Will - Rushdie - 3/2

On page 276, the passage that begins "My mumani . . . " starts in the voice of the narrator Saleem, describing a charming scene from his youth when his film-star aunt made him act out scenes with her.  But the image of innocence is undercut with the detail that Saleem is "trying to keep my eyes away from two impossible orbs, spherical as melons, golden as mangoes."  This is a schoolboy's way of describing breasts, similar to when Saleem described his mother's butt as a giant black mango.  The phrase captures the awkwardness of Saleem's position at that moment:  he is being treated as a child, but he is in the beginning stages of his sexual maturity.  Pia then gives a melodramatic soliloquy, with "one arm flung across her brow."  She laments her declining fame and her simple life with Hanif, and ends with the ridiculous phrase:  "But I know this:  my face is my fortune; after that, what riches do I need?"  This is the voice of an actress, declining in fame but still dignified.  Rushdie is poking fun at the melodrama and narcissism of famous people, but in that moment the reader can still admire her self-possession. 

This is not so true when at the next moment Pia switches to the voice of a nagging wife, decrying Hanif's "boring-boring scripts" which are devoid of singing, dancing, drama, or humor.  Pia's monologue ends with the hilarious line, "So you know what he is writing now?  About . . . the Ordinary Life of a Pickle-Factory!"  Hanif, the strictest realist filmmaker ever, is all the while sitting on a "chlorophyll-striped sofa."  Rushdie inserts this detail to connect him to the Kolynos Kid, the smiley child on a toothpaste billboard representing gross consumerist culture.  This allusion keeps the reader from thinking of Hanif as a martyr, and his wife as a soul-sucker.  Saleem doesn't know whose side to take, and neither does the reader.  Rushdie uses different voices to make a common type of scene bewildering (perhaps because to a young child like Saleem it is bewildering).  This scene is funny, but it's a portrait of an unhappy marriage.  It's melodramatic but also psychologically realistic.