the veil as one-way mirror
casting his veiled face desperately upward while saying allowed that Marathe could scan along the plastic cases of cartridges’ spines
Context
The U.H.I.D. veil, everyone else's emblem of shame, is Marathe's surveillance instrument. Under cover of a desperate addict's upward-cast face he reads the cartridge spines in the open cabinet — including the "tiny round faces of embossed smiles upon the brown cases" that may be the Entertainment itself — because the cheesecloth lets him look while forbidding anyone to see him looking. The one-way property is total: he sits "smiling largely at the woman, forgetting she could not witness it." The book's most conspicuous mark of hiddenness turns out to be, for the professional, a periscope.