellow.” 

Neel’s character development includes reconsidering what he believes to be important. His family places high value on things that ultimately aren’t important and seem laughable to others; for example, instead of learning to understand finances, they created a complex system of understanding kite flying, which is typically considered to be a leisurely affair.