Haroun and the Sea of Stories (20 page)

Many of the names given to people and places in this story have been derived from Hindustani words.

Abhinaya
is, in fact, the name of the Language of Gesture used in Indian classical dance.

Alifbay
is an imaginary country. Its name comes from the Hindustani word for ‘alphabet’.

Batcheat
is from ‘baat-cheet’, that is, ‘chit-chat’.

Bat-Mat-Karo
means ‘Do-Not-Speak’.

Bezaban
means ‘Without-a-Tongue’.

Bolo
comes from the verb ‘bolna’, to speak. ‘Bolo!’ is the imperative: ‘Speak!’

Chup
(pronounce the ‘u’ like the ‘oo’ in ‘good’) means ‘quiet’; ‘
Chupwala
’ means something like ‘quiet fellow’.

The Dull Lake
, which doesn’t exist, gets its name from the Dal Lake in Kashmir, which does.

Goopy
and
Bagha
don’t mean anything special, but they are also the names of the two goofy heroes of a movie by Satyajit Ray. The movie characters are not fishes, but they are pretty fishy.

Gup
(pronounce the ‘u’ as in ‘cup’) means ‘gossip’. It can also mean ‘nonsense’ or ‘fib’.

Haroun
and
Rashid
are both named after the legendary Caliph of Baghdad, Haroun al-Rashid, who features in many Arabian Nights tales. Their surname,
Khalifa
, actually means ‘Caliph’.

Kahani
means ‘story’.

Khamosh
means ‘silent’.

Khattam-Shud
means ‘completely finished’, ‘over and done with’.

Kitab
means ‘book’.

Mali
, not surprisingly, means ‘gardener’.

Mudra
, who speaks Abhinaya, the Language of Gesture (see above), is also named after it, in a way. A ‘mudra’ is any one of the gestures that make up the language.

HAROUN AND THE SEA OF STORIES

Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay in 1947. He is the author of several novels for adults, including
Midnight’s Children
(winner of the 1993 Booker Prize),
Shame
and
The Satanic Verses
(winner of the 1988 Whitbread Prize for Best Novel). In 1990 he received the Writers’ Guild Award for
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
.

Salman Rushdie is an Honorary Professor in Humanities at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His books have been translated into many different languages.

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First published by Granta Books in association with the Penguin Group 1990
Published in Puffin Books 1993

Copyright © Salman Rushdie, 1990
Illustrations copyright © Paul Birkbeck, 1999
All rights reserved

The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted

ISBN: 978-01-4134-239-9