The Satanic Verses

his arms, and screamed devil-sounds at them, sending them scurrying for cover, cowering behind pews, as he strode bloody but unbowed from the battlefield.
    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 hall 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 Café, 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 wordsfilled 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 Nescafé 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,