Thursday October 9, 2008 6:10 am Lethbridge

Saleem Sinai: the narrator
Amina Sinai: wife of Ahmed Sinai
Ahmed Sinai: a young merchant
Aadam Aziz, Amina's father
Reverend Mother, Aadam's Wife
Hanif: Amina's brother
Pia: an attractive actress, Hanif's wife
Mary Pereira: mid-wife and now nanny for Saleem
Musa Pereira: her husband

• "... it's those photos in the paper ... no good would come of that. Photos take away pieces of you. ... when I saw your picture, you had become so transparent I could see the writing from the other side coming right through your face." [p. 138]
  • lovely logic.
    
    
• "What can't be cured must be endured." [p. 140]
  • folksy saying that has many forms.
    
    
• "All games have their morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate. But it's more than that; ... because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, dood against evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent; in the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions." [p. 141]
  • Yes, but ... I prefer gradations rather than dualities.
    
    
• ":... but I found, very early in my life, that the game lacked one crucial dimension, that of ambiguity - because ... it is also possible to slither down a ladder and climb to triumph on the venom of a snake." [p. 141]
  • nice point. Another weakness is the binary nature of the options. Most events in life are more complex, more multidimensional. Simplicity is attractive, but not likely very accurate.
    
    
• "Pia kissed an apple, sensuously, with all the full richness of her painted lips, then passed it on to Nayyar; who planted, upon its opposite face, a viriley passionate mouth. This was the birth of what came to be known as the indirect kiss - and how much more sophisticated a notion it was than anything in our current cinema; how pregnant with longing and eroticism. ... at the sight of a young couple diving behind a bush, which would then begin to shake ridiculously - so low have we sunk in our ability to suggest ..." [p. 142 - 143]
  • lovely
    
    
• "Musa and Mary, quarrelling like aged tigers. What starts fights? ... What tiny grain of grit, in the sea of old age now washing over the old bearer, lodged between his lips to fatten into the dark pearl of hatred." [p. 144]
  • another superb metaphor
    

The Sinai's rent the top floor of their house to Dr Schaapsteker, a elderly man devoted to finding anti-venom for snake bites.

Ahmed appears to be suffering from extreme depression as well as alcoholism. Amina writes to her parents asking for help and they arrive from New Delhi. Reverend Mother takes over the household duties and Amina begins betting on the horses - successfully.

Musa is caught stealing from Ahmed, and although charges are not laid, he leaves.

Amina gives large amounts of money to Ismail Ibrahim to finance a court case against the freezing of Ahmed's assets.

This chapter is a delight. The snakes and ladders theme is on every page, affecting many of the characters in the story as well as in the history of India (e.g. the assassination of Ghandi). Ismail wins the court case and Ahmed's assets are unfrozen. Saleem catches typhoid and is about to die when Dr Schaapsteker gives a kill-or-cure dose of watered down snake venom, which cures Saleem. Rushdie is on every page.

Saleem Sinai: the narrator
Amina Sinai: wife of Ahmed Sinai

• "Amina had become one of those rare people who take the burdens of the world upon their own backs; she began to exude the magnetism of the willingly guilty; and from then on everyone who came in contact with her felt the most powerful of urges to confess thoeir own, private guilts. When they succumbed to my mother's powers, she would smile at them with a sweet sad foggy smile and they would go away, lightened, leaving their burdens on her shoulders; and the fog of guilt thickened." [p. 158]
  

This chapter is primarily about Saleem Sinai and an event when he was eight years old. There is brief mention of the Nasser and the Suez crisis.

Saleem had a habit of hiding in the clothes hamper. But one day while he was hiding his mother came into the room and uttered the name of her first husband, who was talking to her on the telephone. He then happened to see her naked, but he made a noise and was found out.

Saleem announces that he hears voices in his head and thinks that archangels are speaking to him.