The Satanic Verses

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 mother-tongue, 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’slesson: 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 café, she stayed indoors, sending others out for kitchen provisions and household necessities, and also for the endless supply of Bengali and Hindi movies on VCR 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 Lamarckianheresy, 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,’ –