If Mr. Rushdie had followed [the logic of realistic psychology] in "Shame," he would have robbed his novel of its spectral magic, its breakdown of narrative logic that allows time to rush suddenly forward and reveal the end of things, or permits characters to be reincarnated in each other. He would have robbed his novel of its truth—not precisely the truth of parable or allegory or myth, but the truth of a narrative that describes a world apart and is a system accurate and logical only unto itself.
Most damaging of all, an adherence to realism would have robbed "Shame" of the character of Sufiya Zinobia Hyder…. Sufiya Zinobia is the tiny girl whose gender so enraged her father, Raza Hyder, the future military dictator of his country, that even at her birth she blushed in shame. The heat of that shame incubates a beast inside of Sufiya Zinobia, a beast that grows and takes possession of the tiny girl until as an adult she must be immured in an attic to be kept from wandering out at night, seducing strange men and tearing off their heads. When she escapes that attic, she leaves "a hole in the bricked-up window. It had a head, arms, legs." At the end she will return in the form of a white panther to topple her father's regime and destroy her shameless husband with the heat of her rage. I am not giving anything away. The suspense of the story lies in its fabulous illogic.
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