Parvati-the-Witch—Shiva

Parvati-the-Witch and Shiva’s relationship is a romance shaped by magic, abandonment, and disputed parenthood. Parvati summons Shiva after Saleem rejects her; Shiva then leaves her while she is pregnant, and she returns to Saleem, who agrees to marry her. Their story joins private desire to the novel’s larger patterns of exchanged identities and recurring family history: Shiva is the child’s biological father, while Saleem becomes his husband and the father who receives him at birth.

Origins and Summoning

Before Shiva returns to Parvati, she tells Saleem that she had encountered Shiva during the procession in Dacca. She remembers seeing his knees beneath his uniform and recognizing him as the man whose life, in her account, had intersected with hers. She also keeps a lock of his hair, which she says he gave her. The hair becomes a tangible link to the absent man and the means by which she later calls him back.

The reunion follows Saleem’s rejection of Parvati. She takes a bamboo stick with seven knots, attaches a metal hook, and uses the hook and Shiva’s lock of hair in a summoning ritual. The narration presents the result plainly: Shiva comes. Magic is not simply an ornament to their courtship; it supplies the mechanism that brings the pair together and gives their relationship an element of compulsion and uncertainty.

The Liaison and Its Unequal Terms

Shiva arrives in May 1974 as a decorated Army major. He tells Parvati that he has come because he wants to leave behind the wealthy women of high society and has desired her since they first met. Saleem, however, disputes Shiva’s explanation: because he was elsewhere when Shiva arrived, he depends on other people’s accounts, and he insists that Parvati’s magic—not Shiva’s stated motives—drew him to the ghetto. The narrative therefore leaves the beginning of the relationship between reported explanation and Saleem’s interpretation.

In the military quarters, Parvati attends to Shiva, taking off his boots, pressing his feet, bringing lime-flavored water, dismissing his batman, oiling his moustache, and preparing biriani. The story describes her as transforming the plain quarters into a palace, while Shiva gives her his undivided attention for four months, or 117 nights. This period of devotion ends when Parvati tells him on September 12 that she is pregnant with his child.

The pregnancy changes the relationship from an affair into a conflict. Shiva responds with drinking and visits to sex workers, and the liaison becomes marked by quarrels and violence. The novel sets this deterioration against Shiva’s unease in elite society: after his encounters with Roshanara Shetty, he interprets the attention of wealthy women as humiliating and feels his earlier hostility toward the powerful returning. That resentment provides a broader context for his conduct, but it does not undo the personal consequences of his treatment of Parvati.

Abandonment and Return

The narration attributes Shiva’s departure to the lifting of Parvati’s spell. He appears, in Saleem’s account, to awaken from an enchantment and see Parvati as a reminder of the slum background he had escaped. He takes her back to the edge of the magicians’ ghetto and leaves her there. She returns carrying the pregnancy, which the narrator describes as the one thing she did not have when she left.

Saleem interprets the pregnancy as purposeful: he believes Parvati became pregnant to remove his stated reason for refusing to marry her. He acknowledges this as his own belief rather than presenting it as independently established fact. Parvati’s return, after allowing no doubt about her condition, makes the consequences of Shiva’s departure visible to the community and brings her back into Saleem’s life.

On Republic Day, the ghetto’s women shame Parvati by hanging a rope of tattered shoes above her door. Picture Singh proposes that Saleem marry her, invoking his own childlessness and Saleem’s lie that he is impotent. Saleem accepts despite his misgivings. The marriage offers Parvati a place in the household and a socially recognized father for the child, but it does not alter the child’s biological parentage: Shiva remains the father.

Parentage and Narrative Significance

The relationship’s consequences reach their clearest point when Parvati gives birth during the midnight in which the Emergency is declared. After a labor of thirteen days, her son is born and named Aadam Sinai. Saleem receives him as his son, even as he recognizes the irony that the child has a father other than the man who will raise him. The birth thus repeats the novel’s pattern of uncertain parentage and entwined genealogies, recalling the earlier exchange that made Saleem and Shiva rivals as well as counterparts.

Saleem’s narration makes the relationship partly a story of absence. He is not present when Shiva arrives or when Parvati leaves with him; he reconstructs those scenes from the accounts of Shiva, Parvati, and Resham Bibi. That limitation matters: the narrator can report the actions and aftermath, but his insistence that magic explains Shiva’s arrival, and that Parvati planned her pregnancy to secure a marriage, remains his interpretation. The story’s shifting gap between what happens and what Saleem can know gives their romance its uneasy balance of fated pattern and contested motive.

The couple’s separation does not resolve the bond so much as redirect its consequences. Parvati’s summoning brings Shiva into her life; his departure returns her to Saleem; and the child born from the liaison becomes Saleem’s son in the family he forms with Parvati. Their relationship therefore links erotic attachment and abandonment to questions of social and biological fatherhood, while the novel’s repeated crossings of identity make the resulting family both a private arrangement and a miniature of its wider history.