The silver spittoon

The silver spittoon is a lapis-lazuli-inlaid vessel whose importance far exceeds its use. Given by the Rani of Cooch Naheen to Nadir Khan and Mumtaz, it first belongs to a playful artistic circle, then to the lovers’ concealed life, and finally to Saleem, for whom it becomes a portable connection to a past otherwise slipping out of reach. Across these changes, the spittoon gathers memory without making that memory secure: it survives hidden rooms, flight, war, and magical transformation, until bulldozers destroy it and leave Saleem grieving not merely a possession but a tangible witness to his own history.

Appearance and First Associations

The spittoon is introduced in the narrator’s reconstruction of a photograph showing Aadam Aziz, Mian Abdullah, the Rani of Cooch Naheen, and Nadir Khan. The picture seems to speak: Nadir argues that poetry and the game of hitting a spittoon should stand as equals, while the Rani offers a room for the practice and describes her superb silver vessel, inlaid with lapis lazuli. The scene links a refined, gemstone-covered object with an activity that makes art and ordinary bodily life share the same space. Mian Abdullah, meanwhile, keeps looking toward the door, as if history is already calling him away from the animated tableau.

The conversation makes the spittoon a meeting point for conflicting ideas about art. Nadir resists categories that would rank poetry above the game; the Rani imagines the walls marked by imperfect attempts as honest traces. The vessel is therefore presented not only as a precious possession, but as the center of a practice in which refinement and mess, literary inheritance and popular amusement, can coexist. Its later appearances preserve this first association even when the participants and setting have changed.

Gift and Hidden Marriage

The Rani sends the silver spittoon as a wedding gift to Nadir Khan and Mumtaz. Their marriage is concealed in an underground chamber beneath Aadam Aziz’s house, reached through a trapdoor in the drawing room. Nadir calls the lamplit room the Taj Mahal, giving their secret domestic life a name that recalls the celebrated mausoleum built for another Mumtaz. In that private underworld, the gemstone-inlaid gift makes the Rani’s earlier salon-world present in the lovers’ refuge.

The spittoon accompanies their continuation of the old men’s game. Mumtaz prepares paan for Nadir but does not enjoy it herself; she spits lime drink, while his paan leaves red traces. The narrator later identifies these years as the happiest of Mumtaz’s life. She says they might eventually have had children, but that the time was not right, and the passage emphasizes her enduring love of children. The vessel thus belongs to a period of intimacy and imagined family life as well as to a game.

That refuge ends when Emerald tells Major Zulfikar about the underground chamber. A force of fifteen men arrives at Cornwallis Road, and the soldiers open the trapdoor. Nadir has escaped through a toilet’s outside door, leaving the shining spittoon and a brief note for Mumtaz. The note declares divorce three times. In the abrupt sequence, the object remains where the secret marriage has been exposed, a material remnant of a life that has disappeared before its inhabitants can explain themselves.

From Family Relic to Wartime Keepsake

Years later, Saleem encounters the spittoon as part of his family’s buried and partially remembered history. While hiding in a washing-chest, he watches Amina Sinai and hears her repeat Nadir Khan’s name; her gestures recall the earlier games in the Agra cellar. The object’s history is therefore connected to a secret that Saleem discovers not through a formal account, but through overheard speech and an episode of involuntary witnessing. Elsewhere, Saleem describes cutting fragments from newspaper headlines to assemble the words of an anonymous message to Commander Sabarmati, another instance of history reaching him in fragments rather than as a single stable record.

During the Bangladesh war, the spittoon is physically with Saleem. In an abandoned hut, as he and the soldiers around him struggle to recall who they are, Saleem clutches the tarnished vessel and can summon only nicknames for himself. When the pressure of fear and confusion culminates, he throws it against the floor and protests the unfairness of his situation. Later, a travelling vendor recognizes its silver and precious stones and offers a radio and camera in exchange. Saleem asks instead to hear about a soldier who fights using his knees. The refusal to trade underscores that the vessel’s significance for him is not its market value: it is already carrying associations that the vendor cannot know.

The object also becomes an anchor during Saleem’s passage through Parvati-the-witch’s invisible basket. In the disorienting enclosure, he holds onto the silver, which remains a reminder of the outside world even after it too is transformed by Parvati’s whispered words. Saleem recalls earlier episodes in which confinement and change have shaped his life, including his birth, the switching of name-tags, and the washing-chest. He presents the spittoon alongside these recurring enclosed spaces as a particular object through which he can endure another transformation. Emerging from the basket into the shadow of the mosque, he has begun to feel again; the spittoon remains in his hand as he returns to the magicians’ ghetto.

Loss and the Work of Memory

Near the novel’s end, a dream of Nadir Khan brings the spittoon’s earlier story back into focus. The shade of Nadir sees the lapis-lazuli-inlaid vessel and asks Saleem whether he stole it, then wonders whether Saleem might be Mumtaz’s little boy. Nadir’s warning to hide echoes his own escape from the underground chamber, joining the old flight to the danger Saleem is about to face. The object makes recognition possible across generations, though the encounter arrives as a dream rather than as a verified meeting.

When Saleem is captured, the bulldozers swallow the spittoon. He describes its destruction as the loss of the last object connecting him to a more tangible, historically verifiable past. It had already accompanied him through recollections of washing-chests, ghostly visions, freezing and thawing, drainage, and exile; its disappearance removes a physical point of reference at the moment his freedom is taken away. The object’s loss is consequently both material and narrative: Saleem can still recount the past, but he no longer possesses the thing that had seemed to certify his connection to it.

After his release, Saleem mourns the bulldozed vessel even though Picture Singh has supplied an empty Dalda Vanaspati can as a substitute. Saleem uses the can to demonstrate spittoon-hitting to his son, but the imitation cannot console him. He explains the older vessel’s accumulating associations: it allowed intellectuals in the Rani’s salon to practice an art of the masses; it turned Nadir and Mumtaz’s cellar into a second Taj Mahal; and, even while stored in an old trunk, it remained present through episodes of concealment, visions, suspension, bodily change, and exile. The replacement can supports the game, but cannot replace the original’s accumulated history.

The Spittoon as a Narrative Archive

The novel makes the spittoon a small, physical counterpart to Saleem’s larger attempt to preserve memory. At the pickle factory, he describes sealing his autobiography in jars, while acknowledging that memories and pickles alike undergo distortions. The spittoon operates differently: it does not explain the past, but passes through settings and hands, allowing episodes separated in time to become associated with one another. Its continuity offers a material thread through a story whose testimony depends on photographs, overheard names, documents, dreams, and recollection.

Its significance rests on the contrast between persistence and loss. The vessel repeatedly returns as a recognizable object, but its meaning changes with each return: a proposed instrument of artistic play, a wedding gift in a hidden marriage, a keepsake in wartime, an anchor during magical disorientation, and finally a destroyed relic. By the time Saleem seals the last chapter of his autobiography, the spittoon is absent, while its history remains inside the narrative. It cannot guarantee that memory is accurate or complete; its importance is that it gives Saleem something concrete to mourn, and something through which to tell how private lives have been folded into public history.