Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

Saladin's optimism grew, but the red tape surrounding his return to life proved more obstructive than he expected. The banks were taking their time about unblocking his accounts; he was obliged to borrow from Pamela. Nor was work easy to come by. His agent, Charlie Sellers, explained over the phone: ‘Clients get funny. They start talking about zombies, they feel sort of unclean: as if they were robbing a grave.’ Charlie, who still sounded in her early fifties like a disorganized and somewhat daffy young thing of the best county stock, gave the impression that she rather sympathized with the clients’ point of view. ‘Wait it out,’ she advised. ‘They'll come round. After all, it isn't as if you were Dracula, for heaven's sake.’ Thank you, Charlie.

Yes: his obsessive loathing of Gibreel, his dream of exacting some cruel and appropriate revenge, – these were things of the past, aspects of a reality incompatible with his passionate desire to re-establish ordinary life. Not even the seditious, deconstructive imagery of television could deflect him. What he was rejecting was a portrait of himself and Gibreel as monstrous . Monstrous, indeed: the most absurd of ideas. There were real monsters in the world – mass-murdering dictators, child rapists. The Granny Ripper. (Here he was forced to admit that in spite of his old, high estimate of the Metropolitan Police, the arrest of Uhuru Simba was just too darned neat.) You only had to open the tabloids any day of the week to find crazed homosexual Irishmen stuffing babies’ mouths with earth. Pamela, naturally, had been of the view that ‘monster’ was too – what? – judgmental a term for such persons; compassion, she said, required that we see them as casualties of the age. Compassion, he replied, demanded that we see their victims as the casualties. ‘There's nothing to be done with you,’ she had said in her most patrician voice. ‘You actually do think in cheap debating points.’

And other monsters, too, no less real than the tabloid fiends: money, power, sex, death, love. Angels and devils – who needed them? ‘Why demons, when man himself is a demon?’ the Nobel Laureate Singer's ‘last demon’ asked from his attic in Tishevitz. To which Chamcha's sense of balance, his much-to-be-said-for-and-against reflex, wished to add: ‘And why angels, when man is angelic too?’ (If this wasn't true, how to explain, for instance, the Leonardo Cartoon? Was Mozart really Beelzebub in a powdered wig?) – But, it had to be conceded, and this was his original point, that the circumstances of the age required no diabolic explanations.

I'm saying nothing. Don't ask me to clear things up one way or the other; the time of revelations is long gone. The rules of Creation are pretty clear: you set things up, you make them thus and so, and then you let them roll. Where's the pleasure if you're always intervening to give hints, change the rules, fix the fights? Well, I've been pretty self-controlled up to this point and I don't plan to spoil things now. Don't think I haven't wanted to butt in; I have, plenty of times. And once, it's true, I did. I sat on Alleluia Cone's bed and spoke to the superstar, Gibreel. Ooparvala or Neechayvala , he wanted to know, and I didn't enlighten him; I certainly don't intend to blab to this confused Chamcha instead.

I'm leaving now. The man's going to sleep.

His reborn, fledgling, still-fallible optimism was hardest to maintain at night; because at night that otherworld of horns and hoofs was not so easily denied. There was the matter, too, of the two women who had started haunting his dreams. The first – it was hard to admit this, even to himself – was none other than the child-woman of the Shaandaar, his loyal ally in that nightmare time which he was now trying so mightily to conceal behind banalities and mists, the aficionada of the martial arts, Hanif Johnson's lover, Mishal Sufyan.

The second – whom he'd left in Bombay with the knife of his departure sticking in her heart, and who must still think him dead – was Zeeny Vakil.

The jumpiness of Jumpy Joshi when he learned that Saladin Chamcha had returned, in human form, to reoccupy the upper storeys of the house in Notting Hill, was frightful to behold, and incensed Pamela more than she could say. On the first night – she had decided not to tell him until they were safely in bed – he leaped, on hearing the news, a good three feet clear of the bed and stood on the pale blue carpet, stark naked and quaking with his thumb stuck in his mouth.

‘Come back here and stop being foolish,’ she commanded, but he shook his head wildly, and removed his thumb long enough to gibber: ‘But if he's here ! In this house ! Then how can I ...?’ – With which he snatched up his clothes in an untidy bundle, and fled from her presence; she heard thumps and crashes which suggested that his shoes, possibly accompanied by himself, had fallen down the stairs. ‘Good,’ she screamed after him. ‘Chicken, break your neck.’

Some moments later, however, Saladin was visited by the purple-faced figure of his estranged and naked-headed wife, who spoke thickly through clamped teeth. ‘J.J. is standing outside in the street. The damn fool says he can't come in unless you say it's okay with you.’ She had, as usual, been drinking. Chamcha, greatly astonished, more or less blurted out: ‘What about you, you want him to come in?’ Which Pamela interpreted as his way of rubbing salt in the wound. Turning an even deeper shade of purple she nodded with humiliated ferocity. Yes.

So it was that on his first night home, Saladin Chamcha went outside – ‘Hey, hombre! You're really well ?’ Jumpy greeted him in terror, making as if to slap palms, to conceal his fear – and persuaded his wife's lover to share her bed. Then he retreated upstairs, because Jumpy's mortification now prevented him from entering the house until Chamcha was safely out of the way.

‘What a man!’ Jumpy wept at Pamela. ‘He's a prince , a saint !’

‘If you don't pack it in,’ Pamela Chamcha warned apoplectically, ‘I’ll set the fucking dog on you.’

Jumpy continued to find Chamcha's presence distracting, envisaging him (or so it appeared from his behaviour) as a minatory shade that needed to be constantly placated. When he cooked Pamela a meal (he had turned out, to her surprise and relief, to be quite a Mughlai chef) he insisted on asking Chamcha down to join them, and, when Saladin demurred, took him up a tray, explaining to Pamela that to do otherwise would be rude, and also provocative. ‘Look what he permits under his own roof! He's a giant ; least we can do is have good manners.’ Pamela, with mounting rage, was obliged to put up with a series of such acts and their accompanying homilies. ‘I'd never have believed you were so conventional,’ she fumed, and Jumpy replied: ‘It's just a question of respect.’

In the name of respect, Jumpy carried Chamcha cups of tea, newspapers and mail; he never failed, on arriving at the big house, to go upstairs for a visit of at least twenty minutes, the minimum time commensurate with his sense of politeness, while Pamela cooled her heels and knocked back bourbon three floors below. He brought Saladin little presents: propitiatory offerings of books, old theatre handbills, masks. When Pamela attempted to put her foot down, he argued against her with an innocent, but also mulish passion: ‘We can't behave as if the man's invisible. He's here, isn't he? Then we must involve him in our lives.’ Pamela replied sourly: ‘Why don't you just ask him to come down and join us in bed?’ To which Jumpy, seriously, replied: ‘I didn't think you'd approve.’