Jason - Rushdie - 3/7

The beginning of the passage on 390 starts with questions, “Who died in the holy war?” and so on. These questions create a sense of anticipation and mirror or become in some way similar to the falling bombs Saleem describes in the next paragraph. The questions leave the impression of things “being up in the air,” things with answers are similarly “explosive,” in that we learn that Saleem essentially loses his family and with it his life as a part of a family.

            Saleem describes the bombs dropped by the aircrafts involved in the raid as “actual or mythical.” This distinction he creates implies a meaning separate from the physical result (the deaths) that the bombings produces. The section in which Saleem says that there are more bombs remaining to be told of, creates another sense of anticipation for the bombs to actually go off and explode. Saleem interrupts himself while explaining the consequences of the bombing raid to describe the death of Mutasim the Handsome by the bullet of a sniper. This creates more tension and serves as a kind of device for the reader to picture the bombs falling, as if in a movie, in such a way that the bombs are superimposed over the image of Mutasim’s death. This technique is explicitly used and described in a later chapter. It also “buys time” for the bombs to fall (which creates a sense of realism) and correlates the sound of a whizzing bullet with (presumably) the screeching noise of a falling bomb.

This sequence is both an end and a beginning. The passage literally closes the “chapter” or second book of Saleem’s childhood and begins another section of his life (or the retelling of his life).

There’s also a reference to the perforated sheet in this passage. In this instance Saleem seems to analogize the hole in the sheet with a kind of bombing target. Even though the hole resembles a “smoke-image” of (presumably) Naseem Aziz after the bombs have been dropped, the implication seems to be, at least to me, that Saleem understands that his family was specifically targeted.