For every ladder, there is a snake

“For every ladder, there is a snake” is the governing proverb of Saleem Sinai’s childhood game and a pattern through which he interprets sudden changes in fortune. The image first promises balance between ascent and setback; in the events surrounding Amina’s racetrack winnings and Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, it becomes a tense account of how hope can turn to danger, and danger to relief.

The game’s moral

Saleem remembers falling in love with Snakes and Ladders as soon as he was old enough to play. He preferred its dice-driven movement among ladders and snakes to the game of shatranj his father urged him to master. Its attraction lay in the apparent fairness of reversals: climbing could be followed by a fall, while a snake’s descent might eventually be offset by a ladder.

The game offers more than a simple system of rewards and penalties. In Saleem’s interpretation, it gives physical form to paired opposites: up and down, good and evil, the rational straightness of ladders and the serpent’s winding, occult course. He connects these contrasts to other oppositions in his life, including father and mother, Mary and Musa, and knees and nose. Yet its apparent order is incomplete. Events can reverse the expected direction: one may slide down a ladder or climb to triumph on a snake’s venom. That ambiguity keeps the proverb from becoming a reassuring promise that good and bad fortune will neatly cancel each other out.

Amina’s ladder and the waiting danger

The proverb acquires immediate force when Amina’s luck at the racetrack becomes a ladder to victory. Her success does not lift her out of danger; Saleem counters it with the image of the country’s gutters still teeming with snakes. The juxtaposition turns private good fortune into a precarious condition, vulnerable to events beyond the family’s control.

That danger arrives during a screening of Hanif’s film, The Lovers of Kashmir. At the premiere, a house manager interrupts the show to announce that Mahatma Gandhi has been shot dead in Delhi. The news sends the audience into grief and panic. Hanif warns Amina to leave, fearing that if a Muslim committed the killing, there would be violence. For forty-eight hours the family remains behind the walls of Buckingham Villa, where Reverend Mother orders furniture put against the doors and Hindu servants sent home; Amina also stops visiting the racetrack. The ladder of racing success is abruptly overshadowed by the possibility of communal retaliation.

Reversal and the limits of relief

A turn comes when the radio identifies the assassin as Nathuram Godse. Amina responds with relief that the name is not Muslim, and Saleem frames the news as the answering ladder: “for every snake, there is a ladder.” The family’s immediate fear recedes because the reported identity of the killer changes its expectation of danger.

Aadam Aziz refuses to treat that relief as gratitude. Gandhi’s death has placed a new burden of age on him, and he insists that Godse is nothing to be thankful for. Amina, by contrast, rushes up what Saleem calls the long ladder of relief, reasoning that Godse’s identity has saved their lives. The contrast makes the proverb morally unstable as well as formally ambiguous: an outcome that eases one family’s fear does not redeem the assassination or erase the loss that Aadam feels.

Narrative significance

Saleem uses the game’s paired images to make historical upheaval legible at the scale of family life. The assassination is not only a national catastrophe; its uncertain aftermath enters a home, closes its doors, changes Amina’s movements, and makes a name on the radio feel like a reprieve. The proverb links those concrete consequences to the recurring rise and fall of fortune.

Its most important qualification is that reversals do not amount to justice or a dependable balance. A ladder may lead toward another snake, and the snake itself may become the route to temporary safety. The expression therefore records both the appeal of seeing a pattern in chance and the limits of that pattern: relief can arrive, but it remains partial, contingent, and shadowed by what has already happened.