Sarla and Deven’s argument ends before it ever really begins, and Deven turns his attention to the family member he actually cares about: his young son Manu. The novel links this scene of them reading together—most likely from the famous
Panchatantra, a well-known Sanskrit book of fables—to Deven’s precious few memories of his own father, who died when he was young. Crucially, Deven’s love for Urdu poetry is in part a stand-in for his love for his father (who taught him about it). But he is reading a Sanskrit text with his son, which again points to Hindi and Hindu culture’s rising prominence in modern India. Indeed, the rest of this chapter makes it clear that Deven’s relationships with his father and his son are really foils for one another: Deven wants to give his son the love, belonging, and moral guidance that he never got from his father (except through poetry.)