Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies

Both separately and together, Miss Rehana and the Tuesday women allow Rushdie to explore competing and often contradictory constructions of femininity—e.g., the notion that women are both vulnerable victims dependent on men’s protection, and manipulative seductresses capable of controlling men’s actions. However, the women do not embody these qualities in themselves (or, if they do, that is not clear from the story, which never grants readers access to their thoughts). Rather, the story depicts its male characters as projecting ideas about femininity onto women like Miss Rehana, only to discover how thoroughly they have misunderstood them. It also engages readers in a parallel process, highlighting how inadequate colonialist stereotypes of “Eastern” femininity are.

Miss Rehana is an enigma from the start, first appearing behind a cloud of dust. Besides physically obscuring her, the dust “veil[s] her beauty from the eyes of strangers,” much like a traditional hijab (5). The paradoxical description—she is veiled, but she isn’t actually wearing a veil—seeks to upend the expectations of Western readers, who cannot easily classify her as either “independent” or “oppressed.” What follows deepens the ambiguity. The description of the other Tuesday women seems to suggest that Miss Rehana is uniquely “liberated”: Only “a few” women are unveiled, and many are leaning on the arms of their male family members. Yet the Consulate views these same women as con artists seeking passage to England through manipulative means and lying about their affiliation to “bus drivers in Luton or chartered accountants in Manchester” (9). To Western eyes, Rushdie suggests, the Tuesday women are at once victimized and victimizers.

Miss Rehana is equally confounding to the story’s characters. She is objectified throughout the narrative, most obviously by Muhammad Ali but also by the shantytown men who “ogle” her. None of the men looking at her actually see her, as evidenced by the contradictory conclusions they draw about her. Miss Rehana possesses apparent powers to make men operate against their will; Muhammad Ali describes her eyes as doing “bad things to his digestive tract” (6), and he wrongly assumes that she was granted passage to England because “[t]he British sahibs have also been drowning in her eyes” (13). Elsewhere, though, she is not an enchantress but an innocent whose supposed naivete “[makes] [Muhammad] shiver with fear for her” (9). These incompatible views of Miss Rehana have nothing to do with who she is: They’re simply projections of men’s desire for her and the various feelings it gives rise to (e.g., Muhammad Ali’s suppressed guilt about conning women like her).

The story only allows readers (and Muhammad) a glimpse of Miss Rehana’s true nature and circumstances in its closing moments, but even then, the portrait is contradictory. Her arranged engagement to an older man she does not know might seem to confirm her “oppression,” but she manages to avoid this fate. In doing so, she returns to working as a servant, but her closing smile suggests she is content with her life. There is also the question of how duplicitously she has acted and whether, assuming she has been intentionally misleading, that makes her conniving by nature or merely someone navigating a difficult situation as best she can. Such ambiguities highlight the difficulty of truly knowing the gendered and/or racialized “Other.” What is clear is that Miss Rehana is the character with the most agency, gaining her independence through the very system meant to strip it from her—and, ironically, the system that assumes it itself grants independence.