Ahmed Sinai's unexplained skin depigmentation

Ahmed Sinai's unexplained skin depigmentation is a sudden, unexplained change that turns him almost entirely white within a few months. Saleem links it first to the shock of Doctor Narlikar’s death, then entertains a broader possibility: that Ahmed’s altered appearance belongs to a little-noticed phenomenon among Indian businessmen after Independence.

Onset and outward change

Saleem places the onset after Doctor Narlikar’s death and the arrival of Narlikar’s female relations, who take over the Nursing Home and cut Ahmed out of the tetrapod business deal. Ahmed’s skin gradually pales and his hair loses its color; within months, he is white apart from his dark eyes. The change unfolds over time rather than arriving in a single moment, making the transformation visible in both skin and hair.

Ahmed visits doctors, who cannot explain the condition or prescribe a cure. Although he presents himself as worried about becoming white, Saleem says he is secretly rather pleased: Ahmed had long envied Europeans their pigmentation. When he jokes about the change at cocktail hour with Lila Sabarmati, his darker-skinned neighbors laugh politely and feel oddly ashamed. His private satisfaction and the neighbors’ discomfort make the transformation more than a medical mystery; it also exposes the status attached to whiteness in the world around him.

Saleem’s explanations

Saleem first offers circumstantial evidence for a personal cause, suggesting that the shock of Narlikar’s death may have made Ahmed a snow-white father beside Saleem’s ebony mother. He presents this as a possibility, not a medical finding. The narrative leaves the physical cause unresolved, just as the doctors do.

Saleem then proposes an alternative theory based on his supposed psychic travels. He recalls that similar pigmentation changes affected many members of India’s business community during the first nine years after Independence. Some prosperous businessmen, whose fortunes benefited from the first Five Year Plan’s emphasis on commerce, were becoming conspicuously pale. He suggests that the demanding work of taking over from the British and becoming masters of their own destinies may have drained color from their faces. In this account, Ahmed is not an isolated case but a late example of a widespread, generally unnoticed change. The explanation remains Saleem’s speculation, and the narrative does not settle the question between personal shock and national pattern.

Meaning and narrative uncertainty

The episode ties the changing appearance of one man to the upheaval of the post-Independence business world. Ahmed’s long-standing envy of European pigmentation gives the change an ironic personal dimension: what unsettles others is something he has privately desired. At the same time, Saleem’s competing explanations keep appearance from serving as proof of a single cause. The skin’s whitening can be read as an individual response to bereavement or as an emblematic consequence of economic and political transition, but the account marks both as interpretations rather than certainties.

This uncertainty belongs to Saleem’s larger way of narrating: he openly distinguishes what he takes to be circumstantial evidence from a theory he has developed through psychic travel. The result is not a diagnosis but a layered account in which Ahmed’s body becomes a possible register of private shock and collective change, while the reason for the transformation remains unknown.