the author's private joke

At times a message can be conveyed much more successfully if humor is involved.  This method known as satire can be used for many different purposes.  It is most commonly seen in politics, sitcoms, movies, comedy acts, and literature.  The famous author Salman Rushdie frequently uses it in his style of writing, never just as a form of comedic relief alone, but as more of a way to push his beliefs onto the reader in a passive-aggressive style by hinting at things without coming straight out and naming them.  In his short story titled: “The Prophet’s Hair” from “East, West,” (a book of several short stories) Rushdie makes use of satire in a series of ironic events.

The story starts off in the back alleys of the village of Srinagar in Kashmir, India where a boy named Atta is wandering the streets looking for a thief he can hire.  Rushdie’s satire is apparent after the first couple of pages.  Atta is carrying large sums of money with him as he searches for a thief.  As expected, the boy gets mugged and the money is stolen.  Later in the story it is explained that Atta was trying to find a thief to save his father and the rest of his family.

After Atta returns to his mother and sister with his failed attempt to find a thief, Huma , the sister, decides to find a thief herself.  When she enters the back alleys of the city and eventually comes to the “most wretched and disreputable part of the city” (p.57) she meets the “Thief of Thieves,” the Sheikh, Sin.  This is another one of Rushdie’s ironic events because as a young girl Huma’s father warned her that if she continued in her disobedience, that the Sheikh Sin would come and take her away.  Now it is the daughter that is setting the Sheikh loose on her father, to steal something that has caused grief among the family.

One day, after walking out of the door and wishing his family a good day, the father Hashim comes across a vile which he realizes holds the hair of the prophet Muhammad that had been stolen only a day before.  Hashim takes it home to his collection of hundreds of other little treasures where he sits staring at it for lengths of time.  The hair seems to have an effect on its possessor because ever since Hashim found it, he morphed into a religious fanatic, who treated his children and wife terrible.

It was after several abuses by the father Hashim that Atta and Huma decided to find a way to dispose of the cursed relic that had caused such a burden on their family.  The night that the Sheikh Sin came to take the vile, the father was awaken by the screams of his son who lay on his death bed from the mugging.  The father went out into the hallway, sword in hand and swinging it wildly in the darkness, ended up killing his daughter.  After he realized what he had done he took his own life.

The satiric end to the story occurs when the Sheikh returns home with the relic.  He is killed by police, but his wife, who was once blind could now see, and his crippled sons who lived off of the money they received from begging were now healed.  It seems as though the relic produced a opposite effect to whoever it came into contact with.  The irony is that the wife who was once blind could now see, but all that she saw was her husband’s death and her sons’ inability to make a living now that they were healed.

Usually the person performing satire has a hidden motive, or a sarcastic way of walking around his true intentions to have a greater impact on his audience.  Although the ironic scenes are clear in this short story, the overall intention behind them are not so clear.  Perhaps the author was trying to say: be content with your life, because it could be much worse.  Maybe it is possible that there were no hidden motives in the story, and that it followed the more cock-and-bull type of storytelling where the author takes you for a ride to absolutely nowhere.  Whatever the case, Rushdie has the ability of grabbing and holding onto the reader’s attention.