Power

Power is a capacity to affect other people and the course of their lives, but the novel refuses to treat it as a single, stable possession. Karla describes it as the force beneath sex and the opposite of love; Didier Levy measures it through the ability to influence others, keep secrets, and live without remorse; and the slum’s response to Joseph’s violence shows authority being used to demand accountability and then make forgiveness possible. Against these more dramatic forms, Prabaker’s instinct to protect Karla suggests that strength may appear not as domination but as care freely given.

Power, Attention, and Desire

In conversation with Lin, Karla places power above sex and love. She treats sex as bound up with power, while love stands on the other side of it: people fear love because it does not operate by the same terms. Her account makes power an intimate force, not merely a matter of public rank or physical strength. Even being listened to has an influence of its own: Karla recognizes that genuine attention is difficult to resist, though she still reserves the highest place for power.

The distinction matters because the exchange makes closeness and control adjacent without making them identical. Karla’s view suggests that desire can involve an unequal struggle, while love asks for something that power cannot command. Her certainty gives the idea an edge, but the novel later places that claim beside acts of loyalty and care that do not depend on winning or controlling another person. Power can attract, unsettle, and shape a relationship; it does not by itself explain what makes that relationship loving.

Didier’s Measure of Influence

Didier offers Lin a social and political measure of power. Looking across a room of roughly eighty people from many countries and communities, he distinguishes the small number who possess what he calls real power from the many he describes as powerless. He predicts that Karla’s return will make her one of the few influential people present, and warns Lin that her capacity to be an enemy is greater than her capacity to be a friend. In this account, power is not simply popularity: it is the ability to affect the destinies of others.

Didier links that influence to secrets and to life without remorse or regret. He asks Lin whether he regrets anything, then admits that he regrets things he has done and left undone. Karla, he argues, belongs among the powerful because she does not share that burden. The comparison makes moral feeling part of Didier’s test: regret marks a limit on what a person can do without being stopped by conscience. His analysis is itself delivered by someone Lin initially underestimates. Didier’s worn appearance and apparent helplessness conceal a practiced ability to manage how others see him, making the gap between seeming powerless and exercising influence part of the subject.

Protection and the Meaning of Strength

The narrative tests these theories through the remembered attack at the Standing Babas’ den. As a swordsman charged, Lin stepped back and prepared to fight; Prabaker moved sideways in front of Karla. Lin recognizes that he might have been the one to fight, drawing on his experience with violence, but identifies Prabaker’s uncalculated protective gesture as the truer act of bravery. The contrast separates the ability to prevail in a fight from the willingness to place oneself between danger and another person.

That memory changes Lin’s understanding of his friend. He has already come to like Prabaker, admire his optimism, and rely on the comfort of his company; watching him laugh with Jeetendra, Johnny Cigar, and the others, Lin realizes that his affection has become love. Power, in this moment, is not a title or an ability to command. It is revealed through action before explanation: Prabaker’s body moves to shield Karla, although he is neither in love with her nor a fighter. The scene gives protective responsibility a moral weight that force alone cannot claim.

Authority, Accountability, and Love

Joseph’s repeated violence against his wife exposes a different problem of power: the community’s reluctance to intervene in what people ordinarily treat as private domestic disputes. Qasim Ali challenges Johnny Cigar over his failure to stop the abuse and directs the community to act. The episode shows how a norm of noninterference can leave a person without protection, even where neighbors live in close proximity and cannot avoid the consequences of what happens around them.

The community’s response does not end with punishment. After Joseph breaks down, Qasim Ali arranges for him to be washed, given water and clean clothes, and supported by the same people who had held him accountable. Joseph is told that sincere remorse can be met with forgiveness and help, and he is made to acknowledge the community. Qasim then tells him that Maria is not dead. Authority here is neither simply indulgence nor vengeance: it confronts the harm, restrains excess, and leaves open a path toward repair. The sequence makes care consequential without presenting it as a substitute for accountability.

Prabaker’s anxiety about whether he can be a good husband to Parvati offers a more personal counterpoint. He worries that he is too short and small for her and asks Lin for reassurance; Lin answers by judging his character through his lack of hatred and by describing love as making a person larger, while hatred makes a person smaller. The reassurance echoes the earlier recognition of Prabaker’s protective courage. Across these moments, the novel distinguishes power that reduces others to subjects of fear from a strength expressed through protection, vulnerability, and the possibility of forgiveness. Love does not simply win a contest for power; it exposes the limits of power as a measure of human worth.