Cousin’s cook drops hints that he may know where Ayah is, but Cousin cannot get any more details out of him. While going around the city, Lenny is always looking out for Ayah. Godmother does not like to leave the house much, but she occasionally goes to give blood. Lenny goes with her one day. After the blood is taken, she looks longer, as if the good deed has given her greater stature. Slavesister also wants to give blood, but Godmother says she will not permit her to. The two fight again.
Godmother is a highly influential person. She knows all sorts of things that are happening thanks to her spies and informants. She is whispering with Slavesister about something and Lenny thinks she might be trying to find Ayah. Godmother also uses her friends in high places to get Ranna a spot as a boarder at the Convent of Jesus and Mary outside of Lahore. This is a very lucky thing for a refugee child like him and will set him up for success in life.
Lenny continues to wonder what is happening with the women in the courtyard near the house. She hears the women crying out at night. Another disturbing sound is her mother and father fighting at night. They argue about money but also about a woman that Father meets sometimes in the middle of the night. One day Lenny even sees bruises on her mother’s body. She begins to think of the lion in the zoo again.
One night Lenny hears a terrible wail from what she thinks of as the women’s jail. Hamida sleeps next to Lenny’s bed, so she asks her what the screaming is about. Hamida says “What can a sorrowing woman do but wail?” Lenny admits that she saw Hamida there in the jail before she came. Hamida explains that it isn’t a jail but a “camp for fallen women.” Hamida won’t explain what this means but she begins crying. The next day Godmother explains that what Hamida meant by "fallen" is that she was kidnapped by the Sikhs and afterward neither her husband or family would not take her back. Lenny thinks this is unfair since such women do not choose to be kidnapped but Godmother explains that some men “can’t stand their women being touched by other men.” This is one reason that Mother has Hamida by Lenny’s side at all times—to protect her. If she is kidnapped, it will be hard for her to marry.
Lenny thinks that she will have Cousin marry her. It’s not an exciting thought but it’s comforting. One day Cousin and Lenny are sitting together. Lenny is crying but cannot explain why. She gets silent when she is sad. She is thinking about all the “senile, lame and hurt people, and fallen women” as well as the sorry state of the world. Finally, she says that she is sad because she thinks no one will marry her. Cousin volunteers to marry her and tells her that her limp is actually attractive. He also says that it makes her bottom look good when she walks. He finds her attractive and asks if she does too. She admits that he is not as attractive as Masseur was. Cousin feels disappointed and sarcastically asks her to name all the people she finds attractive.
Lenny begins looking about the world and discovering that it is “athrob with men.” She finds all sorts of men attractive and starts to have fantasies about them. Her breasts are beginning to grow and she thinks of the day that she will let someone touch them. Cousin tries to brush his hand against them sometimes and Adi tries to peek into the bathroom when Lenny is washing. Lenny looks at herself in the mirror and enjoys touching her breasts. Walking with Cousin again, she points out all the men she thinks are attractive. Cousin jokes that it is 10% of the male population of Lahore. Lenny blames her “wayward heart” for being “susceptible and fickle.”
Analysis
This chapter explores the themes of forgetting, healing, and moving on. After the trauma of what Ranna went through in the countryside, Lenny respects his ability to forget: “It surprises me how easily Ranna has accepted his loss; and adjusted to his new environment. So…one gets used to everything…If one must. The small bitterness and grudges I tend to nurse make me feel ashamed of myself. Ranna’s ready ability to forgive a past none of us could control keeps him whole.” This chapter also shows Lenny slowly working to forget. She still thinks about Ayah and wonders if she or the adults around her will be able to discover something about her whereabouts. At the same time, the long discussion of marriage and attractiveness with her cousin shows that she is able to think about other things. In fact, she thinks about marriage, men, and her own changing body with great frequency. She blames this on her “wayward heart” at first but then decides that her heart is actually “blameless.” What pushes her to think of these things and change her mind is the “incandescence of [her] womb” which can be interpreted as referring to her womanhood.
The chapter approaches another issue related to womanhood through the character Hamida. She is a refugee who was kidnapped and raped by Sikhs. After this, her family would not take her back. Lenny sees this as unfair. Women like Hamida did not choose for this to happen to them. She rejects seeing this as “fate,” as Hamida does. Lenny thinks “I’ve seen Ayah carried away—and it had less to do with fate than with the will of men.” She is beginning to understand how women are treated in a society and world dominated by men. The thought of both Ayah and women like Hamida, as well as the fighting between her mother and father, does cause Lenny anxiety and she is unable to completely forget her worries. She again begins dreaming of the lion, a symbol for her worries: “And at dawn the insistent roar of the zoo lion tracking me to whatever point of the world I cannot hide from him in my nightmares.” She wants to forget like Ranna but she is hurt by the “condition of the world—in which countries can be broken, people slaughtered and cities burned.”
