Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

After Mishal Sufyan told him about her illegal sexual relations with Hanif Johnson, Jumpy on his way over to Pamela Chamcha's had to stifle a number of bigoted thoughts, such as if his father hadn't been white he'd never have done it ; Hanif, he raged, that immature bastard who probably cut notches in his cock to keep count of his conquests, this Johnson with aspirations to represent his people who couldn't wait until they were of age before he started shafting them!... couldn't he see that Mishal with her omniscient body was just a, just a, child? – No she wasn't . – Damn him, then, damn him for (and here Jumpy shocked himself) being the first.

Jumpy en route to his mistress tried to convince himself that his resentments of Hanif, his friend Hanif , were primarily – how to put it? – linguistic . Hanif was in perfect control of the languages that mattered: sociological, socialistic, black-radical, anti-anti-anti-racist, demagogic, oratorical, sermonic: the vocabularies of power. But you bastard you rummage in my drawers and laugh at my stupid poems. The real language problem: how to bend it shape it, how to let it be our freedom, how to repossess its poisoned wells, how to master the river of words of time of blood: about all that you haven't got a clue . How hard that struggle, how inevitable the defeat. Nobody's going to elect me to anything. No power-baset no constituency: just the battle with the words . But he, Jumpy, also had to admit that his envy of Hanif was as much as anything rooted in the other's greater control of the languages of desire. Mishal Sufyan was quite something, an elongated, tubular beauty, but he wouldn't have known how, even if he'd thought of, he'd never have dared. Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.

When Pamela Chamcha answered the door he found that her hair had gone snow-white overnight, and that her response to this inexplicable calamity had been to shave her head right down to the scalp and then conceal it inside an absurd burgundy turban which she refused to remove.

‘It just happened,’ she said. ‘One must not rule out the possibility that I have been bewitched.’

He wasn't standing for that. ‘Or the notion of a reaction, however delayed, to the news of your husband's altered, but extant, state.’

She swung to face him, halfway up the stairs to the bedroom, and pointed dramatically towards the open sitting-room door. ‘In that case,’ she triumphed, ‘why did it also happen to the dog?’

He might have told her, that night, that he wanted to end it, that his conscience no longer permitted, – he might have been willing to face her rage, and to live with the paradox that a decision could be simultaneously conscientious and immoral (because cruel, unilateral, selfish); but when he entered the bedroom she grabbed his face with both hands, and watching closely to see how he took the news she confessed to having lied about contraceptive precautions. She was pregnant. It turned out she was better at making unilateral decisions than he, and had simply taken from him the child Saladin Chamcha had been unable to provide. ‘I wanted it,’ she cried defiantly, and at close range. ‘And now I'm going to have it.’

Her selfishness had pre-empted his. He discovered that he felt relieved; absolved of the responsibility for making and acting upon moral choices, – because how could he leave her now? – he put such notions out of his head and allowed her, gently but with unmistakable intent, to push him backwards on to the bed.

Whether the slowly transmogrifying Saladin Chamcha was turning into some sort of science-fiction or horror-video mutey , some random mutation shortly to be naturally selected out of existence, – or whether he was evolving into an avatar of the Master of Hell, – or whatever was the case, the fact is (and it will be as well in the present matter to proceed cautiously, stepping from established fact to established fact, leaping to no conclusion until our yellowbrick lane of things-incontrovertibly-so has led us to within an inch or two of our destination) that the two daughters of Haji Sufyan had taken him under their wing, caring for the Beast as only Beauties can; and that, as time passed, he came to be extremely fond of the pair of them himself. For a long while Mishal and Anahita struck him as inseparable, fist and shadow, shot and echo, the younger girl seeking always to emulate her tall, feisty sibling, practising karate kicks and Wing Chun forearm smashes in flattering imitation of Mishal's uncompromising ways. More recently, however, he had noted the growth of a saddening hostility between the sisters. One evening at his attic window Mishal was pointing out some of the Street's characters, – there, a Sikh ancient shocked by a racial attack into complete silence; he had not spoken, it was said, for nigh on seven years, before which he had been one of the city's few ‘black’ justices of the peace... now, however, he pronounced no sentences, and was accompanied everywhere by a crotchety wife who treated him with dismissive exasperation, O, ignore him, he never says a dicky bird ; – and over there, a perfectly ordinary-looking ‘accountant type’ (Mishal's term) on his way home with briefcase and box of sweetmeats; this one was known in the Street to have developed the strange need to rearrange his sitting-room furniture for half an hour each evening, placing chairs in rows interrupted by an aisle and pretending to be the conductor of a single-decker bus on its way to Bangladesh, an obsessive fantasy in which all his family were obliged to participate, and after half an hour precisely he snaps out of it, and the rest of the time he's the dullest guy you could meet ; – and after some moments of this, fifteen-year-old Anahita broke in spitefully: ‘What she means is, you're not the only casualty, round here the freaks are two a penny, you only have to look.’

Mishal had developed the habit of talking about the Street as if it were a mythological battleground and she, on high at Chamcha's attic window, the recording angel and the exterminator, too. From her Chamcha learned the fables of the new Kurus and Pandavas, the white racists and black ‘self-help’ or vigilante posses starring in this modern Mahabharata, or, more accurately, Mahavilayet . Up there, under the railway bridge, the National Front used to do battle with the fearless radicals of the Socialist Workers Party, ‘every Sunday from closing time to opening time,’ she sneered, ‘leaving us lot to clear up the wreckage the rest of the sodding week.’ – Down that alley was where the Brickhall Three were done over by the police and then fitted up, verballed, framed; up that side-street he'd find the scene of the murder of the Jamaican, Ulysses E. Lee, and in that public house the stain on the carpet marking where Jatinder Singh Mehta breathed his last. ‘Thatcherism has its effect,’ she declaimed, while Chamcha, who no longer had the will or the words to argue with her, to speak of justice and the rule of law, watched Anahita's mounting rage. – ‘No pitched battles these days,’ Mishal elucidated. ‘The emphasis is on small-scale enterprises and the cult of the individual, right? In other words, five or six white bastards murdering us, one individual at a time.’ These days the posses roamed the nocturnal Street, ready for aggravation. ‘It's our turf,’ said Mishal Sufyan of that Street without a blade of grass in sight. ‘Let ‘em come and get it if they can.’

‘Look at her,’ Anahita burst out. ‘So ladylike, in'she? So refined. Imagine what Mum'd say if she knew.’ – ‘If she knew what, you little grass —?’ But Anahita wasn't to be cowed: ‘O, yes,’ she wailed. ‘O, yes, we know, don't think we don't. How she goes to the bhangra beat shows on Sunday mornings and changes in the ladies into those tarty-farty clothes – who she wiggles with and jiggles with at the Hot Wax daytime disco that she thinks I never heard of before – what went on at that bluesdance she crept off to with Mister You-know-who Cocky-bugger – some big sister,’ she produced her grandstand finish, ‘she'll probably wind up dead of wossname ignorance .’ Meaning, as Chamcha and Mishal well knew, – those cinema commercials, expressionist tombstones rising from earth and sea, had left the residue of their slogan well implanted, no doubt of that – Aids .