Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

Her son Walcott helped her leave the stage amid cheers and chants; she nodded judiciously in the direction of the noise. Less charismatic speeches followed. Hanif Johnson, Simba's lawyer, made a series of suggestions – the visitors’ gallery must be packed, the dispensers of justice must know that they were being watched; the court must be picketed, and a rota should be organized; there was the need for a financial appeal. Chamcha murmured to Jumpy: ‘Nobody mentions his history of sexual aggression.’ Jumpy shrugged. ‘Some of the women he's attacked are in this room. Mishal, for example, is over there, look, in the corner by the stage. But this isn't the time or place for that. Simba's bull craziness is, you could say, a trouble in the family. What we have here is trouble with the Man.’ In other circumstances, Saladin would have had a good deal to say in response to such a statement. – He would have objected, for one thing, that a man's record of violence could not be set aside so easily when he was accused of murder. – Also that he didn't like the use of such American terms as ‘the Man’ in the very different British situation, where there was no history of slavery; it sounded like an attempt to borrow the glamour of other, more dangerous struggles, a thing he also felt about the organizers’ decision to punctuate the speeches with such meaning-loaded songs as We Shall Overcome , and even, for Pete's sake, Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika . As if all causes were the same, all histories interchangeable. – But he said none of these things, because his head had begun to spin and his senses to reel, owing to his having been given, for the first time in his life, a stupefying premonition of his death.

– Hanif Johnson was finishing his speech. As Dr Simba has written, newness will enter this society by collective, not individual, actions . He was quoting what Chamcha recognized as one of Camus's most popular slogans. The passage from speech to moral action , Hanif was saying, has a name: to become human . – And now a pretty young British Asian woman with a slightly-too-bulbous nose and a dirty, bluesy voice was launching into Bob Dylan's song, I Pity the Poor Immigrant . Another false and imported note, this: the song actually seemed rather hostile towards immigrants, though there were lines that struck chords, about the immigrant's visions shattering like glass, about how he was obliged to ‘build his town with blood'. Jumpy, with his versifying attempts to redefine the old racist image of the rivers of blood, would appreciate that. – All these things Saladin experienced and thought as if from a considerable distance. – What had happened? This: when Jumpy Joshi pointed out Mishal Sufyan's presence at the Friends Meeting House, Saladin Chamcha, looking in her direction, saw a blazing fire burning in the centre of her forehead; and felt, in the same moment, the beating, and the icy shadow, of a pair of gigantic wings. – He experienced the kind of blurring associated with double vision, seeming to look into two worlds at once; one was the brightly lit, no-smoking-allowed meeting hall, but the other was a world of phantoms, in which Azraeel, the exterminating angel, was swooping towards him, and a girl's forehead could burn with ominous flames. – She's death to me, that's what it means , Chamcha thought in one of the two worlds, while in the other he told himself not to be foolish; the room was full of people wearing those inane tribal badges that had latterly grown so popular, green neon haloes, devil-horns painted with fluorescent paint; Mishal probably had on some piece of space-age junk jewellery. – But his other self took over again, she's off limits to you , it said, not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim . – Whereupon his heart got in on the act, bababoom, boomba, dabadoom.

Now he was outside, with Jumpy fussing over him and even Pamela showing concern. ‘I'm the one with the bun in the oven,’ she said with a gruff remnant of affection. ‘What business have you got to pass out?’ Jumpy insisted: ‘You'd best come with me to my class; just sit quietly, and afterwards I'll take you home.’ – But Pamela wanted to know if a doctor was required. No, no, I'll go with Jumpy, I'll be fine. It was just hot in there. Airless. My clothes too warm. A stupid thing. A nothing .

There was an art cinema next to the Friends House, and he was leaning against a movie poster. The film was Mephisto , the story of an actor seduced into a collaboration with Nazism. In the poster, the actor – played by the German star Klaus Maria Brandauer – was dressed up as Mephistophilis, face white, body cloaked in black, arms upraised. Lines from Faust stood above his head:

– Who art thou, then?

– Part of that Power, not understood,

Which always wills the Bad, and always works the Good.

At the sports centre: he could scarcely bring himself to glance in Mishal's direction. (She too had left the Simba meeting in time to make the class.) – Although she was all over him, you came back, I bet it was to see me, isn't that nice , he could hardly speak a civil word, much less ask were you wearing a luminous something in the middle of your , because she wasn't now, kicking her legs and flexing her long body, resplendent in its black leotard. – Until, sensing the coldness in him, she backed off, all confusion and injured pride.

‘Our other star hasn't turned up today,’ Jumpy mentioned to Saladin during a break in the exercises. ‘Miss Alleluia Cone, the one who climbed Everest. I was meaning to introduce you two. She knows, I mean, she's apparently with, Gibreel. Gibreel Farishta, the actor, your fellow-survivor of the crash.’

Things are closing in on me . Gibreel was drifting towards him, like India when, having come unstuck from the Gondwanaland proto-continent, it floated towards Laurasia. (His processes of mind, he recognized absently, were coming up with some pretty strange associations.) When they collided, the force would hurl up Himalayas. – What is a mountain? An obstacle; a transcendence; above all, an effect .

‘Where are you going?’ Jumpy was calling. ‘I thought I was giving you a lift. Are you okay?’

I'm fine. I need to walk, that's all.

‘Okay, but only if you're sure.’

Sure . Walk away fast, without catching Mishal's aggrieved eye.

... In the street. Walk quickly, out of this wrong place, this underworld. – God: no escape. Here's a shop-front, a store selling musical instruments, trumpets saxophones oboes, what's the name? – Fair Winds , and here in the window is a cheaply printed handbill. Announcing the imminent return of, that's right, the Archangel Gibreel. His return and the salvation of the earth. Walk. Walk away fast .

...Hail this taxi. (His clothes inspire deference in the driver.) Climb in squire do you mind the radio. Some scientist who got caught in that hijacking and lost the half of his tongue. American. They rebuilt it, he says, with flesh taken from his posterior, excuse my French. Wouldn't fancy a mouthful of my own buttock meat myself but the poor bugger had no option did he. Funny bastard. Got some funny ideas.

Eugene Dumsday on the radio discussed the gaps in the fossil record with his new, buttocky tongue. The Devil tried to silence me but the good Lord and American surgical techniques knew better . These gaps were the creationist's main selling-point: if natural selection was the truth, where were all the random mutations that got deselected? Where were the monster-children, the deformed babies of evolution? The fossils were silent. No three-legged horses there. No point arguing with these geezers , the cabbie said. I don't hold with God myself . No point, one small part of Chamcha's consciousness agreed. No point suggesting that ‘the fossil record’ wasn't some sort of perfect filing cabinet. And evolution theory had come a long way since Darwin. It was now being argued that major changes in species happened not in the stumbling, hit-and-miss manner first envisaged, but in great, radical leaps. The history of life was not the bumbling progress – the very English middle-class progress – Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution. – I've heard enough, the cabbie said. Eugene Dumsday vanished from the ether, to be replaced by disco music. Ave atque vale .