Amina Sinai—Mary Pereira

Amina Sinai and Mary Pereira become Saleem’s two mothers in practice: Amina is his mother, while Mary, who secretly arranged the switch of newborns, gives up her job and devotes herself to raising him. The relationship is built on daily cooperation and genuine affection, yet Mary’s unconfessed act and Amina’s growing sense of rivalry make their shared care emotionally complicated.

Shared care and hidden history

Three days after Saleem’s birth, Mary is overcome with remorse. Joseph D’Costa has abandoned both her and her sister Alice, and Mary cannot bring herself to confess the baby switch. Instead, she leaves her job at the nursing home and approaches Amina, saying she had seen the baby once, fallen in love with him, and wanted to work as his ayah. Amina accepts. From then on, Mary devotes her life to Saleem’s upbringing, binding her future to the memory of the crime she keeps concealed.

Mary’s care is not a substitute for Amina’s. In practical matters the women are close allies, together bathing and tending Saleem after his circumcision. Their shared work presents motherhood as something enacted through ordinary attention and labor, even as the concealed truth of Saleem’s birth gives that arrangement a second, unspoken history.

Affection and rivalry

The women’s practical alliance does not prevent emotional competition. During a pram ride through the Hanging Gardens, Amina overhears Mary call Saleem her own son to the other ayahs and feels threatened. After that, Saleem becomes the battleground of their affection: each tries to outdo the other in displays of love, while the infant absorbs their embraces and kisses.

The narrator presents the rivalry with affectionate irony. The women’s tenderness is real, but it is also a contest for emotional closeness to the child whose identity Mary has secretly altered. Saleem’s early growth is described as being nourished by their competing affection, making the rivalry part of the intimate world that forms him.

Meaning of the relationship

The pair embody two distinct but overlapping claims to motherhood: Amina’s place in Saleem’s life is established through birth and continuing care, while Mary’s is made through daily devotion and concealed knowledge. Mary’s decision to raise the child she helped switch does not erase her guilt; instead, it turns care into a lasting response to that guilt. Amina, meanwhile, loves Saleem alongside Mary without knowing the secret that has shaped their household.

Their relationship therefore joins domestic intimacy to the novel’s larger concern with unstable identity and parentage. The women act together as mothers, yet the secret beneath their partnership prevents their bond from being fully equal: Mary knows why Saleem’s history is different, while Amina experiences only the child and the affection they both give him.