Part 4 Chapter 9 Summary

Isky appears everywhere on heroic posters announcing "A New Man for a New Century." Then, suddenly, Isky falls, is condemned to death and thousands beg his life be spared. Then, Isky is dead and buried, but still casting his shadow, relentlessly murmuring in his enemies' ears. Arjumand, shut away in Mohenjo with her mother, fills herself with her father's legend in order to serve as his epitaph. Aged Rani cannot accept her dead husband being thus divinized.

Pakistan is divided into two Wings when Isky is elected prime minister under disputed conditions in the West Wing, but soundly repudiated in the East. President Shaggy Dog dispatches an enormous army to the East. Arjumand does not dwell on the fearful war, in which the idolatrous Indians backed the East to divide-and-conquer. The East Wing is reconstituted, laughingly, as a basket-case autonomous nation...