Oh God, where have these people's heads gone?

The repeated imagery of people with missing heads/faces in Basti indicates an ongoing crisis of identity for Zakir. In the first instance Zakir is unable to make out faces on the people that pass him by in the street and this happens right after Zakir's conversation with Irfan where he starts questioning if Pakistan should have been created in the first place. The obscuration of faces is a very striking way of obscuring identity as the face is the immediate way that a person is recognized for who he is. In the context of Zakir questioning partition, it seems that he may be projecting his own identity crisis on to all the inhabitants of the city, and hence to him their faces are gone. The crisis has been present in subtlety all along (in the way he happily explores Pakistan and yet cries at night, in the way they 'accept' Pakistan and yet reminisce about the home left behind in India) but this is the result of the first time he says it out loud and so it marks a realization that signifies a non-realization of the Pakistani identity.

In the second instance, Zakir is Abul Hasan from the Arabian Thousand and One Nights and he is in a city where men do not have heads. He goes on to find out that the men do not have heads because they have been fed to the King's serpents. One way of looking at it, to me, is a parallel that answers why the identity of these men has been taken from them, and by whom. In the context of questioning the partition of India and the loss of identity of the refugees to Pakistan, it seems to say that partition was the doing of the political higher powers and it ended up taking the heads of the masses who could do nothing about it.