Once upon a time, in the halcyon days before he caught the attention of anayatollah , before he went into hiding, before he became, simultaneously, aliving martyr of secularist values and a blasphemous devil, before in fact, heturned into a punch line, Salman Rushdie made his living as a mere writer, famousonly in the relatively anonymously way that even the most successful writersare famous. He wrote bawdy, out-size, polyglot novels, comic, contentiousinvestigations of exile, displacement , and home, of what happens when a personis translated from one culture to another. Formally indebted to the fiction ofSterne, Swift, Kafka, Grass, Garcia Márquez, and de Assis, they werebrassy, loud, raucous books, hymns to mongrelization that staked their claim tothe world's attention by - literally, anyway - shouting.

Now, whether he likes it or not, Rushdie still commands the spotlight by havingbecome - perversely, surreally, Kafkaesquely, as they say - the livingembodiment of his work's themes. He's been cast into the farthest exile yet, adouble exile, not just from his firts life as a Muslim born in Bombay but fromhis adopted life as an Anglo-Indian writer (and atheist) educated at Cambridge,living in London. If there is is any slender virtue at all to his nearly sixyears of isolation, it may reside in the fact that he has been able to indulgemore thoroughly the exile's privilege of memory, of reinventing the past, ofmaking a new homeland in prose.

It's no accident, then, that Rushdie's superb first collection of stories, EastWest (Pantheon), addresses his abiding concern: how to make a home for oneselfin a state of exile . But if the the theme is familiar, Rushdie's treatment ofit, his tone, is strikingly fresh. Mostly absent are the know-it-allpyrotechnics of the novels, These stories generally come across as warm, quiet,tender, and - dare I say it? - endearing. These are not words or attitudes Iwould normally associate with Rushdie's fiction. Indeed, the book seemscomposed by a refuguee leafing through ancient photographs of a homeland that,through time and distance, has come to seem as impossible as a miracle. Butthen, that must be how Rushdie feels about the life jhe enjoyed before February14, 1989.

The collection is divided into three parts of three stories each andrecapitulates Rushdie's own migration form East to West. The first section,"East" could have been written by the masterful Indian writer R. K. Narayan.Set in India and Pakistan, the stories dispay a kind of magical, unfallen charmin establishing a world that is entirely sufficient unto itself. England, forinstance, exists merely as a rumor on the fringe of one story, A cold, grayisland from which Pakistan bachelors summon brides they'd contracted for yearsbefore. Religion plays an enormous role in this East. In the extraordinary "TheProphet's Hair," all hell breaks loose in a Kashmiri family when the fatheracidentally discovers a glass vial purported to contain one of the ProphetMuhammad's hairs. His children hire a thief to spirit it from under his pillowand return it to the mosque. But the hair, amusingly, seems to have an agendaof its own. Despite Rushdie's predilection for the literary unchaste, thesetalse exhibit a worn purity; they feel like repositories of village wisdom.

The collection's second section, "West", vibrates with a bleaker, harshertwang, reading it after "East" is a bit like being uprooted from the villagefor graduate school in semiotics. Smart but chilly, man. Rushdie examines,successively, three heavy-duty Western archetypes - Hamlet, ChristopherColumbus, and, yes, the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. Hamlet'sstory is reinvented in a monloguq centered on Yorick, heretofore better knownas a skull. Columbus, that protovillain of Western imperialism, receives anatypically sympathetic treatment as a misunderstood foreigner at QueenIsabella's court . And in the extravagantly imagintaive "The Auction of theRuby Slippers," it's clear that everybody wants to go home, only nobody, in thecommercially overheated West, has any idea any longer of where home is.

Certainly, that's the case with the Indian residents of England who populatethe books's last section, "East, West." They belong fuller neither to India norto England. One aspiring writer in the spookily adulterous tale "The Harmony ofthe Spheres" turns to a devotee of the occult in a futile attempt fo build "abridge between here and there, between my two othernesses, my doubleunbelonging." The narrator of "The Courter," a story about the dgnified romanceof and Eastern European porter and a homesick émigré from Bombay,finally declines to forfeit what he - and, one suspects, Rushdie - has come toregard as the excrutiating opportunity of "inbetweeenness": "I ... have ropesaround my neck...pulling me this wayt and that, East and West .. commanding,choose, choose ... I refuse to choose."

In this sentence, with its echoes of Melville's recalcitrant Bartleby, Rushdiemakes it explicit that he reisdes principally in a state of doubt.Rootlessness, it seems, is his - and every intellectual's - native country. Butthat has its compensations. The writer is entitled to the joy of the nomad,migrating from one land to another, blithely crossing artificial borderlines,at home everywhere and nowhere.