The Satanic Verses (44 page)

           
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 Cafe 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 cafe, 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 Cafe, after that lost all love of
life.―And now Mishal arrived in the cafe, 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.

           
Still the motionless figures dance between the shimmying of sisters, the
jouncing and bouncing of youth. What are they?―Why, waxworks, nothing
more.―Who are they?―History. See, here is Mary Seacole, who did as
much in the Crimea as another magic-lamping Lady, but, being dark, could scarce
be seen for the flame of Florence's candle;―and, over there!, one Abdul
Karim, aka The Munshi, whom Queen Victoria sought to promote, but who was done
down by colour-barring ministers. They're all here, dancing motionlessly in hot
wax: the black clown of Septimius Severus, to the right; to the left, George
IV's barber dancing with the slave, Grace Jones. Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, the
African prince who was sold for six feet of cloth, dances according to his
ancient fashion with the slave's son Ignatius Sancho, who became in 1782 the
first African writer to be published in England.―The migrants of the
past, as much the living dancers' ancestors as their own flesh and blood,
gyrate stilly while Pinkwalla rants toasts raps up on the stage,
Now-mi-feel-indignation-when-dem-talk-immigration-when-dem-make-insinuation-we-no-part-a-de-nation-an-mi-make-proclamation-a-de-true-situation-how-we-make-contribution-since-de-Rome-Occupation
,
and from a different part of the crowded room, bathed in evil green light, wax
villains cower and grimace: Mosley, Powell, Edward Long, all the local avatars
of Legree. And now a murmur begins in the belly of the Club, mounting, becoming
a single word, chanted over and over: "Meltdown," the customers
demand. "Meltdown, meltdown, melt."

           
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.