The Satanic Verses (41 page)

Shaandaar residents gathered in the night-kitchen for an impromptu crisis summit. While Hind hurled imprecations into chicken soup, Sufyan placed Chamcha at a table, drawing up, for the poor fellow’s use, an aluminium chair with a blue plastic seat, and initiated the night’s proceedings. The theories of Lamarck, I am pleased to report, were quoted by the exiled schoolteacher, who spoke in his best didactic voice. When Jumpy had recounted the unlikely story of Chamcha’s fall from the sky – the protagonist himself being too immersed in chicken soup and misery to speak for himself – Sufyan, sucking teeth, made reference to the last edition of
The Origin of Species
. ‘In which even great Charles accepted the notion of mutation in extremis, to ensure survival of species; so what if his followers – always more Darwinian than man himself! – repudiated, posthumously, such Lamarckian
heresy, insisting on natural selection and nothing but, – however, I am bound to admit, such theory is not extended to survival of individual specimen but only to species as a whole; – in addition, regarding nature of mutation, problem is to comprehend actual utility of the change.’

‘Da-ad,’ Anahita Sufyan, eyes lifting to heaven, cheek lying ho-hum against palm, interrupted these cogitations. ‘Give over. Point is, how’d he turn into such a, such a,’ – admiringly – ‘freak?’

Upon which, the devil himself, looking up from chicken soup, cried out, ‘No, I’m not. I’m not a freak, O no, certainly I am not.’ His voice, seeming to rise from an unfathomable abyss of grief, touched and alarmed the younger girl, who rushed over to where he sat, and, impetuously caressing a shoulder of the unhappy beast, said, in an attempt to make amends: ‘Of course you aren’t, I’m sorry, of course I don’t think you’re a freak; it’s just that you look like one.’

Saladin Chamcha burst into tears.

Mrs Sufyan, meanwhile, had been horrified by the sight of her younger daughter actually laying hands on the creature, and turning to the gallery of nightgowned residents she waved a soup-ladle at them and pleaded for support. ‘How to tolerate? – Honour, safety of young girls cannot be assured. – That in my own house, such a thing …!’

Mishal Sufyan lost patience. ‘Jesus, Mum.’

‘Jesus
?’

‘Dju think it’s temporary?’ Mishal, turning her back on scandalized Hind, inquired of Sufyan and Jumpy. ‘Some sort of possession thing – could we maybe get it you know
exorcized
?’ Omens, shinings, ghoulies, nightmares on Elm Street, stood excitedly in her eyes, and her father, as much the VCR aficionado as any teenager, appeared to consider the possibility seriously. ‘In
Der Steppenwolf,’
he began, but Jumpy wasn’t having any more of that. ‘The central requirement,’ he announced, ‘is to take an ideological view of the situation.’

That silenced everyone.

‘Objectively,’ he said, with a small self-deprecating smile, ‘what
has happened here? A: Wrongful arrest, intimidation, violence. Two: Illegal detention, unknown medical experimentation in hospital,’ – murmurs of assent here, as memories of intra-vaginal inspections, Depo-Provera scandals, unauthorized post-partum sterilizations, and, further back, the knowledge of Third World drug-dumping arose in every person present to give substance to the speaker’s insinuations, – because what you believe depends on what you’ve seen, – not only what is visible, but what you are prepared to look in the face, – and anyhow, something had to explain horns and hoofs; in those policed medical wards, anything could happen – ‘And thirdly,’ Jumpy continued, ‘psychological breakdown, loss of sense of self, inability to cope. We’ve seen it all before.’

Nobody argued, not even Hind; there were some truths from which it was impossible to dissent. ‘Ideologically,’ Jumpy said, ‘I refuse to accept the position of victim. Certainly, he has been victimi
zed
, but we know that all abuse of power is in part the responsibility of the abused; our passiveness colludes with, permits such crimes.’ Whereupon, having scolded the gathering into shamefaced submission, he requested Sufyan to make available the small attic room that was presently unoccupied, and Sufyan, in his turn, was rendered entirely unable, by feelings of solidarity and guilt, to ask for a single p in rent. Hind did, it is true, mumble: ‘Now I know the world is mad, when a devil becomes my house guest,’ but she did so under her breath, and nobody except her elder daughter Mishal heard what she said.

Sufyan, taking his cue from his younger daughter, went up to where Chamcha, huddled in his blanket, was drinking enormous quantities of Hind’s unrivalled chicken yakhni, squatted down, and placed an arm around the still-shivering unfortunate. ‘Best place for you is here,’ he said, speaking as if to a simpleton or small child. ‘Where else would you go to heal your disfigurements and recover your normal health? Where else but here, with us, among your own people, your own kind?’

Only when Saladin Chamcha was alone in the attic room at the very end of his strength did he answer Sufyan’s rhetorical
question. ‘I’m not your kind,’ he said distinctly into the night. ‘You’re not my people. I’ve spent half my life trying to get away from you.’

His heart began to misbehave, to kick and stumble as if it, too, wanted to metamorphose into some new, diabolic form, to substitute the complex unpredictability of tabla improvisations for its old metronomic beat. Lying sleepless in a narrow bed, snagging his horns in bedsheets and pillowcases as he tossed and turned, he suffered the renewal of coronary eccentricity with a kind of fatalistic acceptance: if everything else, then why not this, too? Badoomboom, went the heart, and his torso jerked.
Watch it or I’ll really let you have it. Doomboombadoom
. Yet: this was Hell, all right. The city of London, transformed into Jahannum, Gehenna, Muspellheim.

Do devils suffer in Hell? Aren’t they the ones with the pitchforks?

Water began to drip steadily through the dormer window. Outside, in the treacherous city, a thaw had come, giving the streets the unreliable consistency of wet cardboard. Slow masses of whiteness slid from sloping, grey-slate roofs. The footprints of delivery vans corrugated the slush. First light; and the dawn chorus began, chattering of road-drills, chirrup of burglar alarms, trumpeting of wheeled creatures clashing at corners, the deep whirr of a large olive-green garbage eater, screaming radio-voices from a wooden painter’s cradle clinging to the upper storey of a Free House, roar of the great wakening juggernauts rushing awesomely down this long but narrow pathway. From beneath the earth came tremors denoting the passage of huge subterranean worms that devoured and regurgitated human beings, and from the skies the thrum of choppers and the screech of higher, gleaming birds.

The sun rose, unwrapping the misty city like a gift. Saladin Chamcha slept.

Which afforded him no respite: but returned him, rather, to that other night-street down which, in the company of the physiotherapist Hyacinth Phillips, he had fled towards his destiny, clip-clop, on unsteady hoofs; and reminded him that, as captivity receded and the city drew nearer, Hyacinth’s face and body had seemed to change. He saw the gap opening and widening between her central upper incisors, and the way her hair knotted and plaited itself into medusas, and the strange triangularity of her profile, which sloped outwards from her hairline to the tip of her nose, swung about and headed in an unbroken line inwards to her neck. He saw in the yellow light that her skin was growing darker by the minute, and her teeth more prominent, and her body as long as a child’s stick-figure drawing. At the same time she was casting him glances of an ever more explicit lechery, and grasping his hand in fingers so bony and inescapable that it was as though a skeleton had seized him and was trying to drag him down into a grave; he could smell the freshly dug earth, the cloying scent of it, on her breath, on her lips … revulsion seized him. How could he ever have thought her attractive, even desired her, even gone so far as to fantasize, while she straddled him and pummelled fluid from his lungs, that they were lovers in the violent throes of sexual congress? … The city thickened around them like a forest; the buildings twined together and grew as matted as her hair. ‘No light can get in here,’ she whispered to him. ‘It’s black; all black.’ She made as if to lie down and pull him towards her, towards the earth, but he shouted, ‘Quick, the church,’ and plunged into an unprepossessing box-like building, seeking more than one kind of sanctuary. Inside, however, the pews were full of Hyacinths, young and old, Hyacinths wearing shapeless blue two-piece suits, false pearls, and little pill-box hats decked out with bits of gauze, Hyacinths wearing virginal white nightgowns, every imaginable form of Hyacinth, all singing loudly,
Fix me, Jesus;
until they saw Chamcha, quit their spiritualling, and commenced to bawl in a most unspiritual manner,
Satan, the Goat, the Goat
, and suchlike stuff. Now it became clear
that the Hyacinth with whom he’d entered was looking at him with new eyes, just the way he’d looked at her in the street; that she, too, had started seeing something that made her feel pretty sick; and when he saw the disgust on that hideously pointy and clouded face he just let rip.
‘Hubshees,’
he cursed them in, for some reason, his discarded mother-tongue. Troublemakers and savages, he called them. ‘I feel sorry for you,’ he pronounced. ‘Every morning you have to look at yourself in the mirror and see, staring back; the darkness: the stain, the proof that you’re the lowest of the low.’ They rounded upon him then, that congregation of Hyacinths, his own Hyacinth now lost among them, indistinguishable, no longer an individual but a woman-like-them, and he was being beaten frightfully, emitting a piteous bleating noise, running in circles, looking for a way out; until he realized that his assailants’ fear was greater than their wrath, and he rose up to his full height, spread his arms, and screamed devil-sounds at them, sending them scurrying for cover, cowering behind pews, as he strode bloody but unbowed from the battlefield.

Dreams put things in their own way; but Chamcha, coming briefly awake as his heartbeat skipped into a new burst of syncopations, was bitterly aware that the nightmare had not been so very far from the truth; the spirit, at least, was right. – That was the last of Hyacinth, he thought, and faded away again. – To find himself shivering in the hall of his own home while, on a higher plane, Jumpy Joshi argued fiercely with Pamela.
With my wife
.

And when dream-Pamela, echoing the real one word for word, had rejected her husband a hundred and one times,
he doesn’t exist, it, such things are not so
, it was Jamshed the virtuous who, setting aside love and desire, helped. Leaving behind a weeping Pamela –
Don’t you dare bring that back here
, she shouted from the top floor – from Saladin’s den – Jumpy, wrapping Chamcha in sheepskin and blanket, led enfeebled through the shadows to the Shaandaar Café, promising with empty kindness: ‘It’ll be all right. You’ll see. It’ll all be fine.’

When Saladin Chamcha awoke, the memory of these words
filled him with a bitter anger. Where’s Farishta, he found himself thinking. That bastard: I bet he’s doing okay. – It was a thought to which he would return, with extraordinary results; for the moment, however, he had other fish to fry.

I am the incarnation of evil, he thought. He had to face it. However it had happened, it could not be denied. I am
no longer myself
, or not only. I am the embodiment of wrong, of what-we-hate, of sin.

Why? Why me?

What evil had he done – what vile thing could he, would he do?

For what was he – he couldn’t avoid the notion – being punished? And, come to that,
by whom
? (I held my tongue.)

Had he not pursued his own idea of
the good
, sought to become that which he most admired, dedicated himself with a will bordering on obsession to the conquest of Englishness? Had he not worked hard, avoided trouble, striven to become new? Assiduity, fastidiousness, moderation, restraint, self-reliance, probity, family life: what did these add up to if not a moral code? Was it his fault that Pamela and he were childless? Were genetics his responsibility? Could it be, in this inverted age, that he was being victimized by – the fates, he agreed with himself to call the persecuting agency – precisely
because of
his pursuit of ‘the good’? – That nowadays such a pursuit was considered wrong-headed, even evil? – Then how cruel these fates were, to instigate his rejection by the very world he had so determinedly courted; how desolating, to be cast from the gates of the city one believed oneself to have taken long ago! – What mean small-mindedness was this, to cast him back into the bosom of
his people
, from whom he’d felt so distant for so long! – Here thoughts of Zeeny Vakil welled up, and guiltily, nervously, he forced them down again.

His heart kicked him violently, and he sat up, doubled over, gasped for breath.
Calm down, or it’s curtains. No place for such stressful cogitations: not any more
. He took deep breaths; lay back; emptied his mind. The traitor in his chest resumed normal service.