East West - Salman Rushdie

I had picked up rushdie's ''east west'' from the library recently and wanted to share my thoughts and ask you for yours. starting from the shallow end of the pool, I loved the cover! this one's a 1995 edition by vintage, London. it's got a beautiful painting of a rickshaw-wallah carrying his six passengers (an illustration from one of the short stories) and in the sky there's an aeroplane carrying turban wearing men and odhni clad women away from a temple. the book is split into three parts, with three short stories, the settings each corresponding to their titles ''east'', ''west'' and ''east west''. the nine stories illustrate the brilliant range that rushdie is capable of, starting from an alternative story of Yorick and prince hamlet to visa applicants hopes to hired thieves to Indian diplonauts (!) during the time of Indira Gandhi's assassination to a fantastic description of an auction of ''ruby slippers'' as social commentary. having said that, I wasn't very moved by the ''east'' stories. I enjoyed the way they were written, but thought the characters ALL sounded a little too eccentric. I liked the ''good advice is rarer than rubies'' one the best because the female character was totally in control of what she wanted in her life, despite society's umpteenth attempts to ''save'' her from doing her own thing. lovely! the stories in ''west'' were really good! I loved ''at the auction of the ruby slippers'' where rushdie describes an auction being held for the magical ruby slippers where various fantastic creatures -- sometimes human, sometimes animal, sometimes mythical -- are desperately bidding for the slippers, blind in the hope that magic that the slippers are rumored to be capable of doing will save them. their panic and desperation is sometimes touching, sometimes odd and sometimes pathetic. to me, it symbolised how we are a mixture of all those characters, frantically looking for ''magic'' in our lives by hoping to find all consuming requited love. to quote rushdie: ''at the height of an auction, when the money has become no more than a way of keeping score, a thing happens which I am reluctant to admit: one becomes detached from earth. there is a loss of gravity, a reduction in weight, a floating capsule of the struggle. the ultimate goal crosses a delirious frontier. its achievement and our own survival become - yes!-fictions. and fictions, as I have come close to suggesting before, are dangerous. in fictions grip, we may mortgage our homes, sell our children, to have whatever it is we crave. alternatively in that miasmal ocean, we may simply float away from our desires, and see them anew, from a distance, so that they seem weightless, trivial. we let them go. like men dying in a blizzard, we lie down in the snow to rest.'' it was worth reading the book, just for these words. the next story is titled, ''Christopher Columbus and queen Isabella of Spain consummate their relationship''. its an imagined history of how Isabella was stringing Columbus along until she agreed to finance his westward journey. hilarious, yes, moving, no. I had gone to the Al hambra this summer, so a lot of the details he mentions made sense and I enjoyed the story. the next story is probably my least favourite: ''the harmony of the spheres''. its about a desi guy (khan) and his friendship with a welsh academic who is suferring from schizophrenia while writing a book on the occults.

His wife, Lisa, and Khan's wife Mala are both bystanders in this grand opera of a bizarre friendship that seems to outlast bouts of hostile virulence. I cant imagine why. at the end, khan goes thru his now-mercifully-dead friend's papers and discovers the ''kahani mei twist'' that seemed too contrived and hurried. oh well. moving on... wahey! secret files, conspiracy, revolution, rebellion and boarding school speak--all this and more when Indian bureaucrats in London, two school chums from Doon are reunited and rejuvenate their star trek fascination, in a story called ''Chekhov and Zulu''. unfortunately for me the characters were fleshed out using star-trek metaphors,since I am the black ho-le of all star-trek knowledge, all the ''in jokes'' were lost on me. however, the dialogues were strongly written (altho they may be hard to comprehend by non-Indians), clearly showing the tensions between the two friends, as one is trying to convince the other about rebelling against complaicancy and his friend is pretending to be obtuse because he doesn't want to cross certain lines into radicalism as a career diplomat. a very good story with a believable ending. the last story is ''the courter'', about a well to do Pakistani family who send their son to an English boarding school in the late 1950's/early 1960's. (the autobiographical elements are obvious!)Eventually the family moves to the UK for a year, when the narrator and his sisters grow up, quarelling and distancing their way thru adolescence. the star of the story is the children's ayah called ''certainly-Mary'' (because of her tendency to speak with such certitude) and their hall porter ''mixed up'' (whose bhalo naam has way too many consonants to be pronounceable). the story evolves mainly around their courtship, with mixed-up's heroism in saving Mary and her mistress from being assaulted as a high point, but digresses here and there without really adding to the plot. the point of the story is to show how different people adjust to the tension of belonging to both, east and west, something that isn't too uncommon is rushdie's writing. the author's aya chose to go back forcefully, while his father moved the family back without a bang, and the author decided to stay back with his new British passport. the narrator says that he refuses to choose. I think more could have been said about the fights his 11 year old sister was having with her father and the 16 year old's desire to break from his family. all in all, a good read. next on my reading list is Grimus, which rushdie himself described as having bombed. oh dear. ..Pranjal...

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