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.