Rasheed

Rasheed is a former neighbor of Lin and Anand Rao whose kidney-sale scam ends in the deaths of two women and his own murder. Though he appears chiefly through other people’s accounts, his actions become a turning point for the Cuffe Parade slum: Anand’s killing of him is the first murder among its roughly twenty-five thousand residents, and Anand refuses efforts to soften the punishment he believes he has earned.

Identity and Introduction

Lin first hears of the trouble from Anand, who catches up with him after a visit to the slum and speaks gravely about his former roommate. Rasheed had shared a hut with Anand for two years. Lin remembers him as thin and bearded, with restless eyes that seemed guilty; Anand’s opening account, however, is incomplete, and Lin initially treats it as one of the vague neighborhood complaints he has learned to avoid. That impatience matters: Anand is trying to alert him to a serious wrong, but Lin does not yet understand what is at stake.

Rasheed’s character is assembled through these recollections and through the later account of his scheme, rather than through scenes narrated from his own perspective. Anand describes him as a con man he knew well. Another account characterizes his smile as calculated rather than sincere. Together, these descriptions present a man who uses familiarity and persuasion to secure other people’s trust, while the narrative leaves his private reasoning largely unexamined.

The Kidney-Sale Scheme

Rasheed persuades his wife to have one of her kidneys removed, presenting the operation as a way to raise money for a business. Anand, who knows Rasheed’s history, investigates and reports the matter to Qasim Ali Hussein, the slum’s head man. When Anand confronts Rasheed, Rasheed indignantly challenges his distrust and spills kerosene on himself, daring Anand to act if he believes Rasheed is dishonest. Anand does not accept the challenge as proof of anything; he warns Rasheed to look after the women and leaves.

The operation has taken place six months before the later account. Rasheed then tells his wife that he has repeatedly tried to sell his own kidney without success, and claims that the payment for hers was only half the sum needed to establish their business. He begins pressing her to persuade her younger sister to undergo the same operation. The wife objects, but Rasheed directs his appeal at the younger woman, arguing that refusing would make the first operation pointless. The women eventually agree, and the younger sister returns from the hospital after losing a kidney as well.

Rasheed takes the money and runs. The two sisters’ health declines, and both enter comas in hospital; they are pronounced dead within minutes of one another. Anand remains long enough to see the sheets drawn over their faces, then leaves in a state of anger and guilt. Rasheed’s promise of a business has thus produced neither security nor a future for the women: he has taken the proceeds, while they bear the lasting consequences of the operations.

Death and Its Consequences

Anand searches places where Rasheed is known to drink and finds him asleep in a rubbish pit after a binge. Some children have been paid to keep rats away from him. Anand sends the children off, sits beside Rasheed for a time, and then kills him. He remains there until Rasheed is dead. He subsequently gives himself up and makes a full confession; the account does not present the killing as a concealed act or leave Anand’s responsibility in doubt.

Johnny Cigar brings Lin news of the murder. The shock is not limited to the death itself. In a slum where residents regularly argue and quarrel, no one had previously killed another resident. Rasheed’s death therefore marks a rupture in the community’s shared order. Lin’s thoughts also entangle it with the murder of Madjid and the killing of an old gold smuggler and mafia don. Those deaths are distinct, but their convergence in Lin’s mind makes Rasheed’s murder part of a wider accumulation of violence and loss.

Anand’s Refusal of Help

Later, Lin brings Anand a newspaper article about the sisters and proposes using public sympathy to help with his murder case. The sisters have become widely known, and people regard them as holy and believe they can work miracles. Lin thinks that the account of Anand’s attempt to protect them could reduce his sentence. Anand rejects both the journalist Kavita Singh’s attention and Lin’s proposed campaign. He acknowledges that he acted knowingly, after sitting with Rasheed for a long time, and says he must face the punishment.

Anand’s refusal gives Rasheed’s story a consequence beyond the crime itself. Anand does not claim that Rasheed deserved to die or ask Lin to secure an acquittal. Instead, he believes that removing the punishment would also remove the meaning and honor he associates with taking responsibility for his choice. He asks Lin to let the public attention remain on the sisters and to leave him to the fate he has accepted. Rasheed is therefore present in the scene not as an active character, but as the person whose exploitation and death have shaped Anand’s moral decision.

Narrative Role and Aftermath

Rasheed’s story arrives in stages: first as Anand’s hesitant warning, then as the account of the two operations and the sisters’ deaths, and finally as the news of the killing. That delayed disclosure makes Lin’s earlier impatience consequential. He had a chance to listen when Anand sought help, but failed to grasp the seriousness of the matter; the later revelation makes that missed opportunity part of the surrounding tragedy without making Lin responsible for Anand’s act.

Rasheed also remains in Lin’s memory after his death. In a later inventory of what has been lost, Lin includes Rasheed among the dead, alongside friends, adversaries, and people whose fates remain uncertain. This brief return places Rasheed within the novel’s accumulating field of bereavement: a man known primarily through fraud and harm is nonetheless registered as one more life extinguished. His narrative significance rests in that contrast, and in the irreversible chain from a promised business, through the sisters’ deaths, to the first killing within the slum.