The Jamuna is a river setting where private loss and national upheaval meet. Its banks serve as a place of cremation for Resham Bibi, while its broader river course becomes part of the soldiers’ pursuit of Saleem through wartime East Pakistan. The river’s changing names and recurring appearances bind journeys, exile, and destruction into the novel’s geography.

The river and its shifting identity

During the soldiers’ pursuit of Saleem, the group commandeers a boat and follows the trail downstream. The river is identified as the Padma, but the narration calls that name a local deception: the water is also Ganga, the mother-water and goddess said to stream to earth through Shiva’s hair. The layered naming turns the river into more than a route across the landscape; it connects the soldiers’ immediate flight through a war-torn region to a sacred and mythic geography.

The pursuit carries the soldiers south toward the sea, with Saleem—the silent guide they call the buddha—pointing the way. Their exhausted passage through abandoned rice paddies eventually brings them to the forest’s immense green wall. The river’s course thus functions as a narrative corridor: military pursuit recedes behind the men as the landscape draws them farther from the war and toward the Sundarbans.

A place of mourning

The river appears again in Delhi’s story when Resham Bibi is found dead from the cold in her hut, built from Dalda Vanaspati packing cases. Her body has turned bright blue. Saleem’s account says that she was cremated on the Jamuna’s banks, amid mudflats and buffalo, and that this death meant she would miss his wedding.

The recollection preserves Resham not only through the circumstances of her death but through her former presence at weddings. She had led the henna ceremonies and the songs in which the bride’s friends insulted the groom and his family; once, her expertly aimed insults even helped drive a groom to cancel a wedding. The riverbank cremation therefore marks the loss of a vivid participant in communal ritual, while the narrator’s uncertainty about the precise day makes the memory itself part of the account’s unstable chronology.

Destruction and displacement

During the Emergency, the slum beneath the Friday Mosque is bulldozed and its residents are rounded up. Some magicians are taken to the barbed-wire camp at Khichripur, on the far side of the Jamura River; others escape, including Picture Singh. Reports of the surviving illusionists’ moving slum surface at different places around the city, but demolition crews repeatedly find nothing.

The river is part of the landscape of that dispersal, separating the camp from the destroyed neighborhood even as the escaped community eludes the authorities’ attempts to locate it. The passage makes displacement difficult to fix to one site: the slum is reported in one place, then another, and finally becomes stationary only after the Emergency ends. Against this unstable movement, the Jamuna’s banks also remain a concrete place where the dead are mourned and burned.