Old Delhi is where Amina and Ahmed Sinai establish their married life after leaving Aadam Aziz behind. Its house becomes the setting for Amina’s deliberate work of domestic transformation and her effort to build affection for Ahmed, while its inward-facing neighborhoods contrast with the visible power of the new city. The place also holds secrets that pass from one generation to the next: Saleem later witnesses Amina’s private recollection of Nadir Khan there, and the city’s private spaces become part of his education in family history.

A home remade

Ahmed’s orphaned dwelling in Old Delhi is transformed by Amina’s meticulous attention. She arranges flowers, selects carpets carefully, adjusts furniture by small increments, and rises early to dust the house, including its cane chick-blinds. The changes turn the dwelling into a gentler, more loving home. The green tin trunk she brought with her remains unopened, a reminder that the life she is building in the old city does not simply unpack or erase what came before.

Amina’s care extends beyond the rooms. Unable to offer Ahmed unquestioning loyalty and full-hearted love spontaneously, she sets out to cultivate those feelings through close attention to him. She mentally separates him into traits and habits, then concentrates on one detail at a time until fondness grows into affection and love. His loud voice, post-shaving change of manner, eyes, projecting lower lip, short stature, taste for fried foods, Persian poetry, and furrowed brow become distinct subjects of her attention. The method echoes the perforated sheet through which her parents’ marriage began: intimacy is approached in fragments, one portion at a time.

That intimate project quietly alters the household. Ahmed’s appearance and surroundings come to resemble the man and underground chamber Amina remembers from her earlier life, though the narration presents this influence as an obscure, painstaking process rather than a conscious plan. She also makes the home more enclosed, lining the chick-blinds with black cloth and admitting little light. The softened, screened interior gives form to her effort to accept her new husband, even as the old attachment remains present in her private imagination.

The old city’s inward gaze

The surrounding Muslim neighborhoods near Chandni Chowk are described as turned inward. Narrow lanes and houses crowd together, blocking views of the pink-stone palaces built in the new city; residents look instead toward screened courtyards and lower chick-blinds over windows and verandahs. The contrast places domestic privacy beside the architecture of public power: the city’s grand edifices are physically near yet largely outside the inhabitants’ field of vision.

The streets have their own social life and soundscape. Young men meet in inward-facing groups, bicycle bells ring constantly, and itinerant fruit-sellers call out in the lanes. On the January morning when both Amina and Ahmed are keeping secrets, the clatter of visitors and the rattle of Lifafa Das’s drum enter this ordinary neighborhood world. The domestic scene and the street’s passing noise meet at the house, where Amina is preparing breakfast and overhears Ahmed speaking with his cousin Zohra.

Private histories and what the house conceals

Old Delhi is also the setting for Saleem’s childhood discovery of a family secret. Hiding in the washing-chest, he sees Amina in private distress and hears her repeat Nadir Khan’s name before addressing him directly. Her hands recall their earlier intimacy, and the scene reveals that the past has not been wholly displaced by her marriage to Ahmed. For Saleem, the episode turns household privacy into a source of knowledge: family relationships are not only declared but also glimpsed, overheard, and pieced together from gestures and names.

The city’s rooms and screened spaces thus hold competing versions of family life. Amina works to make Ahmed her beloved through deliberate attention, while memories of Nadir remain active beneath that effort. Saleem’s later narration sets the lived, embodied traces of the past—the remembered gestures and the spoken name—alongside public records and official language elsewhere in his story. In Old Delhi, the home is both a place Amina remakes and a place where what she cannot fully leave behind becomes visible to her son.