Mary Pereira—Joseph D’Costa

Mary Pereira—Joseph D’Costa is a courtship transformed by political conflict, abandonment, and guilt. Joseph’s disappearance and Mary’s longing for him form the personal motive behind her exchange of the newborns’ name-tags, an act whose consequences bind her for the rest of her life to Saleem and to a secret she cannot bring herself to confess.

Courtship and Political Division

Mary meets Joseph D’Costa while both work at a nursing home on Pedder Road: she is a midwife, and he is an orderly. Their early relationship is affectionate. Joseph takes her out for tea, lassi, or falooda and speaks tenderly to her; Mary enjoys his attention. The intimacy later described in her confession is therefore not simply a prelude to her crime: it is the attachment she hopes to recover when Joseph’s behavior and political commitments begin to pull them apart.

Joseph becomes preoccupied with reports of violence and with the north wind, which he associates with death. He argues that independence benefits the rich while poor people are driven to fight one another in Punjab and Bengal. Mary does not share his political analysis. She urges him to live quietly and regards Hindu-Muslim violence as a conflict that should not involve Christians. Joseph, by contrast, rejects the idea that Christian identity places them outside the struggle: he calls Christianity the white people’s religion and insists that local people must fight back and redirect the violence toward its causes.

Mary’s account makes the political disagreement a turning point in their private relationship. She says she repeatedly asks Joseph to abandon his ideas, after which he stops speaking with her and begins associating with people she considers dangerous. Rumors link him to attacks on cars, buses, and trams. Mary is frightened by his activism and tells her sister Alice about it, speculating that the smell near Joseph’s home by a slaughterhouse may have affected him. The explanation is her own anxious interpretation, not an account of what caused his politics.

Separation, Jealousy, and Desperation

Alice goes to speak with Joseph, ostensibly on Mary’s behalf, but returns blaming Mary for having pressured him instead of supporting his political cause. Mary resents Alice’s intervention and suspects that her younger, prettier sister is repeating Joseph’s views in order to win his affection. The sisters’ differing accounts intensify Mary’s insecurity: what begins as a dispute over politics becomes entangled with fear that Alice may take Joseph from her.

Mary admits to the priest that she does not know what she might do to get Joseph back. Her confession establishes longing, jealousy, and distress as the emotional circumstances surrounding her later decision. It does not make the decision an act of political solidarity: when she exchanges the babies’ name-tags, she believes Joseph will love her for it. The act is her private attempt to recover his affection through a revolution of her own, undertaken in his name rather than with his participation.

Joseph disappears from Mary’s life. He is on the run from the police and has abandoned both Mary and Alice. Three days after the births, Mary recognizes that he is not coming back and regrets what she has done, but fear prevents her from admitting the crime. Her feelings toward him thus persist alongside abandonment and resentment, while the consequences of her choice begin to attach her to someone else’s life.

The Baby Exchange and Its Consequences

At the hospital, Mary is briefly alone with the two newborn boys and changes their name-tags. Saleem, born to Vanita and William Methwold, is given the Sinai name and raised as the child of Amina and Ahmed Sinai. The other infant, Shiva, is assigned to Vanita’s family. Mary’s decision is connected explicitly to her hope that Joseph will love her; it also alters both children’s identities and family histories, though Joseph is absent and has no demonstrated knowledge of what she has done.

Afterward, Mary gives up her job at the nursing home and approaches Amina Sinai, saying she has fallen in love with the baby and asking whether Amina needs an ayah. Amina agrees. Mary then devotes her life to bringing Saleem up. This care does not undo the exchange or bring Joseph back; instead, it makes the secret part of Mary’s daily bond with the child whose identity she changed. Her work as Saleem’s ayah becomes a long act of attachment and reparation conducted without disclosure.

The narration connects Mary’s preserved secret to the food she prepares. Her chutneys carry her guilt and fear of discovery, and the family experiences their effect as a source of uncertainty and accusing dreams. Saleem later uses the same chutney to draw listeners into his account of the past and to defend his right to tell it. In this way, Mary’s private history enters the form of his public narrative: a hidden act is carried forward through care, food, memory, and the story Saleem tells.

Joseph’s Death and Mary’s Haunting

Joseph eventually reappears in the narrative not as Mary’s returning lover but as a fugitive associated with a clocktower containing homemade bombs. The police identify him as a wanted man, pursued for about a year. He is found dead after a snake escapes from the tower, and Mary collapses when she sees his face. His death closes off the possibility of reunion, but it does not bring her relief or resolve the secret between them.

Saleem experiences Mary’s recurring dreams of Joseph through his developing telepathy. In those dreams Joseph appears in changing forms and accuses or torments her. The account says that Saleem cannot discover the secret itself because it is not at the front of Mary’s mind. Mary’s guilt is therefore present to him indirectly—in dreams and in the troubling effect of her chutneys—before he understands its cause.

Later, Mary’s fear of sleep and repeated nightmares blur the boundary between waking and dreaming. Joseph’s ghost appears to her in Buckingham Villa, where she sees him in several rooms and even beside Amina in bed. She becomes accustomed to his presence and finds old affection returning, but his expression remains accusing rather than loving. Mary understands that the haunting will not end unless she confesses her crime; she nevertheless remains silent, partly because she loves Saleem and believes telling the truth would hurt him. Her relationship with Joseph survives as an unresolved attachment, while her daily care for Saleem becomes the reason she continues to bear its consequences.

Guilt, Care, and Narrative Memory

The relationship’s enduring significance lies in the distance between Mary’s motive and the scale of the result. She acts from personal desperation, hoping to win Joseph back, but the exchange changes the lives and identities of two children. Joseph neither appears as her partner in the act nor returns to share its consequences. Mary’s devotion to Saleem is genuine in the account, yet it begins in a concealed act that she cannot openly repair.

At the end of Saleem’s memoir, the history of guilt is recast through the possibility of preservation. He describes the pickles as altered by the process that keeps them, but hopes they retain the authentic taste of truth and remain acts of love. That closing idea fits Mary’s divided legacy: the story does not erase the harm of the exchange, and it does not reduce her lifelong care to the crime. Her relationship with Joseph supplies the emotional origin of the secret; her relationship with Saleem carries that secret into the family’s memory and into the narrative that preserves it.