Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

Novak and the rest had snapped out of their happy mood. ‘Animal,’ Stein cursed him as he administered a series of kicks, and Bruno joined in: ‘You're all the same. Can't expect animals to observe civilized standards. Eh?’ And Novak took up the thread: ‘We're talking about fucking personal hygiene here, you little fuck.’

Chamcha was mystified. Then he noticed that a large number of soft, pellety objects had appeared on the floor of the Black Maria. He felt consumed by bitterness and shame. It seemed that even his natural processes were goatish now. The humiliation of it! He was – had gone to some lengths to become – a sophisticated man! Such degradations might be all very well for riff-raff from villages in Sylhet or the bicycle-repair shops of Gujranwala, but he was cut from different cloth! ‘My good fellows,’ he began, attempting a tone of authority that was pretty difficult to bring off from that undignified position on his back with his hoofy legs wide apart and a soft tumble of his own excrement all about him, ‘my good fellows, you had best understand your mistake before it's too late.’

Novak cupped a hand behind an ear. ‘What's that? What was that noise?’ he inquired, looking about him, and Stein said, ‘Search me.’ ‘Tell you what it sounded like,’ Joe Bruno volunteered, and with his hands around his mouth he bellowed: ‘Maa-aa-aa!’ Then the three of them all laughed once more, so that Saladin had no way of telling if they were simply insulting him or if his vocal cords had truly been infected, as he feared, by this macabre demoniasis that had overcome him without the slightest warning. He had begun to shiver again. The night was extremely cold.

The officer, Stein, who appeared to be the leader of the trinity, or at least the primus inter pares, returned abruptly to the subject of the pellety refuse rolling around the floor of the moving van. ‘In this country,’ he informed Saladin, ‘we clean up our messes.’

The policemen stopped holding him down and pulled him into a kneeling position. ‘That's right,’ said Novak, ‘clean it up.’ Joe Bruno placed a large hand behind Chamcha's neck and pushed his head down towards the pellet-littered floor. ‘Off you go,’ he said, in a conversational voice. ‘Sooner you start, sooner you'll polish it off.’

Even as he was performing (having no option) the latest and basest ritual of his unwarranted humiliation, – or, to put it another way, as the circumstances of his miraculously spared life grew ever more infernal and outré – Saladin Chamcha began to notice that the three immigration officers no longer looked or acted nearly as strangely as at first. For one thing, they no longer resembled one another in the slightest. Officer Stein, whom his colleagues called ‘Mack’ or ‘Jockey’, turned out to be a large, burly man with a thick roller-coaster of a nose; his accent, it now transpired, was exaggeratedly Scottish. ‘Tha's the ticket,’ he remarked approvingly as Chamcha munched miserably on. ‘An actor, was it? I'm partial to watchin’ a guid man perform.’

This observation prompted Officer Novak – that is, ‘Kim’ – who had acquired an alarmingly pallid colouring, an ascetically bony face that reminded one of medieval icons, and a frown suggesting some deep inner torment, to burst into a short peroration about his favourite television soap-opera stars and game-show hosts, while Officer Bruno, who struck Chamcha as having grown exceedingly handsome all of a sudden, his hair shiny with styling gel and centrally divided, his blond beard contrasting dramatically with the darker hair on his head, – Bruno, the youngest of the three, asked lasciviously, what about watchin’ girls, then, that's my game. This new notion set the three of them off into all manner of half-completed anecdotes pregnant with suggestions of a certain type, but when the five policemen attempted to join in they joined ranks, grew stern, and put the constables in their places. ‘Little children,’ Mr. Stein admonished them, ‘should be seen an’ no hearrud.’

By this time Chamcha was gagging violently on his meal, forcing himself not to vomit, knowing that such an error would only prolong his misery. He was crawling about on the floor of the van, seeking out the pellets of his torture as they rolled from side to side, and the policemen, needing an outlet for the frustration engendered by the immigration officer's rebuke, began to abuse Saladin roundly and pull the hair on his rump to increase both his discomfort and his discomfiture. Then the five policemen defiantly started up their own version of the immigration officers’ conversation, and set to analysing the merits of divers movie stars, darts players, professional wrestlers and the like; but because they had been put into a bad humour by the loftiness of ‘Jockey’ Stein, they were unable to maintain the abstract and intellectual tone of their superiors, and fell to quarrelling over the relative merits of the Tottenham Hotspur ‘double’ team of the early 1960s and the mighty Liverpool side of the present day, – in which the Liverpool supporters incensed the Spurs fans by alleging that the great Danny Blanchflower was a ‘luxury’ player, a cream puff, flower by name, pansy by nature; – whereupon the offended claque responded by shouting that in the case of Liverpool it was the supporters who were the bum-boys, the Spurs mob could take them apart with their arms tied behind their backs. Of course all the constables were familiar with the techniques of football hooligans, having spent many Saturdays with their backs to the game watching the spectators in the various stadiums up and down the country, and as their argument grew heated they reached the point of wishing to demonstrate, to their opposing colleagues, exactly what they meant by ‘tearing apart’, ‘bollocking’, ‘bottling’ and the like. The angry factions glared at one another and then, all together, they turned to gaze upon the person of Saladin Chamcha.

Well, the ruckus in that police van grew noisier and noisier, – and it's true to say that Chamcha was partly to blame, because he had started squealing like a pig, – and the young bobbies were thumping and gouging various parts of his anatomy, using him both as a guinea-pig and a safety-valve, remaining careful, in spite of their excitation, to confine their blows to his softer, more fleshy parts, to minimize the risk of breakages and bruises; and when Jockey, Kim and Joey saw what their juniors were getting up to, they chose to be tolerant, because boys would have their fun.

Besides, all this talk of watching had brought Stein, Bruno and Novak round to an examination of weightier matters, and now, with solemn faces and judicious voices, they were speaking of the need, in this day and age, for an increase in observation, not merely in the sense of ‘spectating’, but in that of ‘watchfulness’, and ‘surveillance’. The young constables’ experience was extremely relevant, Stein intoned: watch the crowd, not the game. ‘Eternal vigilance is the price o’ liberty,’ he proclaimed.

‘Eek,’ cried Chamcha, unable to avoid interrupting. ‘Aargh, unnhh, owoo.’

After a time a curious mood of detachment fell upon Saladin. He no longer had any idea of how long they had been travelling in the Black Maria of his hard fall from grace, nor could he have hazarded a guess as to the proximity of their ultimate destination, even though the tinnitus in his ears was growing gradually louder, those phantasmal grandmother's footsteps, ellowen, deeowen, London. The blows raining down on him now felt as soft as a lover's caresses; the grotesque sight of his own metamorphosed body no longer appalled him; even the last pellets of goat-excrement failed to stir his much-abused stomach. Numbly, he crouched down in his little world, trying to make himself smaller and smaller, in the hope that he might eventually disappear altogether, and so regain his freedom.