Naima Najmuddin

Naima Najmuddin is Gibreel Farishta’s mother, remembered for a devotion so complete that simply seeing her son seemed to fulfill her dreams. Her death in a bus collision removes the person at the center of the family’s affections and leaves father and son to compete, silently, over the work through which each tries to express love.

Identity and Family

Naima lives with her husband, Najmuddin Senior, and their son in a shack beside the airport runway at Santacruz. When Gibreel returns from running tiffins, the departing planes cast their green, red, and yellow lights over him. Naima tells him that laying eyes on him makes all her dreams come true. Her response is the first indication of a peculiarity surrounding Gibreel: he appears able to satisfy people’s most secret desires, although he has no idea how he does so.

The family’s affection is unevenly distributed. Naima’s eyes are for Gibreel, and she nightly presses his feet while leaving her husband’s unstroked. Yet Najmuddin Senior does not seem to resent this preference while she is alive. The narrator frames the son as a blessing and gratitude as the proper response to one; after Naima’s death, however, the intensity of the father’s rivalry with his son becomes more apparent.

Death and Its Aftermath

Naima is killed when a bus hits her. Gibreel is not there to answer her prayers for life, and the narration gives her death the abrupt finality of an event that cannot be undone. Neither father nor son speaks of grief. Instead, both bury their sadness in extra labor, turning their shared loss into an unspoken contest: who can carry more tiffins, win more contracts, and run faster.

For Gibreel, the competition comes to express what he understands of his father’s pain. He sees the veins knotted at Najmuddin Senior’s neck and temples and recognizes that the older man resented him for having occupied the foremost place in Naima’s affections. The father’s effort to surpass his son becomes an effort to reclaim, through work, the primacy he had lost in his wife’s love. Once Gibreel understands this, he eases off; his father’s zeal does not.

Narrative Role

Naima’s importance in the passage lies in the force of her attachment and the consequences of her absence. Her delight in Gibreel introduces his apparent, unconscious power to fulfill hidden wishes, while the contrast between her tenderness toward her son and her husband’s unstroked feet anticipates the rivalry that follows her death.

Her death also gives the family’s work its emotional meaning. Tiffin-running, contracts, and speed are not merely measures of livelihood or achievement: after Naima is gone, they become the mute language in which father and son contend over grief and love. The novel presents this response without turning it into a spoken reconciliation; Gibreel’s recognition changes his own effort, but Najmuddin Senior continues to run.