“Have you ever had the frustration dream?”
This is the question which opens the story. For anyone who doesn’t know what the “frustration dream” actually constitutes, no worries. The narrator proceeds over the next five paragraphs to explicate through example. By the time the story proper begins, the premise has been constitutionally grounded. Which turns out to be pretty important because the actual story of this narrative is a frustration dream come true. What else would be expected an author most famous of successfully grounding the context of medieval England for a series of wildly popular detective novels?
There were more than fifteen hundred rupees in the roll of notes. Mahdar Iqbal had given us everything he had.
The author developed a preference over time, it seems, of building her stories toward an ironic payoff at the end. The reader who settles in for a binge of stories one after another is therefore set up for this upending of expectations which naturally can lead to predicting in advance the irony. (Kind of like watching episode of The Twilight Zone one after another.) But such predictability is accounted for by the author who decides that even if the reader knows a twist is coming, they won’t know whether this is a story with a positive ironic outcome for the protagonist or a negative. In this particular case, the final reverses everything that has been assumed by the characters with one of the more optimistic twist endings to be found among such types of stories.
“I still wonder which he was really diving for, the girl, or the thirty pounds’ weight of thin bar gold that drowned her.”
At the other end of the spectrum is this final line of “The Golden Girl.” The title character is a breathtakingly beautiful and quite obviously pregnant blonde woman who is on a ship heading from Liverpool to Bombay with her husband. Fire breaks out and a call to lifeboats goes out thought conditions are such that a panic is avoided. It is for this reason that the narrator fulfills his role as crew member by gently guiding the woman who is notably pregnant because of the juxtaposition with her otherwise diminutive frame over the rails and directly into the water where a lifeboat crew was waiting just yards away. Only it turns out she was never pregnant, but using that condition to disguise the gold she was smuggling which, as a result, caused her to immediately sink like a stone straight out of sight of the rescue boat, never to be seen alive again.
