Clusters of intellectuals had formed around certain beautiful women – the starlet Pia Aziz, the artist Aurora Zogoiby – while most of the other women were sitting at the feet of a boozy but celebrated Muslim writer of low-life stories which was shocking them by providing, in the most exquisite and ornate Urdu Sir Darius Xerxes Cama had ever heard, detailed and hair raising descriptions of the worst things in the world, undisguised by circumlocution, unfettered by good taste. He spoke naturally in that famous glittering prose which was somehow both voluptuous and precise, at once dainty and appalling of the degraded interiors of the local insane asylum, of the brutal murders and casual rapes that were the city’s hidden news, of the corruption of those in authority and the violence in the hearts of the poor, of incestuous love affairs in high society and the killing of daughters in slums, of the caged whores of Falkland Road and of the mafias who ran the city’s organized crime and would order men’s penises to be severed as casually as they would call for a bunch of red bananas in a bazaar.
Salman Rushdie, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet”, 1999
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