Lifafa Das’s peepshow

Lifafa Das’s peepshow is a black box on wheels, operated by turning a handle that moves picture postcards past viewing holes. Its promise to show the whole world is both its attraction and its defining ambition: it gathers famous sights, political events, ordinary social scenes, and commercial images into a small portable frame. When communal suspicion turns against its owner, the box is caught up in the danger, and Amina Sinai’s intervention saves Lifafa Das; after the crowd disperses, Musa retrieves the peepshow from the street.

Form and contents

The peepshow is a working street attraction. Lifafa Das rattles his dugdugee drum to draw children, then invites them to look through the box as its postcards progress. The images are not simply a sequence of celebrated landmarks. The Taj Mahal, Meenakshi Temple, and the Ganges share space with Stafford Cripps leaving Nehru’s residence, untouchables being touched, educated people sleeping on railway lines, a European actress posed beneath fruit, and a newspaper photograph of a fire at an industrial estate. The collection places the monumental beside the contemporary and the ordinary, without shielding viewers from unpleasant features of the age.

That range helps explain the scale of Lifafa Das’s sales pitch. The conventional street cry invites passers-by to see Delhi; because he is already in Delhi, he adapts it to promise everything. He keeps adding postcards in an effort to make the contents fulfill the claim. The box is therefore more than a display of separate pictures: its growing collection embodies the desire to gather a vast, changing reality into one manageable view.

Audiences and place in the neighborhood

The peepshow draws children from the street, but it is not only for children. Adults also come to see what is new inside, and Begum Amina Sinai is among its frequent customers. The box belongs to the neighborhood’s shared public life: its moving images offer a meeting point for curiosity, entertainment, and the news of the wider world.

The narration links that urge to encompass reality with the peepshow’s maker. As its stock of postcards expands, the attempt to fit everything into the box begins to trouble Lifafa Das himself. The narrator recognizes a related impulse in the painter who was Nadir Khan’s friend, then turns the question back on the act of telling this story. The peepshow thus stands as a small material counterpart to narrative itself: both select and arrange pieces of a larger world, while the desire to include everything remains impossible to satisfy.

The crowd and the peepshow

The box is on display when the mood in the neighborhood changes. An eight-year-old girl demands to be first, but Lifafa Das tells her that everyone will have a turn and continues turning the handle. Her father and others then direct communal abuse at Lifafa Das, and the schoolboys repeat accusations they do not understand. The children move away from the box as Lifafa Das drags it through the crowd, trying to escape. A pot is thrown and breaks beside him; he ends up with his back against a doorway, the peepshow no longer a spectacle but something he struggles to take with him.

Amina Sinai opens the door behind Lifafa Das, and he falls into the dark corridor beside her. She has heard the shouting and sees the danger in the crowd; despite Zohra’s protest, she goes downstairs and shelters him. After the crowd disperses, Musa the bearer goes into the street and rescues the peepshow. Its return is a distinct consequence of Amina’s act: Lifafa Das is safe inside, while his box, left amid the commotion, is brought back from the street.

Narrative significance

The peepshow’s smallness sharpens the contrast between its promise and the world surrounding it. The postcards carry history and public life into a neighborhood street, but the same street can abruptly turn against the man showing them. In the rescue scene, Lifafa Das’s claim to show everything gives way to a more immediate question of whether he can escape the crowd; the box’s survival depends on the actions of people nearby, first Amina and then Musa.

The episode also connects the object’s function to the novel’s self-conscious account of telling. A box of pictures cannot contain all reality, and the narrator’s own recognition of a wish to encapsulate the whole world makes that limit part of the subject. The peepshow offers a vivid miniature of how stories assemble images and events, while its public setting shows that what audiences see—and how they respond—can be shaped by the pressures of the moment.