“Anything you want to be, you kin be”

“Anything you want to be, you kin be” is a refrain associated with Mary Pereira whose meaning shifts across the novel: first a song heard in childhood, it later becomes a remembered voice urging possibility, then a lullaby-like inheritance passed to Saleem’s silent son. Its hopeful promise sits in tension with Saleem’s eventual recognition that identity is also shaped by everything done to and before a person.

The song in the neighborhood

The refrain belongs to a popular song Mary sings, heard by Saleem while he is still a child. In one early scene, Amina is in the kitchen preparing breakfast while Ahmed talks with their cousin Zohra; All-India Radio plays Lata Mangeshkar singing a love song at the table. The episode places the refrain’s musical world amid family secrets and Amina’s effort to manage domestic life, rather than presenting it as an abstract maxim.

The novel also introduces the phrase’s distinctive spoken form, “Anything you want to be, you kin be.” Its colloquial pronunciation marks it as a heard and remembered voice, not a polished declaration. That sound later allows Saleem to recognize the song as part of his own history even when the person associated with it is absent.

A remembered voice amid uncertainty

After the violence in Dacca and a period of isolation, Saleem recalls the voice of Mary Pereira singing the refrain. The memory comes as he reflects on anger and his determination to choose a future rather than accept one as already settled. The song does not erase the pressures of history around him, but it supplies language for imagining agency within them.

That possibility is tested by what Saleem later says about himself. In his account, he is not an exceptional person standing outside history: he is the sum of what came before him, what he has experienced, and the people whose lives have affected his. The refrain’s promise therefore remains in productive tension with a more relational view of identity, in which choosing a future cannot mean becoming independent of the past.

The refrain passed to Aadam

The words return at the birth of Aadam, Saleem’s adopted son. Aadam has a navel that protrudes outward, and Picture Singh calls attention to it; the infant’s refusal to cry or whimper wins Saleem’s affection. As Saleem rocks him gently, he hears the song in the historical accents of Mary Pereira: “Anything you want to be, you kin be; you kin be just what-all you want.”

The recurrence makes the refrain an inheritance carried by memory and care rather than by biological descent. Mary’s voice is heard again in the words surrounding Aadam’s infancy, while Saleem’s role as the child’s adoptive father gives the song a new context. It links a remembered past to a child whose future is still open, even as the novel’s wider account of history cautions that no life begins outside the consequences of other lives.