The Satanic Verses (47 page)

‘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 fi 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.

He chose Lucretius over Ovid. The inconstant soul, the mutability of everything, das Ich, every last speck. A being going through life can become so other to himself as to
be another
, discrete, severed from history. He thought, at times, of Zeeny Vakil on that other planet, Bombay, at the far rim of the galaxy: Zeeny, eclecticism, hybridity. The optimism of those ideas! The certainty on which they rested: of will, of choice! But, Zeeny mine, life just happens to you: like an accident. No: it happens to you as a result of your condition. Not choice, but – at best – process, and, at
worst, shocking, total change. Newness: he had sought a different kind, but this was what he got.

Bitterness, too, and hatred, all these coarse things. He would enter into his new self; he would be what he had become: loud, stenchy, hideous, outsize, grotesque, inhuman, powerful. He had the sense of being able to stretch out a little finger and topple church spires with the force growing in him, the anger, the anger, the anger.
Powers
.

He was looking for someone to blame. He, too, dreamed; and in his dreams, a shape, a face, was floating closer, ghostly still, unclear, but one day soon he would be able to call it by its name.

I am
, he accepted,
that I am
.

Submission.

His cocooned life at the Shaandaar B and B blew apart the evening Hanif Johnson came in shouting that they had arrested Uhuru Simba for the Granny Ripper murders, and the word was they were going to lay the Black Magic thing on him too, he was going to be the voodoo-priest baron-samedi fall guy, and the reprisals – beatings-up, attacks on property, the usual – were already beginning. ‘Lock your doors,’ Hanif told Sufyan and Hind. ‘There’s a bad night ahead.’

Hanif was standing slap in the centre of the café, confident of the effect of the news he was bringing, so when Hind came across to him and hit him in the face with all her strength he was so unprepared for the blow that he actually fainted, more from surprise than pain. He was revived by Jumpy, who threw a glass of water at him the way he had been taught to do by the movies, but by then Hind was hurling his office equipment down into the street from upstairs; typewriter ribbons and red ribbons, too, the sort used for securing legal documents, made festive streamers in the air. Anahita Sufyan, unable any more to resist the demonic proddings of her jealousy, had told Hind about Mishal’s relations with the up-and-coming lawyer-politico, and after that there had
been no holding Hind, all the years of her humiliation had come pouring out of her, it wasn’t enough that she was stuck in this country full of jews and strangers who lumped her in with the negroes, it wasn’t enough that her husband was a weakling who performed the Haj but couldn’t be bothered with godliness in his own home, but this had to happen to her also; she went at Mishal with a kitchen knife and her daughter responded by unleashing a painful series of kicks and jabs, self-defence only, otherwise it would have been matricide for sure. – Hanif regained consciousness and Haji Sufyan looked down on him, moving his hands in small helpless circles by his sides, weeping openly, unable to find consolation in learning, because whereas for most Muslims a journey to Mecca was the great blessing, in his case it had turned out to be the beginning of a curse; – ‘Go,’ he said, ‘Hanif, my friend, get out,’ – but Hanif wasn’t going without having his say,
I’ve kept my mouth shut for too long
, he cried,
you people who call yourself so moral while you make fortunes off the misery of your own race
, whereupon it became clear that Haji Sufyan had never known of the prices being charged by his wife, who had not told him, swearing her daughters to secrecy with terrible and binding oaths, knowing that if he discovered he’d find a way of giving the money back so that they could go on rotting in poverty; – and he, the twinkling familiar spirit of the Shaandaar Café, after that lost all love of life. – And now Mishal arrived in the café, O the shame of a family’s inner life being enacted thus, like a cheap drama, before the eyes of paying customers, – although in point of fact the last tea-drinker was hurrying from the scene as fast as her old legs would carry her. Mishal was carrying bags. ‘I’m leaving, too,’ she announced. ‘Try and stop me. It’s only eleven days.’

When Hind saw her elder daughter on the verge of walking out of her life forever, she understood the price one pays for harbouring the Prince of Darkness under one’s roof. She begged her husband to see reason, to realize that his good-hearted generosity had brought them into this hell, and that if only that devil, Chamcha, could be removed from the premises, then maybe they
could become once again the happy and industrious family of old. As she finished speaking, however, the house above her head began to rumble and shake, and there was the noise of something coming down the stairs, growling and – or so it seemed – singing, in a voice so vilely hoarse that it was impossible to understand the words.

It was Mishal who went up to meet him in the end, Mishal with Hanif Johnson holding her hand, while the treacherous Anahita watched from the foot of the stairs. Chamcha had grown to a height of over eight feet, and from his nostrils there emerged smoke of two different colours, yellow from the left, and from the right, black. He was no longer wearing clothes. His bodily hair had grown thick and long, his tail was swishing angrily, his eyes were a pale but luminous red, and he had succeeded in terrifying the entire temporary population of the bed and breakfast establishment to the point of incoherence. Mishal, however, was not too scared to talk. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ she asked him. ‘You think you’d last five minutes out there, looking like you do?’ Chamcha paused, looked himself over, observed the sizeable erection emerging from his loins, and shrugged. ‘I am
considering action,’
he told her, using her own phrase, although in that voice of lava and thunder it didn’t seem to belong to her any more. ‘There is a person I wish to find.’

‘Hold your horses,’ Mishal told him. ‘We’ll work something out.’

What is to be found here, one mile from the Shaandaar, here where the beat meets the street, at Club Hot Wax, formerly the Blak-An-Tan? On this star-crossed and moonless night, let us follow the figures – some strutting, decked out, hot-to-trot, others surreptitious, shadow-hugging, shy – converging from all quarters of the neighbourhood to dive, abruptly, underground, and through this unmarked door. What’s within? Lights, fluids, powders, bodies shaking themselves, singly, in pairs, in
threes, moving towards possibilities. But what, then, are these other figures, obscure in the on-off rainbow brilliance of the
space
, these forms frozen in their attitudes amid the frenzied dancers? What are these that hip-hop and hindi-pop but never move an inch? – ‘You lookin good, Hot Wax posse!’ Our host speaks: ranter, toaster, deejay nonpareil – the prancing Pinkwalla, his suit of lights blushing to the beat. – Truly, he is exceptional, a seven-foot albino, his hair the palest rose, the whites of his eyes likewise, his features unmistakably Indian, the haughty nose, long thin lips, a face from a
Hamza-nama
cloth. An Indian who has never seen India, East-India-man from the West Indies, white black man. A star.