Buckingham Villa, William Methwold’s former residence on Methwold’s Estate, becomes the principal home of the Sinai family and a chamber in which colonial habits, family memory, and concealed history accumulate. First offered as part of Methwold’s sale of his palaces, it is inherited with its furnishings and eccentric rules; later, it stands amid the upheavals that displace its residents and shelter the family when Mary Pereira’s long-kept secret is finally disclosed.

House and Setting

Buckingham Villa is one of four identical mansions built for the Estate’s original European residents. The houses are imposing three-storey structures on a low, two-storey hillock, with red gabled roofs, corner turrets capped by pointed tiles, verandahs, and servants’ quarters reached by hidden spiral iron staircases. The villa’s name places it in a deliberately grand European company: Methwold named the four houses Versailles Villa, Buckingham Villa, Escorial Villa, and Sans Souci. Around them, bougainvillaea, pale-blue pools, rock gardens, tamarind trees, roses, butterflies, and cane chairs arrange the Estate as a cultivated domestic landscape.

The setting is also a social map. The Estate road curves towards the sea and looks down on the Breach Candy Swimming Club, whose pool is shaped like British India and reserved for white swimmers. The houses therefore stand within an image of imperial order even as their eventual transfer to Indian buyers approaches. Buckingham Villa is not an isolated mansion but part of a designed enclave, where architecture, leisure, and inherited domestic objects carry the residue of British rule into the lives of the people who move in.

Sale and Inherited Ways of Living

In June, Methwold sells his empty palaces for very little, but the bargain comes with conditions. Speaking of his ancestor’s part in building the city, he presents the sale as a chance for his descendant to play a part at an important juncture. He urges the buyers to move in promptly and says he can go to the Taj Hotel. The arrangement makes transfer of ownership more complicated than a simple handover: the new residents acquire the houses and are drawn into Methwold’s peculiar customs.

Ahmed Sinai finds a cocktail cabinet in Buckingham Villa, Methwold’s own house before it becomes the Siniais’ home. He takes to fine Scotch whisky and defends the possibility of indulging the former owner’s eccentricities as a sign of their own civilization. The cabinet makes the transition tangible: Methwold has departed, but his furnishings remain, shaping the new owner’s daily life and complicating any clean boundary between colonial possession and postcolonial home.

Across the Estate, the buyers encounter talking budgerigars, old clothes, used brassieres, goldfish, dogs, ceiling fans, gas cookers, and the requirements of bird care. At six each evening they gather in their gardens for cocktail hour; when Methwold visits, they slip into imitated Oxford accents. The residents learn his domestic routines while he supervises their transformation and murmurs, “Sabkuch ticktock hai.” Buckingham Villa belongs to this larger process of adaptation: the house is a home, but also one of the instruments through which its new inhabitants rehearse an inherited style of life.

Family Home and a Preserved Secret

Buckingham Villa becomes the central domestic space of Saleem’s childhood. When Amina and the baby Saleem return home in a borrowed Studebaker, Ahmed brings a manila envelope containing a pickle jar. The jar, emptied of lime kasaundy, washed, boiled, and refilled, is sealed with a rubber diaphragm over its tin lid. It contains briny water and an umbilical cord, preserved rather than discarded. The narrative leaves unresolved whether the cord belongs to Saleem or the other baby, while making clear that the baby and afterbirth both arrive at the Estate and await their time.

The jar’s journey links the house to a secret that the family does not yet know. As Saleem grows up, the cord remains in brine at the back of a teak almirah. Years later, during the family’s exile in Pakistan and Saleem’s struggle towards purity, umbilical cords briefly return to the story. Within Buckingham Villa, the sealed jar makes birth itself an object stored alongside the household’s other possessions: intimate evidence preserved in the domestic interior, its meaning postponed.

The villa’s history as a family home also includes periods of absence and altered affection. After Saleem’s return from exile, he finds that Ahmed seems to want nothing more to do with him. Ahmed instead admits Brass Monkey into the private space of his office, embraces her, and places his hopes for the future upon her. The shift in favour leaves Saleem feeling displaced in his own household, while Brass Monkey herself is astonished by her new position. Buckingham Villa thus holds not only the family’s material inheritance but changing arrangements of attention, trust, and belonging.

Demolition, Mourning, and Revelation

The Estate’s landscape changes as the Narlikar women acquire properties around it and plan to replace the buildings on the hillock with a thirty-storey pink obelisk. Ahmed alone refuses to sell Buckingham Villa, despite the vast sums offered. The developers warn that he will have to sell cheaply when the area is surrounded by rubble; remembering what he considers their tetrapod-related perfidy, he remains unmoved. His refusal makes the villa a last point of resistance to the transformation of the childhood world, though it cannot prevent the larger demolition.

When demolition crews move in, Buckingham Villa is enveloped by dust. In that obscured setting, the family receives news of Hanif Aziz’s suicide and gathers for the forty-day mourning period. Relatives arrive from Agra, Delhi, and Pakistan, including Aadam Aziz, Reverend Mother, Mustapha, Alia, General Zulfikar, Emerald, and Zafar; Pia stays in the house at Amina’s invitation. Dust creeps past wet towels placed at the windows, follows the mourners inside, and filters through the walls. It blurs the distinctions between the present family and the vanishing Estate: memories of Lila Sabarmati’s pianola, Toxy Catrack’s prison bars, a Dubash statuette, and Sonny Ibrahim’s posters reappear as dust-formed images. The villa becomes a besieged interior in which grief and the debris of a lost world mingle.

On the thirty-seventh day of mourning in 1958, the secret that has haunted Mary Pereira for more than eleven years comes to light. An old, decaying ghost—Joseph D’Costa—walks up the hillock and appears through the dust as Mary cleans the chick-blinds on the verandah. She recognizes him and rushes into the house to beg Amina’s forgiveness. She then brings the family to Ahmed’s office and begins to confess the crime of changing the babies’ name-tags. Holding Saleem’s hand, Mary shields him as the family learns that the boy they have raised is not Ahmed and Amina’s biological son. The villa’s domestic spaces, from verandah to office, turn into the route by which buried history enters public family knowledge.

Significance

Buckingham Villa gathers the novel’s questions of ownership, inheritance, and identity into one address. Methwold’s sale passes houses to new residents while leaving his customs and furnishings behind; the Sinai family’s home consequently carries both the promise of possession and the persistence of what came before. The cocktail cabinet and preserved umbilical cord give that inheritance distinct material forms, one associated with learned habits and the other with uncertain birth.

The house’s later enclosure by demolition dust reverses the apparent solidity of its architecture. The villa cannot preserve the Estate unchanged, yet its rooms and thresholds hold the family through mourning and expose the secret on which Saleem’s identity depends. Its history moves from a colonial palace offered for sale, through the intimate routines of a growing family, to a dust-filled setting where the past returns and a carefully maintained domestic story breaks open.