The Ground Beneath Her Feet, continued.

Chap. 6 Disorientations

This is one of the better chapter titles. It has at least three meanings. The straight forward one of losing one's balance or sense of direction. In the text Rushdie refers to this as no longer facing the east. Then it can be interpreted as the westernization of the east. And thus a play on the word dis-orient. This novel is full of such multifaceted gems.

Quotations:

• "Spenta saw on his face the look of tragaic innocence worn by goats on their way to the slaughterhouse." [p. 152]
• "O fierce intensity of childhood seing! As children we're all photographers, needing no cameras, burning images into memories." [p. 157]
• "Doodhwala was the only one of us who accepted the condition of life as it was, as a given. ... Things are what they are." [p. 166]
• "Disorientation is loss of the East. ... Lose the east and you lose your bearings, your certainties, your knowledge of what is and what may be, perhaps even your life." [p. 176]
• "What if the whole deal - orientation, knowing where you are, and so on, what if it's all a scam?" [p. 176]
• "We three kings of Disorient were." [p. 177]
• "Ormus liked to compose his own songs up on the flat roof of the apartment block, and spent eternities up there, lost within himself, searching for the points at which his inner life intersected the life of the greater world outside, and calling those points of intersection 'songs'". [p. 183]
• "... if the world itself were metamorphosing unpredictably, then nothing could be relied upon any more. What could one trust? How to find moorings, foundations, fixed points, in a broken, altered time. ... The world is what it is." [p. 184]