East, West
Authors: Salman Rushdie
ACCLAIM
FOR
Salman Rushdie’s
East, West
“A master of perpetual storytelling.”
—
The New Yorker
“No one writes more convincingly of the tug between old and new, home and the allure of the unknown.”
—
Time
“These stories are recounted with wit and make for entirely enjoyable reading.”
—
The New York Times
“Fascinating.… Rushdie is an author who can do anything with words.”
—
The New York Review of Books
“A concise sampler of the delights of Rushdie’s
oeuvre
.… The varied stories in
East, West
are deceptively simple.… Rushdie fans will eagerly add this to their collections.”
—
San Francisco Chronicle
“A splendid introduction to [Rushdie’s] many-faceted reality … tender and rueful in its regard for human hope and frailty.”
—
Chicago Tribune
“[Of the stories] in
East, West
, one or two remain sweetly confined. In the others, the bandages are off and the author’s rage and bitter irony assert themselves.… Two or three gleam as exuberantly as anything he has done.”
—
Los Angeles Times
BOOKS
BY
Salman Rushdie
FICTION
The Moor’s Last Sigh
East, West
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
The Satanic Verses
Shame
Midnight’s Children
Grimus
NONFICTION
‘The Wizard of Oz’
Imaginary Homelands
The Jaguar Smile
Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie is the author of ten books, including
Shame
,
The Satanic Verses
,
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
, and
Midnight’s Children
, which in 1993 was adjudged the “Booker of Bookers.” He was awarded the European Union’s Aristeion Literary Prize for
The Moor’s Last Sigh
.
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JANUARY 1996
Copyright © 1994 by Salman Rushdie
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Great Britain in hardcover by Jonathan Cape Ltd., London, in 1994. First published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1995.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Rushdie, Salman
East, West: stories/Salman Rushdie
p. cm.
ISBN 0-679-43965-X
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-5233-4
I. Title.
PR6068.U757E27 1995
823’.914—DC20 94-28277
Vintage ISBN: 0-679-75789-9
v3.1
for Andrew and Gillon
CONTENTS
Good Advice Is Rarer Than Rubies
At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers
Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain Consummate Their Relationship (
Santa Fé
,
AD
1492
)
East
G
OOD
A
DVICE
I
S
R
ARER
T
HAN
R
UBIES
On the last Tuesday of the month, the dawn bus, its headlamps still shining, brought Miss Rehana to the gates of the British Consulate. It arrived pushing a cloud of dust, veiling her beauty from the eyes of strangers until she descended. The bus was brightly painted in multicoloured arabesques, and on the front it said ‘MOVE OVER DARLING’ in green and gold letters; on the back it added ‘TATA-BATA’ and also ‘O.K. GOOD-LIFE’. Miss Rehana told the driver it was a beautiful bus, and he jumped down and held the door open for her, bowing theatrically as she descended.
Miss Rehana’s eyes were large and black and bright enough not to need the help of antimony, and when the advice expert Muhammad Ali saw them he felt himself becoming young again. He watched her approaching the Consulate gates as the light strengthened, and asking the bearded lala who guarded them in a gold-buttoned khaki uniform with a cockaded turban when they would open. The lala, usually so rude to the Consulate’s Tuesday women, answered Miss Rehana with something like courtesy.
‘Half an hour,’ he said gruffly. ‘Maybe two hours. Who knows? The sahibs are eating their breakfast.’
The dusty compound between the bus stop and the Consulate was already full of Tuesday women, some veiled, a few barefaced like Miss Rehana. They all looked frightened, and leaned heavily on the arms of uncles or brothers, who were trying to look confident. But Miss Rehana had come on her own, and did not seem at all alarmed.
Muhammad Ali, who specialised in advising the most vulnerable-looking of these weekly supplicants, found his feet leading him towards the strange, big-eyed, independent girl.
‘Miss,’ he began. ‘You have come for permit to London, I think so?’
She was standing at a hot-snack stall in the little shanty-town by the edge of the compound, munching chilli-pakoras contentedly. She turned to look at him, and at close range those eyes did bad things to his digestive tract.
‘Yes, I have.’
‘Then, please, you allow me to give some advice? Small cost only.’
Miss Rehana smiled. ‘Good advice is rarer than rubies,’ she said. ‘But alas, I cannot pay. I am an orphan, not one of your wealthy ladies.’
‘Trust my grey hairs,’ Muhammad Ali urged her.
‘My advice is well tempered by experience. You will certainly find it good.’
She shook her head. ‘I tell you I am a poor potato. There are women here with male family members, all earning good wages. Go to them. Good advice should find good money.’
I am going crazy
, Muhammad Ali thought, because he heard his voice telling her of its own volition, ‘Miss, I have been drawn to you by Fate. What to do? Our meeting was written. I also am a poor man only, but for you my advice comes free.’
She smiled again. ‘Then I must surely listen. When Fate sends a gift, one receives good fortune.’
He led her to the low wooden desk in his own special corner of the shanty-town. She followed, continuing to eat pakoras from a little newspaper packet. She did not offer him any.
Muhammad Ali put a cushion on the dusty ground. ‘Please to sit.’ She did as he asked. He sat cross-legged across the desk from her, conscious that two or three dozen pairs of male eyes were watching him enviously, that all the other shanty-town men were ogling the latest young lovely to be charmed by the old grey-hair fraud. He took a deep breath to settle himself.
‘Name, please.’
‘Miss Rehana,’ she told him. ‘Fiancée of Mustafa Dar of Bradford, London.’
‘Bradford, England,’ he corrected her gently. ‘London is a town only, like Multan or Bahawalpur. England is a great nation full of the coldest fish in the world.’
‘I see. Thank you,’ she responded gravely, so that he was unsure if she was making fun of him.
‘You have filled application form? Then let me see, please.’
She passed him a neatly folded document in a brown envelope.
‘Is it OK?’ For the first time there was a note of anxiety in her voice.
He patted the desk quite near the place where her hand rested. ‘I am certain,’ he said. ‘Wait on and I will check.’
She finished the pakoras while he scanned her papers.
‘Tip-top,’ he pronounced at length. ‘All in order.’
‘Thank you for your advice,’ she said, making as if to rise. ‘I’ll go now and wait by the gate.’
‘What are you thinking?’ he cried loudly, smiting his forehead. ‘You consider this is easy business? Just give the form and poof, with a big smile they hand over the permit? Miss Rehana, I tell you, you are entering a worse place than any police station.’
‘Is it so, truly?’ His oratory had done the trick. She was a captive audience now, and he would be able to look at her for a few moments longer.
Drawing another calming breath, he launched into his set speech. He told her that the sahibs thought that all the women who came on Tuesdays, claiming to be dependents of bus drivers in Luton or chartered accountants in Manchester, were crooks and liars and cheats.
She protested, ‘But then I will simply tell them that I, for one, am no such thing!’
Her innocence made him shiver with fear for her. She was a sparrow, he told her, and they were men with hooded eyes, like hawks. He explained that they would ask her questions, personal questions, questions such as a lady’s own brother would be too shy to ask. They would ask if she was virgin, and, if not, what her fiancé’s love-making habits were, and what secret nicknames they had invented for one another.
Muhammad Ali spoke brutally, on purpose, to lessen the shock she would feel when it, or something like it, actually happened. Her eyes remained steady, but her hands began to flutter at the edges of the desk.
He went on:
‘They will ask you how many rooms are in your
family home, and what colour are the walls, and what days do you empty the rubbish. They will ask your man’s mother’s third cousin’s aunt’s step-daughter’s middle name. And all these things they have already asked your Mustafa Dar in his Bradford. And if you make one mistake, you are finished.’
‘Yes,’ she said, and he could hear her disciplining her voice. ‘And what is your advice, old man?’
It was at this point that Muhammad Ali usually began to whisper urgently, to mention that he knew a man, a very good type, who worked in the Consulate, and through him, for a fee, the necessary papers could be delivered, with all the proper authenticating seals. Business was good, because the women would often pay him five hundred rupees or give him a gold bracelet for his pains, and go away happy.
They came from hundreds of miles away – he normally made sure of this before beginning to trick them – so even when they discovered they had been swindled they were unlikely to return. They went away to Sargodha or Lalukhet and began to pack, and who knows at what point they found out they had been gulled, but it was at a too-late point, anyway.
Life is hard, and an old man must live by his wits. It
was not up to Muhammad Ali to have compassion for these Tuesday women.
But once again his voice betrayed him, and instead of starting his customary speech it began to reveal to her his greatest secret.