With their philosophical, artistic, and eccentric bents, these highbrow/high-strung high-jinkster types make for a couple notches above escapist fare as the titular seductress finds her way from Italy to the emperor, lending breadth to the love story and deepening the mystery while giving such who’s-on-first clues to her ultimate identity with some kaleidoscopic ’splainin’ to do: "The Mirror's daughter was the mirror of her mother and of the woman whose mirror the Mirror had been."

Indeed, such reflections often come and go with the dazzling displays of ideas, wordplay, whimsy, and poetic passages that ebb and flow, keeping afloat Rushdie’s mixture of historical research, philosophical quests, and interest in myth and folklore.

Overall, the novel is a dialogue of sorts, back and forth over the decades and across thousands of miles between, for example, Machiavelli, brooding over the nature of power and morality in sensual, humanist Florence; and the troubled Akbar, pondering the same mysteries in the hedonistic Mughal capital. There is also much traffic across what Rushie refers to as “the frontier of the real,” the Checkpoint Charlie of the imagination. Akbar has the power to dream into reality, notably his favorite wife, Jodha. Traveling the other way, the artist Dashwanth becomes so bizarrely absorbed by Qara Köz that he chooses to disappear into his own paintings of her. “A dreamer could become his dream,” observes the Mughal Emperor.

The character of Akbar is just the one to ponder such seeming imponderables - wanting to, in one case, investigate why somebody should hold fast to an untrue religion just because it was the faith of one’s fathers. “Was faith not faith but simply family habit?” he asks himself. “Maybe there was no true religion but only this eternal handing down. And error could be handed down as easily as virtue. Was faith no more than an error of our ancestors?”

Then again, maybe he had too much time and money on his hands. A stint making with the bustle and hum of the caravanserai could take care of that…