72 SOCIAL SCIENTIST who takes the reader into his confidence and appears to share every problem with his audience, while he also gossips, coffee-house style, complete with anecdotes about current events. Thus Bhutto and Zia figure in these gossipy tales while their counterparts in the fiction, Isky Harappa and Raza Hyder, enact the early part of their fictional histories, but when the tale gathers momentum and the asides and confidences diminish we find that these identities have fused and changed kaleidosco-pically, until they are no langer distinguishable. The details in both levels of narrative signify what has been as well as what might have been. The consistent authorial persona intrudes early on to inform you that what he is writing is a modern fairy-tale, a love story. At the same time by listing the actualities of present-day Pakistan while ostensibly rejecting them in favour of his fable, he makes sure that they never stray very far from one's consciousness. Exile can breed a self-involved sentimentality—something I found a little nauseating in Sashthi Brata's My God Died Young, for instance. It might, on the other hand, bring a Joycean comic detachment. Rushdie has cured himself of the former (a little of the residue is to be found in Midnights Children) and not wholly given himself up to the latter; although the mock-epic narration of the life-style of the Three Mothers of Omar Khayyam Shakil culminating in, literally, a deus ex machina (ingeniously constructed long ago by Mistri Balloch) is pure joy. The use of non-English idioms is also structural and not merely a flavour added to the work. Thus ^Arre, fool from somewhere"^ (often used in Midnight9s Children) gives way to the "encyclopaedias of nuance" inherent in words like sharam and takalloufy both of which are central to the plot. Rushdie explores all these nuances through his characters and their relations with each other. Sufiya Zinobia, the idiot child-woman, is the very incarnation of shame as she is the saint "who suffers in our stead'9. Bilquis, her mother, who had survived the holocaust prior to partition with only a dupatta to cover her, subsequently can feel shame for not producing a male heir, for her elder daughter's shame, for her younger daughter's shamelessness in refusing to marry the young man she should have married, and who in the end covers the escaping Raza's shame in a burkha. Omar Khayyam Shakil is debarred from his birth onwards from ever feeling shame which causes an even greater off-centring, and acts as a counterpoint to the movement in Iskander Harappa's life from unrepentant playboy to dubious man of destiny and martyr. There is shame too in the heart of the immigrant who murdered his daughter on account of her relationship with a white man, not in Peccavistan but in "Proper London"—an even more harrowing shame in responding to this shame and sympathising with it. Takallouf similarly pervades relations between husbands and wives and between the protagonists in the power drama and influences major events, withdrawals, resentments. Rushdie is almost pedantic