The Satanic Verses (31 page)

Lying there, drifting towards sleep, she thought of the last thing she needed to tell her late husband. ‘In bed,’ the words came, ‘you never seemed interested in me; not in my pleasure, what I needed, not really ever. I came to think you wanted, not a lover. A servant.’ There. Now rest in peace.

She dreamed of him, his face, filling the dream. ‘Things are ending,’ he told her. ‘This civilization; things are closing in on it. It has been quite a culture, brilliant and foul, cannibal and Christian, the glory of the world. We should celebrate it while we can; until night falls.’

She didn’t agree, not even in the dream, but she knew, as she dreamed, that there was no point telling him now.

After Pamela Chamcha threw him out, Jumpy Joshi went over to Mr Sufyan’s Shaandaar Café in Brickhall High Street and sat there trying to decide if he was a fool. It was early in the day, so the place was almost empty, apart from a fat lady buying a box of pista barfi and jalebis, a couple of bachelor garment workers drinking chaloo chai and an elderly Polish woman from the old days when it was the Jews who ran the sweatshops round here, who sat all
day in a corner with two vegetable samosas, one puri and a glass of milk, announcing to everyone who came in that she was only there because ‘it was next best to kosher and today you must do the best you can’. Jumpy sat down with his coffee beneath the lurid painting of a bare-breasted myth-woman with several heads and wisps of clouds obscuring her nipples, done life-size in salmon pink, neon-green and gold, and because the rush hadn’t started yet Mr Sufyan noticed he was down in the dumps.

‘Hey, Saint Jumpy,’ he sang out, ‘why you bringing your bad weather into my place? This country isn’t full enough of clouds?’

Jumpy blushed as Sufyan bounced over to him, his little white cap of devotion pinned in place as usual, the moustache-less beard hennaed red after its owner’s recent pilgrimage to Mecca. Muhammad Sufyan was a burly, thick-forearmed fellow with a belly on him, as godly and as unfanatic a believer as you could meet, and Joshi thought of him as a sort of elder relative. ‘Listen, Uncle,’ he said when the café proprietor was standing over him, ‘you think I’m a real idiot or what?’

‘You ever make any money?’ Sufyan asked.

‘Not me, Uncle.’

‘Ever do any business? Import-export? Off-licence? Corner shop?’

‘I never understood figures.’

‘And where your family members are?’

‘I’ve got no family, Uncle. There’s only me.’

‘Then you must be praying to God continually for guidance in your loneliness?’

‘You know me, Uncle. I don’t pray.’

‘No question about it,’ Sufyan concluded. ‘You’re an even bigger fool than you know.’

‘Thanks, Uncle,’ Jumpy said, finishing his coffee. ‘You’ve been a great help.’

Sufyan, knowing that the affection in his teasing was cheering the other man up in spite of his long face, called across to the light-skinned, blue-eyed Asian man who had just come in wearing a snappy check overcoat with extra-wide lapels. ‘You,
Hanif Johnson,’ he called out, ‘come here and solve a mystery.’ Johnson, a smart lawyer and local boy made good, who maintained an office above the Shaandaar Café, tore himself away from Sufyan’s two beautiful daughters and headed over to Jumpy’s table. ‘You explain this fellow,’ Sufyan said. ‘Beats me. Doesn’t drink, thinks of money like a disease, owns maybe two shirts and no VCR, forty years old and isn’t married, works for two pice in the sports centre teaching martial arts and what-all, lives on air, behaves like a rishi or pir but doesn’t have any faith, going nowhere but looks like he knows some secret. All this and a college education, you work it out.’

Hanif Johnson punched Jumpy on the shoulder. ‘He hears voices,’ he said. Sufyan threw up his hands in mock amazement. ‘Voices, oop-baba! Voices from where? Telephone? Sky? Sony Walkman hidden in his coat?’

‘Inner voices,’ Hanif said solemnly. ‘Upstairs on his desk there’s a piece of paper with some verses written on it. And a title:
The River of Blood
.’

Jumpy jumped, knocking over his empty cup. ‘I’ll kill you,’ he shouted at Hanif, who skipped quickly across the room, singing out, ‘We got a poet in our midst, Sufyan Sahib. Treat with respect. Handle with care. He says a street is a river and we are the flow; humanity is a river of blood, that’s the poet’s point. Also the individual human being,’ he broke off to run around to the far side of an eight-seater table as Jumpy came after him, blushing furiously, flapping his arms. ‘In our very bodies, does the river of blood not flow?’
Like the Roman
, the ferrety Enoch Powell had said,
I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood
. Reclaim the metaphor, Jumpy Joshi had told himself. Turn it; make it a thing we can use. ‘This is like rape,’ he pleaded with Hanif. ‘For God’s sake, stop.’

‘Voices that one hears are outside, but,’ the café proprietor was musing. ‘Joan of Arc, na. Or that what’s his name with the cat: Turn-again Whittington. But with such voices one becomes great, or rich at least. This one however is not great, and poor.’

‘Enough.’ Jumpy held both arms above his head, grinning without really wanting to. ‘I surrender.’

For three days after that, in spite of all the efforts of Mr Sufyan, Mrs Sufyan, their daughters Mishal and Anahita, and the lawyer Hanif Johnson, Jumpy Joshi was not really himself, ‘More a Dumpy than a Jumpy,’ as Sufyan said. He went about his business, at the youth clubs, at the offices of the film co-operative to which he belonged, and in the streets, distributing leaflets, selling certain newspapers, hanging out; but his step was heavy as he went his way. Then, on the fourth evening, the telephone rang behind the counter of the Shaandaar Café.

‘Mr Jamshed Joshi,’ Anahita Sufyan carolled, doing her imitation of an upper-class English accent. ‘Will Mr Joshi please come to the instrument? There is a personal call.’

Her father took one look at the joy bursting out on Jumpy’s face and murmured softly to his wife, ‘Mrs, the voice this boy is wanting to hear is not inner by any manner of means.’

The impossible thing came between Pamela and Jamshed after they had spent seven days making love to one another with inexhaustible enthusiasm, infinite tenderness and such freshness of spirit that you’d have thought the procedure had only just been invented. For seven days they remained undressed with the central heating turned high, and pretended to be tropical lovers in some hot bright country to the south. Jamshed, who had always been clumsy with women, told Pamela that he had not felt so wonderful since the day in his eighteenth year when he had finally learned how to ride a bicycle. The moment the words were out he became afraid that he had spoiled everything, that this comparison of the great love of his life to the rickety bike of his student days would be taken for the insult it undeniably was; but he needn’t have worried, because Pamela kissed him on the mouth and thanked him for saying the most beautiful thing any man had ever said to any woman. At this point he understood that he could
do no wrong, and for the first time in his life he began to feel genuinely safe, safe as houses, safe as a human being who is loved; and so did Pamela Chamcha.

On the seventh night they were awakened from dreamless sleep by the unmistakable sound of somebody trying to break into the house. ‘I’ve got a hockey-stick under my bed,’ Pamela whispered, terrified. ‘Give it to me,’ Jumpy, who was equally scared, hissed back. ‘I’m coming with you,’ quaked Pamela, and Jumpy quavered, ‘Oh, no you don’t.’ In the end they both crept downstairs, each wearing one of Pamela’s frilly dressing-gowns, each with a hand on the hockey-stick that neither felt brave enough to use. Suppose it’s a man with a shotgun, Pamela found herself thinking, a man with a shotgun saying, Go back upstairs … They reached the foot of the stairs. Somebody turned on the lights.

Pamela and Jumpy screamed in unison, dropped the hockey-stick and ran upstairs as fast as they could go; while down in the front hall, standing brightly illuminated by the front door with the glass panel it had smashed in order to turn the knob of the tongue-and-groove lock (Pamela in the throes of her passion had forgotten to use the security locks), was a figure out of a nightmare or a late-night TV movie, a figure covered in mud and ice and blood, the hairiest creature you ever saw, with the shanks and hoofs of a giant goat, a man’s torso covered in goat’s hair, human arms, and a horned but otherwise human head covered in muck and grime and the beginnings of a beard. Alone and unobserved, the impossible thing pitched forward on to the floor and lay still.

Upstairs, at the very top of the house, that is to say in Saladin’s ‘den’, Mrs Pamela Chamcha was writhing in her lover’s arms, crying her heart out, and bawling at the top of her voice: ‘It isn’t true. My husband exploded. No survivors. Do you hear me? I am the widow Chamcha whose spouse is beastly dead.’

M
r Gibreel Farishta on the railway train to London was once again seized as who would not be by the fear that God had decided to punish him for his loss of faith by driving him insane. He had seated himself by the window in a first-class non-smoking compartment, with his back to the engine because unfortunately another fellow was already in the other place, and jamming his trilby down on his head he sat with his fists deep in scarlet-lined gabardine and panicked. The terror of losing his mind to a paradox, of being unmade by what he no longer believed existed, of turning in his madness into the avatar of a chimerical archangel, was so big in him that it was impossible to look at it for long; yet how else was he to account for the miracles, metamorphoses and apparitions of recent days? ‘It’s a straight choice,’ he trembled silently. ‘It’s A, I’m off my head, or B, baba, somebody went and changed the rules.’

Now, however, there was the comforting cocoon of this railway compartment in which the miraculous was reassuringly absent, the arm-rests were frayed, the reading light over his shoulder didn’t work, the mirror was missing from its frame, and then there were the regulations: the little circular red-and-white signs forbidding smoking, the stickers penalizing the improper use of the chain, the arrows indicating the points to which – and not
beyond! – it was permitted to open the little sliding windows. Gibreel paid a visit to the toilet and here, too, a small series of prohibitions and instructions gladdened his heart. By the time the conductor arrived with the authority of his crescent-cutting ticket-punch, Gibreel had been somewhat soothed by these manifestations of law, and began to perk up and invent rationalizations. He had had a lucky escape from death, a subsequent delirium of some sort, and now, restored to himself, could expect the threads of his old life – that is, his old new life, the new life he had planned before the er interruption – to be picked up again. As the train carried him further and further away from the twilight zone of his arrival and subsequent mysterious captivity, bearing him along the happy predictability of parallel metal lines, he felt the pull of the great city beginning to work its magic on him, and his old gift of hope reasserted itself, his talent for embracing renewal, for blinding himself to past hardships so that the future could come into view. He sprang up from his seat and thumped down on the opposite side of the compartment, with his face symbolically towards London, even though it meant giving up the window. What did he care for windows? All the London he wanted was right there, in his mind’s eye. He spoke her name aloud: ‘Alleluia.’

‘Alleluia, brother,’ the compartment’s only other occupant affirmed. ‘Hosanna, my good sir, and amen.’