One of the interesting points of this story is about the role the noses of the family plays in the story. At the beginning we see a young doctor Aadam Aziz fall on his nose and immediately distances himself from any type of religion, vowing to never bow in front of any man or god again. This gets him into trouble later on during his marriage with Naseem due to the fact that she’s religious and he isn’t. It’s not a typical haunting, but the otherworldly effect his nose seems to have in his life is very interesting. Then during the protest, Aziz’s nose begins to itch as military men surround the location of the protesters. Suddenly, he sneezes and falls down, therefore saving his life. The idea of haunting is that ideas out of our relatively limited parameters as humans means that we sometimes assign things as coincidences even when they could be two unrelated things. Major life events in the Aziz family seems to coincidentally fall on the same dates that major world events take place such as the end of World War 2 and the Atomic Bombing. Even Saleem is born on the exact day India became independent.