The Satanic Verses (38 page)

           
Her language: obliged, now, to emit these alien sounds that made her tongue
feel tired, was she not entitled to moan? Her familiar place: what matter that
they had lived, in Dhaka, in a teacher's humble flat, and now, owing to
entrepreneurial good sense, savings and skill with spices, occupied this
four-storey terraced house? Where now was the city she knew? Where the village
of her youth and the green waterways of home? The customs around which she had
built her life were lost, too, or at least were hard to find. Nobody in this
Vilayet had time for the slow courtesies of life back home, or for the many
observances of faith. Furthermore: was she not forced to put up with a husband
of no account, whereas before she could bask in his dignified position? Where
was the pride in being made to work for her living, for his living, whereas
before she could sit at home in much-befitting pomp?―And she knew, how
could she not, the sadness beneath his bonhomie, and that, too, was a defeat;
never before had she felt so inadequate as a wife, for what kind of a Mrs. is
it that cannot cheer up her man, but must observe the counterfeit of happiness
and make do, as if it were the genuine McCoy?―Plus also: they had come
into a demon city in which anything could happen, your windows shattered in the
middle of the night without any cause, you were knocked over in the street by
invisible hands, in the shops you heard such abuse you felt like your ears
would drop off but when you turned in the direction of the words you saw only
empty air and smiling faces, and every day you heard about this boy, that girl,
beaten up by ghosts.―Yes, a land of phantom imps, how to explain; best
thing was to stay home, not go out for so much as to post a letter, stay in,
lock the door, say your prayers, and the goblins would (maybe) stay
away.―Reasons for defeat? Baba, who could count them? Not only was she a
shopkeeper's wife and a kitchen slave, but even her own people could not be
relied on;―there were men she thought of as respectable types, sharif,
giving telephone divorces to wives back home and running off with some haramzadi
female, and girls killed for dowry (some things could be brought through the
foreign customs without duty);―and worst of all, the poison of this
devil-island had infected her baby girls, who were growing up refusing to speak
their mothertongue, even though they understood every word, they did it just to
hurt; and why else had Mishal cut off all her hair and put rainbows into it;
and every day it was fight, quarrel, disobey,―and worst of all, there was
not one new thing about her complaints, this is how it was for women like her,
so now she was no longer just one, just herself, just Hind wife of teacher
Sufyan; she had sunk into the anonymity, the characterless plurality, of being
merely one-of-the-women-like-her. This was history's lesson: nothing for
women-like-her to do but suffer, remember, and die.

           
What she did: to deny her husband's weakness, she treated him, for the most
part, like a lord, like a monarch, for in her lost world her glory had lain in
his; to deny the ghosts outside the cafe, she stayed indoors, sending others
out for kitchen provisions and household necessities, and also for the endless
supply of Bengali and Hindi movies on V C R through which (along with her
ever-increasing hoard of Indian movie magazines) she could stay in touch with
events in the "real world", such as the bizarre disappearance of the
incomparable Gibreel Farishta and the subsequent tragic announcement of his
death in an airline accident; and to give her feelings of defeated, exhausted
despair some outlet, she shouted at her daughters. The elder of whom, to get
her own back, hacked off her hair and permitted her nipples to poke through
shirts worn provocatively tight.

           
The arrival of a fully developed devil, a horned goat-man, was, in the light of
the foregoing, something very like the last, or at any rate the penultimate,
straw.

           
* * * * *

           
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 V C R 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 victim-
ized
, 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
. Yes: 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 devilsounds at them, sending them scurrying for cover, cowering
behind pews, as he strode bloody but unbowed from the battlefield.