Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

Pinkwalla takes his cue from the crowd, So-it-meltdown-time-when-de-men-of-crime-gonna-get-in-line-for-some-hell-fire-fryin , after which he turns to the crowd, arms wide, feet with the beat, to ask, Who's-it-gonna-be? Who-you-wanna-see? Names are shouted, compete, coalesce, until the assembled company is united once more, chanting a single word. Pinkwalla claps his hands. Curtains part behind him, allowing female attendants in shiny pink shorts and singlets to wheel out a fearsome cabinet: man-sized, glass-fronted, internally-illuminated – the microwave oven, complete with Hot Seat, known to Club regulars as: Hell's Kitchen. ‘All right ,’ cries Pinkwalla. ‘Now we really cookin.’

Attendants move towards the tableau of hate-figures, pounce upon the night's sacrificial offering, the one most often selected, if truth be told; at least three times a week. Her permawaved coiffure, her pearls, her suit of blue. Maggie-maggie-maggie , bays the crowd. Burn-burn-burn . The doll, – the guy , – is strapped into the Hot Seat. Pinkwalla throws the switch. And O how prettily she melts, from the inside out, crumpling into formlessness. Then she is a puddle, and the crowd sighs its ecstasy: done . ‘The fire this time,’ Pinkwalla tells them. Music regains the night.

When Pinkwalla the deejay saw what was climbing under cover of darkness into the back of his panel van, which his friends Hanif and Mishal had persuaded him to bring round the back of the Shaandaar, the fear of obeah filled his heart; but there was also the contrary exhilaration of realizing that the potent hero of his many dreams was a flesh-and-blood actuality. He stood across the street, shivering under a lamp-post though it wasn't particularly cold, and stayed there for half an hour while Mishal and Hanif spoke urgently to him, he needs somewhere to go, we have to think about his future . Then he shrugged, walked over to the van, and started up the engine. Hanif sat beside him in the cab; Mishal travelled with Saladin, hidden from view.

It was almost four in the morning when they bedded Chamcha down in the empty, locked-up nightclub. Pinkwalla – his real name, Sewsunker, was never used – had unearthed a couple of sleeping-bags from a back room, and they sufficed. Hanif Johnson, saying goodnight to the fearsome entity of whom his lover Mishal seemed entirely unafraid, tried to talk to him seriously, ‘You've got to realize how important you could be for us, there's more at stake here than your personal needs,’ but mutant Saladin only snorted, yellow and black, and Hanif backed quickly away. When he was alone with the waxworks Chamcha was able to fix his thoughts once again on the face that had finally coalesced in his mind's eye, radiant, the light streaming out around him from a point just behind his head, Mister Perfecto, portrayer of gods, who always landed on his feet, was always forgiven his sins, loved, praised, adored... the face he had been trying to identify in his dreams, Mr Gibreel Farishta, transformed into the simulacrum of an angel as surely as he was the Devil's mirror-self.

Who should the Devil blame but the Archangel, Gibreel?

The creature on the sleeping-bags opened its eyes; smoke began to issue from its pores. The face on every one of the waxwork dummies was the same now, Gibreel's face with its widow's peak and its long thin saturnine good looks. The creature bared its teeth and let out a long, foul breath, and the waxworks dissolved into puddles and empty clothes, all of them, every one. The creature lay back, satisfied. And fixed its mind upon its foe.

Whereupon it felt within itself the most inexplicable sensations of compression, suction, withdrawal; it was racked by terrible, squeezing pains, and emitted piercing squeals that nobody, not even Mishal who was staying with Hanif in Pinkwalla's apartment above the Club, dared to investigate. The pains mounted in intensity, and the creature thrashed and tossed around the dance-floor, wailing most piteously; until, at length, granted respite, it fell asleep.

When Mishal, Hanif and Pinkwalla ventured into the club-room several hours later, they observed a scene of frightful devastation, tables sent flying, chairs broken in half, and, of course, every waxwork – good and evil – Topsy and Legree – melted like tigers into butter; and at the centre of the carnage, sleeping like a baby, no mythological creature at all, no iconic Thing of horns and hellsbreath, but Mr Saladin Chamcha himself, apparently restored to his old shape, mother-naked but of entirely human aspect and proportions, humanized – is there any option but to conclude? – by the fearsome concentration of his hate.

He opened his eyes; which still glowed pale and red.

Alleluia Cone, coming down from Everest, saw a city of ice to the west of Camp Six, across the Rock Band, glittering in the sunlight below the massif of Cho Oyu. Shangri-La , she momentarily thought; however, this was no green vale of immortality but a metropolis of gigantic ice-needles, thin, sharp and cold. Her attention was distracted by Sherpa Pemba warning her to maintain her concentration, and the city had gone when she looked back. She was still at twenty-seven thousand feet, but the apparition of the impossible city threw her back across space and time to the Bayswater study of old dark wooden furniture and heavy velvet curtains in which her father Otto Cone, the art historian and biographer of Picabia, had spoken to her in her fourteenth and his final year of ‘the most dangerous of all the lies we are fed in our lives', which was, in his opinion, the idea of the continuum. ‘Anybody ever tries to tell you how this most beautiful and most evil of planets is somehow homogeneous, composed only of reconcilable elements, that it all adds up , you get on the phone to the straitjacket tailor,’ he advised her, managing to give the impression of having visited more planets than one before coming to his conclusions. ‘The world is incompatible, just never forget it: gaga. Ghosts, Nazis, saints, all alive at the same time; in one spot, blissful happiness, while down the road, the inferno. You can't ask for a wilder place.’ Ice cities on the roof of the world wouldn't have fazed Otto. Like his wife Alicja, Allie's mother, he was a Polish émigré, a survivor of a wartime prison camp whose name was never mentioned throughout Allie's childhood. ‘He wanted to make it as if it had not been,’ Alicja told her daughter later. ‘He was unrealistic in many ways. But a good man; the best I knew.’ She smiled an inward smile as she spoke, tolerating him in memory as she had not always managed to during his life, when he was frequently appalling. For example: he developed a hatred of communism which drove him to embarrassing extremes of behaviour, notably at Christmas, when this Jewish man insisted on celebrating with his Jewish family and others what he described as ‘an English rite’, as a mark of respect to their new ‘host nation’ – and then spoiled it all (in his wife's eyes) by bursting into the salon where the assembled company was relaxing in the glow of log fire, Christmas tree lights and brandy, got up in pantomime Chinee, with droopy moustaches and all, crying: ‘Father Christmas is dead! I have killed him! I am The Mao: no presents for anyone! Hee! Hee! Hee!’ Allie on Everest, remembering, winced – her mother's wince, she realized, transferred to her frosted face.

The incompatibility of life's elements: in a tent at Camp Four, 27,600 feet, the idea which seemed at times to be her father's daemon sounded banal, emptied of meaning, of atmosphere , by the altitude. ‘Everest silences you,’ she confessed to Gibreel Farishta in a bed above which parachute silk formed a canopy of hollow Himalayas. ‘When you come down, nothing seems worth saying, nothing at all. You find the nothingness wrapping you up, like a sound. Non-being. You can't keep it up, of course. The world rushes in soon enough. What shuts you up is, I think, the sight you've had of perfection: why speak if you can't manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences? It feels like a betrayal of what you've been through. But it fades; you accept that certain compromises, closures, are required if you're to continue.’ They spent most of their time in bed during their first weeks together: the appetite of each for the other seemingly inexhaustible, they made love six or seven times a day. ‘You opened me up,’ she told him. ‘You with the ham in your mouth. It was exactly as if you were speaking to me, as if I could read your thoughts. Not as if,’ she amended. ‘I did read them, right?’ He nodded: it was true. ‘I read your thoughts and the right words just came out of my mouth,’ she marvelled. ‘Just flowed out. Bingo: love. In the beginning was the word.’