Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

All that night he walked the city streets, which remained stable, banal, as if restored to the hegemony of natural laws; while Rekha – floating before him on her carpet like an artiste on a stage, just above head-height – serenaded him with the sweetest of love songs, accompanying herself on an old ivory-sided harmonium, singing everything from the gazals of Faiz Ahmed Faiz to the best old film music, such as the defiant air sung by the dancer Anarkali in the presence of the Grand Mughal Akbar in the fifties classic Mughal-e-Azam , – in which she declares and exults in her impossible, forbidden love for the Prince, Salim, – ‘Pyaar kiya to darna kya?’ – That is to say, more or less, why be afraid of love? and Gibreel, whom she had accosted in the garden of his doubt, felt the music attaching strings to his heart and leading him towards her, because what she asked was, just as she said, such a little thing, after all.

He reached the river; and another bench, cast-iron camels supporting the wooden slats, beneath Cleopatra's Needle. Sitting, he closed his eyes. Rekha sang Faiz:

Gibreel saw a man behind his closed eyes: not Faiz, but another poet, well past his heyday, a decrepit sort of fellow. – Yes, that was his name: Baal. What was he doing here? What did he have to say for himself? – Because he was certainly trying to say something; his speech, thick and slurry, made understanding difficult... Any new idea, Mahound, is asked two questions. The first is asked when it's weak: WHAT KIND OF AN IDEA ARE YOU? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.

‘What's the second question?’ Gibreel asked aloud.

Answer the first one first.

Gibreel, opening his eyes at dawn, found Rekha unable to sing, silenced by expectations and uncertainties. He let her have it straight off. ‘It's a trick. There is no God but God. You are neither the Entity nor Its adversary, but only some caterwauling mist. No compromises; I won't do deals with fogs.’ He saw, then, the emeralds and brocades fall from her body, followed by the flesh, until only the skeleton remained, after which that, too, crumbled away; finally, there was a piteous, piercing shriek, as whatever was left of Rekha flew with vanquished fury into the sun.

And did not return: except at – or near – the end.

Convinced that he had passed a test, Gibreel realized that a great weight had lifted from him; his spirits grew lighter by the second, until by the time the sun was in the sky he was literally delirious with joy. Now it could really begin: the tyranny of his enemies, of Rekha and Alleluia Cone and all the women who wished to bind him in the chains of desires and songs, was broken for good; now he could feel light streaming out, once more, from the unseen point just behind his head; and his weight, too, began to diminish. – Yes, he was losing the last traces of his humanity, the gift of flight was being restored to him, as he became ethereal, woven of illumined air. – He could simply step, this minute, off this blackened parapet and soar away above the old grey river; – or leap from any of its bridges and never touch land again. So: it was time to show the city a great sight, for when it perceived the Archangel Gibreel standing in all his majesty upon the western horizon, bathed in the rays of the rising sun, then surely its people would be sore afraid and repent them of their sins.

He began to enlarge his person.

How astonishing, then, that of all the drivers streaming along the Embankment – it was, after all, rush-hour – not one should so much as look in his direction, or acknowledge him! This was in truth a people who had forgotten how to see. And because the relationship between men and angels is an ambiguous one – in which the angels, or mala'ikah, are both the controllers of nature and the intermediaries between the Deity and the human race; but at the same time, as the Quran clearly states, we said unto the angels, be submissive unto Adam , the point being to symbolize man's ability to master, through knowledge, the forces of nature which the angels represented – there really wasn't much that the ignored and infuriated malak Gibreel could do about it. Archangels could only speak when men chose to listen. What a bunch! Hadn't he warned the Over-Entity at the very beginning about this crew of criminals and evildoers? ‘Wilt thou place in the earth such as make mischief in it and shed blood?’ he had asked, and the Being, as usual, replied only that he knew better. Well, there they were, the masters of the earth, canned like tuna on wheels and blind as bats, their heads full of mischief and their newspapers of blood.

It really was incredible. Here appeared a celestial being, all radiance, effulgence and goodness, larger than Big Ben, capable of straddling the Thames colossus-style, and these little ants remained immersed in drive-time radio and quarrels with fellow-motorists. ‘I am Gibreel,’ he shouted in a voice that shook every building on the riverbank: nobody noticed. Not one person came running out of those quaking edifices to escape the earthquake. Blind, deaf and asleep.

He decided to force the issue.

The stream of traffic flowed past him. He took a mighty breath, lifted one gigantic foot, and stepped out to face the cars.

Gibreel Farishta was returned to Allie's doorstep, badly bruised, with many grazes on his arms and face, and jolted into sanity, by a tiny shining gentleman with an advanced stammer who introduced himself with some difficulty as the film producer S.S. Sisodia, ‘known as Whiwhisky because I'm papa partial to a titi tipple; mamadam, my caca card.’ (When they knew each other better, Sisodia would send Allie into convulsions of laughter by rolling up his right trouser-leg, exposing the knee, and pronouncing, while he held his enormous wraparound movie-man glasses to his shin: ‘Self pawpaw portrait.’ He was longsighted to a degree: ‘Don't need help to see moomovies but real life gets too damn cloclose up.’) It was Sisodia's rented limo that hit Gibreel, a slow-motion accident luckily, owing to traffic congestion; the actor ended up on the bonnet, mouthing the oldest line in the movies: Where am I , and Sisodia, seeing the legendary features of the vanished demigod squashed up against the limousine's windshield, was tempted to answer: Baback where you bibi belong: on the iska iska iscreen . – ‘No bobobones broken,’ Sisodia told Allie. ‘A mimi miracle. He ista ista istepped right in fafa front of the wee wee wehicle.’

So you're back , Allie greeted Gibreel silently. Seems this is where you always land up after you fall .

‘Also Scotch-and-Sisodia,’ the film producer reverted to the question of his sobriquets. Tor hoohoo humorous reasons. My fafavourite pup pup poison.’

‘It is very kind of you to bring Gibreel home,’ Allie belatedly got the point. ‘You must allow us to offer you a drink.’

‘Sure! Sure!’ Sisodia actually clapped his hands. ‘For me, for whowhole of heehee Hindi cinema, today is a baba banner day.’

‘You have not heard perhaps the story of the paranoid schizophrenic who, believing himself to be the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, agreed to undergo a lie-detector test?’ Alicja Cohen, eating gefilte fish hungrily, waved one of Bloom's forks under her daughter's nose. ‘The question they asked him: are you Napoleon? And the answer he gave, smiling wickedly, no doubt: No. So they watch the machine, which indicates with all the insight of modern science that the lunatic is lying.’ Blake again, Allie thought. Then I asked: does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so? He – i.e. Isaiah – replied. All poets believe that it does. & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing . ‘Are you listening to me, young woman? I'm serious here. That gentleman you have in your bed: he requires not your nightly attentions – excuse me but I'll speak plainly, seeing I must – but, to be frank, a padded cell.’