"Every man pays for the love in bed-that’s life-but the practical man doesn’t pay too much."
Braheem Yakoub’s philosophical quip subtly disheartens Zizi from remarrying his fresh bride five months following Sumira’s interment. “Love in bed” denotes coitus which Braheem Yakoub reasons is expendable for ‘practical men.’ Yakoub reasons that Zizi’s impetus for re-wedding is accredited to erotic appetite which could subjugate the practicality of his manliness.
“Then after a minute Jameel spoke. Someday, he said, would own a place like this.And when that day came he would sell everything in waxed paper-the burgers, the pie, even the chilli.”God willing,” Braheem said , pleased. But the boy went on.He would marry an Amerkani woman, he said, and teach his children to speak only Inglees, like the other monkeys.”
Jameel’s unequivocal ambitions mirror his unconscious thirst for unqualified assimilation. Jameel visualizes himself steering business magnificently like an American, espousing a supreme American companion and articulate, dreamed-for American kid.
“Me, my only school was what we called the College of Hard Knocks. My father enrolled me. He used to brag about how he’d lifted a sliver of the True Cross off a Turk who tried selling it to him.”
The narrator ascribes his criminality to the deleterious stimulus from his father. His father’s brags vis-à-vis ‘lifting of the True Cross’ programmed the narrator to take part in illegitimate deeds as long as they would mollify his idiosyncratic intents. The bragging normalized theft for the narrator who wound up expending the adverse spur as a Looking Glass Self for his dealings and resolutions.
“ So I moved on and ended up working on Canton Avenue in old Saint Patrick’s Parish at the B and L Confectionery- a candy store where, on the QT, a Catholic could get himself a pail of beer after mass. The beer was supplied by Jackie Kennedy, who wore pearl gray spats and a pinky ring.”
This passage embodies the irrefutable intersection between Catholicism and alcoholism. Although Catholicism is a dependable religion that would emphatically combat intoxication, the Catholics are at the vanguards sponsoring concentrated drunkenness based on the measure ( pail) of beer that the Catholics would purchase. Catholicism and Alcoholism cohabit as if they are underwritten by equivalent creeds, yet they should be unquestionably contradictory.
