The short stories collected in East, West interrogate fiction’s capacity to either redeem or ensnare the individual. In the stories found in Part 1, “East,” the primary characters often find themselves overtaken by fantasies, myths, or superstitions they hope might deliver them from their otherwise mundane circumstances. In “Good Advice Is Rarer Than Rubies,” for example, Muhammad Ali believes in the power of his own deceptions. He is in the habit of telling women who come to the consulate in desperate hope of immigrating from India to the United Kingdom that he knows a good man at the consulate who can guarantee them a British passport: “I have a good friend who will put your name and photo, and then, hey-presto, England there you come” (11). His scam in turn allows his victims to believe even more ardently in the myth of Western freedom and ultimate happiness. 

In “The Free Radio,” the gullible and naive Ramani similarly buys into a myth sold to him by the government. He volunteers himself for sterilization, convinced it is worth it because he will get a free transistor radio in exchange. He then proceeds to act as if he already owns the radio, his imagination transporting him out of reality and into a more pleasant fiction. In “The Prophet’s Hair,” Hashim initially disbelieves in the power of religious relics until the Prophet Muhammad’s hair captivates him, causing him to mutate into an unfamiliar iteration of himself.

While the stories in Part 1 explore how myth and fantasy might offer the illusion of escape, the collection’s subsequent stories reveal the possible fraudulence in these promises. In “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers,” for example, happiness, belonging, and truth are not as attainable as the narrator would hope. Throughout the auction, the narrator is determined to procure the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz because he hopes they will help him win back his ex-lover, Gale, and secure lasting happiness and fulfillment. However, the higher the price on the slippers goes, the more detached from reality the narrator becomes. His internal monologue during the bidding scene captures the power of fantasy to divorce the individual from reality and from themselves:

In fiction’s 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 (102).

This passage poses Western dreams of wealth, accomplishment, and happiness as lies. The more the individual attains, the more she wants—until she has discarded her entire life in hopes of procuring some impossible totem of contentment. This is, Rushdie implies, the myth of Western capitalism, which endangers the individual’s psychological safety and relational health. 

The subsequent story, “Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain Consummate Their Relationship” similarly conveys how happiness and truth are unachievable according to the West’s individualistic society, and notions of domination, expansion, and success at its heart. Although Queen Isabella looks into a prophetic bowl and discovers that she will someday attain the entire known world, she remains dissatisfied, convinced that she won’t be happy until she attains the unknown, too. The constant pursuits of one’s desires, Rushdie’s stories imply, inhibit the pursuit of meaning and truth.