Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

Almost twenty years earlier, when the young and newly renamed Saladin was scratching a living on the margins of the London theatre, in order to maintain a safe distance from his father; and when Changez was retreating in other ways, becoming both reclusive and religious; back then, one day, out of the blue, the father had written to the son, offering him a house. The property was a rambling mansion in the hill-station of Solan. ‘The first property I ever owned,’ Changez wrote, ‘and so it is the first I am gifting to you.’ Saladin's instant reaction was to see the offer as a snare, a way of rejoining him to home , to the webs of his father's power; and when he learned that the Solan property had long ago been requisitioned by the Indian Government in return for a peppercorn rent, and that it had for many years been occupied by a boys’ school, the gift stood revealed as a delusion as well. What did Chamcha care if the school were willing to treat him, on any visits he cared to make, as a visiting Head of State, putting on march-pasts and gymnastic displays? That sort of thing appealed to Changez's enormous vanity, but Chamcha wanted none of it. The point was, the school wasn't budging; the gift was useless, and probably an administrative headache as well. He wrote to his father refusing the offer. It was the last time Changez Chamchawala tried to give him anything. Home receded from the prodigal son.

‘I never forget a faface,’ Sisodia was saying. ‘You're mimi Mimi's friend. The Bostan susurvivor. Knew it the moment I saw you papa panic at the gaga gate. Hope you're not feefeeling too baba bad.’ Saladin, his heart sinking, shook his head, no, I'm fine, honestly. Sisodia, gleaming, knee-like, winked hideously at a passing stewardess and summoned more whisky. ‘Such a shashame about Gibreel and his lady,’ Sisodia went on. ‘Such a nice name that she had, alia alia Alleluia. What a temper on that boy, what a jeajealous tata type. Hard for a momodern gaga girl. They bus bust up.’ Saladin retreated, once again, into a pretence of sleep. I have only just recovered from the past. Go, go away .

He had formally declared his recovery complete only five weeks earlier, at the wedding of Mishal Sufyan and HanifJohnson. After the death of her parents in the Shaandaar fire Mishal had been assailed by a terrible, illogical guilt that caused her mother to appear to her in dreams and admonish her: ‘If only you'd passed the fire extinguisher when I asked. If only you'd blown a little harder. But you never listen to what I say and your lungs are so cigarette-rotten that you could not blow out one candle let alone a burning house.’ Under the severe eye of her mother's ghost Mishal moved out of Hanif's apartment, took a room in a place with three other women, applied for and got Jumpy Joshi's old job at the sports centre, and fought the insurance companies until they paid up. Only when the Shaandaar was ready to reopen under her management did Hind Sufyan's ghost agree that it was time to be off to the after-life; whereupon Mishal telephoned Hanif and asked him to marry her. He was too surprised to reply, and had to pass the telephone to a colleague who explained that the cat had got Mr Johnson's tongue, and accepted Mishal's offer on the dumbstruck lawyer's behalf. So everybody was recovering from the tragedy; even Anahita, who had been obliged to live with a stiflingly old-fashioned aunt, managed to look pleased at the wedding, perhaps because Mishal had promised her her own rooms in the renovated Shaandaar Hotel. Mishal had asked Saladin to be her chief witness in recognition of his attempt to save her parents’ life, and on their way to the registry office in Pinkwalla's van (all charges against the DJ and his boss, John Maslama, had been dropped for lack of evidence) Chamcha told the bride: ‘Today feels like a new start for me, too; perhaps for all of us.’ In his own case there had been by-pass surgery, and the difficulty of coming to terms with so many deaths, and nightmare visions of being metamorphosed once more into some sort of sulphurous, cloven-hoof demon. He was also, for a time, professionally crippled by a shame so profound that, when clients finally did begin to book him once more and ask for one of his voices, for example the voice of a frozen pea or a glove-puppet packet of sausages, he felt the memory of his telephonic crimes welling up in his throat and strangling the impersonations at birth. At Mishal's wedding, however, he suddenly felt free. It was quite a ceremony, largely because the young couple could not refrain from kissing one another throughout the procedure, and had to be urged by the registrar (a pleasant young woman who also exhorted the guests not to drink too much that day if they planned to drive) to hurry up and get through the words before it was time for the next wedding party to arrive. Afterwards at the Shaandaar the kissing continued, the kisses becoming gradually longer and more explicit, until finally the guests had the feeling that they were intruding on a private moment, and slipped quietly away leaving Hanif and Mishal to enjoy a passion so engulfing that they did not even notice their friends’ departure; they remained oblivious, too, of the small crowd of children that gathered outside the windows of the Shaandaar Café to watch them. Chamcha, the last guest to leave, did the newly weds the favour of pulling down the blinds, much to the children's annoyance; and strolled off down the rebuilt High Street feeling so light on his feet that he actually gave a kind of embarrassed skip.

Nothing is forever, he thought beyond closed eyelids somewhere over Asia Minor. Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream. Or if not unhappiness, then at least melancholy... These broodings were interrupted by a lusty snore from the seat beside him. Mr Sisodia, whisky-glass in hand, was asleep.

The producer was evidently a hit with the stewardesses. They fussed around his sleeping person, detaching the glass from his fingers and removing it to a place of safety, spreading a blanket over his lower half, and trilling admiringly over his snoring head: ‘Doesn't he look poochie? Just a little cuteso, I swear!’ Chamcha was reminded unexpectedly of the society ladies of Bombay patting him on the head during his mother's little soirees, and fought back tears of surprise. Sisodia actually looked faintly obscene; he had removed his spectacles before falling asleep, and their absence gave him an oddly naked appearance. To Chamcha's eyes he resembled nothing so much as an outsize Shiva lingam. Maybe that accounted for his popularity with the ladies.

Flicking through the magazines and newspapers he was offered by the stewardesses, Saladin chanced upon an old acquaintance in trouble. Hal Valance's sanitized Aliens Show had flopped badly in the United States and was being taken off the air. Worse still, his advertising agency and its subsidiaries had been swallowed by an American leviathan, and it was probable that Hal was on the way out, conquered by the transatlantic dragon he had set out to tame. It was hard to feel sorry for Valance, unemployed and down to his last few millions, abandoned by his beloved Mrs. Torture and her pals, relegated to the limbo reserved for fallen favourites, along with busted entrepreneur-boffins and insider-dealing financiers and renegade ex-ministers; but Chamcha, flying to his father's deathbed, was in so heightened an emotional condition that he managed a valedictory lump in the throat even for wicked Hal. At whose pool table , he wondered vaguely, is Baby playing now?

In India, the war between men and women showed no sign of abating. In the Indian Express he read an account of the latest ‘bride suicide’. The husband, Prajapati, is absconding . On the next page, in the weekly small-ad marriage market, the parents of young men still demanded, and the parents of young women proudly offered, brides of ‘wheatish’ complexions. Chamcha remembered Zeeny's friend, the poet Bhupen Gandhi, speaking of such things with passionate bitterness. ‘How to accuse others of being prejudiced when our own hands are so dirty?’ he had declaimed. ‘Many of you in Britain speak of victimization. Well. I have not been there, I don't know your situation, but in my personal experience I have never been able to feel comfortable about being described as a victim. In class terms, obviously, I am not. Even speaking culturally, you find here all the bigotries, all the procedures associated with oppressor groups. So while many Indians are undoubtedly oppressed, I don't think any of us are entitled to lay claim to such a glamorous position.’