Lapis-lazuli-encrusted silver spittoon

The Lapis-lazuli-encrusted silver spittoon is a portable emblem of family inheritance in Saleem Sinai’s history: a finely made possession concealed during a move, reported missing in a later theft, and recalled as part of intimate and inherited memories. Its appearances connect domestic upheaval to the novel’s recurring traffic between objects, personal recollection, and national history.

Appearance and Inheritance

On June 4, Saleem’s parents leave for Bombay by Frontier Mail. Hidden beneath dowry in a green tin trunk is the silver spittoon, described as forbidden, delicately wrought, and encrusted with lapis lazuli. The departure coincides with Earl Mountbatten of Burma’s announcement of the Partition of India and the start of his seventy-day countdown to the transfer of power. The juxtaposition places an individual family’s concealed possession beside a public calendar of political change.

The object belongs to a larger account of inheritance that Saleem imagines extending across generations. Five years before India’s birth as a nation, he says, his inheritance already includes an optimism that returns in his own time, cracks that will reappear in his skin, and the family histories that shape him. The spittoon’s recurrence gives that inheritance a material presence: history is not only recalled as an idea but carried, hidden, and rediscovered among household goods.

Reported Missing and Found

After the theft at the Sinai home, Amina lists the spittoon among the missing valuables, alongside gold coins, jeweled samovars, silver tea services, and the contents of the green tin trunk. The police question the servants, but Amina objects to Mary Pereira being questioned, saying that she knows Mary is innocent. A search then locates the spittoon in the bedroll of Musa, the old bearer, along with gold coins and a silver samovar; a missing tea service is found beneath his charpoy.

Musa begs Ahmed Sinai’s forgiveness and says he was afraid Ahmed would put him out on the street. Ahmed, in a state of weakness, leaves rather than answer him. Amina asks Musa why he made a terrible oath. The recovery turns the heirloom into evidence in a household crisis: its movement from concealed luggage to Musa’s bundle exposes the theft and sharpens the conflict between a servant’s fear and the family’s sense of betrayal.

Recollection and Repetition

The spittoon also belongs to the novel’s recurring game of “hit-the-spittoon.” Saleem pauses to take up the game in his retrospective account, and the phrase returns in a memory of what happened after games in a cellar in Agra. In that recollection, Amina’s hands remember earlier days as her thoughts turn to Nadir Khan; the game serves as a link between the domestic past and a concealed former relationship. The object’s significance therefore exceeds its value as a stolen possession: its name can summon a scene of family intimacy and the history surrounding it.

Later, Saleem describes himself assembling the name of Commander Sabarmati by cutting syllables from newspaper headlines. He characterizes this as cutting up history to suit his purposes. Read alongside the spittoon’s movement through family memories, the episode reinforces a narrative pattern in which fragments—whether a remembered game, a household object, or pieces of printed news—are made to carry a larger account of the past. The spittoon does not explain that past by itself; it recurs as one of the concrete objects through which Saleem’s associative history takes shape.

Object, Record, and Memory

The book sets official records and public declarations beside memories transmitted through objects, gestures, and retelling. A letter from Jawaharlal Nehru frames the newborn Saleem as a mirror of India, while Saleem’s later account emphasizes how memory can be gathered and reshaped. In his final image of autobiography, he seals his chapters in pickle jars, preserving memories while acknowledging that distortion remains. The spittoon belongs to the same material world of recollection: it is hidden in a trunk, listed in an inventory, recovered from a bedroll, and brought back through remembered play.

Its recurrence also demonstrates how a possession can change narrative function without changing its identity. First it is part of the family’s concealed baggage on the journey to Bombay; then it is a missing heirloom whose recovery exposes Musa’s theft; elsewhere it is attached to a game and to Amina’s remembered past. These contexts make the spittoon a compact thread through Saleem’s family history, joining political transition, domestic conflict, and the uncertain work of remembering.