The Secret Society: Descendants of Crypto-Jews in the San Antonio ...

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Naseem Aziz, protests against her husband’s desire that she give up purdah 8 because she
insists, “‘They will see more than [my body]! They will see my deep-deep shame!’” 9
Naseem’s culturally-imposed equation of her body with shame exposes the external/social
and internal/personal disparagement of female identity caused by cultural expectations of
female Purity. Throughout the novel, then, Reverend Mother (a nickname given to Saleem’s
grandmother, indicating her role as matriarch) seeks out various alternate forms of purdah
and attempts to co-opt them as avenues of power in order to conceal the helplessness
imparted by her woman’s body in a culture of shame. Indeed, “she [lives] in an invisible
fortress of her own making, an ironclad citadel of traditions and certainties” (Rushdie, 40), so
that the culture itself becomes a form of purdah. In one episode, she responds to Aadam’s
command of “‘Be silent, woman!’” by remaining permanently silent (Rushdie, 55), thereby
making her obedience to her husband a form of power. This purdah of silence, however, also
conceals her identity, for “her sentences […] offer up glimpses of her self” (Rushdie, 56) in
the same way that coming out of traditional purdah would offer glimpses of her body.
Finally, she retreats into the purdah of the glass booth at her gasoline pump in Pakistan;
“transformed […] into a woman more interested in other people’s lives than her own,” she
“[develops] the absorbent properties of a sponge” (Rushdie, 375), and thus succumbs
willingly to yet another form of identity concealment as a result of purdah. However, in this
state of purdah-ensconced non-identity, in which her personal identity loses importance to
her, “she [becomes] the first victim of that spirit of detached fatigue which made the end the
only possible solution” (Rushdie, 376)—death becomes the only resolution to the paradox of
identity-less existence which society imposes upon women.