“It was an arranged engagement […] I was nine years old when my parents fixed it. Mustafa Dar was already thirty at that time, but my father wanted someone who could look after me as he had done himself and Mustafa was a man known to Daddyji as a solid type. Then my parents died and Mustafa Dar went to England and said he would send for me. That was many years ago. I have his photo, but he is like a stranger to me. Even his voice, I do not recognize it on the phone.”

Miss Rehana confesses the truth of her story to Muhammad Ali, revealing her contentment with reality and disinterest in the mythic dreams of the West. Her parents hoped she would marry Mustafa Dar and live a stable and happy life in England. Now that her parents have passed away and she is settled in her life in India, Miss Rehana is reluctant to start over. She chooses the familiarity of the known over the unfamiliar and flimsy promises of the unknown—which are represented by her betrothed’s unrecognizable photo and voice.

“That boy could have had a good life. God had blessed him with God’s own looks, and his father had gone to the grave for him, but didn’t he leave the boy a brand-new first-class cycle rickshaw with plastic covered seats and all? So: looks he had, his own trade he had, there would have been a good wife in time, he should just have taken out some years to save some rupees; but no, he must fall for a thief’s widow before the hairs had time to come out on his chin, before his milk-teeth had split, one might say.”

The first-person narrator of “The Free Radio” is so disturbed by the village boy Ramani’s story because he is living vicariously through him. The young man has potential which the narrator envies, and he believes Ramani has squandered. In this passage from the story’s start, the narrator describes Ramani as a fool, disparaging his choices and behaviors. He shadows Ramani’s character with doubt and judgment because he is struggling to reconcile Ramani’s fantasies with his reality.

“‘It is not so bad,’ Ram said, meaning the nasbandi. ‘It does not stop love-making or anything, excuse me, teacher sahib, for speaking of such a thing. It stops babies only and my woman did not want children any more, so now all is hundred per cent OK. Also it is in national interest,’ he pointed out. ‘And soon the free radio will arrive.’”

In “The Free Radio,” Ramani assures the narrator that getting a voluntary vasectomy has more benefits than drawbacks—namely, his new bride’s happiness and his own radio. Ramani’s outlook on the forced sterilizations of the State of Emergency disrupts the narrator’s political viewpoints. Ramani’s point of view also conveys how he is being exploited by the state.

“They were wonderful letters, brimming with confidence, but whenever I read them, and sometimes I read them still, I remember the expression which came over his face in the days just before he learned the truth about his radio, and the huge mad energy which he had poured into the act of conjuring reality, by an act of magnificent faith, out of the hot thin air between his cupped hand and his ear.”

The narrator’s reflections on Ramani’s letters further the collection’s theme of The Illusions Provided by False Stories and Promises. Throughout “The Free Radio,” the narrator is incensed by Ramani’s choices and his seeming inability to engage with the reality of their violent political climate. By the story’s end, however, the narrator himself clings to Ramani’s magical thinking, suddenly realizing how freeing these imaginings have been for Ramani and are becoming for him.

“In their children, Atta and Huma, the moneylender and his wife had successfully sought to inculcate the virtues of thrift, plain dealing and a healthy independence of spirit. […] Within a few hours, however, the glassy contentment of that household, of that life of porcelain delicacy and alabaster sensibilities, was to be shattered beyond all hope of repair.”

The stark change in Hashim’s family life captures the profound power the Prophet’s hair has over him. Before finding the hair, Hashim is an orderly, logical, and disciplined person; his family respects him and abides by his neat manner of running the household. After finding the hair, the family’s contentment is quickly “shattered,” revealing Hashim to be a greedy and violent man. The narrator describes their home life as “glassy,” “porcelain,” “delicate,” and “alabaster,” diction which conveys notions of fragility; Hashim was hiding behind a flimsy facade. The passage contributes to the collection’s theme of the illusions provided by false stories and promises.

“These breaches of the family’s unwritten laws of decorum alarmed Atta and Huma, and when, that evening, their mother attempted to calm Hashim down, he struck her on the face with an open hand. Atta leapt to his mother’s defence and he, too, was sent flying. ‘From now on,’ Hashim bellowed, ‘there’s going to be some discipline around here!’”

The narrator’s detailed description of Hashim’s family’s home life creates a tumultuous narrative mood. Diction including “alarmed,” “struck,” “leapt,” “flying,” and “bellowed” enacts Hashim’s emotional intensity and the violence his real character creates for his family. Hashim’s behavior is so unpredictable and uncontrollable, he creates an unsustainable living situation for his family. He demands discipline, yet proves to be entirely undisciplined himself—the hair’s supernatural power revealing his true nature.

“Meanwhile Hashim had erupted into the corridor, having unsheathed the sword inside his cane. […] A shadow came rushing towards him through the midnight darkness of the passageway and, in his somnolent anger, the moneylender thrust his sword fatally through its heart. Turning up the light, he found that he had murdered his daughter, and under the dire influence of this accident he was so overwhelmed by remorse that he turned the sword upon himself, fell upon it and so extinguished his life.”

This series of climactic events conveys the fatal consequences of Hashim’s greed. Instead of returning the Prophet’s hair to the mosque, Hashim keeps it for himself so he might bolster his curio collection; in turn, he wreaks havoc on his home and family. This sequence of hyperbolic and violent events—the death of Atta, followed by Huma’s murder, and Hashim’s death by suicide—have a Shakespearean quality that conveys the deadly repercussions of avarice. These events also formally foreshadow those depicted in the subsequent short story “Yorick.”

“Sir, of course the jester had a wife; she may not feature in the great man’s play, but you’ll concede that a woman’s a necessary apparatus if a man would make a dynasty, and how else?—answer me that?—could the antique Fool have produced that Line, that veritable Monologue of Yoricks of whom the ill-named Tristram person’s parson was but one single syllable?”

Assuming a Shakespearean quality, the first-person narrator of “Yorick” breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to his imagined audience. The narrator is relaying a new version of the Hamlet story he recently discovered on an ancient piece of vellum. Amid his recounting, his audience interrupts and asks questions—intrusions which represent Rushdie’s reader’s possible problems with the text. The result is a narrative self-consciousness, which challenges the boundaries between fiction and reality.

“I must show you Hamlet sleepless in his bed,—but where’s the fellow who can portray an absence?—of sleep, I mean, and of a mother’s kiss upon his cheek,—for a cheek unkissed resembles in all particulars a cheek for which no osculation had been hoped, and a boy shewn horizontal in his cot, and subject to the tergiversations & other Frenzies characteristic of insomnia, may nevertheless be taken for a child plagued […] at being forbidden the grown-ups’ table.”

In “Yorick,” the first-person narrator offers a new portrayal of Shakespeare’s Hamlet character. Instead of depicting him as the mentally unstable, untrustworthy, and vengeful Prince of Denmark, the narrator depicts him as a young, lonely child starved of maternal attention. This new glimpse at Hamlet’s humanity is meant to offer insight into Hamlet’s acts against Yorick, and later against Horwendillus, Ophelia, and Claudius.

“We revere the ruby slippers because we believe they can make us invulnerable to witches […] because of their powers of reverse metamorphosis, their affirmation of a lost state of normalcy in which we have almost ceased to believe and to which the slippers promise us we can return; and because they shine like the footwear of the gods.”

In “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers,” the narrator describes why the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz have such a cult following and are such coveted objects. The slippers are “revered” for their alleged magical “powers.” Their admirers believe that the slippers might in fact transport the individual to new worlds, according to their heart’s desires. Diction including “invulnerable,” “witches,” “metamorphosis,” “shine,” and “gods” present the slippers in a mystical light, which echoes their symbolic significance. The shoes give the narrator hope of exacting his impossible dreams, which over time prove increasingly unattainable.

“Are we asking, hoping for, too much? As our numberless needs emerge from their redoubts and press in upon the electrified glass, will the shoes, like the Grimms; ancient flatfish, lose patience with our ever-growing demands and return us to the hovels of our discontents?”

The narrator’s desperation to procure the ruby slippers furthers the collection’s theme of the Search for Home and Belonging. The narrator has felt so unmoored since he and his ex-lover, Gale, broke up that he is willing to go to extreme lengths to win her back. In this moment, he is momentarily self-aware enough to recognize his dream as “too much.” Yet he still longs to remain in the fantasy the slippers offer him—that the impossible is possible if he only believes.

“So it is that my cousin Gale loses her hold over me in the crucible of the auction. So it is that I drop out of the bidding, go home, and fall asleep. When I awake I feel refreshed, and free.”

In this climactic passage of “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers,” the narrator ultimately lets go of his fantasies and returns to reality. The higher the price on the ruby slippers goes, the more impossible it becomes for the narrator to buy the shoes and give them to Gale. He breaks free of this fantasy, which he describes as a “crucible”—a metaphor which conjures notions of a great, crushing burden.

“The Queen plays with Columbus. At luncheon she promises him everything he wants; then cuts him dead later the same afternoon, looking through him as if he were a veil. […] She banishes him to the stables and piggeries for forty days. He sits forlorn on horse-munched hay while his thoughts run on distant, fabled gold. He dreams of the Queen’s perfumes but awakes, gagging, in a pigsty. Toying with Columbus pleases the Queen.”

In “Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain Consummate Their Relationship,” the author uses humor and hyperbole to comment on the possible dangers of greed and desire. Christopher Columbus is so desperate to procure his boats for his voyage that he falls sway to Queen Isabella’s games. Queen Isabella is so determined to maintain her power and reputation that she becomes involved in elaborate schemes to humiliate Columbus. The absurdity of the passage reiterates the illusions provided by false stories and promises.

“He walks beyond fatigue, beyond the limits of endurance and the frontiers of self, and somewhere along this path he loses his balance, he falls off the edge of his sanity, and out here beyond his mind’s rim he sees, for the first and only time in his life, a vision.”

In this passage, Christopher Columbus becomes so caught up in his own disappointed dreams that he loses touch with reality. He is unable to move, loses his balance, cannot see, and nearly “falls off the edge of sanity.” His desire and greed for more are so encompassing, they overtake his physical, sensory, and mental functioning.

“All at once she remembers Columbus […] Columbus, the invisible man who dreams of entering the invisible world, the unknown and perhaps even unknowable world beyond the Edge of Things, beyond the stone bowl of the everyday, beyond the thick blood of the sea. Columbus in this bitter dream makes Isabella see the truth at last, makes her accept that her need for him is as great as his for her.”

Queen Isabella’s dream about the future compels her to back Columbus’s mission and give him the boats and money he needs to explore overseas. It is a fantasy—an unconscious vision of the future—which dictates the Queen’s actions in her waking life. The passage thus conveys the power of desires and dreams to control the individual, and to overtake her sense of logic and reality.

“It hadn’t worked. As we shrieked at Eliot’s ghost stories, we knew that the demon had traced the number on his car license-plates, that it could call him any time on his unlisted telephone; that it had rediscovered his home address.”

Throughout “The Harmony of the Spheres,” the narrator tries to make sense of his late friend Eliot Crane’s life with paranoid schizophrenia. The narrative alternates between atmospheric and emotional extremes, which mimic Eliot’s psychological vacillations. The narrator wants to regard “Eliot’s ghost stories” as diverting tales, but privately acknowledges that they portend another paranoid episode for his friend. The narrator struggles to reconcile these disparate facets of his friend’s character and behavior throughout the short story, because he relates to Eliot’s ever-swaying moods.

“Lucy would phone with bulletins: the drugs were working, the drugs were not working because he refused to take them regularly, he seemed better as long as he did not try to write, he seemed worse because not writing plunged him into such deep depressions, he was passive and inert, he was raging and violent, he was filled with guilt and despair.”

The narrator’s description of his late friend Eliot’s psychological and emotional extremes acts as a metaphor for the divided self. In one moment, Eliot will respond to his medications, while in the next he will stop responding; in one moment, writing is good for him, while in the next it debilitates him. The same is true of the narrator’s internal conflict. He often feels immobilized by his attempts at Navigating Cross-Cultural Identity, caught between similarly polarizing thoughts and feelings.

“We were the most unlikely of friends. I liked hot weather, he preferred it grey and damp. I had a Zapata moustache and shoulder-length hair, he wore tweeds and corduroy. I was involved in fringe theatre, race relations and anti-war protests. He weekended on the country-house circuit, killing animals and birds.”

The narrator’s and Eliot’s contrasting characters furthers the novel’s theme of navigating cross-cultural identity. Although the narrator and Eliot are best friends, they are nothing alike—having different sensibilities and engaging in different pastimes. The same is true of the narrator’s—and many of the collection’s primary characters’—experiences of the diaspora. The characters feel as if they belong to two places at once, perpetually caught between these geographical and cultural extremes. Ultimately, the two realms are unreconcilable, and the characters most often have to let go of one to embrace the other; in “The Harmony of Spheres” this “letting go” is symbolized by Eliot’s death by suicide.

“‘It wasn’t really him writing,’ she consoled me mechanically. ‘He was sick.’ And I know what made him sick, I thought; and vowed silently to remain well. Since then there has been no intercourse between the spiritual world and mine. Mesmer’s ‘influential fluid’ evaporated for ever as I plunged through the putrid tea-chests of my friend’s mad filth.”

Sorting through Eliot’s papers and writings after his death complicates how the narrator sees and understands himself. For years, he wanted to believe in his friend’s brilliance (despite and because of his mental illness). After his death, he is forced to acknowledge the severity of his friend’s condition, and his own participation in it. He writes off Eliot’s writings as “putrid, mad filth” because to prove his own sanity he must declare his friend insane.

“‘You liked toys and games,’ he said. Zulu had been a crack rifle shot, the school’s champion wrestler, and an expert fencer. ‘Every Speech Day,’ Zulu said, ‘I would sit in the hall and clap, while you went up for all the work prizes. English Prize, History Prize, Latin Prize, Form Prize. Clap, clap, clap, term after term, year after year. But on Sports Day I got my cups.’”

As is true of the friendship at the heart of “The Harmony of the Spheres,” Chekov and Zulu’s friendship in “Chekov and Zulu” is a marriage of opposites. The friends have been close for many years despite their marked differences. In this scene of dialogue, the companions marvel and exclaim at their differences, declaring themselves blood brothers despite how little they have in common. They want to believe that their dichotomies are what make their connection work; however, they ultimately have a falling out and cannot reconcile their political differences. Their friendship is also a metaphor for navigating cross-cultural identities; one cultural identity must ultimately cede to the other.

“The scene around him vanished, dissolving in a pool of light, and was replaced by the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. All the leading figures were in their appointed places. Zulu sat beside Chekov at the front.”

After Chekov and Zulu have their falling out, Chekov loses himself in imagined experiences with his now estranged friend. He fondly remembers all the time they would get lost in their diverting Star Trek fantasy; this imaginary game offers Chekov a balm to his grief and allows him to escape the pain of losing Zulu.

“For whatever reason, it has become more important than ever to set down the story I’ve been carrying around unwritten for so long, the story of Aya and the gentle man whom she renamed—with unintentional but prophetic overtones of romance—‘the courter’. I see now that it is not just their story, but ours, mine, as well.”

In “The Courter,” the narrator’s nanny Certainly-Mary’s sudden reappearance in his life inspires the narrator to reflect on his childhood past. In doing so, he is attempting to confront and acknowledge his South Asian roots and to reconcile with his familial history. He begins his tale with a melancholic and thoughtful tone, which conveys his emotional investment in this era of his life.

My existing Indian passport permitted me to travel only to a very few countries, which were carefully listed on the second right-hand page. But I might soon have a British passport and then, by hook or by crook, I would get away from him. I would not have this face-pulling in my life.”

The narrator’s reflections on his Indian versus British passports contribute to the collection’s theme of the search for home and belonging. The narrator is determined to secure his British passport because his Indian passport feels insufficient. He doesn’t regard India as “home” because the place has never afforded him a solidified sense of self. He thus hopes a British passport would grant him a more definite sense of belonging beyond his familial origins. He wants to sever his family ties (which he associates with his “face-pulling” father) because he wants an independent, singular identity and home.