Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

He was hopping, now, from foot to foot, full of the thrill of the old words. ‘For me it is always Ovid over Lucretius,’ he stated. ‘Your soul, my good poor dear sir, is the same. Only in its migration it has adopted this presently varying form.’

‘This is pretty cold comfort,’ Chamcha managed a trace of his old dryness. ‘Either I accept Lucretius and conclude that some demonic and irreversible mutation is taking place in my inmost depths, or I go with Ovid and concede that everything now emerging is no more than a manifestation of what was already there.’

‘I have put my argument badly,’ Sufyan miserably apologized. ‘I meant only to reassure.’

‘What consolation can there be,’ Chamcha answered with bitter rhetoric, his irony crumbling beneath the weight of his unhappiness, ‘for a man whose old friend and rescuer is also the nightly lover of his wife, thus encouraging – as your old books would doubtless affirm – the growth of cuckold's horns?’

The old friend, Jumpy Joshi, was unable for a single moment of his waking hours to rid himself of the knowledge that, for the first time in as long as he could remember, he had lost the will to lead his life according to his own standards of morality. At the sports centre where he taught martial arts techniques to ever-greater numbers of students, emphasizing the spiritual aspects of the disciplines, much to their amusement (‘Ah so, Grasshopper,’ his star pupil Mishal Sufyan would tease him, ‘when honolable fascist swine jump at you flom dark alleyway, offer him teaching of Buddha before you kick him in honolable balls’), – he began to display such passionate intensity that his pupils, realizing that some inner anguish was being expressed, grew alarmed. When Mishal asked him about it at the end of a session that had left them both bruised and panting for breath, in which the two of them, teacher and star, had hurled themselves at one another like the hungriest of lovers, he threw her question back at her with an uncharacteristic lack of openness. ‘Talk about pot and kettle,’ he said. ‘Question of mote and beam.’ They were standing by the vending machines. She shrugged. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I confess, but keep the secret.’ He reached for his Coke: ‘What secret?’ Innocent Jumpy. Mishal whispered in his ear: ‘I'm getting laid. By your friend: Mister Hanif Johnson, Bar At Law.’

He was shocked, which irritated her. ‘O, come on . It's not like I'm fifteen .’ He replied, weakly, ‘If your mother ever,’ and once again she was impatient. ‘If you want to know,’ petulantly, ‘the one I'm worried about is Anahita. She wants whatever I've got. And she, by the way, really is fifteen.’ Jumpy noticed that he'd knocked over his paper-cup and there was Coke on his shoes. ‘Out with it,’ Mishal was insisting. ‘I owned up. Your turn.’ But Jumpy couldn't say; was still shaking his head about Hanif. ‘It'd be the finish of him,’ he said. That did it. Mishal put her nose in the air. ‘O, I get it,’ she said. ‘Not good enough for him, you reckon.’ And over her departing shoulder: ‘Here, Grasshopper. Don't holy men ever fuck?’

Not so holy. He wasn't cut out for sainthood, any more than the David Carradine character in the old Kung Fu programmes: like Grasshopper, like Jumpy. Every day he wore himself out trying to stay away from the big house in Netting Hill, and every evening he ended up at Pamela's door, thumb in mouth, biting the skin around the edges of the nail, fending off the dog and his own guilt, heading without wasting any time for the bedroom. Where they would fall upon one another, mouths searching out the places in which they had chosen, or learned, to begin: first his lips around her nipples, then hers moving along his lower thumb.

She had come to love in him this quality of impatience, because it was followed by a patience such as she had never experienced, the patience of a man who had never been ‘attractive’ and was therefore prepared to value what was offered, or so she had thought at first; but then she learned to appreciate his consciousness of and solicitude for her own internal tensions, his sense of the difficulty with which her slender, bony, small-breasted body found, learned and finally surrendered to a rhythm, his knowledge of time. She loved in him, too, his overcoming of himself; loved, knowing it to be a wrong reason, his willingness to overcome his scruples so that they might be together: loved the desire in him that rode over all that had been imperative in him. Loved it, without being willing to see, in this love, the beginning of an end.

Near the end of their lovemaking, she became noisy. ‘Yow!’ she shouted, all the aristocracy in her voice crowding into the meaningless syllables of her abandonment. ‘Whoop! Hi! Hah .’

She was still drinking heavily, scotch bourbon rye, a stripe of redness spreading across the centre of her face. Under the influence of alcohol her right eye narrowed to half the size of the left, and she began, to his horror, to disgust him. No discussion of her boozing was permitted, however: the one time he tried he found himself on the street with his shoes clutched in his right hand and his overcoat over his left arm. Even after that he came back: and she opened the door and went straight upstairs as though nothing had happened. Pamela's taboos: jokes about her background, mentions of whisky-bottle ‘dead soldiers’, and any suggestion that her late husband, the actor Saladin Chamcha, was still alive, living across town in a bed and breakfast joint, in the shape of a supernatural beast.

These days, Jumpy – who had, at first, badgered her incessantly about Saladin, telling her she should go ahead and divorce him, but this pretence of widowhood was intolerable: what about the man's assets, his rights to a share of the property, and so forth? Surely she would not leave him destitute? – no longer protested about her unreasonable behaviour. ‘I've got a confirmed report of his death,’ she told him on the only occasion on which she was prepared to say anything at all. ‘And what have you got? A billy-goat, a circus freak, nothing to do with me.’ And this, too, like her drinking, had begun to come between them. Jumpy's martial arts sessions increased in vehemence as these problems loomed larger in his mind.

Ironically, while Pamela refused point-blank to face the facts about her estranged husband, she had become embroiled, through her job at the community relations committee, in an investigation into allegations of the spread of witchcraft among the officers at the local police station. Various stations did from time to time gain the reputation of being ‘out of control’ – Notting Hill, Kentish Town, Islington – but witchcraft? Jumpy was sceptical. ‘The trouble with you,’ Pamela told him in her loftiest shooting-stick voice, ‘is that you still think of normality as being normal. My God: look at what's happening in this country. A few bent coppers taking their clothes off and drinking urine out of helmets isn't so weird. Call it working-class Freemasonry, if you want. I've got black people coming in every day, scared out of their heads, talking about obeah, chicken entrails, the lot. The goddamn bastards are enjoying this: scare the coons with their own ooga booga and have a few naughty nights into the bargain. Unlikely? Bloody wake up .’ Witchfinding, it seemed, ran in the family: from Matthew Hopkins to Pamela Lovelace. In Pamela's voice, speaking at public meetings, on local radio, even on regional news programmes on television, could be heard all the zeal and authority of the old Witchfinder-General, and it was only on account of that voice of a twentieth-century Gloriana that her campaign was not laughed instantly into extinction. New Broomstick Needed to Sweep Out Witches . There was talk of an official inquiry. What drove Jumpy wild, however, was Pamela's refusal to connect her arguments in the question of the occult policemen to the matter of her own husband: because, after all, the transformation of Saladin Chamcha had precisely to do with the idea that normality was no longer composed (if it had ever been) of banal, ‘normal’ elements. ‘Nothing to do with it,’ she said flatly when he tried to make the point: imperious, he thought, as any hanging judge.