The Satanic Verses

mouse.’ After this second daughter she told Sufyan that enough was enough, and ordered him to move his bed into the hall. He accepted without any argument her refusal to have more children; but then she discovered that the lecher thought he could still, from time to time, enter her darkened room and enact that strange rite of silence and near-motionlessness to which she had only submitted in the name of reproduction. ‘What do you think,’ she shouted at him the first time he tried it, ‘I do this thing for
fun
?’
    Once he had got it through his thick skull that she meant business, no more hanky-panky, no sir, she was a decent woman, not a lust-crazed libertine, he began to stay out late at night. It was during this period – she had thought, mistakenly, that he was visiting prostitutes – that he became involved with politics, and not just any old politics, either, oh no, Mister Brainbox had to go and join the devils themselves, the Communist Party, no less, so much for those principles of his; demons, that’s what they were, worse by far than whores. It was because of this dabbling in the occult that she had to pack up her bags at such short notice and leave for England with two small babies in tow; because of this ideological witchcraft that she had had to endure all the privations and humiliations of the process of immigration; and on account of this diabolism of his that she was stuck forever in this England and would never see her village again. ‘England,’ she once said to him, ‘is your revenge upon me for preventing you from performing your obscene acts upon my body.’ He had not given an answer; and silence denotes assent.
    And what was it that made them a living in this Vilayet of her exile, this Yuké of her sex-obsessed husband’s vindictiveness? What? His book learning? His
Gitanjali, Eclogues
, or that play
Othello
that he explained was really Attallah or Attaullah except the writer couldn’t spell, what sort of writer was that, anyway?
    It was: her cooking. ‘Shaandaar,’ it was praised. ‘Outstanding, brilliant, delicious.’ People came from all over London to eat her samosas, her Bombay chaat, her gulab jamans straight from Paradise. What was there for Sufyan to do? Take the money, serve the tea, run from here to there, behave like a servant for all his education. O, yes, of course, the customers liked his personality, he always had an appealing character, but when you’re running an eatery it isn’t the conversation they pay for on the bill. Jalebis, barfi, Special of the Day. How life had turned out! She was the mistress now.
    Victory!
    And yet it was also a fact that she, cook and breadwinner, chiefest architect of the success of the Shaandaar Café, which had finally enabled them to buy the whole four-storey building and start renting out its rooms, –
she
was the one around whom there hung, like bad breath, the miasma of defeat. While Sufyan twinkled on, she looked extinguished, like a lightbulb with a broken filament, like a fizzled star, like a flame. – Why? – Why, when Sufyan, who had been deprived of vocation, pupils and respect, bounded about like a young lamb, and even began to put on weight, fattening up in Proper London as he had never done back home; why, when power had been removed from his hands and delivered into hers, did she act – as her husband put it – the ‘sad sack’, the ‘glum chum’ and the ‘moochy pooch’? Simple: not in spite of, but on account of. Everything she valued had been upset by the change; had in this process of translation, been lost.
    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? –