The Satanic Verses

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 VCR 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, ‘whathas 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 victimi
zed
, 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 rhetoricalquestion. ‘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