White Teeth: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

Two weeks later, Samad is packing the one shirt he’s never worn to mosque into a plastic bag, so that he can change later and meet Poppy illicitly (without desecrating clothes he wears while worshipping). Magid and Millat are packing food into rucksacks to meet Irie and visit an old man they have been assigned to offer charity to for the Harvest Festival. The narrator notes that both journeys are “rerun[s].” Immigrants have always been “prone to repetition,” and in London, the Iqbals are reenacting “the dash they made from one land to another,” since Magid, Millat, and Samad are all dashing away from their Muslim heritage and beliefs.

On the bus, Millat, Magid, and Irie loudly discuss the food they are bringing to the old man. An old age pensioner comments to another man that they—the children—should go back to their own country. Meanwhile, Samad is on his way to meet Poppy in Harlesden, which he agreed to after kissing her in her office two weeks before. He changes in a McDonald’s bathroom and visits his cousin’s wife Zinat’s shop, to provide himself with an alibi; Zinat is a notorious gossip, and Samad tells her that he is going to Park Royal to discuss a life insurance plan, knowing that she will report back to Alsana. Samad brings Poppy a coconut, which he says is “brown and old on the outside, white and fresh on the inside.”

The old man the children are visiting, Mr. J. P. Hamilton, is surprised to find them on his doorstep. He is a distinguished, well-dressed man with a signet ring and four argent medals, and he speaks in a voice that “even the children sensed was from a different class, a different era.” Mr. Hamilton closes the door on the children, but Millat rings the doorbell again; the old man lets them into his home reluctantly and inspects the groceries they have left, which he deems “too hard” for him to eat (he has only false teeth). Mr. Hamilton instructs the children to take better care of their teeth than he did, though he notes that when he was in the Congo, “the only way [he] could identify a nigger was by the whiteness of his teeth.” The children are horrified by his racist remarks, but Mr. Hamilton presses on, talking about “third molars”—wisdom teeth, inherited through the father’s line. The children leave in the middle of his rambling. 

In Willesden, the children frequently encounter “the Mad”: crazy street people, the kind of people Londoners have learned not to look at for fear of direct interaction. Samad and Poppy Burt-Jones encounter “Mad Mary,” a “black voodoo woman with a red face”; Samad tells Poppy not to look at her, since she is dangerous and “doesn’t like white people.” Mad Mary screams at them, and Samad is struck by the thought that she is looking at him “with recognition”: she has identified him as a “fellow traveler,” a fellow madman. Samad touches Mad Mary lightly on her shoulder, trying to pacify her, and she moves away from them. Poppy compliments him for how calm he is, and Samad says that it runs in his family, thinking of Mangal Pande.

 Samad and Poppy walk through the city, talking, and Poppy confesses that she likes him. Samad reacts harshly, telling her that there is “nothing good” about their situation. Poppy tells him that he can leave if he wants to, but he says that he wants to spend the night with her; she shows him a toothbrush that she bought for him so that he can stay overnight with her. Just then, Samad spots his two sons nearby, “their white teeth biting into two waxy apples.”