Parvati’s summoning of Shiva and pregnancy

Parvati’s summoning of Shiva and pregnancy turn an intimate rejection into a consequential reversal: spurned by Saleem, Parvati calls his former enemy to her through a ritual, begins a relationship with Shiva, and returns to the magicians’ ghetto carrying his child after he abandons her. The episode alters the triangle between Parvati, Shiva, and Saleem, but it also exposes the limits of Saleem’s account: the narrator is absent from crucial moments and reconstructs them from other people’s testimony, while framing Parvati’s choices as an answer to his own refusal.

Rejection and the summoning

Saleem presents the chain of events as beginning with a lie from his own lips and Parvati’s resulting desperation. Spurned by him, she remembers that Shiva has long been his arch-enemy. In her shack she takes a bamboo stick marked by seven knots, fixes an improvised metal hook to one end, and recites words while holding the hook in her right hand and a lock of hair in her left. Saleem identifies the implement as the Hook of Indra and says that Parvati calls Shiva to her; in his telling, Shiva comes.

The summoning gives Parvati a way to act after Saleem has rejected her. The ritual does not reconcile the former rivals or restore her place beside Saleem; it redirects the story toward Shiva. Saleem’s emphasis on the magic is inseparable from his emphasis on his own responsibility: he describes himself as having pushed Shiva into the background and says his lie brought Parvati to this desperate point. Her decision is hers, but the narrated cause begins with Saleem’s refusal.

Shiva’s arrival and Parvati’s new life

Shiva arrives at the magicians’ slum in May 1974, riding an Army motorcycle in uniform and holding the rank of major. Saleem tentatively associates the date with May 18, the day of India’s first nuclear explosion, but openly qualifies his memory. The parallel is therefore an association made by the narrator, not a date he establishes with certainty. Shiva’s changed public standing sharpens the contrast with Saleem: once a rival pushed out of the Midnight Children’s councils, Shiva has risen as a decorated war hero while Saleem has fallen.

At the Army quarters, Shiva’s status allows him liberties with military regulations, including bringing a woman into quarters not intended for married men. Parvati attends to him there: she takes off his boots, presses his feet, brings lime-flavored water, dismisses his batman, oils his moustache, tends to his knees, and prepares biriani. Saleem describes her as transforming the plain quarters into a palace, a Kailasa fit for Shiva. The account says Shiva devotes himself to her for four months, or 117 nights.

On September 12, Parvati tells Shiva, while kneeling at his feet, that she is going to have his child. Saleem presents the pregnancy as the turning point in their relationship. Their liaison becomes tempestuous, and Shiva begins drinking and visiting sex workers. The narrative also describes him as fathering children across the capital, making his conduct part of a broader pattern rather than a response limited to Parvati.

Abandonment and return

Saleem attributes Shiva’s departure to the end of Parvati’s spell. He argues that without the spell Shiva would have left as soon as he learned of the pregnancy, and that its release explains why he could do so afterward. This is the narrator’s interpretation, not an independently confirmed account of Shiva’s state of mind. In Saleem’s telling, Shiva comes to see Parvati as a reminder of the slum childhood from which he escaped, and fears that she and the child will pull him back toward it. He takes her back to the edges of the magicians’ ghetto and leaves her there.

Parvati returns to the ghetto in January, waiting until her pregnancy is unmistakable. She stands on the steps of the Friday Mosque, hands folded over her swollen belly, where passersby can see her. Saleem finds her there after returning with Picture Singh. Her return makes the consequence of Shiva’s departure visible, and her pregnancy ensures that the affair has not ended with the separation: the child remains with her, growing as she had intended.

A story told at a distance

Saleem acknowledges that he was not present when Shiva arrived, when Shiva took Parvati away, or when she returned from the quarters. During Shiva’s arrival, Saleem is with Picture Singh at a meeting about a national railway strike; he says he is occupied with politics and the cause of national salvation while Parvati’s actions set another course in motion. After her departure, he relies on other people’s accounts: Resham Bibi describes Parvati leaving, while Saleem says only Parvati could tell him what happened to her away from the ghetto. The central events are thus conveyed through a narrator who admits gaps in his knowledge.

That distance shapes the episode’s treatment of agency and motive. Saleem calls Parvati’s pregnancy a plan to invalidate his defense against marrying her, but immediately identifies this as his belief and says he will leave analysis to posterity. The assertion offers a motive without making it certain. What the account firmly establishes is the sequence: Saleem rejects Parvati; she summons Shiva; the relationship lasts 117 nights; she announces her pregnancy; Shiva leaves; and she returns to the ghetto with his child. The telling’s uncertainty does not erase the consequences, but it prevents Saleem’s explanation from standing as the only possible truth.

Private events amid public upheaval

The story places Parvati’s personal decision alongside a country in political conflict. Saleem links Shiva’s rise as a war hero to the reinvention of lives brought by war, and relates the timing of his arrival to India’s entry into the nuclear age, while marking his own recollection as uncertain. Later, while Parvati is away, Saleem and Picture Singh address inequality and political change through a public performance in which snakes act out scenes of wealth and deprivation. Saleem insists that his political preoccupations did not halt the private chain of events that would end in Parvati’s pregnancy and return.

The contrast gives the episode its structural force: national crises occupy Saleem’s attention, but events occurring outside his view alter his closest relationships. Parvati is not merely carried along by his political narrative. Through the summoning and the decision to return visibly pregnant, she acts on her own future; yet Saleem’s account continues to filter her motives through his guilt, assumptions, and incomplete knowledge. The episode therefore makes personal history consequential while leaving its interpretation contested.