A Delicate Line

            Growing up, we all heard the stories and were taught not to take what isn’t ours.  We hear stories of people finding a wallet or money and turning the object in or returning it to the owner.  The person who gets back what they lost is very grateful and gives the person a reward that is better than the object they returned.  The moral is don’t steal what isn’t yours and you will be better of because of it.  However, in Salman Rushdie’s East, West, the main character Hashim apparently never heard this story. 

            Hashim finds a hair in a silver vile and the hair is that of the prophet of Muhammad.  He knows that he should return the stolen trinket that he found but he is a greedy collector and decides to keep it.  Hashim is a very wealthy man and the vile seems to be punishing those that come in contact with it.  He is a money lender that overcharges all of his clients and that collects their money if they are late by brute force.  What once was a very happy family turns into a punishing dictatorship run by Hashim.  He turns on his family declaring that his son is an idiot, he disowns his daughter, and tells his wife that he has many mistresses on the side.  He beats his wife, daughter, and son and becomes extremely religious upon finding the vile.  Everyone that comes into contact with the vile has their life destroyed.

            Rushdie is using this tall tale to warn about the powers of money and religion and how they can corrupt families and on a bigger picture, societies.  Hashim prides himself on charging, “an interest rate over 70 percent” (Rushdie 41) and teaching his children “the virtues of thrift” (42).  Money and power ruled Hashim’s life and everything that he did.  After he finds the vial, accepts Islam as his faith and tries to right the wrongs in his life.  He forces everyone in his family to “pray five times daily” (46) and read for two hours every day out of the Qur’an.  At the end of the story, Hashim’s son dies, Hashim accidentally murders his daughter, he kills himself, and the wife is so stricken with grief that she is placed in a mental hospital for the rest of her life.

            Furthermore, another character that is driven by greed, the thief of all thieves Sheikh Sin, has a similar ending.  Hashim’s daughter convinces him to steal the vial and thus end the curse on her family.  Hashim’s daughter tells the thief that upon completion of the task, she will make him rich and describes his rewards as “lavish” (39).  He agrees to the task and he ultimately is shot by the police after the robbery attempt goes awry and most of the Hashim family ends up dead.  In addition, Sheikh’s sons are “hopelessly devout men” (53) end up having their legs miraculously fixed (they were cripples).  However, this made it so that they could not beg for money which they had done all their lives and were thus “ruined men” (58).  They fell under the curse too even though the only contact with the hair was that of their father having possessed it for a brief time.

            Rushdie is warning that religion and the greed of money will corrupt anything if abused.  There is a fine line that must be walked so one does not grasp too much power.  He uses characters in this short story to show the dangers and what can happen when money or religion is abused.  The old saying power corrupts is justly used as a summation of this story and one must be careful of how to live and not become obsessed with a certain aspect of life.