The colonel quotes Gandhi saying that Indians should only buy salt taken from the Indian Ocean. Colonel Bharucha comes to the microphone and Lenny thinks about how much his way of speaking changes in these moments. It’s a pressed butterfly but Lenny refuses to touch it, thinking “There are certain things I’ll hold and certain things I won’t” (a reference to touching the scar on her cousin’s genitals in Chapter 3).Įveryone moves into another room for speeches. Godmother winks at Lenny and she thinks about how she sees a side of Godmother that no one else does. The Colonel tells her to put her heel down and try to walk normally. Bankwalla, his “jolly wife,” and a man named Manek Mody who is Godmother’s brother-in-law. Colonel Bharucha is there for the prayer, and so are Godmother, Slavesister, Electricaunt, her cousin, a man from the Central Bank of India called Mr. There is a marble step and beyond that an inner sanctum where only the priests who tend the fire can go. Lenny goes to kneel before the altar once the ritual is over. Priests are gathered around a fire altar chanting. The horse falls and everyone tumbles out, but they eventually make it to the temple. The family goes to the fire temple in a horse-led carriage called a tonga. The Parsees of the city are going to hold a prayer to celebrate the British victory. The family quickly returns to Lahore, where the weather is 116 F even in the shade. Yet Lenny is also relieved: “I am swept by a sense of relief so unburdening that I realize I was born with an awareness of the war: and I recall the dim, faraway fear of bombs that tinged with bitterness my mother’s milk.” People scream, “We have won! Victory! The war is over!” Lenny sees that her father, mother, and everyone else around is happy, but she had secretly hoped that the Japanese would win like Subhas Chandra Bose had planned (as described in Chapter 4).

On the way, news comes from the radio that the Second World War is over. Adi is riding on a tall pony while Lenny is resentful to be on a donkey. During the summer, Lenny’s family goes to the Murree Hills in the foothills of the Himalayas where the temperatures are cooler.

Cracking india by bapsi sidhwa