The Museum of Failures

Content Warning: This section discusses parental abuse and ableism. It also replicates, in direct quotes from the source material, some offensive language and terminology surrounding physical and intellectual disability.

“When at last his mother had emerged, her eyes were red. A wave of outrage had risen in the young Remy and he’d run up to hug and console her. Which was why he had been stunned when she’d gruffly pushed him away.”

Remy remembers a moment from his childhood when he ran to console a teary Shirin who had been fighting with Cyrus but was inexplicably rebuffed. Remy’s childhood memories are dotted with moments like this, featuring Shirin’s rejection of him for no apparent reason. These moments set up Remy and Shirin’s strained relationship as the central mystery and conflict of the novel.

“‘The child should look like at least one of us, honey,’ Kathy had said. ‘And getting a…a white kid is going to be hard.’ He had tensed at the thought of yet another link tying him to a country he had been determined to leave behind. But Kathy had seemed so convinced that he’d acquiesced.”

While Remy and Kathy are looking to adopt, it was Kathy’s idea to adopt from India. This passage showcases two things: First, it displays Remy’s initial discomfort and desire to disconnect from his country of origin. Remy thinks of Bombay, and subsequently India, as a place that always disappoints. The passage also displays how Kathy and Remy are reluctant to adopt from the US because they will not be able to adopt a white child. Later in the novel, Remy acknowledges that they didn’t want to adopt a Black child, foreseeing the difficulties that child would face in life within the unsaid caste system in America.

“He had often thought of Bombay as the museum of failures, an exhibit hall filled with thwarted dreams and broken promises. The reels of red tape themselves were worthy of their own display room.”

Remy thinks of Bombay as a “museum of failures.” This motif, from which the title is derived, appears here for the first time and does so multiple times across the novel. It evolves from signifying just Bombay to eventually mean memories and the past as well.