However, just as Adam and Eve can never return to Eden,
Saleem cannot return to Kashmir—at least, not to the Kashmir he
remembers through Aadam. That Kashmir doesn’t exist anymore, a fact Saleem
himself hints at when he first describes Aadam’s Kashmir and claims
that “[i]n those days there was no army camp at the lakeside, no
endless snakes of camouflaged trucks and jeeps clogged the narrow
mountain roads, no soldiers hid behind the crests of the mountains
past Baramulla and Gulmarg.” Even at the beginning of the novel,
the beauty of Kashmir is tainted by hindsight. In 1915, the valley
may have seemed “hardly changed since the Mughal Empire,” but by
the time Saleem begins telling his story, Kashmir has transformed
irrevocably. Whether or not we believe Saleem’s claim that he directly
influenced the political situation, his dreams remain a concrete
expression of the nostalgia and desire that fed India and Pakistan’s
struggle over Kashmir. Saleem’s inability to recapture his lost
Eden reflects the futility of the unyielding struggle between India
and Pakistan for control of the region.
Saleem also claims to Padma that the India-Pakistan war
of 1965 was a personal Jehad, or holy war, against him. Before Saleem’s
family gets eradicated, bitterness and deception have already brought them
to the breaking point. Since arriving in Pakistan, each of their lives
has taken a drastic turn for the worse. Rushdie accelerates the narrative
by packing Amina’s pregnancy, Ahmed’s rapid decline, Pia’s numerous
affairs, Zulfikar’s murder, and Alia’s hateful revenge into the
span of a single chapter. The family’s existence has become grotesque,
and Saleem believes that Pakistan must be trying to drive out his
wretched family, the way the human body rejects and expels hazardous
material. Only by laying waste to the past and annihilating his
memory can Saleem achieve blankness and thus cleanliness. Echoing
the novel’s earlier claims that creation and destruction are intimately
linked, Saleem achieves purity in the “Land of the Pure” through
cataclysmic and utter devastation.
