Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses

you remember Rekha on her carpet when we fell and someone else mad looking guy Scottish get-up gora type

didn't catch the name

She saw them or she didn't see them I can't be sure she just stood there

It was Rekha's idea take her upstairs summit of Everest once you've been there the only way is down

I pointed my finger at her we went up

I didn't push her

Rekha pushed her

I wouldn't have pushed her

Spoono

Understand me Spoono

Bloody hell

I loved that girl.

Salahuddin was thinking how Sisodia, with his remarkable gift for the chance encounter (Gibreel stepping out in front of London traffic, Salahuddin himself panicking before an open aircraft door, and now, it seemed, Alleluia Cone in her hotel lobby) had finally bumped accidentally into death; – and thinking, too, about Allie, less lucky a faller than himself, making (instead of her longed-for solo ascent of Everest) this ignominiously fatal descent, – and about how he was going to die for his verses, but could not find it in himself to call the death-sentence unjust.

There was a knocking at the door. Open, please. Police . Kas-turba had called them, after all.

Gibreel took the lid off the wonderful lamp of Changez Chamchawala and let it fall clattering to the floor.

He's hidden a gun inside , Salahuddin realized. ‘Watch out,’ he shouted. ‘There's an armed man in here.’ The knocking stopped, and now Gibreel rubbed his hand along the side of the magic lamp: once, twice, thrice.

The revolver jumped up, into his other hand.

A fearsome jinnee of monstrous stature appeared , Salahuddin remembered. ‘What is your wish? I am the slave of him who holds the lamp.’ What a limiting thing is a weapon, Salahuddin thought, feeling oddly detached from events. – Like Gibreel when the sickness came. – Yes, indeed; a most confining manner of thing. – For how few the choices were, now that Gibreel was the armed man and he, the unarmed ; how the universe had shrunk! The true djinns of old had the power to open the gates of the Infinite, to make all things possible, to render all wonders capable of being attained; how banal, in comparison, was this modern spook, this degraded descendant of mighty ancestors, this feeble slave of a twentieth-century lamp.

‘I told you a long time back,’ Gibreel Farishta quietly said, ‘that if I thought the sickness would never leave me, that it would always return, I would not be able to bear up to it.’ Then, very quickly, before Salahuddin could move a finger, Gibreel put the barrel of the gun into his own mouth; and pulled the trigger; and was free.

He stood at the window of his childhood and looked out at the Arabian Sea. The moon was almost full; moonlight, stretching from the rocks of Scandal Point out to the far horizon, created the illusion of a silver pathway, like a parting in the water's shining hair, like a road to miraculous lands. He shook his head; could no longer believe in fairy-tales. Childhood was over, and the view from this window was no more than an old and sentimental echo. To the devil with it! Let the bulldozers come. If the old refused to die, the new could not be born.

‘Come along,’ Zeenat Vakil's voice said at his shoulder. It seemed that in spite of all his wrong-doing, weakness, guilt – in spite of his humanity – he was getting another chance. There was no accounting for one's good fortune, that was plain. There it simply was, taking his elbow in its hand. ‘My place,’ Zeeny offered. ‘Let's get the hell out of here.’

‘I'm coming,’ he answered her, and turned away from the view.