Summary
Lahore is changing. Rosy, Peter, and their family have left. So has the Government House gardener. Lenny hears lyrics from a popular actress and singer’s latest song on the street and thinks the lyrics are relevant: “Friends from our childhood, don’t forget us/See that a changed world does not mock us.” Waves of Muslim refugees enter Lahore. The population of the city is changing and the land, villages, and cities of the Punjab are given to new owners through a process that Lenny calls “wheeling and dealing.”
Lenny also describes how the “tide is turned.” By this she means that the remnants of British rule are showing a preference for Hindus over Muslims and the Indian ruler Nehru over the Pakistani ruler Jinnah. They even give India the Muslim-majority state Kashmir because Nehru is from there.
The chapter goes on to compare the personality and appearance of Nehru and Jinnah. Nehru dresses well and is charming. He flirts with Lady Mountbatten, the Viceroy’s wife, and there are rumors that they are lovers. He is Cambridge-educated, powerful, and good at flattery. He is handsome and healthy. Jinnah, in contrast, does not know to flatter. He speaks with an accent and is ill-looking. He wears dark clothes. He is no longer at the height of his strength of handsomeness as a man. He believes too much in laws and constitutions for giving out justice.
One day Mother shows Lenny a photograph of Jinnah’s wife, who was Parsee. Lenny thinks that the woman in the photograph is “astonishingly beautiful.” She was bold: in the photograph she is wearing a strapless gown. This was an era where dressing this way was considered shameful. In addition, she defied her wealthy father to marry Jinnah, then a Muslim lawyer twenty-two years older. She was also excommunicated from the Parsee community. Yet despite this boldness, she died at age twenty-nine. According to Lenny’s mother, she died of a broken heart. Lenny says that Jinnah, too, died of a broken heart. Forty years later, scholars of Gandhi and Mountbatten or filmmakers portraying their lives show Jinnah as a monster. The chapter ends with a quotation from the Indian poet Naidu Sarojini who described Jinnah as wearing a reserved mask, being naive and faithful in humanity, tender as a woman and happy as a child. He was an idealist.
Analysis
This chapter shows the drastic changes that came with the “population exchange” of seven million Muslims from India to Pakistan and 5 million Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan to India. This massive movement of people occurred in just three months and lead not only to the death and violence described in previous chapters but also divided communities, lost wealth and property, and discrimination. As the previous chapters of the book showed how people lived together before India and Pakistan were split, the description of Lahore changing and all of the familiar people who left effectively show the everyday and human toll of the population exchange.
The second half of the chapter moves out of Lenny’s childhood reflections and into politics. It provides a comparison of the Indian leader Nehru and the Pakistani ruler Jinnah. The narration accuses the British Raj of wanting to divide India and choosing favorites once this split happened. India is described as being favored against the Muslim-majority nation of Pakistan. Nehru is described as strong, charming, and powerful as compared to the older, sickly, somber Jinnah who does not know how to compliment or charm. The description of Jinnah’s beautiful Parsee wife points to the contrast between a “brilliant, elegantly handsome” youth and his later life, in which his wife suffered a broken heart and died as did Jinnah himself. The last paragraph moves the action outside of the 1940s and Lenny’s childhood. The narration speaks from the perspective of “today, forty years later” to compare how Jinnah is negatively portrayed in books and films with the positive portrayals of Gandhi and Mountbatten. The implication here is that Jinnah is treated unfairly and remains misunderstood as a historical figure who was perhaps not overly charming but was idealistic and humane.
