Part 2 Chapter 4 Summary

Rushdie intrudes to announce, "This is a novel about Sufiya Zinobia," Omar's wife and adds, enigmatically, "Sufiya Zinobia is about this novel." Her mother Bilquìs, as a young woman in the dangerous days just before partition, is afraid of the hot afternoon wind known as the Loo. She imagines herself as a grand, imperious empress. Her widowed father, Mahmoud ("The Woman") Kemal, runs the seedy, raucous, cheap Empire Theater, whose only pretension, a gold-painted equestrian knight labeled Excelsior, inspires Bilquìs' flights of fancy. Muslims and Hindus attend different movie theaters and attack those of their enemies. Mahmoud announces a double feature, one film appealing to Muslims and one to Hindus and both communities boycott the Empire. Bilquìs begs her father to give up such romanticism, but he turns uncharacteristically stubborn.

Terrified by a sound like...