Anything you want to be, you can be

“Anything you want to be, you can be” is a recurring expression of possibility in Saleem’s family story. First associated with Mary Pereira’s care for Saleem, it returns when she sings it to Brass Monkey after Saleem’s place in the household has diminished. Its movement between children makes it both a comforting refrain and an ironic measure of how little control they have over the identities and fortunes adults give them.

Words of possibility

The expression enters the novel as a song Mary Pereira sings to Saleem. When Saleem later finds his father drawing closer to Brass Monkey, he hears Mary sing the same tune to his sister, with the altered wording “You can be just what-all you want!” What had once accompanied Saleem’s special place in the family now belongs to the child newly receiving attention.

The refrain is expansive, but its circumstances are specific: a song passed between a caregiver and children whose standing in the household changes. Its apparent promise of self-determination therefore sits beside the facts of childhood dependence. Neither child controls who is favored or how the adults around them interpret their place.

A changed place in the household

After Saleem’s return from exile, his father seems to want little to do with him, while Brass Monkey becomes the favored child. Ahmed admits her into his office, embraces her, and places his hopes for the future upon her. At dinner, she receives the largest helping of chips, an extra nargisi kofta, and the choicest pasanda; Saleem, by contrast, senses distrust and confusion when the family looks at him.

Mary’s song accompanies this reversal. Saleem recognizes that the refrain he regarded as his own theme has been transferred to Brass Monkey, and describes his position as usurped. The shift turns an expression of boundless possibility into a marker of changing family fortunes: the words remain, but the child at their center changes.

Promise and limits

The novel repeatedly places language beside the forces that give people their identities. In Lifafa Das’s peepshow, the cry “Dunya dekho” promises to show the whole world, while his box contains both celebrated monuments and contemporary political and social images. The expansive claim draws attention to the gap between an invitation to see everything and the necessarily selective contents of the box. The same tension shades the family refrain: a promise may open an imaginative horizon without making every desired outcome attainable.

That gap becomes sharper when Saleem recounts how a schoolyard rhyme he repeats in Gujarati is taken up by demonstrators and becomes a song of war during a language conflict. Words travel beyond their speaker’s intended use and acquire consequences in public. By contrast, the family song passes quietly from Mary to one child and then another, its meaning altered by who receives affection and attention.

Refrain against assigned realities

The expression’s optimism also contrasts with Saleem’s account of political truth in Pakistan. After an election whose reported results favor the President’s Muslim League, he reflects on a country where “the truth is what it is instructed to be.” The contrast is not that the song supplies a remedy for political falsehood; rather, it makes the limits of choice legible. Possibility can be spoken and sung, while family position, public identity, and official accounts are shaped by powers beyond an individual child’s wishes.

Across these contexts, the refrain keeps its warmth but loses any guarantee. Its return to Brass Monkey does not erase Saleem’s earlier attachment to it, just as a promised future does not determine what will happen. The expression endures as a small, portable hope—one whose changing recipient reveals the instability beneath its certainty.