MEMORIES OF A MOHAJIR 71 are best-sellers to boot. The timing of his work to coincide with the Raj-nostalgia phase intensifies this initial suspicion which is unrelieved by the publicity given to his work in the mass media and by the winning of the Booker McConnell Prize for Fiction. Rushdie anticipates this hostility from a sub-continental audience: Outsider! Tresspasser! You have no right to this subject!...We reject your authority. We know you, with your foreign language mapped around you like a flag: Speaking about us in your forked tongue, what can you tell us but lies? (Shame, p 28). It would be easy enough to dismiss him in these terms and to castigate his selective middle-class memory of the sub-continent which gives equal importance to the Nanavati scandal of the 'fifties and the liberation of Bangladesh in the early 'seventies. One might, again with some justification, question the seriousness of an author who ignores (in Midnights Children) the genuine popular movements of the period with which he deals, such as Tebhaga, Rashidali Day or Telangana. This is a criticism levelled against him in an otherwise favourable review of Midnight^ Children by Tariq Ali in the New Left Review. But to do this would be to ignore the undeniable power of his writing and also to fail to recognise that he belongs to a new phase of the Anglo-Indian encounter. He is a voluntary exile from the land(s) of his forefathers; he lives in the United Kingdom and represents the curious shadowy twilit existence of the Asian immigrant there, now a fact of the British scene, Enoch Powell and Paki-bashing notwithstanding, but continuing to be like the hero of the Shame, off-centred and at an angle to reality, both in Britain and in the sub-continent. He deserves to be read seriously for this reason. I hope I am not suggesting that he is a waif or refugee or even a member of the little India that is epitomised by Southall. He is much too suave and sophisticated for that: < The layers of experience, however, give him an international mythology so that the traditional sub-continental mythology rubs shoulders with Yggdrasil and Beauty and the Beast, Khaansi-ki-rani, the Hindi cinema and the Koran with Bellow and Buchner, while the apocryphal story of Napier's conquest ofSind gives his imaginary landscape a name, Peccavistan, which ties up with the central motif of Shame. The central tale of the Shame is an allegory of present-day Pakistan. Moving concurrently with this fable is an insistent authorial persona