The Spittoon

What is the deal with the spittoon? What is it, and what's it used for in the first place? The first part is easy: a spittoon is a pot for holding spit. Yep. It was even popular in the United States until the 1930s. (Don't believe us? Click here.)

Why were people spitting so much, and isn't that nasty? Yeah, it is nasty. In the US, people spit because of chewing tobacco. In India, they spit because they were chewing betel nut. They would make mixtures of the nut and herbs, chew it, and spit it into a spittoon. (More about that for you here.)

Now about Saleem's spittoon: it's a wedding present to Nadir Khan and Mumtaz from the Rani of Cooch Naheen. It's made out of lapis lazuli and silver, so it's fancy for a spittoon. The spittoon is what causes Saleem's amnesia, and he holds on to it like old memories. It is destroyed along with the magicians' ghetto.

Classy

It's hard to get the point of the spittoon if you don't get where it fits in Indian class structures. Spittoons are not for fancy people. They are for everyday people—old people, poor people, etc. In other words, not for people like Saleem's family.

The whole issue comes up when Nadir Khan is talking to Mian Abdullah about his rhyme-less poetry. Mian believes that poetry should be ornate and uplifting, not simple. Nadir replies: "Nadir's voice, issuing from the fading picture: 'I do not believe in high art, Mian Sahib. Now art must be beyond categories; my poetry and-oh-the game of hit-the-spittoon are equals'" (1.3.27). In other words, he's not into that hoity toity stuff. Poetry is for the people—just like spittoons.

More proof that spittoons are low-class: Dalits (an Indian caste that was called the Untouchables) were once forced to wear spittoons around their necks so that their spit wouldn't fall on anything and make it unclean. So a person walking with a spittoon conjures up ideas of the lowest of the low.

But there's something special about Saleem's spittoon: it's fancy. The Rani tells us about it: "I have a superb silver spittoon, inlaid with lapis lazuli, and you must all come and practise. Let the walls be splashed with our inaccurate expectorating!'" (1.3.27). Even though it was a game for the masses, some people made having fancy spittoons and betel nut holders into status symbols. People like the Rani.

So the spittoon is both fancy and common: it's the tool of the masses in an elite package. Sounds a bit like someone we know. Someone with a big nose. A guy born to poor parents but raised by a rich family, perhaps?

Memories And Amnesia

Saleem makes this one easy for us. He tells us out right in these two quotes what the spittoon means to him.

What I held on to in that ghostly time-and-space: a silver spittoon. Which, transformed like myself by Parvati-whispered words, was nevertheless a reminder of the outside... clutching finely-wrought silver, which glittered even in that nameless dark, I survived. Despite head-to-toe numbness, I was saved, perhaps, by the glints of my precious souvenir. (3.26.36)

I lost something else that day, besides my freedom: bulldozers swallowed a silver spittoon. Deprived of the last object connecting me to my more tangible, historically-verifiable past, I was taken to Benares to face the consequences of my inner, midnight-given life. (3.29.39)

The spittoon is Saleem's connection to his past, his memories. It reminds him of his mother, and Nadir Khan, and how she married his father, and how he was born. In other words, it's the memoir of his family, and it is what allows him not to die when Parvati disappears him. It reminds him of his identity.

That's a lot of heavy lifting for a little pot. Even a fancy one.

But that's not all. Someone who likes to quote the Bible might say that what the spittoon giveth, the spittoon taketh away. It gives him a connection to his past, but then it also takes it away. When his family is struck by bombs, the spittoon hits Saleem on the head and gives him amnesia. Saleem describes it this way:

I have shaken off five-hundred-year-old whores and confessions of love at dead of night, free now, beyond caring, crashing on to tarmac, restored to innocence and purity by a tumbling piece of the moon, wiped clean as a wooden writing-chest, brained (just as prophesied) by my mother's silver spittoon. (2.23.62)

That's a lot of words to say he lost his memory.

This new "purified" guy is not Saleem at all. It's the Buddha. Without his memories, Saleem is not the same person. Memories make you who you are.

No wonder Saleem is attached to that spittoon.