Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies

“[The bus] arrived pushing a cloud of dust, veiling her beauty from the eyes of strangers until she descended.”

The use of the word “veiling” is intentional, as the history of the veil for women in Pakistan is a long and contested one. That the veil shrouding Miss Rehana is street dust is satirical, upending the assumption that she would be veiled at all. Miss Rehana’s introduction thus foreshadows the challenge she will pose to gender norms and colonial institutions, establishing the theme of The (Western) Male Gaze and Constructions of Femininity.

“The lala, usually so rude to the Consulate’s Tuesday women, answered Miss Rehana with something like courtesy. ‘Half an hour,’ he said gruffly. ‘Maybe two hours. Who knows? The sahibs are eating their breakfast.’”

The lala’s response is not truly courteous, despite the narrator suggesting otherwise. The juxtaposition of the narrator’s description with the lala’s actual response is humorous and pokes fun at the lala while demonstrating how little the guards (and by extension the Consulate) care for the Tuesday women.

“She turned to look at him, and at close range those eyes did bad things to his digestive tract.”

This passage conveys the supposed power inherent in the beauty of the Other (gendered or racial), which renders its viewer powerless. Muhammad Ali sees Miss Rehana simultaneously as a desirable object and as a preternaturally powerful agent.