“What can’t be cured must be endured”

The expression “What can’t be cured must be endured” names a discipline of living with irreversible harm, but its force changes as Saleem Sinai’s story unfolds. It can sound like a maxim for bearing what cannot be altered; by the novel’s end, it also carries the cost of accepting damage that remains unresolved. Rather than closing wounds, the phrase gives Saleem a way to keep narrating through them.

A family maxim and its inheritance

The saying appears in Saleem’s reckoning with the history that made him. Looking back across what has happened to him, he describes himself as the sum of what preceded him, what others did to him, and the consequences of his own presence. The maxim belongs to this accumulated inheritance: a life cannot be separated from the forces and injuries that formed it, and endurance becomes one response to that burden.

The expression also resurfaces in the story of Saleem’s return to the magicians’ colony on February 23, 1973. He has abandoned hopes of preferment in public service and taken up a precarious life among the performers, where he earns a living by using his exceptional sense of smell to entertain tourists. His return follows expulsion from another home and the collapse of his earlier ambitions. In that setting, endurance is not triumph or restoration; it is the practical capacity to begin again under changed circumstances.

Injury, memory, and belated knowledge

The novel connects endurance to bodily injury and delayed understanding. During the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, Saleem’s grandfather Aadam Aziz is knocked down after a sneeze and survives the firing. His medical bag scatters in the dust, and its clasp leaves a bruise that remains with him for years. The episode makes survival inseparable from an injury that cannot simply be erased: an accidental gesture saves him, while the bodily mark persists.

Saleem’s own account repeatedly returns to events whose meaning emerges only later. As a child hiding in a washing-chest, he overhears his mother, Amina, speak the name Nadir and sees evidence of a secret from her earlier life. The discovery unsettles his understanding of family before he can fully make sense of what he has witnessed. Much later, after a snakebite in the Sundarbans restores his memories, he tells the soldiers the history he had lost; yet even as the story pours out, one particular memory remains beyond his grasp. Endurance here includes the incomplete work of remembering: narration may recover much, but it does not promise total knowledge.

Endurance under political violence

In the account of the Midnight’s Children’s captivity, the proverb is set against the conditions imposed on them. Saleem asks why the children are being confined and describes restraints tailored to suppress their individual powers. He admits his guilt and refuses the comfort of a detached explanation, saying that the group is too close to events for perspective. The saying offers no answer to the violence or assurance of rescue; it marks the grim necessity of continuing while the danger is still unfolding.

Saleem’s reflections on the Emergency sharpen that tension. He recalls that the Widow drained anger from him along with everything else, and that the lesson learned in the Widows’ Hostel was that there was no escape. His calm as he writes is therefore not evidence that the harm has been repaired. It is a state produced by what has been taken from him, and the proverb’s stoicism sits uneasily beside his continuing awareness of the loss.

The limits of acceptance

The maxim is not the novel’s final word on the value of endurance. When Padma proposes marriage, Saleem briefly imagines that her determination might alter the ending he expects for himself. He accepts her proposal, allowing a moment of shared hope, but knows that affection cannot guarantee a reprieve from his anticipated death or the bodily disintegration he describes. The expression’s resigned logic and Padma’s insistence that there is a future remain in tension: one accepts the limits of cure, while the other refuses to treat the present ending as inevitable.

At the close, Saleem considers whether his pickles can preserve history without distorting it. He acknowledges that the pickling process alters and intensifies what it preserves, but hopes the result may still carry an authentic taste of truth and constitute an act of love. This is endurance transformed into a narrative practice: memory is shaped, not restored to an untouched state. The proverb therefore remains deliberately unresolved. It can help Saleem bear what cannot be undone, but the act of telling keeps care, judgment, and the possibility of another ending from disappearing into mere resignation.