The book ends with Marcus accompanying the Buddha's head on an American military helicopter flight to the National Museum in Kabul, away from the turmoil of Usha, with its battling tribes and warlords. Madeline Clements has described how this ending can be read as a reaffirmation that Western forces and imperial archival institutions are in the end the only ones to be trusted with custodianship of the relics of Afghan antiquity. Certainly, taking the Buddha to an area of comparative safety controlled by the United States and its allies underlines the nagging suspicion that only the West truly understands the importance of cultural heritage. It can be seen as, in James Clifford's terms, an act of "ethnographic salvage," rescuing peripheral cultures from the threat of "dissipation, contingency and loss" if left in situ. However, it is possible to argue that rather than simply endorsing this measure, the novel in its closing pages is, in fact, pointing out the further consequences of imperialism: revealing those ongoing local, national, and international compromises—the desire to shepherd the past as well as dictate the future—that are the reality of dominance in the global context. As such, Aslam's novel could be read as responding to Amitava Kumar's call for attention to be paid to "how literature … reveals local or national [or, indeed, international] realities of dominance, suppression, oppression and exploitation in a global context."

XREF: Echoes James Clifford's concept of ethnographic salvage and critiques of Western museums' custodianship claims — connects to postcolonial theory by Clifford, Spivak, and Said. QUESTION: Does the Buddha's removal to Kabul count as salvage or theft? The interpretive tension between 'rescue' and 'dominance' is flagged but unresolved.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 414