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

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The veil similarly acts as both a shield and a trap for Jamila. She becomes “the
victim of her own public image” (Rushdie, 359) because she is unable to move outside of her
veil-encircled sphere of existence. Though Jamila’s entire life is characterized by an intense
desire for the attention and preference that her gender denies her within her cultural
paradigm, as an adolescent she diverges from her childhood belief that “if she was going to
get any attention in her life, she would have to make plenty of noise” (Rushdie, 169).
Ironically, while her early efforts at gaining attention by “making noise” fail miserably, she
finally succeeds in receiving attention in her later years by “[sitting] demurely” behind a
“white silk chadar” (Rushdie, 358). 10
This strange success reveals cultural standards of
acceptability in female behavior; paradoxically, cultural ideals of femininity establish that
women can only gain attention by deliberately diverting attention away from their existence.
When “Pakistan [falls] in love with a fifteen-year-old girl whom it only ever glimpsed
through a gold-and-white perforated sheet” (Rushdie, 359), it idolizes, not Jamila herself, but
her image of Purity. Though Saleem melodramatically asserts that he “must take second
place to her talent forever” (Rushdie, 336), the attention Jamila receives has more to do with
her extreme assimilation into a culture of Purity than her personal identity or talent. When
Rushdie points to “the blind and blinding devoutness and the right-or-wrong nationalism
which […] began to dominate [Jamila’s] personality, to the exclusion of almost everything
else” (Rushdie, 359), he demonstrates that the true worth of her talent is doubly marginalized
by pre-existing cultural and religious ideals of female behavior (“devoutness”) and post-
Partition ideals of national Purity (“right-or-wrong nationalism”). Unfortunately, Jamila
internalizes this marginalization, so that she becomes subject to “the exaggerations and
simplifications of self which are the unavoidable side-effects of stardom” (Rushdie, 359).