Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

Mishal fell upon her sister, pulling her hair, – Anahita, in pain, was nevertheless able to get in another dig, ‘Least I didn't cut my hair into any weirdo pincushion, must be a nutter who fancies that,’ and the two departed, leaving Chamcha to wonder at Anahita's sudden and absolute espousal of her mother's ethic of femininity. Trouble brewing , he concluded.

Trouble came: soon enough.

More and more, when he was alone, he felt the slow heaviness pushing him down, until he fell out of consciousness, running down like a wind-up toy, and in those passages of stasis that always ended just before the arrival of visitors his body would emit alarming noises, the howlings of infernal wahwah pedals, the snare-drum cracking of satanic bones. These were the periods in which, little by little, he grew. And as he grew, so too did the rumours of his presence; you can't keep a devil locked up in the attic and expect to keep it to yourself forever.

How the news got out (for the people in the know remained tight-lipped, the Sufyans because they feared loss of business, the temporary beings because their feeling of evanescence had rendered them unable, for the moment, to act, – and all parties because of the fear of the arrival of the police, never exactly reluctant to enter such establishments, bump accidentally into a little furniture and step by chance on a few arms legs necks): he began to appear to the locals in their dreams. The mullahs at the Jamme Masjid which used to be the Machzikel HaDath synagogue which had in its turn replaced the Huguenots’ Calvinist church; – and Dr Uhuru Simba the man-mountain in African pill-box hat and red-yellow-black poncho who had led the successful protest against The Aliens Show and whom Mishal Sufyan hated more than any other black man on account of his tendency to punch uppity women in the mouth, herself for example, in public, at a meeting, plenty of witnesses, but it didn't stop the Doctor, he's a crazy bastard, that one , she told Chamcha when she pointed him out from the attic one day, capable of anything; he could've killed me, and all because I told everybody he wasn't no African, I knew him when he was plain Sylvester Roberts from down New Cross way; fucking witch doctor, if you ask me ; – and Mishal herself, and Jumpy, and Hanif; – and the Bus Conductor, too, they all dreamed him, rising up in the Street like Apocalypse and burning the town like toast. And in every one of the thousand and one dreams he, Saladin Chamcha, gigantic of limb and horn-turbaned of head, was singing, in a voice so diabolically ghastly and guttural that it proved impossible to identify the verses, even though the dreams turned out to have the terrifying quality of being serial, each one following on from the one the night before, and so on, night after night, until even the Silent Man, that former justice of the peace who had not spoken since the night in an Indian restaurant when a young drunk stuck a knife under his nose, threatened to cut him, and then committed the far more shocking offence of spitting all over his food, – until this mild gentleman astounded his wife by sitting upright in his sleep, ducking his neck forwards like a pigeon's, clapping the insides of his wrists together beside his right ear, and roaring out a song at the top of his voice, which sounded so alien and full of static that she couldn't make out a word.

Very quickly, because nothing takes a long time any more, the image of the dream-devil started catching on, becoming popular, it should be said, only amongst what Hal Valance had described as the tinted persuasion . While non-tint neo-Georgians dreamed of a sulphurous enemy crushing their perfectly restored residences beneath his smoking heel, nocturnal browns-and-blacks found themselves cheering, in their sleep, this what-else-after-all-but-black-man, maybe a little twisted up by fate class race history, all that, but getting off his behind, bad and mad, to kick a little ass.

At first these dreams were private matters, but pretty soon they started leaking into the waking hours, as Asian retailers and manufacturers of button-badges sweatshirts posters understood the power of the dream, and then all of a sudden he was everywhere, on the chests of young girls and in the windows protected against bricks by metal grilles, he was a defiance and a warning. Sympathy for the Devil: a new lease of life for an old tune. The kids in the Street started wearing rubber devil-horns on their heads, the way they used to wear pink-and-green balls jiggling on the ends of stiff wires a few years previously, when they preferred to imitate spacemen. The symbol of the Goatman, his fist raised in might, began to crop up on banners at political demonstrations, Save the Six, Free the Four, Eat the Heinz Fifty-Seven. Pleasechu meechu , the radios sang, hopeyu guessma nayym . Police community relations officers pointed to the ‘growing devil-cult among young blacks and Asians’ as a ‘deplorable tendency’, using this ‘Satanist revival’ to fight back against the allegations of Ms Pamela Chamcha and the local CRC: ‘Who are the witches now?’ ‘Chamcha,’ Mishal said excitedly, ‘you're a hero. I mean, people can really identify with you. It's an image white society has rejected for so long that we can really take it, you know, occupy it, inhabit it, reclaim it and make it our own. It's time you considered action.’

‘Go away,’ cried Saladin, in his bewilderment. ‘This isn't what I wanted. This is not what I meant, at all.’

‘You're growing out of the attic, anyhow,’ rejoined Mishal, miffed. ‘It won't be big enough for you in not too long a while.’

Things were certainly coming to a head.

‘Another old lady get slice las’ night,’ announced Hanif Johnson, affecting a Trinidadian accent in the way he had. ‘No mo soshaal security for she.’ Anahita Sufyan, on duty behind the counter of the Shaandaar Café, banged cups and plates. ‘I don't know why you do that,’ she complained. ‘Sends me spare.’ Hanif ignored her, sat down beside Jumpy, who muttered absently: ‘What're they saying?’ – Approaching fatherhood was weighing on Jumpy Joshi, but Hanif slapped him on the back. ‘The ol’ poetry not goin great, bra,’ he commiserated. ‘Look like that river of blood get coagulate.’ A look from Jumpy changed his tune. ‘They sayin what they say,’ he answered. ‘Look out for coloureds cruisin in cars. Now if she was black, man, it'd be “No grounds to suspec racial motive.” I tell you,’ he went on, dropping the accent, ‘sometimes the level of aggression bubbling just under the skin of this town gets me really scared. It's not just the damn Granny Ripper. It's everywhere. You bump into a guy's newspaper in a rush-hour train and you can get your face broken. Everybody's so goddamn angry, seems like to me. Including, old friend, you,’ he finished, noticing. Jumpy stood, excused himself, and walked out without an explanation. Hanif spread his arms, gave Anahita his most winsome smile: ‘What'd I do?’

Anahita smiled back sweetly. ‘Dju ever think, Hanif, that maybe people don't like you very much?’

When it became known that the Granny Ripper had struck again, suggestions that the solution to the hideous killings of old women by a ‘human fiend’, – who invariably arranged his victims’ internal organs neatly around their corpses, one lung by each ear, and the heart, for obvious reasons, in the mouth, – would most likely be found by investigating the new occultism among the city's blacks which was giving the authorities so much cause for concern, – began to be heard with growing frequency. The detention and interrogation of ‘tints’ intensified accordingly, as did the incidence of snap raids on establishments ‘suspected of harbouring underground occultist cells’. What was happening, although nobody admitted it or even, at first, understood, was that everyone, black brown white, had started thinking of the dream-figure as real, as a being who had crossed the frontier, evading the normal controls, and was now roaming loose about the city. Illegal migrant, outlaw king, foul criminal or race-hero, Saladin Chamcha was getting to be true. Stories rushed across the city in every direction: a physiotherapist sold a shaggy-dog tale to the Sundays, was not believed, but no smoke without fire , people said; it was a precarious state of affairs, and it couldn't be long before the raid on the Shaandaar Café that would send the whole thing higher than the sky. Priests became involved, adding another unstable element – the linkage between the term black and the sin blasphemy – to the mix. In his attic, slowly, Saladin Chamcha grew.