Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

‘The sea will part at the angel's command,’ Ayesha answered.

‘You are leading these people into certain disaster.’

‘I am taking them into the bosom of God.’

‘I don't believe in you,’ Mirza Saeed insisted. ‘But I'm going to come, and will try to end this insanity with every step I take.’

‘God chooses many means,’ Ayesha rejoiced, ‘many roads by which the doubtful may be brought into his certainty.’

‘Go to hell,’ shouted Mirza Saeed Akhtar, and ran, scattering butterflies, from the room.

‘Who is the madder,’ Osman the clown whispered into his bullock's ear as he groomed it in its small byre, ‘the madwoman, or the fool who loves the madwoman?’ The bullock didn't reply. ‘Maybe we should have stayed untouchable,’ Osman continued. ‘A compulsory ocean sounds worse than a forbidden well.’ And the bullock nodded, twice for yes, boom, boom.

‘Once I'm an owl, what is the spell or antidote for turning me back into myself?’ Mr. Muhammad Sufyan, prop. Shaan-daar Cafe and landlord of the rooming-house above, mentor to the variegated, transient and particoloured inhabitants of both, seen-it-all type, least doctrinaire of hajis and most unashamed of VCR addicts, ex-schoolteacher, self-taught in classical texts of many cultures, dismissed from post in Dhaka owing to cultural differences with certain generals in the old days when Bangladesh was merely an East Wing, and therefore, in his own words, ‘not so much an immig as an emig runt’ – this last a good-natured allusion to his lack of inches, for though he was a wide man, thick of arm and waist, he stood no more than sixty-one inches off the ground, blinked in his bedroom doorway, awakened by Jumpy Joshi's urgent midnight knock, polished his half-rimmed spectacles on the edge of Bengali-style kurta (drawstrings tied at the neck in a neat bow), squeezed lids tightly shut open shut over myopic eyes, replaced glasses, opened eyes, stroked moustacheless hennaed beard, sucked teeth, and responded to the now-indisputable horns on the brow of the shivering fellow whom Jumpy, like the cat, appeared to have dragged in, with the above impromptu quip, stolen, with commendable mental alacrity for one aroused from his slumbers, from Lucius Apuleius of Madaura, Moroccan priest, ad 120—180 approx., colonial of an earlier Empire, a person who denied the accusation of having bewitched a rich widow yet confessed, somewhat perversely, that at an early stage in his career he had been transformed, by witchcraft, into (not an owl, but) an ass. ‘Yes, yes,’ Sufyan continued, stepping out into the passage and blowing a white mist of winter breath into his cupped hands, ‘Poor misfortunate, but no point wallowing. Constructive attitude must be adopted. I will wake my wife.’

Chamcha was beard-fuzz and grime. He wore a blanket like a toga below which there protruded the comic deformity of goats’ hoofs, while above it could be seen the sad comedy of a sheepskin jacket borrowed from Jumpy, its collar turned up, so that sheepish curls nestled only inches from pointy billy-goat horns. He seemed incapable of speech, sluggish of body, dull of eye; even though Jumpy attempted to encourage him – ‘There, you see, we'll have this well sorted in a flash’ – he, Saladin, remained the most limp and passive of – what? – let us say: satyrs. Sufyan, meanwhile, offered further Apuleian sympathy. ‘In the case of the ass, reverse metamorphosis required personal intervention of goddess Isis,’ he beamed. ‘But old times are for old fogies. In your instance, young mister, first step would possibly be a bowl of good hot soup.’

At this point his kindly tones were quite drowned by the intervention of a second voice, raised high in operatic terror; moments after which, his small form was being jostled and shoved by the mountainous, fleshy figure of a woman, who seemed unable to decide whether to push him out of her way or keep him before her as a protective shield. Crouching behind Sufyan, this new being extended a trembling arm at whose end was a quivering, pudgy, scarlet-nailed index finger. ‘That over there,’ she howled. ‘What thing is come upon us?’

‘It is a friend of Joshi's,’ Sufyan said mildly, and continued, turning to Chamcha, ‘Please forgive, – the unexpectedness et cet, isn't it? – Anyhow, may I present my Mrs.; – my Begum Sahiba, – Hind.’

‘What friend? How friend?’ the croucher cried. ‘Ya Allah, eyes aren't next to your nose?’

The passageway, – bare-board floor, torn floral paper on the walls, – was starting to fill up with sleepy residents. Prominent among whom were two teenage girls, one spike-haired, the other pony-tailed, and both relishing the opportunity to demonstrate their skills (learned from Jumpy) in the martial arts of karate and Wing Chun: Sufyan's daughters, Mishal (seventeen) and fifteen-year-old Anahita, leapt from their bedroom in fighting gear, Bruce Lee pajamas worn loosely over T-shirts bearing the image of the new Madonna; – caught sight of unhappy Saladin; – and shook their heads in wide-eyed delight.

‘Radical,’ said Mishal, approvingly. And her sister nodded assent: ‘Crucial. Fucking A .’ Her mother did not, however, reproach her for her language; Hind's mind was elsewhere, and she wailed louder than ever: ‘Look at this husband of mine. What sort of haji is this? Here is Shaitan himself walking in through our door, and I am made to offer him hot chicken yakhni, cooked by my own right hand.’

Useless, now, for Jumpy Joshi to plead with Hind for tolerance, to attempt explanations and demand solidarity. ‘If he's not the devil on earth,’ the heaving-chested lady pointed out unanswerably, ‘from where that plague-breath comes that he's breathing? From, maybe, the Perfumed Garden?’

‘Not Gulistan, but Bostan,’ said Chamcha, suddenly. ‘A I Flight 420.’ On hearing his voice, however, Hind squealed frightfully, and plunged past him, heading for the kitchen.

‘Mister,’ Mishal said to Saladin as her mother fled downstairs, ‘anyone who scares her that way has got to be seriously bad .’

‘Wicked,’ Anahita agreed. ‘Welcome aboard.’

This Hind, now so firmly entrenched in exclamatory mode, had once been – strangebuttrue! – the most blushing of brides, the soul of gentleness, the very incarnation of tolerant good humour. As the wife of the erudite schoolteacher of Dhaka, she had entered into her duties with a will, the perfect helpmeet, bringing her husband cardamom-scented tea when he stayed up late marking examination papers, ingratiating herself with the school principal at the termly Staff Families Outing, struggling with the novels of Bibhutibhushan Banerji and the metaphysics of Tagore in an attempt to be more worthy of a spouse who could quote effortlessly from Rig-Veda as well as Quran-Sharif, from the military accounts of Julius Caesar as well as the Revelations of St John the Divine. In those days she had admired his pluralistic openness of mind, and struggled, in her kitchen, towards a parallel eclecticism, learning to cook the dosas and uttapams of South India as well as the soft meatballs of Kashmir. Gradually her espousal of the cause of gastronomic pluralism grew into a grand passion, and while secularist Sufyan swallowed the multiple cultures of the subcontinent – ‘and let us not pretend that Western culture is not present; after these centuries, how could it not also be part of our heritage?’ – his wife cooked, and ate in increasing quantities, its food. As she devoured the highly spiced dishes of Hyderabad and the high-faluting yoghurt sauces of Lucknow her body began to alter, because all that food had to find a home somewhere, and she began to resemble the wide rolling land mass itself, the subcontinent without frontiers, because food passes across any boundary you care to mention.