East, West: Stories
Salman Rushdie
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 0679757899
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Satanic Verses comes nine stories that reveal the oceanic distances and the unexpected intimacies between East and West. Daring, extravagant, comical and humane, this book renews Rushdie's stature as a storyteller who can enthrall and instruct us with the same sentence.
our Nietzschean, relativistic universe. Behaviourist philosophers and quantum scientists crowd around the magic shoes. They make indecipherable notes. Exiles, displaced persons of all sorts, even homeless tramps have turned up for a glimpse of the impossible. They have emerged from their subterranean hollows and braved the bazookas, the Uzi-armed gangs high on crack or smack or ice, the smugglers, the emptiers of houses. The tramps wear stenchy jute ponchos and hawk noisily into the giant
in his eyes. ‘Do you care nothing for our friendship? For my responsibilities in life?’ Chekov was abashed. ‘Quite right, Zools old boy. Too bleddy true. You can’t imagine how delighted I was when I learned we would be able to join forces like this in London. Nothing like the friendships of one’s boyhood, eh? Nothing in the world can take their place. Now listen, you great lummox, no more of that long face. I won’t permit it. Great big chap like you shouldn’t look like he’s about to blub. Blood
resign. You should quit, too.’ ‘If you have gone so damn radical,’ cried Chekov, ‘why hand over these lists at all? Why go only half the bleddy hog?’ ‘I am a security wallah,’ said Zulu, opening the car door. ‘Terrorists of all sorts are my foes. But not, apparently, in certain circumstances, yours.’ ‘Zulu, get in, damn it,’ Chekov shouted. ‘Don’t you care for your career? A wife and four kiddiwinks to support. What about your old chums? Are you going to turn your back on me?’ But Zulu was
raise my sisters and me, and her great adventure with her ‘courier’ in London, where we all lived for a time in the early Sixties in a block called Waverley House; but what with one thing and another I never got round to it. Then recently I heard from Certainly-Mary after a longish silence. She wrote to say that she was ninety-one, had had a serious operation, and would I kindly send her some money, because she was embarrassed that her niece, with whom she was now living in the Kurla district of
in the master bedroom, the three of us in a much smaller room, and Mary, I regret to admit, on a straw mat laid on the fitted carpet in the hall. The third bedroom became my father’s office, where he made phone-calls and kept his Encyclopaedia Britannica, his Reader’s Digests, and (under lock and key) the television cabinet. We entered it at our peril. It was the Minotaur’s lair. One morning he was persuaded to drop in at the corner pharmacy and pick up some supplies for the baby. When he