1. SHORT STORY
Short Story is different from an anecdote, and a novel.
Anecdote is the unelaborated narration of a single incident, but like the novel, it
organizes the action, thought and dialogue of its characters into the artful pattern of a
plot, directed towards, particular effects on an audience.
Novel is an extended narrative, the novel is distinguished from the short story and
from the work of middle length called the novelette, its magnitude permits a greater
variety of characters, greater complication of plot (or plots), ampler development
of milieu, more sustained exploration of character , motives than do the shorter
and more concentrated modes.
2. The Pioneers of the Short Story
Edgar Allen Poe
O. Henry
Ernest Hemingway and many more.
Edgar Allan Poe as defined Short Story as “The Prose Tale” as a
narrative prose which can be read at one sitting i.e. from half an hour
to two hours and is limited to “a certain unique or single effect” to
which every detail is subordinate.
4. Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
A British Indian Novelist, short story writer and essayist of Kashmiri descent.
He was born on 19th June 1947 in Mumbai.
His Second Novel, Midnight’s Children (1981) brought him literary recognition and
fame to the extent that it influenced later Indian Writing in English immensely.
This book was the winner of the 1981 Booker Prize, Best of the Bookers in 1993
and 2008 and best novel to have received the prize during its first 25 and 40 years.
Rushdie is known for his style of magical realism, in which the real world
described has magical or unreal elements within it.
East West, the collection of stories from which ‘Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies’ is
taken, is divide into three sections, titled ‘East’, ‘West’ and ‘East West’ with each
section containing stories which are set in their respective geographical areas.
5. Good Advices is Rarer than Rubies
By Salman Rushdie
Characters
Plot
Setting
Theme
6. Characters
Miss Rehana
Rehana is an young beautiful woman
with big black and shiny eyes.
She is very confident, independent and
calm.
She is also very poor, and works as a
ayah for three boys.
Her parents died when she was very
young, and before they died they
promised her away to a thirty year old
man.
Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali is a very old man, who
was an advice expert outside the
British Consulate.
He has lived a long hard and unloving
life.
He was kind of hypnotized by Rehana,
and didn't follow his usual rules and
offered a free advice to her.
7. Plot
The short-story is about a young woman called Miss Rehana who has taken the bus to the gates of The
British Consulate along with the other so-called Tuesday-women to get a passport for Bradford in England to
join her fiancée there.
The advice expert Muhammad Ali, was attracted to Miss Rehana’s beauty, so he offered an advice at a
small sum.
Muhammad Ali picked out his customers carefully, making sure they had a lot of money and came from
hundreds of miles away.
Muhammad Ali offers Miss Rehana a passport for free, which he has never done before, but she turns him
down because this isn't legal, and she doesn’t want to commit a crime.
She left, and later she came back and gave him a pakora as a thank you for his advice, and an apologize for
her rudeness. She had answered all the questions wrong, and been turned down by the Embassy.
She tells Muhammad Ali her story that engagement had been arranged with a 30-year-old man by her
parents when she was 9 years old, because they were dying and wanted her to be looked after.
She would now return to her job, working in Lahore in a great house as an ayah, a maid, to three good boys
who would be sad to see her leave.
8. Setting
The setting of this story is in Lahore,
Pakistan outside the British Consulate.
9. Theme
The theme of this short story is to believe in oneself and happiness.
Rehana was determined that, she wanted to live her life in Lahore, Pakistan, as a ayah
for three good boys.
She gets engaged at the age of Nine to a thirty years man for the Happiness of her
parents.
She never wished to go to her husband, because, she never wanted to make those
three boys sad.
The last line of the Story certainly states that even Muhammad Ali was happy on his
meeting with Rehana.
Rehana wanted every one to be happy.
10. Conclusion
East West have immense
possibilities. Although they
can’t merge the can possibly
have an encounter because
both the cultures are far
different from each other.
