Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

Gibreel's sexual obsession, Chamcha reminded himself, actually made things easier. ‘She's certainly a very attractive woman,’ he murmured by way of an experiment, and was gratified to receive a furious, strung-out glare in return. After which Gibreel, making a show of controlling himself, put his arm around Saladin and boomed: ‘Apologies, Spoono, I'm a bad-tempered bugger where she's concerned. But you and me! We're bhai-bhai! Been through the worst and come out smiling; come on now, enough of this .little nowhere park. Let's hit town.’

There is the moment before evil; then the moment of; then the time after, when the step has been taken, and each subsequent, stride becomes progressively easier. ‘Fine with me,’ Chamcha replied. ‘It's good to see you looking so well.’

A boy of six or seven cycled past them on a BMX bike. Chamcha, turning his head to follow the boy's progress, saw that he was moving smoothly away down an avenue of overarching trees, through which the hot sunlight managed here and there to drip. The shock of discovering the location of his dream disoriented Chamcha briefly, and left him with a bad taste in his mouth: the sour flavour of might-have-beens. Gibreel hailed a taxi; and requested Trafalgar Square.

O, he was in a high good humour that day, rubbishing London and the English with much of his old brio. Where Chamcha saw attractively faded grandeur, Gibreel saw a wreck, a Crusoe-city, marooned on the island of its past, and trying, with the help of a Man-Friday underclass, to keep up appearances. Under the gaze of stone lions he chased pigeons, shouting: ‘I swear, Spoono, back home these fatties wouldn't last one day; let's take one home for dinner.’ Chamcha's Englished soul cringed for shame. Later, in Covent Garden, he described for Gibreel's benefit the day the old fruit and vegetable market moved to Nine Elms. The authorities, worried about rats, had sealed the sewers and killed tens of thousands; but hundreds more survived. ‘That day, starving rats swarmed out on to the pavements,’ he recalled. ‘All the way down the Strand and over Waterloo Bridge, in and out of the shops, desperate for food.’ Gibreel snorted. ‘Now I know this is a sinking ship,’ he cried, and Chamcha felt furious at having given him the opening. ‘Even the bloody rats are off And, after a pause: ‘What they needed was a pied piper, no? Leading them to destruction with a tune.’

When he wasn't insulting the English or describing Allie's body from the roots of her hair to the soft triangle of'the love-place, the goddamn yoni,’ he seemed to wish to make lists: what were Spoono's ten favourite books, he wanted to know; also movies, female film stars, food. Chamcha offered conventional cosmopolitan answers. His movie-list included Potemkin, Kane, Otto e Mezzo, The Seven Samurai, Alphaville, El Angel Exterminador . ‘You've been brainwashed,’ Gibreel scoffed. ‘All this Western art-house crap.’ His top ten of everything came from ‘back home’, and was aggressively lowbrow. Mother India, Mr. India, Shree Charsawbees : no Ray, no Mrinal Sen, no Aravindan or Ghatak. ‘Your head's so full of junk,’ he advised Saladin, ‘you forgot everything worth knowing.’

His mounting excitement, his babbling determination to turn the world into a cluster of hit parades, his fierce walking pace – they must have walked twenty miles by the end of their travels – suggested to Chamcha that it wouldn't take much, now, to push him over the edge. It seems I turned out to be a confidence man, too, Mimi. The art of the assassin is to draw the victim close; makes him easier to knife . Tm getting hungry,’ Gibreel imperiously announced. ‘Take me to one of your top-ten eateries.’

In the taxicab, Gibreel needled Chamcha, who had not informed him of the destination. ‘Some Frenchy joint, na? Or Japanese, with raw fishes and octopuses. God, why I trust your taste.’

They arrived at the Shaandaar Café.

Jumpy wasn't there.

Nor, apparently, had Mishal Sufyan patched things up with her mother; Mishal and Hanif were absent, and neither Anahita nor her mother gave Chamcha a greeting that could be described as warm. Only Haji Sufyan was welcoming: ‘Come, come, sit; you're looking good.’ The café was oddly empty, and even Gibreel's presence failed to create much of a stir. It took Chamcha a few seconds to understand what was up; then he saw the quartet of white youths sitting at a corner table, spoiling for a fight.

The young Bengali waiter (whom Hind had been obliged to employ after her elder daughter's departure) came over and took their order – aubergines, sikh kababs, rice – while staring angrily in the direction of the troublesome quartet, who were, as Saladin now perceived, very drunk indeed. The waiter, Amin, was as annoyed with Sufyan as the drunks. ‘Should never have let them sit,’ he mumbled to Chamcha and Gibreel. ‘Now I'm obliged to serve. It's okay for the seth; he's not the front line, see.’

The drunks got their food at the same time as Chamcha and Gibreel. When they started complaining about the cooking, the atmosphere in the room grew even more highly charged. Finally they stood up. ‘We're not eating this shit, you cunts,’ yelled the leader, a tiny, runty fellow with sandy hair, a pale thin face, and spots. ‘It's shit . You can go fuck yourselves, fucking cunts.’ His three companions, giggling and swearing, left the cafe. The leader lingered for a moment. ‘Enjoying your food?’ he screamed at Chamcha and Gibreel. ‘It's fucking shit. Is that what you eat at home, is it? Cunts.’ Gibreel was wearing an expression that said, loud and clear: so this is what the British, that great nation of conquerors, have become in the end. He did not respond. The little rat-faced speaker came over. ‘I asked you a fucking question,’ he said. ‘I said. Are you fucking enjoying your fucking shit dinner ?’ And Saladin Chamcha, perhaps out of his annoyance that Gibreel had not been confronted by the man he'd all but killed – catching him off guard from behind, the coward's way – found himself answering: ‘We would be, if it wasn't for you.’ Ratboy, swaying on his feet, digested this information; and then did a very surprising thing. Taking a deep breath, he drew himself up to his full five foot five; then leaned forward, and spat violently and copiously all over the food.

‘Baba, if that's in your top ten,’ Gibreel said in the taxi home, ‘don't take me to the places you don't like so much.’

‘“Minnamin, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan,’” Chamcha replied. ‘It means, “My darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty.” Nabokov.’

‘Him again,’ Gibreel complained. ‘What bloody language?’

‘He made it up. It's what Kinbote's Zemblan nurse tells him as a child. In Pale Fire .’

‘ Perndirstan ,’ Farishta repeated. ‘Sounds like a country: Hell, maybe. I give up, anyway. How are you supposed to read a man who writes in a made-up lingo of his own?’

They were almost back at Allie's flat overlooking Brickhall Fields. The playwright Strindberg,’ Chamcha said, absently, as if following some profound train of thought, ‘after two unhappy marriages, wedded a famous and lovely twenty-year-old actress called Harriet Bosse. In the Dream she was a great Puck. He wrote for her, too: the part of Eleanora in Easter . An “angel of peace”. The young men went crazy for her, and Strindberg, well, he got so jealous he almost lost his mind. He tried to keep her locked up at home, far from the eyes of men. She wanted to travel; he brought her travel books. It was like the old Cliff Richard song: Gonna lock her up in a trunk/so no big hunk/can steal her away from me .’

Farishta's heavy head nodded in recognition. He had fallen into a kind of reverie. ‘What happened?’ he inquired as they reached their destination. ‘She left him,’ Chamcha innocently declared. ‘She said she could not reconcile him with the human race.