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Metaphor
Explanation and Analysis—Aaaaaaa!:
In Chapter 12, the narrator considers the 20th century at large: "This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment." This leads to a discussion of the idea of "dilution," by which different races intermarry so much that they are no longer distinguishable. This is a concern for White Britons and some immigrants alike, including Alsana. The narrator describes her worries about Millat's diluted progeny in a metaphor based on a Punnett square:
Even the unflappable Alsana Iqbal would regularly wake up in a puddle of her own sweat after a night visited by visions of Millat (genetically BB; where B stands for Bengaliness) marrying someone called Sarah (aa, where a stands for Aryan), resulting in a child called Michael (Ba), who in turn marries somebody called Lucy (aa), leaving Alsana with a legacy of unrecognizable great-grandchildren (Aaaaaaa!), their Bengaliness thoroughly diluted, genotype hidden by phenotype.
A Punnett square, as taught in many grade school biology classes, is a simple diagram to describe the probability of inheritance of dominant and recessive traits, usually represented in upper- and lowercase letters, respectively. Millat is fully Bengali, represented by his BB allele. By intermarrying with Aryan people (i.e., those from the "Aryan race," the pseudoscientific hypothetical ancestors of a unified White race), his children would have mixed traits from both, eventually leaving "a legacy of unrecognizable great-grandchildren." The narrator turns the Punnett square metaphor into a joke, as the "a"s representing "Aryan" start piling up until they become a scream of terror: "Aaaaaaa!"
Race is not a strict genetic reality, but a complex result of genetic inheritance mixed with cultural, societal, and political factors. Because of this, Alsana's Punnett square is metaphorical: races cannot actually be defined by simple dominant and recessive traits. However, colonialist ideology has often been justified by scientific racism, which claims that races have fundamental biological differences. Those who believe such a thing would not take this passage as metaphorical at all. The novel, especially through the Futuremouse project, is especially interested in genetics and what is fundamental about a person (or any organism) as compared to the choices they make. This passage, though funny, reminds the reader that simple genetic theories have real consequences when applied to real people.
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