“If he had a fault, it was that of ostentation, of seeking to be not only himself but a performance of himself as well, and, the driver thought, around here everybody is a little bit that way too, so maybe this man is not so foreign to us after all.”

As characters flit between names and identities, the performance of the self becomes a critical act. The yellow-haired stranger is secretly tied to the Mughal Empire, but he performs the role of the foreigner so as to ingratiate himself in this new environment. His performance is part of his plan, as much a magic trick as any of the other illusions he performs. Mogor creates a falsified, heightened version of reality by performing his sense of self as though it were a story.

“‘These things are not mine,” he said to his new Florentine friend, ‘yet they remind me of who I am. I act as their custodian for a time, and when that time is ended, I let them go.’”

The items kept in the captain’s safe act as anchors in a changing and unreliable world. These items are not necessarily valuable beyond whatever sentimental meaning they possess, but they are invaluable in the way in which they can create a foundation of understanding for the man who owns them. In a chaotic world of fiction and magic, possessing and understanding these small, totemic items means that a person need not lose their sense of self, even as the world descends into absurdity.

“There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.”

The term “safely dead” (37) creates a distinction between the dangerous, changing world of the living and the fixed, knowable world of the dead. Death is a finality, a full stop at the end of a life story.