The Satanic Verses (39 page)

           
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 hail 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 Cafe, 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.

           
No more of that, Saladin Chamcha told himself firmly. No more of thinking
myself evil. Appearances deceive; the cover is not the best guide to the book.
Devil, Goat, Shaitan? Not I.

           
Not I: another.

           
Who?

           
* * * * *

           
Mishal and Anahita arrived with breakfast on a tray and excitement all over
their faces. Chamcha devoured cornflakes and Nescafe while the girls, after a
few moments of shyness, gabbled at him, simultaneously, non-stop. "Well,
you've set the place buzzing and no mistake."―"You haven't gone
and changed back in the night or anything?"―"Listen, it's not a
trick, is it? I mean, it's not make-up or something theatrical?―I mean,
Jumpy says you're an actor, and I only thought,―I mean," and here
young Anahita dried up, because Chamcha, spewing cornflakes, howled angrily:
"Make-up? Theatrical?
Trick?
"

           
"No offence," Mishal said anxiously on her sister's behalf.
"It's just we've been thinking, know what I mean, and well it'd just be
awful if you weren't, but you are, "course you are, so that's all
right," she finished hastily as Chamcha glared at her
again.―"Thing is," Anahita resumed, and then, faltering,
"Mean to say, well, we just think it's great."―"You, she
means," Mishal corrected. "We think you're, you
know."―"Brilliant," Anahita said and dazzled the
bewildered Chamcha with a smile. "Magic. You know.
Extreme
."

           
"We didn't sleep all night," Mishal said. "We've got
ideas."

           
"What we reckoned," Anahita trembled with the thrill of it, "as
you've turned into,―what you are,―then maybe, well, probably,
actually, even if you haven't tried it out, it could be, you could..." And
the older girl finished the thought: "You could've developed―you know―
powers
."

           
"We thought, anyway," Anahita added, weakly, seeing the clouds
gathering on Chamcha's brow. And, backing towards the door, added: "But
we're probably wrong.―Yeh. We're wrong all right. Enjoy your
meal."―Mishal, before she fled, took a small bottle full of green fluid
out of a pocket of her red-and-black-check donkey jacket, put it on the floor
by the door, and delivered the following parting shot. "O, excuse me, but
Mum says, can you use this, it's mouthwash, for your breath."

           
* * * * *

           
That Mishal and Anahita should adore the disfiguration which he loathed with
all his heart convinced him that "his people" were as crazily
wrong-headed as he'd long suspected. That the two of them should respond to his
bitterness―when, on his second attic morning, they brought him a masala
dosa instead of packet cereal complete with toy silver spacemen, and he cried
out, ungratefully: "Now I'm supposed to eat this filthy foreign
food?"―with expressions of sympathy, made matters even worse.
"Sawful muck," Mishal agreed with him. "No bangers in here,
worse luck." Conscious of having insulted their hospitality, he tried to
explain that he thought of himself, nowadays, as, well, British. . . "What
about us?" Anahita wanted to know. "What do you think we
are?"―And Mishal confided: "Bangladesh in't nothing to me. Just
some place Dad and Mum keep banging on about."―And Anahita,
conclusively: "Bungleditch."―With a satisfied
nod.―"What I call it, anyhow."

           
But they weren't British, he wanted to tell them: not
really
, not in any
way he could recognize. And yet his old certainties were slipping away by the
moment, along with his old life. . . "Where's the telephone?" he
demanded. "I've got to make some calls."

           
It was in the hall; Anahita, raiding her savings, lent him the coins. His head
wrapped in a borrowed turban, his body concealed in borrowed trousers (Jumpy's)
and Mishal's shoes, Chamcha dialled the past.

           
"Chamcha," said the voice of Mimi Mamoulian. "You're dead."

           
This happened while he was away: Mimi blacked out and lost her teeth. "A
whiteout is what it was," she told him, speaking more harshly than usual
because of difficulty with her jaw. "A reason why? Don't ask. Who can ask
for reason in these times? What's your number?" she added as the pips
went. "I'll call you right back." But it was a full five minutes
before she did. "I took a leak. You have a reason why you're alive? Why
the waters parted for you and the other guy but closed over the rest? Don't
tell me you were worthier. People don't buy that nowadays, not even you,
Chamcha. I was walking down Oxford Street looking for crocodile shoes when it
happened: out cold in mid-stride and I fell forward like a tree, landed on the
point of my chin and all the teeth fell out on the sidewalk in front of the man
doing find-the-lady. People can be thoughtful, Chamcha. When I came to I found
my teeth in a little pile next to my face. I opened my eyes and saw the little
bastards staring at me, wasn't that nice? First thing I thought, thank God,
I've got the money. I had them stitched back in, privately of course, great
job, better than before. So I've been taking a break for a while. The voiceover
business is in bad shape, let me tell you, what with you dying and my teeth, we
just have no sense of responsibility. Standards have been lowered, Chamcha.
Turn on the TV, listen to radio, you should hear how corny the pizza
commercials, the beer ads with the Cherman accents from Central Casting, the
Martians eating potato powder and sounding like they came from the Moon. They
fired us from
The Aliens Show
. Get well soon. Incidentally, you might
say the same for me."

           
So he had lost work as well as wife, home, a grip on life. "It's not just
the dentals that go wrong," Mimi powered on. "The fucking plosives
scare me stupid. I keep thinking I'll spray the old bones on the street again.
Age, Chamcha: it's all humiliations. You get born, you get beaten up and
bruised all over and finally you break and they shovel you into an urn. Anyway,
if I never work again I'll die comfortable. Did you know I'm with Billy Battuta
now? That's right, how could you, you've been swimming. Yeah, I gave up waiting
for you so I cradlesnatched one of your ethnic co-persons. You can take it as a
compliment. Now I gots to run. Nice talking to the dead, Chamcha. Next time
dive from the low board. Toodle oo."

           
I am by nature an inward man, he said silently into the disconnected phone. I
have struggled, in my fashion, to find my way towards an appreciation of the
high things, towards a small measure of fineness. On good days I felt it was
within my grasp, somewhere within me, somewhere within. But it eluded me. I
have become embroiled, in things, in the world and its messes, and I cannot
resist. The grotesque has me, as before the quotidian had me, in its thrall.
The sea gave me up; the land drags me down.

           
He was sliding down a grey slope, the black water lapping at his heart. Why did
rebirth, the second chance granted to Gibreel Farishta and himself, feel so
much, in his case, like a perpetual ending? He had been reborn into the
knowledge of death; and the inescapability of change, of things-never-the-same,
of no-way-back, made him afraid. When you lose the past you're naked in front of
contemptuous Azraeel, the death-angel. Hold on if you can, he told himself.
Cling to yesterdays. Leave your nail-marks in the grey slope as you slide.

           
Billy Battuta: that worthless piece of shit. Playboy Pakistani, turned an
unremarkable holiday business―
Battuta's Travels
―into a fleet
of supertankers. A con-man, basically, famous for his romances with leading
ladies of the Hindi screen and, according to gossip, for his predilection for
white women with enormous breasts and plenty of rump, whom he "treated
badly", as the euphemism had it, and "rewarded handsomely". What
did Mimi want with bad Billy, his sexual instruments and his Maserati Biturbo?
For boys like Battuta, white women―never mind fat, Jewish, non-deferential
white women―were for fucking and throwing over. What one hates in
whites―love of brown sugar―one must also hate when it turns up,
inverted, in black. Bigotry is not only a function of power.

           
Mimi telephoned the next evening from New York. Anahita called him to the phone
in her best damnyankee tones, and he struggled into his disguise. When he got
there she had rung off, but she rang back. "Nobody pays transatlantic
prices for hanging on." "Mimi," he said, with desperation patent
in his voice, "you didn't say you were leaving." "You didn't
even tell me your damn address," she responded. "So we both have
secrets." He wanted to say, Mimi, come home, you're going to get kicked.
"I introduced him to the family," she said, too jokily. "You can
imagine. Yassir Arafat meets the Begins. Never mind. We'll all live." He
wanted to say, Mimi, you're all I've got. He managed, however, only to piss her
off. "I wanted to warn you about Billy," was what he said.

           
She went icy. "Chamcha, listen up. I'll discuss this with you one time
because behind all your bullshit you do maybe care for me a little. So
comprehend, please, that I am an intelligent female. I have read
Finnegans
Wake
and am conversant with postmodernist critiques of the West, e.g. that
we have here a society capable only of pastiche: a 'flattened' world. When I
become the voice of a bottle of bubble bath, I am entering Flatland knowingly,
understanding what I'm doing and why. Viz., I am earning cash. And as an
intelligent woman, able to do fifteen minutes on Stoicism and more on Japanese
cinema, I say to you, Chamcha, that I am fully aware of Billy boy's rep. Don't
teach me about exploitation. We had exploitation when youplural were running
round in skins. Try being Jewish, female and ugly sometime. You'll beg to be black.
Excuse my French: brown."

           
"You concede, then, that he's exploiting you," Chamcha interposed,
but the torrent swept him away. "What's the fuckin' diff?" she
trilled in her Tweetie Pie voice. "Billy's a funny boy, a natural scam
artist, one of the greats. Who knows for how long this is? I'll tell you some
notions I do not require: patriotism, God and love. Definitely not wanted on
the voyage. I like Billy because he knows the score."