Hind

Hind is a formidable figure in the novel’s interwoven Jahilia and London narratives. In Jahilia she is the wife of Abu Simbel, a leading political and commercial power, and an outspoken opponent of Mahound’s faith. In London she is Mrs. Sufyan, the cook whose work makes the Shaandaar Café prosperous, yet whose success does not free her from loneliness, resentment, or conflict with her family. The narratives place these versions of Hind in revealing correspondence without reducing her to a single, uncomplicated emblem: in each setting she has influence, but also confronts changes she cannot control.

Identity and Position in Jahilia

Hind is introduced during Jahilia’s festival of Ibrahim as Abu Simbel’s beautiful and formidable wife. Her husband is head of the city’s ruling council, wealthy through caravans and commerce, and connected to the temples whose revenues support his power. Hind’s family controls the temple of Al-Lat at the southern gate, as well as the temples of Manat and Uzza. Her position is therefore not merely that of a prominent man’s spouse: her family’s religious authority is part of the economic structure of the city.

At the House of the Black Stone, Abu Simbel brings the poet Baal before the shrines of Uzza, Manat, and Al-Lat. Baal’s devotion to Al-Lat is well known, and he initially understands Abu Simbel’s appeal to their shared mistress as a reference to the goddess. Abu Simbel’s taunting clarification reveals that Hind, not Al-Lat, is the mistress he meant. The episode establishes Hind’s relationship with Baal while exposing the danger of assuming that the public arrangements of power reveal the private loyalties within them. Her family’s stewardship of the temples and her own devotion to Al-Lat remain closely bound, but they are not the same thing.

Opposition to Mahound

Hind’s conflict with Mahound is both religious and political. After Mahound has fainted, she visits him and tells him that she is Abu Simbel’s wife and no ally of his. She describes her husband as weak, arguing that his calculation and uncertainty make him unreliable, while presenting herself as a direct and deliberate opponent. She regards Mahound’s recognition of Al-Lat as no basis for reconciliation: in her view, the goddess is Allah’s equal, not a subordinate figure, and their conflict cannot be settled by a truce that absorbs her into his religious order.

Hind’s resistance is especially pointed because Mahound’s movement threatens the religious institutions that sustain her family’s wealth. Yet the text does not reduce her objections to material self-interest. Hind insists on the dignity and independence of Al-Lat, and treats the struggle as a contest between opposing principles, not simply a dispute over temple revenues. Her position gives the Jahilia episodes a rival voice: where Mahound advances a new religious order, Hind refuses the premise that the old goddesses can be accommodated on terms set by the new faith.

After Mahound announces that he is abrogating the verses attributed to Shaitan, Hind becomes a visible figure of vengeance. Near Mount Cone, the disciples warn Mahound that she is wearing white mourning clothes and has let down her hair; they report that she is demanding blood vengeance. Her response to the upheaval is thus personal as well as theological. Abu Simbel has not yet yielded to her demand, however, and is still weighing the political odds. When Mahound returns to Jahilia and enters the House of the Black Stone, Hind’s anger forms part of the danger surrounding his return, even though the available account does not describe her carrying out the revenge she seeks.

The Sufyan Household and Migration

The London narrative gives Hind a different domestic history. She was once a gentle, accommodating wife to Muhammad Sufyan, an erudite schoolteacher in Dhaka. She admired his wide-ranging learning and tried to meet his pluralism through her own work in the kitchen, learning dishes from across the subcontinent. Over time, cooking became a passion and a source of distinction in the household. Her husband’s ascetic restraint, by contrast, became a point of irritation: she felt that he rejected the food and effort through which she expressed herself.

Their marriage also deteriorated over their expectations of family life and intimacy. After the birth of their second daughter, Anahita, Hind refused to have more children and insisted that Muhammad Sufyan respect that decision. Their estrangement grew as he spent more time away from home and became involved in Communist politics. Hind believed that his political choices had forced her to leave for England with their two young daughters and had trapped her in a country where she would never again see her village. The move becomes, in her understanding, not a fresh beginning but the lasting consequence of a marriage in which her wishes and losses have gone unanswered.

In London, Hind’s cooking supplies the family’s livelihood and public standing. Customers come from across the city for her samosas, Bombay chaat, and gulab jamans at the Shaandaar Café. The business eventually enables the family to buy the four-storey building and rent out its rooms. Hind is its chief architect, while Muhammad Sufyan serves customers and handles the work around her cooking. The reversal gives her real economic authority, but the household’s increased prosperity does not restore the life she believes migration took from her. Her husband appears more cheerful and at ease in London even as she feels defeated by the very arrangement she has helped build.

Conflict at Home and with the Community

Hind’s sense of displacement is reinforced by her daughters’ growing distance from her. Mishal and Anahita understand their mother tongue but refuse to speak it, and Hind reads their choices—including Mishal’s changed appearance—as further signs that England is altering the family beyond her reach. She retreats indoors, relying on Indian films and movie magazines to follow the world she has left, and directs much of her frustration at her daughters. The domestic space that her work has made prosperous is also where her isolation and authority collide.

When Saladin Chamcha arrives at the Shaandaar household in his goat-like transformed body, Hind responds with alarm and identifies him as a devil. Her fear shapes the household’s first reaction, but it does not determine everyone else’s: the daughters show interest, and Anahita later approaches Saladin with sympathy. As weeks pass, Hind becomes less frightened and more resentful of his presence, which she associates with lost income and disruption. She objects to her daughters spending time with a sick visitor instead of following the life she expects for them. Saladin’s arrival intensifies divisions already present in the family rather than creating them from nothing.

A later confrontation exposes another source of strain. When Hanif Johnson arrives with news that Uhuru Simba has been arrested in the Granny Ripper case and that reprisals may follow, Hind strikes him and throws his office materials into the street. The immediate outburst follows Anahita’s disclosure of Mishal’s relationship with Hanif, but Hind’s anger opens onto broader grievances: her hostility toward the surrounding society, her dissatisfaction with Muhammad Sufyan, and her feeling that humiliation has accumulated without relief. She then threatens Mishal with a kitchen knife; Mishal defends herself, and Muhammad Sufyan is left distressed by the conflict.

The quarrel also reveals that Hind has kept the café’s prices secret from her husband and made her daughters swear not to tell him. Hanif accuses the family of profiting from the hardship of their own community. Muhammad Sufyan had not known what his wife charged, and the discovery shakes the affectionate, familiar role he had occupied in the café. Mishal arrives carrying bags and announces that she is leaving. The episode leaves Hind’s household fractured: the business that represents her achievement is now also the setting in which hidden decisions, family loyalties, and accusations of exploitation are made public.

Narrative Role and Significance

Hind’s two narrative settings create a sharp contrast between public command and private defeat. In Jahilia, she speaks as a religious and political antagonist who refuses compromise with Mahound; her connection to Al-Lat gives that resistance an institutional base as well as a personal voice. In London, she is neither a ruler nor a temple-holder, but her labor sustains a business and gives her practical control within a family whose migration and changing generations have unsettled her sense of place.

The echo between the two Hinds brings questions of power and belonging into different registers. The Jahilia figure can name an opponent and insist on the terms of a religious conflict; Mrs. Sufyan struggles to make her losses legible within ordinary domestic life. Her cooking crosses regional boundaries and makes the café a successful meeting place, even as she experiences cultural change as a threat to her daughters’ ties to her. Hind is therefore neither simply powerful nor simply powerless: the novel shows how authority can coexist with grief, and how the ability to shape a household or a city’s religious economy does not guarantee control over the future.