The Div’s Bottle Symbol Analysis

After the div forces Baba Ayub to choose between his own happiness and that of his favorite child, Qais, it gives Baba Ayub a small bottle of liquid, and tells Baba Ayub to drink it. The contents of the bottle eventually make Baba Ayub forget that he ever had a son named Qais, or had to make the choice of whether or not to sacrifice him to the div. The div’s bottle thus symbolizes one of the key themes of And the Mountains Echoed: the human ability to forget. That Baba Ayub needs to drink from a bottle is ironic—as we see in the later chapters of the novel, humans don’t need magic to forget their unsavory pasts: without any help, they are capable of forgetting almost anything. And yet the div’s bottle isn’t entirely successful at making Baba Ayub forget his son. Like the other characters in the novel, Ayub occasionally feels a brief “flash” of his past, which he’s powerless to understand or interpret. If the bottle at first seems to symbolize one’s ability to forget, it ultimately becomes a symbol of one’s remarkable power to remember.