Summary
Chapter 1
The summer of 1911 is among the hottest that anyone in Delhi can remember. In addition to the heat, sand and dust also cause problems, and there are occasionally fires which turn the sky red. The mood of the city is tense and temperamental.
Mir Nihal leaves his shop for the day. He is worried about Babban Jan, for an unspecified reason, but decides to go straight home and tend to his pigeons; he has forgotten to leave them water. He begins to feel old and weak while thinking of his mistress, and for a moment he loses vision, which he attributes to heatstroke.
On his walk home, he encounters Sheikh Mohammad Sadiq, who asks him if he would consider allowing his servant Ghafoor to marry his niece. Mir Nihal is not enthusiastic about the idea, but since he is in a rush to get home to his pigeons, he suggests his friend speak directly to Ghafoor about the matter, implicitly giving his consent as a result.
Chapter 2
When Mir Nihal arrives home, Begam Jamal is sick in bed with fever, He goes to sit with her, and the women, who have been busy preparing Asghar’s marriage, adjust their demeanor upon his arrival. Masroor has also come down with heatstroke. Dilchain attends to both with water and mango sherbet to sooth their throats.
Mir Nihal finally gets to his pigeon house, and finds four have died of heatstroke, while the rest seem to be struggling to move. He refills their pot with water, and they rush to drink from it. He has lost ten pigeons recently due to the heat. His pigeons are among the most well trained in Delhi, and it takes months to train them properly, so the loss hits him hard. He thinks of them as children think of their toys, and has put years into tending to them. He is again reminded of his age, and feels sad.
The next day he goes to the pigeon market, near the mosque, to replenish his stock. There, he encounters Khwaja Ashraf Ali, a competitive neighbor with a rivaling group of pigeons. They have an outwardly pleasant but charged interaction. After he purchases some new members of his flock, Mir Nihal gets into discussion with a few other pigeon fliers about different breeds. Hakim Bashir prefers Kabuli pigeons, a breed that flies much higher than the golay pigeons Mir Nihal flies. Khwaja Ashraf Ali claims it takes no skill to train Kabuli pigeons, and tells a story about a particularly skilled flier of golay pigeons. Hakim Bashir backs down, as their debate is interrupted by the call to evening prayer. As Mir Nihal introduces his new pigeons to his loft, Ghafoor interrupts him with news of Babban Jan, whose condition is getting worse. He fears the worst, and rushes to see her.
Analysis
Part II begins where Part I ended, setting the tone for the coming chapters with a description of the weather. The overwhelming heat suggests a tense atmosphere as Mir Nihal must come to terms with the changing world around him before consenting to the match between Asghar and Bilqeece.
Before he is even confronted with the question of Asghar's marriage, he is forced to deal with navigating a marriage proposal he is opposed to when Sheikh Mohammad Sadiq asks Mir Nihal if he would allow his servant Ghafoor to marry the Sheikh's niece. With a number of other concerns on his mind, he passively consents to the proposal, indicating and foreshadowing how he will eventually do the same for his son.
Mir Nihal's relationship with his pigeons points to his anxieties over aging. Flying his pigeons makes him feel like a child, and a few of them dying makes him feel his old age, both because they symbolize youth for him and because he has literally put many years into keeping them and tending to them. The episode in which he goes to the market to replace the pigeons that had died also shows how pigeon flying is an activity which represents a certain generation of older men in Delhi—not only a hobby, but a tradition and a culture around which they can bond and relate to each other. The significance is not simply personal to Mir Nihal but also social.
However, by the end of the chapter, his attempts to avoid dealing with getting older fails. Though he has replaced his pigeons, and he is again reminded of death when Ghafoor informs him of his mistress's worsening condition.
