Nadir Khan's flight from the Aziz home and divorce from Mumtaz

Nadir Khan's flight from the Aziz home and divorce from Mumtaz end his three-year concealment beneath the family house. Emerald reveals his hiding place to Major Zulfikar, who arrives with soldiers to search for him; by then Nadir has escaped through an outside door and left a note declaring the marriage over. The episode joins escape to separation: the house is opened, but its hidden resident is already gone.

Background and Exposure

Nadir has been living underground in a refuge beneath the Aziz home for three years. The immediate crisis follows Reverend Mother's prolonged denunciation of her daughter's marriage. As she reproaches Aadam Aziz for allowing Mumtaz to marry a man she considers unworthy, Emerald recognizes Nadir as the source of the family's troubles and decides that exposing him will restore the household's happiness.

Emerald breaks her oath and runs through the rain-soaked streets to the Cantonment district, where Major Zulfikar is stationed. Her unusual public flight—without her dupatta and with her fingers in her ears—marks her urgent rejection of the family arrangement. She identifies the underground refuge to the Major, turning a private domestic secret into a matter for the army.

The Search and Escape

Major Zulfikar has never been certain whether Nadir was responsible for the Hummingbird's murder, but Emerald's information gives him a chance to investigate. Excited by the prospect of discovering the underground Taj, he sets out for Cornwallis Road with fifteen men. They enter the drawing room, roll back the carpet, and open the trapdoor while Aadam watches and Reverend Mother tries to comfort Mumtaz.

The search finds no Nadir. Warned by Aadam's first roar and overwhelmed by embarrassment, he has already vanished from his refuge. A trapdoor in one of the toilets stands open; an empty enamel pot lies beside the wooden toilet seat, and the outside door leading to the lane by the cornfield is open. Although the door had been secured with a lock, it had been forced, leaving a clear route out of the house. The emptied underground refuge makes the failure of the search visible: the soldiers arrive at the hidden space only after its occupant has escaped.

Divorce and Consequences

In the lamplit refuge, beside a shining spittoon, the searchers find a note addressed to Mumtaz and signed by Nadir. It consists of the triple declaration of divorce, rendered in the narration as “I divorce thee. I divorce thee. I divorce thee.” The note makes the consequence of his escape explicit: Nadir has not merely left the house but ended his marriage to Mumtaz.

Nadir's departure is described as having done the decent thing, but the separation occurs without a face-to-face farewell. Mumtaz remains in the house, crying as Reverend Mother attempts to console her; the written declaration is the only direct sign left by her absent husband. The scene thus places a formal ending to the marriage inside the same hidden space that had enabled it to continue in secrecy.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

Major Zulfikar reacts with anger when he discovers that Nadir has escaped and pursues him beyond the house, but the search yields no sign of the fugitive. The episode's action therefore reverses the expected outcome: Emerald's disclosure succeeds in exposing the refuge, yet it does not deliver Nadir to the soldiers. The opened trapdoor reveals where he had been, while the open outside door records how completely he has already left.

The flight closes a three-year period in which Nadir's presence was concealed beneath the household's ordinary rooms. His refuge had made an otherwise impossible marriage part of the Aziz family's domestic life; its emptiness and the divorce note dismantle that arrangement at once. The episode also brings family grievance, military authority, and marital separation into a single sequence, with the decisive act occurring in writing after the person who made it has disappeared.