One of the more shallow ways to react to literature: prove yourself unable to get past some moral sticking point in the story, particularly when the author shows himself aware of the injustice.
Nonetheless:
Torn hymen=spoiled meat.
Weird synchronicities between this one and the subsequent Midnight's Children. Preoccupation with virginity, the preservation and loss thereof. Stained marital sheets displayed to an expectant public. Old, but perhaps not that old, moral codes that still stir up indignant rage in me.
By the way, do you know those successful neo-Victorian books by brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden, The Dangerous Book for Boys, The Daring Book for Girls, etc.? They follow a simple prescription, namely resurrect a nostalgic Victorian weltanschauung of colonial explorers and Kipling-esque right-is-right, moral backbone, which we all thought rightly buried under the million hapless corpses of the Somme (but not, of course, in forgotten African mass graves). I was content to leave it there, but the present-day fathers of the UK and USA are nothing if not wistful for days when you could call Cecil Rhodes anything other than a bag of worthless horsefuck; when, in fact, one could crown him a Dangerous Hero among others in the Igguldens' obscene new book. Please let's not have a Victorian revival. So they were genteel. They also enslaved the entire fucking world.
