No mysteries here or depths; . . .

"No Mysteries here or depths; only surfaces and revelations. Yet to learn the city was to discover that this banal clarity was an illusion. The city was all treachery, all deception, a quick-change, quicksand metropolis, hiding its nature, guarded and secret in spite of all its apparent nakedness."

. . . Salman Rushdie . . . somehow describing Kashmir and Los Angeles at the same time in Shalimar the Clown . . . 5 . . .