Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies

As precious stones, rubies have long symbolized power and wealth; they were also among the treasures looted by the British during their occupation of India. The story’s title plays on these associations, uniting the pretext for imperialism (spreading “civilization”) with its reality (resource extraction) to suggest both the rarity of good advice and its actual worth. In a setting full of changing power dynamics and actors (including the British Consulate) ready to exploit them, Miss Rehana notes just how rare it is to receive genuine counsel. Her awareness of this foreshadows that she holds the most power in the story.

The Tuesday women are visitors to the British Consulate who come weekly seeking passage to England. Often accompanied by male family members who, according to Miss Rehana, are gainfully employed, they are seen by characters in the story as simultaneously naive and manipulative: Muhammad describes them as easy to con, the narrator describes them as anxious and desperate, and the Consulate fears they will seek entry to England at any cost.

As a motif, the Tuesday women therefore develop the theme of The (Western) Male Gaze and Constructions of Femininity. The way other characters respond to them reveals the paradoxical assumption that women and/or migrants are both deceptive and vulnerable (the interchangeability implied by the name “Tuesday women” suggests their role as representative of the migrant identity as perceived by others). Miss Rehana’s character development suggests that the women are in fact complex characters irreducible to categories of either “victim” or “victimizer.” Their presence in the story thus exposes the irony of the Consulate’s screening procedures, which take these categories as a given and dole out passage to England (likewise assumed to be an uncomplicated good) accordingly.

The British Consulate functions as a symbol of power. Like the gates that the lala guards, the Consulate is the gate to England and would therefore seem to represent colonial power specifically. However, the story never directly depicts the Consulate wielding that power; rather, it shows marginalized characters—most notably Muhammad Ali and Miss Rehana—coopting the Consulate’s power in various ways, suggesting that imperial relations are not so one-sided as readers might assume, and highlighting Colonialism’s Displacements and Destabilizations. In fact, the reader never even sees the inside of the Consulate, though it looms large at each turn in the story. In a commentary on the nature of power itself, the Consulate is at once all pervasive and ambiguous.