GOOD ADVICE IS RARER THAN RUBIES

I. Overall Claim

Throughout the narrative of Salman Rushdie’s short story “Good Advice is Rarer

Than Rubies,” originally published in the anthology East, West (SuperSummary, n.d.), there

runs a strong yet implicit thread of postcolonial and realist spirit as the author honestly

depicts the struggles of ordinary individuals such as poor people trying to get by and would-

be immigrants (thus also touching on class dynamics) living in a third-world country like

India that is still dealing with the fallout of British imperialism, which instills in many of

these people a desire to migrate to their colonizers’ country for a chance at a better life,

without resorting to romanticizing such experiences. Postmodernist elements also manifest in

the narrative through its empowerment of those who are traditionally powerless – in this case,

a poor and orphaned young Indian woman who was arranged by her parents to marry a much

older man she barely knows – through the decisions they make to assert their agency and to

reject the norms that the dominant patriarchal, capitalist, and white supremacist institutions in

society would impose on them.

The title of the story is itself a reference to the classic movie “The Wizard of Oz,”

based on L. Frank Baum’s novel “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” where it alludes to the ruby

slippers that would allow Dorothy to leave the mystical and foreign land of Oz and go home

to Kansas (eNotes, n.d.). The line comes up in the actual story when Rehana Begum says that

“good advice is rarer than rubies” in response to Muhammad Ali offering her advice about

applying for a permit to travel to Britain that he promises would be good. In fact, Rehana’s

remark turns out to be true in a sense because the counsel that Ali gave Rehana ended up not

being that good due to his proposal that she illegally use a British passport, a gift that she
turns down because she does not want to be a criminal, though the advice was also ironically

helpful for Rehana in making sure that she would answer all the sahibs’ questions wrong and

thus fail the interview that would have qualified her for the travel documents allowing her to

travel to Britain. This indicates that giving genuinely good and helpful advice is truly far

from an easy task, especially when the one who is supposed to be offering their counsel

shares advice based on misinterpretations they have made regarding the person who is in

need of advice, such as what happened with Ali and Rehana (Matteo, 2018).

II. Analysis of Elements

A. Setting

The story takes place in what seems to be British India, particularly in what is now

known as Pakistan – based on mentions of places like Lahore, Multan, and Bahawalpur – at a

time when the desire for immigration to first-world Western nations like Britain, in light of its

strong colonial influence, was peaking sometime in the twentieth century.

B. Characters

There are two primary characters in the story: Rehana Begum, the beautiful young

woman who has gone to the British Consulate in hopes of getting the papers that will allow

her to travel to England to be with her fiancé, and Muhammad Ali, the poor aging con man

whose life seems to get upturned when he meets Rehana that fateful day outside the consulate.

These two main characters are considered dynamic and round, for they show multiple

character traits that make them nuanced, complex individuals and also manifest an ability to

change and develop as people. Other characters who remain in the background or do not

appear but are prominently mentioned, who would likely be considered static and flat, are
Mustafa Dar, Rehana’s fiancé who is currently residing in England, and the sahibs at the

British Consulate who interview hopeful immigrants-to-be like Rehana in order to decide if

they are legitimately qualified to be given passports and move to Britain or not.

C. Plot

The plot commences with Rehana getting off a bus and arriving at the gates of the

British Consulate while it is still dawn on a Tuesday morning. She is greeted by the sight of a

bustle of people already gathering in the shanty-town outside the consulate, including other

“Tuesday women” like her hoping to qualify for immigration, and goes up to the lala outside

the gates to ask him when they would open. She is told to wait for around half an hour to two

hours since the sahibs are still breaking their fast, and then she is approached by Muhammad

Ali, who had been watching her and considers her strangely intriguing. Deducing the task she

has in mind while at the consulate, he offers to give her some advice for a small fee, but

Rehana declines due to being an impoverished orphan. Insistent that they talk as he continues

to find himself drawn to her, he soon relents to give his advice for free, which Rehana

gracefully accepts.

The pair move to sit at Ali’s booth in the shanty-town and proceed to talk about

Rehana’s business at the consulate. This is when she divulges more information about her

situation: she is engaged to a man named Mustafa Dar who currently lives in Bradford,

England and she has already filled out a form to apply for the permit that she needs in order

to travel to England and live with her fiancé. Ali then checks her documents and declares

them to be in good shape, but stops Rehana before she rises to leave to give her some more

words of advice about dealing with the sahibs at the consulate. He warns her that they tended

to be prejudiced against the Indian “Tuesday women” whom they viewed as crooks and liars,
and that they would not go easy on her during her interview, where they would ask her many

personal and uncomfortable questions about her and her fiancé that were borderline invasive

as a basis of determining if her intentions of immigrating were the real deal or if she was

merely faking her relationship with Mustafa as an excuse to leave India and move to Britain.

Rehana is shocked and protests her innocence but nonetheless listens to Ali as he

continues to shed light on the brutal truth behind the process of applying for a travel permit.

When he is done, she asks for his advice once more, at which point Ali would have tried to

swindle her by directing her to a man he knew in the consulate who would make the

necessary papers for her without having her go through the sahibs’ questioning and she would

pay him a good deal of money for his trouble before later realizing that the documents were

fake, at which point it would be too late. However, for the same strange reason that drew him

to her in the first place, Ali decides to be honest with his client for once, and shows her a

genuine way that she could travel to Britain by herself: a British passport. However, instead

of gratefully and happily accepting the gift, Rehana seems troubled by the idea of committing

such a crime, thinking that doing so would only serve to justify the sahibs’ low opinion of

people like her who were willing to become illegal, undocumented immigrants. She declines

Ali’s offer and then moves to enter the consulate building at this point, despite his protests

that she need not humiliate herself and lose her dignity by undergoing the legal but arduous

process of obtaining travel papers.

For the rest of the day, Ali could do nothing but wallow in his concern and misery as

he hangs around near the consulate’s gates, even though he had told himself that she would

not want to have anything to do with him anymore. When Rehana finally exits the building,

she sees him waiting, and appears calm and at peace once more while talking to him. This

leads Ali to think that she was successful in her endeavor, and filled with hope and happiness,
he congratulates her, at which point she offers to buy him a chili pakora snack as a way of

giving him her thanks and to apologize for her rudeness.

Sometime later, while they are in the afternoon compound near the bus that would

bring her back home, Rehana and Ali talk once more. Rehana tells him the full story behind

her relationship with Mustafa: she was engaged to him at a young age while he was many

years older than her as her parents had considered him a solid, trustworthy companion who

could take care of their daughter, but then her parents had died and Mustafa left for England,

during which he said he would later send for her. Now, several years later, while she has his

photo, she knows practically nothing about the man she is expected to spend the rest of her

life with someday. Ali tries to reassure her that she will now have all the time to get to know

him once she is in England, but then she reveals that she had not passed the interview at the

consulate at all, as she had gotten all the sahibs’ questions wrong due to her lack of

knowledge about Mustafa. Despite Ali’s lamentation of such a supposed tragedy, Rehana

does not appear saddened by the whole ordeal, seemingly happy that she can get back to

Lahore and her job there where she works as an ayah or nanny to three boys, and she tells Ali

not to be sad on her behalf either. Before she leaves, Ali sees her smiling on the bus while he

watches from the compound, and it strikes him as the happiest thing he has ever seen in his

long life.

D. Figurative Language

Like any piece of creative writing, the short story employs figurative language which

is diffused throughout the narrative. Examples of metaphors in the story include the

description of Rehana’s eyes as “large and black and bright enough not to need the help of

antimony” (Rushdie, 1994, p. 5), which could be seen as a metaphor for how her dark eyes
were bright and clear enough without needing to be offset by the silvery-white color of the

antimony metalloid; the saying “England is a great nation full of the coldest fish in the world”

(Rushdie, 1994, p. 8) according to Ali, where the English people appear to have been

compared to cold fish; Ali’s warning to Rehana where he likens her to a sparrow and calls the

consulate’s sahibs men with hooded eyes like hawks – the latter of which is actually written

as a simile (Rushdie, 1994, p. 9); and when Ali calls Rehana “a rare person, a jewel”

(Rushdie, 1994, p. 11) due to her beauty which he is attracted to.

Meanwhile, hyperboles or overstatements are found in the story such as when he says

that looking closely at Rehana’s eyes did bad things to Ali’s digestive tract (Rushdie, 1994, p.

6) which exaggerates the effect of Rehana and her eyes on Ali’s feelings and reactions; in Ali

warning Rehana that the consulate she would be entering was worse than any police station

(Rushdie, 1994, p. 8), exaggerating how bad the sahibs could get in terms of their

interrogation-like interviews in comparison to police officers; when Ali yells that it was their

people’s curse to be foolish and poor after Rehana declines his advice and leaves for the

consulate (Rushdie, 1994, p. 12), as a way of over-emphasizing the Indian people’s

misfortune; and when Rehana and Ali are now in the afternoon compound where a hawker

was shouting at them and other passengers while trying to sell their wares of love stories and

green medicines, both of which supposedly cured unhappiness (Rushdie, 1994, pp. 13-14)

where the healing impact of the love stories and green medicines are exaggerated for effect.

On the other hand, an example of synecdoche is Ali telling Rehana to “trust my grey hairs”

(Rushdie, 1994, p. 6) when he offers her his advice, where the gray hairs are a stand-in for Ali

himself as a roundabout way of telling Rehana to trust him because of the implication that he

is wise due to his old age. There is also an erotema when Ali laments Rehana’s decision to

supposedly be a fool and says “What goes of my father’s if you are?” (Rushdie, 1994, p. 12),
which is posed as a rhetorical question. A possible apostrophe is also seen when Ali thinks to

himself “My God, ya Allah, she has pulled it off” (Rushdie, 1994, p. 13), with God or Allah

as the addressee, after Ali sees how calm Rehana is when she leaves the consulate building

and assumes that she has perfectly aced the interview by leaving the sahibs bewitched with

her eyes as well.

Irony is also employed in the narrative, through situational irony in particular, where

Rehana is at the British Consulate hoping to get a travel permit to Britain at the beginning of

the story, but then she is waylaid by Ali who advises her with a means of travel that is

different but also illegal since it is more difficult to legally obtain travel papers due to the

sahibs’ rigorous interrogation. Then when she turns down his advice and enters the consulate,

both readers and Ali are made to believe that Rehana passed her interview and that she will

soon be moving to England to live with Mustafa before it is revealed in a twist in the end that

she in fact purposely failed the questioning, with the implication that she partly did it with the

ironic guidance of Ali’s own warnings about the sahibs’ behavior.

Lastly, the symbolism behind the saying in the title is also important to remember,

where it serves as an allusion to how Dorothy Gale from “The Wizard of Oz” returns home

from Oz with the help of ruby slippers and parallels how Rehana ironically uses Ali’s advice

in her endeavor to be made to stay in India, her home, rather than be forced to move to a

foreign nation like Britain, and the use of the term “rubies” also emphasizes the Indian setting

since India was positioned in the Western imagination as an exotic land of riches and spices

(Matteo, 2018).

All in all, utilizing these examples of figurative language serve to underscore the main

message and theme of the narrative in a creative, original manner and emphasizes special

effects throughout the story to create an impact on the readers.

 E. Theme

The main theme at the heart of the story is about the importance of the choices that

people make for themselves and for others and what that says about their characters and what

they value. Ali tries to be honest and genuinely helpful towards Rehana despite his previous

dedication to being a fraud and a con man, which is a testament to the influence that Rehana

has unknowingly exerted over him in a short period of time, even as the advice he offers her

does not turn out to be actually that good due to him making mistaken assumptions about her

character. Meanwhile, Rehana ends up choosing her happiness over her duty when she

declines Ali’s “good advice” that leads her to seemingly fail her interview at the consulate on

purpose and she decides to stay behind in India with a job that she finds herself contented

with, instead of moving to an alien country to lead a probably stable, companionable life with

her long-time fiancé in line with her parents’ wishes, even though she barely knows him.

Rehana shows agency and resilience in taking charge of her own future in spite of the

familial duties and society’s gendered norms and expectations that would try to force her to

do otherwise, and considering her position as an orphaned young woman who works as a

domestic helper during an uncertain era in British-ruled India, such an assertion of her

autonomy indicates the defiance in her spirit where she refuses to be subjected to either

Indian or British patriarchy in whatever ways she can. Based on this, it can also be inferred

that the story depicts an “individual versus self” type of conflict, where both Ali and Rehana

struggle with their inner desires and principles as people with these struggles being more or

less resolved by the end of the narrative.

III. Analysis of Literary Tradition/Convention/Contention

 The short story is an example of postcolonial fiction that is explored through concepts

of world literature and the Anglocentric versus the peripheries, along with utilizing elements

of realism and postmodernism.

Postcolonialism by itself is defined as a critical analysis of phenomena and modes of

discourse related to third-world countries and the countries that had colonized them

(Mambrol, 2016), and is applied within the field of literature as primarily referring to literary

works coming from these colonized countries that deal with social, political, economic,

cultural, and religious issues as well as imperial hegemony in general (Purdue Online Writing

Lab, n.d.). Related to this literary convention are the concepts of world literature and

Anglocentricism versus peripheries, where the former refers to the totality of national

literatures from all around the world or literary works that also circulate outside of their

country of origin (Definitions, n.d.), while the latter refers to the contrast between literary

works rooted in English culture and literary works from other parts of the world – particularly

marginalized regions – which are not filtered through an English or Anglo-American lens of

viewing society.

The story demonstrates being written in such a style through its portrayal of

experiences and events happening to people living in India, a known postcolonial and third-

world region in Asia – which is where the author Salman Rushdie was born before being

raised and now living in Britain (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1998) – as opposed to events

occurring to people in England, which happens to be India’s former colonial master. In fact,

the author rejects the superiority narrative perpetuated by the British Raj during their rule in

India by showing how migrating to Britain does not necessarily improve the life of an Indian

person compared to what life was like in their homeland, especially for one like Rehana

Begum who is in fact more independent as an individual when she chooses to stay in India,
and it all comes to down to the circumstances that one finds themself in and how they make

the most of it.

Elements of realism and postmodernism are also explored in the narrative. Literary

realism, defined as an approach that tries to describe story elements without idealization or

romanticized subjectivity (Columbia Encyclopedia, 2019), is represented through the author’s

attempts to describe and depict life for ordinary, marginalized individuals like Muhammad

Ali and Rehana Begum residing in a postcolonial state with clean truthfulness. On the other

hand, the influence of literary postmodernism, defined as a tradition of works that often rely

on fragmented and contradictory and parody-centered stylistic conventions (Fleming, n.d.),

can be attested to through the application of an unreliable narrator – Ali, in this case – whose

limited perspective helps distort readers’ perceptions of certain events and other characters

like Rehana, as well as the portrayal of empowerment and self-realized autonomy for the

marginalized that is a common theme in postmodern fiction.

 References

Electronic Sources

Columbia Encyclopedia (2019). Realism (in literature). Encyclopedia. Retrieved December

2019 from https://www.encyclopedia.com/reference/encyclopedias-almanacs-

transcripts-and-maps/realism-literature

Definitions (n.d.). World literature. Retrieved December 2019 from

https://www.definitions.net/definition/world+literature

Encyclopaedia Britannica (1998). Salman Rushdie. Retrieved December 2019 from

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Salman-Rushdie

eNotes (n.d.). Good Advice is Rarer Than Rubies by Salman Rushdie. Retrieved December

2019 from https://www.enotes.com/topics/good-advice-rarer-than-rubies

Fleming, J. (n.d.). Postmodernism in literature: Definition & examples. Study. Retrieved

December 2019 from https://study.com/academy/lesson/postmodernism-in-literature-

definition-lesson-quiz.html

Mambrol, N. (2016). Postcolonialism. Literary Theory and Criticism. Retrieved December

2019 from https://literariness.org/2016/04/06/postcolonialism/

Matteo, V. (2018). Plot summary and analysis: Good Advice is Rarer Than Rubies by Salman

Rushdie. Owlcation. Retrieved December 2019 from

 https://owlcation.com/humanities/Plot-Summary-and-Analysis-of-Good-Advice-Is-

Rarer-Than-Rubies-by-Salman-Rushdie

Purdue Online Writing Lab (n.d.). Postcolonial criticism (1990s-present). Retrieved

December 2019 from

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/writing_in_literature/

literary_theory_and_schools_of_criticism/post_colonial_criticism.html

SuperSummary (n.d.). Good Advice is Rarer Than Rubies summary. Retrieved December

2019 from http://www.supersummary.com/good-advice-is-rarer-than-rubies/summary/

Print Sources

Rushdie, S. (1994). Good Advice is Rarer Than Rubies. In S. Rushdie (Ed.), East, West (pp.

5-16). London: Jonathan Cape.