In reference to Judaism-
Tai pushes the shikara off from the jetty. Spits. Begins to row away. "I Knew it", he says. "You will use a machine now instead of your own big nose" (Rushdie, 17). All of Rushdie's various uses of spit struck me as having Judaic underpinnings. In the first creation story of Genesis, God forms Adam and Eve out of clay and spit- in the second, he uses his breath. Given the emphasis placed upon ancestry in the Old Testament, it seems as though there is a correlation between the act of spitting and the importance of Saleem's heritage in the narrative. In the passage wherein Tai bids goodbye to Saleem's grandfather as he leaves him at the house that belongs to Ghani, after Tai berates him, Tai seems to cast a foreshadowing of Aziz's future- telling him he will opt for a western object that signifies progress rather than his nose, a mark of his forefathers. The fact that Taj spits as he says this seems to underscore the role of spit as a kind of corollary of Saleem's descendants.
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